Interview conducted by Josh Horowitz
January 23, 2004
For director Gary Ross to call his latest work, SEABISCUIT, a long-shot when it comes to the Oscars, is a bit disingenuous. Based on a bestseller, starring critical faves like Jeff Bridges and Chris Cooper, and depicting a life-affirming story of redemption for three men and a horse, SEABISCUIT has the right pedigree for winning an award or two.
I’ll allow Ross his humble protestations though, if for no other reason that he’s been responsible for a host of great films in his career. As a screenwriter, he penned BIG, DAVE, and MR. BASEBALL. Well, two out of three isn’t bad.
In 1998, he made an impressive debut as a director with PLEASANTVILLE, a comedy with a healthy dose of substance that bubbles to the surface by the end.
Like his latest film, Ross has the pedigree for success. His father was a successful screenwriter, most interestingly perhaps possessing a credit for THE CREATURE FROM BLACK LAGOON.
It’s also no surprise to find out, after examining the moral and social currents that run through all his projects, that Ross has spent time as a speechwriter for several democratic candidates. And, as he revealed to me in a phone conversation recently, he still has a foot squarely in the political arena.
Josh Horowitz: So do you have a chart up on the wall of all the upcoming ceremonies you have to attend for awards and such for the film?
Gary Ross: No. There’s a lot to go to and to me it’s really important to go to all the stuff for my costume designer, my editor, and cinematographer. They’ve all been nominated too which makes me the happiest.
JH: I guess this is that kind of film that can share the wealth because it’s a top-notch production from top to bottom.
GR: Yeah and they all deserve it. When you direct a movie, there are so many people that help you and invest so much of themselves so it’s great.
JH: I know you’ve been active politically and written for political candidates. How would you evaluate the SEABISCUIT campaign thus far?
GR: I think we probably had more advertising earlier because we were out in July. The fact that we’re still being considered so many months after the movie opened is sort of remarkable. How would I characterize us? I would characterize us as a long-shot but for obvious reasons we’re comfortable being one. (LAUGHS)
JH: What have been some of your favorite films this year that resonated with you on a personal level?
GR: I loved 21 GRAMS. I liked IN AMERICA very much. I thought it was personal and touching and wonderful. As far as screenplays go, I thought FINDING NEMO was one of the most remarkably crafted screenplays I’ve seen in years. Forget about the fact that it’s animated and it’s for kids, just to sustain that structure seamlessly from a screenwriting point of view is phenomenally difficult.
JH: In terms of alternating between story-lines?
GR: It’s two story-lines. The movie is inter-cut between two story-lines. There’s Nemo lost in the tank and his father going to find him. Usually you feel the cuts and in that movie you really didn’t. That’s just a remarkable thing to pull off.
JH: When you see a film that you admire, do you feel in some way that you might have wanted a crack at writing and directing that?
GR: No, I never ever feel that way. I don’t even feel that way about movies that do very well that I may have passed on. There’s more than enough to go around. One of the nice things about this season is that you feel a part of a community of people and there’s two ways to look at this. You can feel competitive or you can feel that it’s wonderful to be included and you can celebrate the fact that you’re a part of a community that is fundamentally collegial. Anthony Minghella and I had a long talk about this last night at an event. We have more in common with each other than we do with anyone else in the process.
JH: I would think that your admiration for the sport of horse racing has been significantly increased thanks to the process of making this film.
GR: Obviously. What they do is phenomenally athletic and dangerous. It’s a fascinating world to go into. It’s not like other sports where there’s a tremendous amount of accolades and glamour for the participants. But they love it. The top paid jockey gets paid what a minor league baseball player gets.
JH: Is it odd for you that despite not being a huge horse racing fan at the outset you have now made what many might call a definitive film about the sport?
GR: It’s a very astute question. The best thing you can be sometimes is a little bit of an outsider. I think it was the world and the people involved and the characters that intrigued me. One of the thrills about making a movie is that you go in not knowing that much and you learn about a world and soak it up and see it what it means to you. That’s what’s really exciting about doing a movie is that you kind of become a bit of an expert. I don’t know that you should ever do something that you’re really a fan of. Like the only thing that I’m really fanatical about besides my work and my family is playing tennis which I do six days a week. I’m a pretty serious tennis player and I would never want to make a tennis movie. I toyed with it for a while but in a sense you can’t really go into a world and observe it in a way that you would something else.
JH: You almost can’t relate to it in a way an audience member would because you’re too involved.
