NEWSWEEK: Is everyone prepared for their screenings? Are your movies ready and are you ready emotionally? JAMES GRAY: My movie is done and I’m absolutely terrified. I’m terrified. I have no idea what the reaction is going to be. None. My first movie went to the Venice Film Festival, and it was a horrifying experience. I mean, it turned out very well [“Little Odessa” won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1994]–but it was the first time I had ever done anything that was shown publicly. I remember the first day I went to the festival. I said, “How do I dress?” The distributor said, “Oh, Venice is very casual–jeans, T shirt, don’t worry about it.” I went to the first movie, which was “Il Postino.” I had just arrived–after, like, 8,000 hours in the air–and I was really tired, and they sat me right next to Michael Radford, who directed the movie. Within the first three minutes I was asleep. It had nothing to do with his movie–I was just totally jet-lagged. And, of course, I’m dressed in jeans and a T shirt, and everyone else is in black tie, and I feel like a total heel. Then when my official screening comes up, I dress in black tie, and everyone else is in jeans and a T shirt. They think I’m, like, the waiter, you know? It was a total fiasco.

Roland, you’ve already been to Cannes, and won the Palme d’Or for “The Mission” in 1986. Does that make the festival less stressful? ROLAND JOFFE: Well, as James is saying, it’s a bit like a $30 million bungee jump. I think you’re standing there on the precipice and you’re saying, “My God, what did I do this for? Why did I ever want to make a movie? Why did I ever want to make this movie?” That’s bound to happen, I think. And then you also get a perfect understanding of what it’s like to be a racehorse. I mean, you are [literally] pushed around… Even going up the red carpet, which everybody says is a magnificent experience, you feel exactly like a horse. You feel people mentally poking you and taking the odds. I’ve never met a director who has actually loved Cannes. Most of us feel it’s a bit like diving into a cold swimming pool in the morning. You kind of have to do it, but you grit your teeth.

One of the problems, I would think, is that you’re showing your movies to critics who’ve seen so many films in such a short period of time that they can barely stand up. JOFFE: Well, yes. You feel like a cook, and you’re serving them the 17th meal that they’ve had that day. When I won Cannes, I was a bit of a kid, I think. I mean, I wasn’t prepared for this. I had just done “The Killing Fields,” which was a movie I made because I loved the subject. I don’t think I was prepared for the naked ambition of it all. And I can remember the reaction of people when “The Mission” won. I remember a line of critics–American critics–getting up at the back and booing. I was the only one that could see them, actually, be- cause I was standing onstage. And I was thinking, “What have I done to deserve this?”… I’d always thought that you made a movie and you showed your movie to a sort of neutral world who absorbs the truth of your movie. What I realized is that that doesn’t really happen at all. You show your movie to a roiling, furious, angry world, all with their own opinions. And if by any chance you don’t happen to match their cliches, they get furious at you.

EDWARD YANG: I am not really a veteran, but I think Cannes is very disorienting. There are just so many things to do. For instance, your press agent will say, “You’ve got to talk to this guy. He’s the most important critic in France!” All day you’re doing interviews. Every hour. Pretty much the same questions. You don’t know how you do it. Your producer, he wants you to sell the film in a certain way. He expects so much–and you expect so much of yourself.

KARYN KUSAMA: That must be part of not just the festival experience, but of the transition from making the film–conceiving of the film, working on the film, living inside of it–to [selling it]. You, as the director, become this object for public consumption. I think that’s the most disturbing thing. Suddenly you have to be aware of the fact that people care about how you look, or how you sound, if you’re brash or you’re shy–to me, all that stuff is so immaterial to the work.

JOFFE: You put it brilliantly. You said something absolutely exquisite. You live inside a film. You live in a world that is entirely inhabited by the film, and then suddenly you pop out again and…

Kusama: And you’re supposed to be a salesman.

Earlier Roland talked about those moments when you wonder why you ever wanted to make a film. Have others had those kinds of panic attacks, where you suddenly decide you’re a fraud? GRAY: I have to say, I never anticipated that that would be the case with me. And it happens every day of my life now. I remember when I was in film school. I mean, I’m a total cliche. I went to USC film school. And I remember the first day I got there, there was this orientation thing. They said, “What’s your favorite movie?” There were 30 of us there, and it was like, " ‘Jaws,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Jaws,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Jaws,’ ‘Rocco and His Brothers,’ ‘Jaws,’ ‘Star Wars’." So I was the artsy-fartsy schmuck. And I remember thinking, “I’m so great. I’m the man!” And then I started to make movies, and you realize how incredibly f—ing hard it is. Telling a story with elegance and restraint–it’s impossible. I look at movies by people like John Ford and I literally can’t believe it, because it feels effortless to me. I watched this movie “Umberto D,” a De Sica movie I’m obsessed with. It’s really powerful, and you’re thinking, “Oh, it’s not so hard! It’s just a guy and his dog!” But it’s impossible. I made my first movie and I was very lucky–I had just graduated from film school and I had Tim Roth and Vanessa Redgrave and Max Schell and all these people. I was watching dailies and I was like, “Yeah, it’s great! I’m making something great!” And then I went to the first assembly…

