Action!

And action!

Got it!

Cut!

This great Hollywood director began his career with the film Heavy, under the watchful eye of master filmmaker Milos Forman.

He's directed some of the biggest movie stars and some of their best roles.

Sylvester Stallone, who gained over 35 pounds for Copland, and unknown Angelina Jolie for Girl Interrupted, which won her Oscar gold.

Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line, earning both Academy Awards, and Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in the action comedy Knight and Day.

Hi, this is Jim Mangold, and welcome to the so-called Hollywood's Best Film Directors.

I hope you think I deserve mentioning.

Both my parents are painters.

My father is Robert Mangold, he's a minimalist painter, and my mom is Sylvia Plamac Mangold, she's also a fine artist and a painter.

And so I grow up in both part of the New York City art world kind of getting trundled from one opening to another, and most of my parents' friends were also painters.

When my dad got a show at the Guggenheim, we had enough money that we moved to upstate and got a country house.

It was there that I started playing with my dad's Super 8 movie camera when I was about, I'd say, 8, 9, 10 years old, starting in there.

I started making movies and we'd go places and then starting even trying to construct dramas with movies.

By the time I graduated high school, I had made about 20 different short films, all with sound and different kinds of experimenting with different kinds of things, dramas, fantasy films, horror movie that won some awards in New York, this and that, and then was kind of heading off to college very excited about studying film direction.

I decided I enrolled at a school called CalArts, California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, and I landed there, and as fate would have it, in a way, the reason I should have been there or had to be there was one I never knew, which was that there was an amazing teacher there, a man by the name of Alexander McKendrick.

I'll refer to him as Sandy, because that's how I talked to him about him all my life and knew him.

But Sandy McKendrick had directed a series of amazing films, and then, because he had gotten ill with emphysema, and because the movie business had changed in a radical way, he kind of found himself making a major career shift mid-life and becoming a teacher.

I mean, to talk about movie directing for a second, it's a very hard thing to teach.

And the actual experience of directing a film is so unique from what it is to sit.

It's easy to analyze, but what it is to actually sit and live through is something that only those of us who have done it can in a way share with one another.

But having a teacher who has done it, really done it, is a huge benefit.

And Sandy was a remarkable teacher in many ways.

I was a film school student's fantasy when I graduated that June, literally having an agent who was chairman of an agency and kind of bidding wars for my services.

But I was 21 years old and I think that the thing, the lesson I learned from all that in retrospect was just how important it is that when you get an opportunity like that, that you have something to say.

And I wanted very much to be a movie director and I wanted very much to work and be famous and cool and say action, but I hadn't figured out everything I wanted to say yet.

I was banging around L.A.

and kind of trying to get work and it was at that moment I decided that I would try and go back to the last place I was happy, which was film school.

And I applied to Columbia Film School in New York where I had read that Milos Forman was teaching.

I was very lucky to arrive at that school the next fall at a time when he actually was teaching and I got selected to be one of the five or six that he worked with aggressively in a kind of master class of directors.

At Columbia, Milos was a real inspiration to me both in the way he had made independent films early on in Czechoslovakia, amazing independent films, and in the way he had navigated his way through the Hollywood system.

But he was also just a great writing teacher and it was there that I sat with him and he said what did you want to work on and other people were working on short films and I said I want to work on a feature about a very fat man who's invisible and he was like well that's not a story and I was like he's like that's an idea but that's not a story and about a hundred pages into my writing he came in one day and said right here on page 47 that's your story and what happened on that page was that when this was what would become my first film Heavy, Victor, the very large guy's mother dies who ends up getting played by Shelly Winters in the movie and he comes back to the restaurant he works at and doesn't tell anyone.

And Milos was basically like that's your dramatic event, that's enough to build the whole movie around and that's what your movie's about.

For the next six months I finished that script, shaped it and went about trying to find the money to actually make it.

Heavy was shot for under $500,000.

It was a great experience making that film because it was also a moment where I was figuring out how and what I wanted to say and what I cared about.

"Action."

"Got it."

"Cut."

Well, I wrote Copland while I was working on Heavy.

I got offered a lot of money to let go of the script so that someone else could direct it and I didn't and I insisted the only studio that would ultimately allow me to be the director as well and guarantee, guarantee it because I also was smart enough I was like you can't just hire me as director and then fire me you have to actually guarantee I will direct the film was Harvey Weinstein and Bob Weinstein at Miramax and that's when I met my partner and wife Kathy Conrad who was the one who read the script and brought it to them and I think really coaxed them into making that deal.