GR: That’s exactly right and also you need a bit of detachment to see what it means in a larger context not just the context of the sport. I think that’s the reason SEABSICUIT is resonating, because of the struggle and the perseverance of the characters and their relationships. Its not really just about horse racing. If I had been too inside the sport it might have been difficult for me to understand the larger context of the movie.
JH: There’s actually not a ton of actual horse racing in the movie similar in a sense to that ROCKY has only one significant boxing match in the film. Was that a difficult line for you negotiate to determine how much to include?
GR: Absolutely. Each horse race had to have its own specific purpose within the story. I couldn’t just generically put in a horse race. One is about his[Tobey’s] anger and one is about his initiation. The one with Gary Stephens in Mexico is all about his feelings of inferiority to another jockey graced with natural ability and Tobey struggling to catch up. The trick is, what does each horse race mean and how is it different from the others?
JH: You talk in the commentary on the dvd about the stoicism of your male characters in this film. Because of the time and place, these men aren’t the sort to open their hearts in a grand speech. Is that a double edged sword for you as a storyteller? That takes away a tool for you.
GR: Sure. It’s a challenge because it all has to be in subtext, right? So whatever you’re playing is underneath the scene. Its not necessarily in the lines. That’s a challenge for the actors, the director and the writer. But it’s also the most wonderfully satisfying writing.
JH: I want to also ask about the almost omniscient narrator and the use of David McCullough no less. He lends an authority and that PBS sort of gravitas. These are not the usual things associated with a big budget film.
GR: I knew it was a different kind of choice and a risky choice but I also thought that it was very important to convey the context and the historical sense and to understand what the times were that produced this story. I also thought It was kind of exciting to take the audience to a different place and yank them out of the lull of a fictional narrative if you will. That can also be like hitting a flat in jazz but sometimes you do that on purpose. It yanks the audience momentarily out of the fictional narrative but it also feels so much more real because these images and this way of storytelling is something we’ve come to understand as truthful. It’s in a language that says this is true, this is fact. So ultimately it adds a kind of weight and therefore resonance to the movie.
JH: For my money, Jeff Bridges might just be the best actor alive. I know you wrote this script with some of the actors like Tobey in mind. Was that the case for Jeff?
GR: I really just wrote the part. We went through the process of imagining a couple of massive huge movie stars for second or two but then we went to Jeff. He was perfect. He was able to embody that boyish enthusiasm and that whole Horatio Alger American capitalist enthusiasm at
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the same time he was able to plunge this guy into grief and grow him up. You saw him gain wisdom and I needed a guy who could really play both ends of that character.
JH: Was there ever discussion about the echoes to another character he’d played, Preston Tucker?
GR: Yeah sure. That was definitely a consideration and one of the things about Tucker is that he remained naively idealistic throughout his life, which is one of the reasons that movie worked so well. We were doing something really different. It was a guy who believed a kind of American mythology and had that cruelly ripped yanked out from under him. But we definitely discussed it. We didn’t want to retread the same ground unless it was absolutely appropriate.
JH: One thing I feel like people take for granted about you because you’ve been in the business for a while, is that this was only your second film as a director, the same in a weird way as Sofia Coppola.
GR: That’s right. Sofia and I have directed as many movies as each other. Listen she’s probably been on more movie sets as I have. (LAUGHS)
JH: You two are probably neck and neck there. Any trepidation about a huge undertaking like this? Your first film was ambitious as well but still this is a big budgeted film.
GR: You’re right. PLEASANTVILLE really got me ready. It was such a difficult first film that it was a bit of a baptism by fire. The thing that was daunting here was the short prep. We only had about three months to prep the movie. We probably should have had eight. That was terrifying. It sort of forced me to focus so much so early in the beginning of the prep that by the time I finally
got ready to shoot it I felt very ready. But yeah, I was overwhelmed at the beginning. I think there are two types of directors. There’s the director that’s scared at the beginning of prep and there’s the director that’s scared at the beginning of shooting.
JH: Did you have final cut over SEABISCUIT?
GR: No. I don’t have final cut in my contract but it’s not really necessary. I work with people I respect and who respect me. No one asked me to make any changes I disagree with. It’s a wonderfully collegial relationship. No, I don’t have it in my contract. I will never ask for it in my contract. I think if somebody is putting up this much money they have a right to have a discussion with you.
JH: I read something your director of photography John Schwartzman said to the effect of this film required more mapping out than anything he’s ever done and this is a guy that shoots Michael Bay films.
GR: I know. (LAUGHS)
JH: Was this simply about the logistics of the racing or did this extend to every scene?