KUSAMA: That’s always a killer. GRAY: … and it was, like, the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I said, “OK, this is horrendous.” It was a crisis. I remember realizing, “You thought you were the man, and you’re actually Bozo the Clown.” And this is not false humility. I mean, not a day has gone by in the last six years that I haven’t thought, “I’m a complete fraud,” and I wish that weren’t true. I remember when I was buying a car and [the form] said “Occupation?” I wrote down “film director,” and it sounded bogus. It sounded like I was making it up. I mean, I’ve talked about this many a time with the therapist. I do know some directors, by the way, that they think they’re fantastic.

GRAY:

How well do directors handle criticism? KUSAMA: I feel like you have to accept on some level that some work just simply isn’t universal. Most work isn’t. A lot of the great work isn’t.

GRAY: I can’t think of anything that is. I taught a class at USC. I screened “The Godfather” for them. I never met anyone who didn’t like “The Godfather.” A lot of my students did not like “The Godfather.” I was showing it to them because it is the only movie that I can think of that combines a sort of European commitment to dramatic depth and character with an American commitment to narrative. It was a big hit when it came out, and it’s a very salacious kind of story. But I showed them that movie, and there were people who thought it was boring. I showed them “Once Upon a Time in the West,” too, which I think is an amazing film. And it was the same thing: “It’s too long! And what’s with that music?”

JOFFE: One can be capable of looking at films in very different ways, and I think this comes back to one’s sense of panic about what the audience will make of what we’ve done. I did a version of “The Scarlet Letter,” with Demi Moore… And, I mean, I have never read worse reviews–all attacking everything that was imaginative in the film. There was no reasoning behind the attacks, except that “it wasn’t in the book.”… Of course, I was very hurt in some ways [by the reviews in America]. But the great thing about movies is that they play in other countries. So when it played in other countries–except in England, where they parrot what happens in America–then I would get people writing to me, and people actually discovering the movie, and the movie was a hit. So you begin to say, “So it’s not just the film–it’s [the baggage] people bring to the film”… I think that people don’t want to accept movies as having any intellectual content. They get angry about it.

I thought that, because of the rise of independent movies, this was supposed to be a great time for intelligent movies. GRAY: If you want to think about how the culture has changed–and whether or not it’s better today or worse today–all you have to do is think about the fact that “Midnight Cowboy,” which is a rated-X movie, won best picture for 1969. That could never, ever, ever happen today. And I think that is a very bad thing. In a way, it’s the result of capitalism. Capitalism is a great system if you want to buy the best car, but it’s not so easy on the artist. The [Hollywood] system is so geared toward making money that there is a kind of deer-in-the-headlights thing when it comes to the “art cinema.”

The conventional wisdom is that a movie is no good if it doesn’t make a lot of money and, conversely, that a movie is great if it’s a big hit. GRAY: There is no doubt about that. I am going to get myself into some trouble here, but if you look at “Titanic”–that movie’s merits exist on the fact that it made a ton of money.

KUSAMA: When everyone thought it would fail, too.

YANG: I think there are two ends of this business. One end is people like us, people who are creative. The other end is the distributors. And it is basically true everywhere: they want to spend the least amount of money to make the most amount of money. They don’t want to do anything creative. I think that when you have to sell a product like films, you have to be creative [making the movies and selling them]. Even if you have a product that can sell, nobody knows how to sell it. And filmmakers get all the blame. I think high tech is going to help solve this problem, because you can go directly to the audience [at home, using the Web and broadband]. I love to see my film projected on a big screen and watched by a lot of people, but most of the films I watched recently were on tape. You know–a little TV in front of my bed.