Well about a week after I wrapped shooting on Copland I got a call from Winona Ryder who had seen Heavy about seven times and because of that film had wanted me to see and read this book Girl Interrupted that I'd heard about but never read.

And I read the book and there were some existing scripts that had been written for the book to adapt it for her to star in.

And I thought that none of them had kind of cracked it yet.

I was a fan of Winona's and I also had made a movie about eight sweaty men.

So I kind of, the idea of making a film with young women and in a completely different environment, a dramatic film but kind of a very much more female driven movie with a female cast seemed really attractive to me.

Well with Knight and Day what was so intriguing about the film for me with the combination I'm a big admirer of films like Charade and North by Northwest kind of these great 60s romps, round the world romps, spy romps where there's both an element of comedy and an element of action and an element of mystery and I think it's a real tone that we've lost.

I haven't seen a lot of films like that since then.

And when I read the script I was really intrigued with that.

But with a film like this it was also the interest of Cruise who I had met.

I actually talked to Tom about playing the role that Russell had played in 3:10 to Yuma And we had gotten to know each other during that period.

And the fact that Cruise was interested in this script and this idea was really interesting to me.

Because my own instinct about the kind of Tom Cruise movie I'd want to make was one in which he wasn't the grim hero, a la Ethan Hunter, wasn't kind of the perfect hero guy.

But my own affection for Tom Cruise's movies, the ones I liked, the characters I was always most interested in, was the guy who's got flaws, and who was always a little vexed, or kind of taken back by people and irrational behavior, a la Rain Man, a la Jerry Maguire, Risky Business.

What I loved about this role for Tom was that for five years or so, I think he's been making movies where he's fairly much a kind of super-focused, serious cat.

And ready, three, two, one, action.

And I felt like this was an opportunity for him to open up, A, the humorous side of, if you know him, he's very funny and very exuberant.

Three, two, one, go.

But also, just another side of him, which is just this guy who's so focused, that when he deals with something that doesn't quite make sense, it's always really delicious to watch him try and understand, like, "What is this girl saying to me?

What is... How do I process this?"

Bob is someone I credit with really teaching me to feel comfortable with actors who were icons.

Um... The... Bob had this thing he said to me, which is that he, you know, he doesn't as a habit do movies with young directors.

And one of the reasons he doesn't was because they're so amazed that they're working with Travis Bickle that they somehow don't assert themselves.

And so he was really direct with me.

He was a neighbor of mine in downtown New York.

So first of all, in pre-production of the movie, he would have me over all the time to his loft and we'd talk about the script and his role.

But I could also see the other thing he was doing, which I have ever since tried to do with all the actors I worked with, which is he's he makes an effort to become a friend.

Because innately, what the act of doing a movie together is, is a kind of ally ship, a kind of Milos had an expression he'd say all the time.

I'm not sure where he picked it up that you should never make a movie with someone you wouldn't eat dinner with.

And then in a way I think Bob De Niro was following through on that idea, which is just that if I'm going to do this, then we got to know each other.

And the biggest thing Bob said to me, and it was very important, was he said, "If I'm off in the scene, tell me.

In the middle of the scene, tell me.

Make me do it again.

Stop me.

Go around again."

The only thing he said I don't like is when we cut and then for 20 minutes we talk.

He said, "In some way, talk to me with the cameras rolling.

Keep all the juices flowing and keep it going."

And that's something I've done ever since.

It's an incredibly great way, technique, to kind of keep the film set alive.

To keep, every time you say cut, everyone arrives and tweaks.

The director of photography will tweak, the makeup people will re-cover a pimple, the hair people will sweep in, and the scene can go dead.

And especially if there's emotions in the scene or there's a kind of energy or momentum in the scene.

And what Bob taught me was how to kind of maintain that.

How do you get everything ready, you prepare everyone for a run.

Now for the next 30 minutes we're going to do nothing but act until there's no more film in the cameras.

And even if the scene is 20 seconds long, we're going to do that scene over and over a hundred ways until we've nailed it.

And then we say cut and one take may have 30 versions of that scene in it before the film is cut again.

And Bob taught me that.

So what I wrote was a character kind of from my imagination, but who embodied a kind of sexual edge violent edge a kind of an anarchist in a way and who didn't believe in anything but herself and I thought it came out really well a lot of what we wrote came out really well but who was going to play this was an incredible question and a lot of the stars, young stars in Hollywood who read it, female stars, all, everyone wanted to play this role.