GR: The first thing I do is write basically a shooting plan. It’s notes for myself through the entire script of how I plan to directorally attack each scene. A lot of those are about the cinematography and some may be about production design and some may be about performance and from that John and I devised a shot list. But the first draft of it is really me alone at the typewriter dealing with what the imagery is going to be. And then the second version is John and I sit down and hone it and I have his input. It was wonderfully collaborative and because of that John and I felt amazingly prepared. It informs the scouting process. If you pre-visualize to that degree, you don’t ever go on a scout and be driven by the physical circumstances. You know what you’re looking for. You can be a victim of the prep or you can use the prep to define the movie yourself. A lot of what the pre-visualization does is it informs the design of the movie. John and I never showed up on a set where we didn’t have a sense of déjà vu like we’d already shot it in out heads.
JH: At the same time, I would think you as the director would want to leave a little room for collaboration and adaptation on the set.
GR: Yeah and it lets you be freer ironically because you’re not tense. You have this road map and you get there and can throw it out if you find a better shot. It made us secure enough to do the other.
JH: Switching gears completely, I have to ask you about my favorite
uncorroborated factoid found on the internet about you. Is it true that you won fifty thousand dollars on TIC TAC DOUGH?!?
GR: $48,200.
JH: (LAUGHS) Well see I was wrong then. You have to tell about the circumstances behind that.
GR: I was writing novels and I was broke and I was kind of starving. I was going out with a girl who had won ten grand on Password. I was sort of getting bored with the relationship so I was tuning out one day and then she told me how she won ten thousand dollars and I kind of perked up and went, “what?” So the next day I responded to an ad because I needed the money.
JH: Any fond memories of [host] Wink Martindale?
GR: Once I won the money and I started to kind of goof on the show, he wasn’t really happy with me. (LAUGHS)
JH: I want to ask you about PLEASANTVILLE which was a favorite film of mine in recent years. I know your father was blacklisted and I assume there are echoes of that in the film. After all, part of it is about courage and standing up for what you believe in despite the consequences.
GR: Totally. It’s a very, very personal movie that way. A lot of it comes out of my id. Looking back on it I think that my ‘50s weren’t other people’s ‘50s. There was such a homogenized cheery gloss put over the decade but in my family there was a certain amount of paranoia and fear because of blacklisting and so I think that informs the movie.
JH: Many writers try to make the transition to directing and I feel like, unlike actors, they’re only given a couple shots to get it right to insure an ongoing career. After writing for so long did you feel that kind of pressure having that opportunity to direct finally at your feet?
GR: I definitely felt that pressure. The good news is that I had spent a lot of time apprenticing before I ever shot. I studied acting, I directed plays, I studied with Stella Adler so I had an actors’ vocabulary. But more than anything, I apprenticed on all my sets. I was on the set of BIG everyday. I was on the set of DAVE everyday. I shot second unit for DAVE. So I wasn’t a stranger to the workings of a movie set so I think that helped.
JH: What are your remembrances of BIG today?
GR: Just that everything was new. The collaboration with Anne Spielberg who is still a close friend of mine was a wonderful thing. We augmented each other well. That’s what made it a good collaboration. We stayed very tight with each other under very difficult circumstances at times. We didn’t get along with [director] Penny [Marshall] all the way through. It was stressful but we were very supportive of each other.
JH: Did Penny’s film reflect you and Anne’s vision?
GR: Uh…for the most part. I would have directed it differently than Penny but Tom [Hanks] was perfect casting. There were a lot of very talented people who came together. You have to say that Penny did a very good job when you look at the movie that came out of it. I would have made different choices, that’s all.
JH: What’s up with DOG YEARS, your script you were to direct Jim Carrey and Nicole Kidman in at one time in?
GR: It may get made. I sill like the script very much. For a million reasons it didn’t come together then and so I’m still considering it. I would call it a fantasy/comedy/drama.
JH: You were attached to direct WILLY WONKA for a while. Any regrets about Tim Burton now getting a crack at it?
GR: No, I think he’s a way better choice than me. And I think Johnny Depp is perfect. They’re going to make the movie exactly the right way and I think they’re the ones who should make it.
JH: One last thing. You’ve contributed speeches and jokes to political candidates like Dukakis and Clinton in the past. Are you punching up any candidates stump speeches right now?
GR: (PAUSE) Uh…yeah. (LAUGHS)
JH: Anyone you’d like to mention?
GR: No. (LAUGHS)
JH: (LAUGHS) Are you wearing a Howard Dean or Wesley Clark pin right now?
GR: (LAUGHS) I decline to comment.
JH: Well, I’ll listen for the zingers in the speeches. Anything I can listen out for?
GR: No. (LAUGHS)
JH: OK, you win. I can’t get you.
SEABISUIT is available on DVD.
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