Edward, can you tell us a little bit about your education and your career as a filmmaker in Taiwan? YANG: Actually, James Gray, I think we have a lot in common. For instance, my first student work at USC was torn to pieces. It made me quit school. I went back to high tech, because I was majoring in high tech. Really, I was so discouraged that I dropped out, and went back and got a pretty good job. My mother loved it. I was in Seattle, working on microcomputers. When I had a chance to make a film later, I thought, “OK, I’ll just make this one film and be done.” And then I made the next one. I have made eight films now, but I still think I might not be able to make another one.

JOFFE: It’s a battle to get a movie made, and I think we all share that in common. I think it’s a terrible battle, unless it is a movie that’s kind of already pressed out like a Lincoln Continental, and everybody already knows what the shape is, and they just want somebody who presses the buttons.

Karyn, when you started “Girlfight,” you’d never made a movie before and you cast an actress, Michelle Rodriguez, who’d never made a movie before, either. You must have been nervous. KUSAMA: It would have been great to have found an actor who was trained, who knew the drill about showing up [on time]. But I think, actually, actors are sort of necessarily unstable anyway. And it occurs to me only now that every good actor is a wild card, and that’s what makes them good. I just knew I wanted a fresh face in my film. I felt like often films are somewhat weighed down by celebrity… I said to my casting director a long time ago, I said, “Look, what I’m looking for is Brando. But Brando as a teenage girl–a Latina. Let’s find her.” And we were just lucky, because I think we did find somebody who had that sort of physical heat and who sort of burned up the screen.

“Girlfight” was such a huge hit at the Sundance Film Festival. Roland, do you remember when “The Killing Fields” came out and you got so much attention as a first-time director? Do you remember what it felt like? JOFFE: I remember exactly what it felt like. I remember the very first review I ever read of “The Killing Fields.” It said, “There are two movies opening this week. There’s ‘The Killing Fields,’ and there’s ‘Sheena: Queen of the Jungle.’ Go and see ‘Sheena: Queen of the Jungle.’ ‘The Killing Fields’ is probably the worst movie ever made.” [Laughter]

GRAY: That’s, like, the worst thing I’ve ever heard.

JOFFE: To my amazement, it wasn’t that greatly received. And, again, after I did “The Mission,” some people were telling me that this was an unforgettable movie, and other people said it was “dead in the water.” I remember coming to L.A. A journalist said to me, “It must be fantastic, Roland. You know, you are coming to L.A. And in front of you, you see the red carpet unrolling. That must be a fantastic sensation.” I said, “You know, it is a marvelous sensation, but I hear a faint sound behind me.” And he said, “What’s that?” And I said, “The sound of it being rolled up. I can only pray that I won’t get rolled up in it–that I’ll hop off before that happens.” But that’s life, because we all live on the edge. I sound as though I’m bemoaning the fact that that’s what people said about the movies, but that’s part of the process, that’s part of life, and you just have to embrace it as much as you can.

Why do people want to direct movies for a living? Surely, there are less frustrating ways to be creative. GRAY: Because movies are so great. I was just a f–ed-up kid when I was young, and the only emotional reactions I really felt were at the movies. It is very difficult for me to say this without getting grotesquely simple and personal about it. But they’re kind of my emotional outlet. I even remember when my mother died, I saw it like a movie. That’s pathetic but it’s true.

James, you’ve said that being hip is the worst thing that can happen to a filmmaker. In the mid-’90s, you made it a point of pride that you weren’t just going to rip off Quentin Tarantino like a lot of other people did. GRAY: Hipness is like a disease because it stifles people. I may very well suck. But I would at least like to suck trying to do what it is that I’m interested in. You know, people ask me, “It took you five years in between movies. Why? Didn’t you get offered anything?” Yeah, I got offered lots of things, but the streets are littered with people who went off and did “Johnny and His Magic S–t Machine II” to make a lot of money. And I didn’t want to do that. People are anxious to have you sell out. They want you to sell out. I’ve never seen anything like it.

KUSAMA: Oh, it’s incredible.

GRAY: Hipness brings with it a lack of emotional commitment. It’s like you’re making a simulacrum of a movie. It is not an actual movie that is made with passion. And [passion] is why you’re making films in the first place.

KUSAMA: I agree. I think that’s the problem with so many movies. Right now there’s a fear of nakedness, of honesty, of mystery. All of the messiness of life and the unfinished endings and the disappointment and those sort of unexpected moments of just sheer bliss that we never could have planned or engineered ourselves–all of those things often go unexamined in the movies. I mean, I’ve had very interesting responses to “Girlfight.” A lot of people have said to me, “I didn’t know you were going to make such an emotional movie.” I just sort of said, “Well, gosh, what else would I do?”