It had great dialogue, there's incredible scenes.

But I read quite a few very famous and some not so young women who wanted to play the role but I felt like I really hadn't met the person then.

Cut!

Beautiful.

Everyone hold position.

I was very excited.

I had seen some Gia advance that Angelina had done for Cable, and I thought it was very powerful and I was very excited to meet her.

And I met her the day before she read for me.

And we talked about the role for a while.

And then Angie came in and read the scenes with me.

She read the same three scenes that every other actress had read.

Only she knocked me out of my chair.

What Angie did was so powerful.

There was really no question that she was going to get the role.

There was no agenda that could compete with what she had left in that audition on tape.

Action!

Part of my job as a movie director, as I see it, is you have to make a bet and you are gambling and there's always a chance or an ability to try and redirect your bet if you bet wrong, but you have to make a decision and stick with it.

And to me, I had confidence in them.

I believed they would pull it off.

I could figure I could always fix it later if they didn't.

But the fact is that, to me, that kind of faith is what I have to have always.

I mean, that you never know.

How is it going to work with Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder and all these elements?

How is Stallone going to do?

How is De Niro and Stallone's scene going to be?

How is... every day I wake up going to the set with a question of whether I'll screw up the movie or not.

And whether it'll all work or fit together or not.

Just to get up... I mean, what are you doing out there?

Everyone should just start kind of making their way back in again.

Well, my whole thing was just that I wanted it to be real.

That, to me, what always goes wrong in musical films, and also musical biopics for that matter, is that you don't believe that the musical sequence seems like it was in West Side Story that someone pressed play on a tape and then some perfect recording starts to play and then Natalie Wood sounds amazing, but there's something anesthetized about that style of making a film.

And my real model was "Coal Miner's Daughter," I mean, in technique, where Sissy Spacek did all the singing, as well as everyone else.

And that there was a feeling just that the actor never stopped acting, that the performance never stopped.

Because the key, even in making a musical, is that the song has to be an extension of the drama in the film.

It can't be that the drama in the film stops and then you listen to a song for four minutes and the drama comes back.

You want the drama and the conflict of the movie to continue.

So the way, if you look at Walk the Line, one of the things you'll see I was very conscious of in writing the script, was every song is also, there's something going on underneath the song.

They may be singing "Time's a-wastin'" but John is falling madly in love with her and is moved to try and kiss her in the middle of the song and then she runs away on him.

Or, obviously, in the end of the film, I'm not giving anything away to most people at this point, he proposes to her in the middle of the song and forces her to make a decision in the middle of the song about whether she's going to spend her life with him or not.

So you can see that every musical piece was a pivotal piece, including his audition at Sun.

There's a huge decision getting made in every song.

And to me, the idea of doing that to playback, of doing that where the actor's voice either wasn't their own or was some kind of completely canned experience, it didn't seem... It didn't seem risky to me to do it the way we did it.

It seemed risky to me to do it the other way.

It seemed to make sense to me to do it the way we did it, which is to insist that the actors bring their rawness.

De Niro taught me an attention to detail too.

One of my very first days on the set, De Niro, we were in the old New York Post building, and De Niro played a detective.

And he had a desk that was his desk, and he would, um, he was making the prop guy put stuff in every drawer in the desk.

And there weren't many scenes in this office, and the prop guy comes up to me and he's like, "You know, we don't even have a scene where he does, like, what are we doing this for?"

And I was like, there was a part of me that was like, "Dude, it's Bob De Niro.

Like, just put stuff in the desks.

And in the drawers of the desk."

So Bob's sitting there and he's trying to figure out where he'd have his paper clips and where he'd have his rubber bands and the prop guy's going like, "Ugh, what a nightmare."

And... lo and behold, three days later, we're shooting one of Bob's final scenes in the movie and when someone comes running in to tell him Stallone's come busting in downstairs bloody carrying the guy they've all been looking for and De Niro found this rubber band in his drawer and as someone tells him the note he started making a cat's cradle with his fingers out of this rubber band and it's this brilliant little moment, you can see it, you can not see it but it's again this lesson about no matter, the lesson for me was no matter how big anyone gets no matter how huge or famous these people are who they are because they give a damn about acting.

It's still always about a lens and a couple of people and moving them through space in a believable fashion and having them elicit the script in a believable fashion so that as long as you have enough money for a sound man and some lights and a lens your job my job really never changes and so in that sense it's always been I always thought it would when I made a movie for five hundred thousand dollars and then I made a next movie for you know 25 million dollars I thought wow this is gonna be a lot different it isn't the lights fading you're running with your head cut off you're trying to get all the shots you need and it's it's just you're moving Sylvester Stallone around quickly instead of some local actor but the fact is that it's still the same job in the case of 3:10 to Yuma Christian was someone who I had met earlier and before and and had I knew his wife very well because she actually had been Winona Ryder's assistant on Girl Interrupted and then and when I got to spend more time with Christian I really realized what an incredibly supportive and brilliant figure he was and in Russell's case he's someone who I met... ...because when I was first working on the Johnny Cash movie many years earlier he was someone who I had actually met with and talked to about it and I thought Russell might be given that he's also a singer-songwriter might be a brilliant idea and he think he would have been in a different way to play the middle years of Johnny Cash, but the Russell always remembered that I was really interested in him for that movie and he was really very appreciative of how the film turned out.

We had set Copland up at Miramax and then we had not a lot of money to make it with and there were a lot of big movie stars who had been circling the script and had read it.

And so Harvey Weinstein had made it his business to figure out how we could get one of these big stars for no money.

And the problem was we couldn't.

Most of the stars we were talking to all felt like this was a very commercial film and they should get paid to be in it.

But there was I got a call from the at that time a gentleman who was the one of the big agents at William Morris and actually chairman of William Morris who was Stallone's agent and he said what do you think about the idea of Sylvester Stallone to play Sheriff Freddie Heflin in your movie and I was like I think it's the worst idea I ever heard I think it's terrible and and he was like well Sly would like to fly out and meet you I was living in New York at the time he would like to fly out and meet you and talk to you about it and I was like what is there to talk about it's the worst idea in the world I couldn't imagine a more terrible idea the guy is only plays heroes he only plays men who knock heads he travels in a posse wearing Planet Hollywood jackets he's he's got I mean this whole image is entirely wrong for this movie he said I think you'd like talking to him so I met Stallone at the restaurant in the Four Seasons in Manhattan and two things one is he's a very sweet guy he's a very charismatic guy and he was at a juncture in his life where he clearly knew my hesitations about casting in the movie and he had an answer for every question and I had come equipped with a list and my list was basically this it was be no posse if you do this movie no posse it's just you and your makeup people.

Two, I was like no script changes none you do this script you do what I say that's it he kept saying yes after everyone of these The other one is there's no better or worse side of your face to shoot you I'm gonna shoot you from any side of your face that I need to and if you need to be in the background out of focus and someone else's shot you're gonna stay later to do that he's like okay yeah watch him go away and then come back inside.

You can just lean toward camera kind of lean into your own chair.

I like it.

Okay.

Last thing was and you need to gain 35 to 40 pounds I want you soft I want you vulnerable and you can't be the hero in this film and he agreed all these things if someone were to ask me what is my own favorite film of mine of movies I've made that's a really hard question to answer I think it's a hard question to answer in the sense that they're all like children and and to pick one over another is kind of impossible I do think the horror movie that we made the thriller identity is often overlooked I think there's some really cool stuff in that film.

I do think that there's a huge amount of Inventiveness in Kate & Leopold that that we worked on very hard that has also been overlooked These are perhaps the less loved children of my films and that I think that in some ways your affection is always to the children of yours that somehow didn't meet with as much love in the world as the others.

Of course, Walk the Line is a giant experience for me.

There's something about that movie to me that was a huge lesson in the power of pushing something you really believe in through.

And so I think I'll always have an incredible amount of kind of passion for that movie.

It changed the world for me in terms of what people thought I might be capable of doing.

But I also think it changed personally my world a little bit because I got to know these two amazing people.

When Angie won the Oscar for me what was most important was that it was, it was, there was the pride of the writer because that role was something that we had made up and that it was someone, and it was that I felt like wow that's great that this role we crafted had had and she took it so far but there was also just the pride in that she it was clear to everyone making that movie that she was an actress of unrivaled power she's like a volcano and she has this kind of I mean there's a beauty to her but that's only one component of it there is a kind of fire and a kind of ability to deliver the kind of material that not many women can do it was a great very proud moment if you're a kid which I was when I got discovered the idea of working in Hollywood is a fantasy but when you really realize the sharp elbows it requires which in some ways I think Sandy was trying to prepare me for you you have to be really smart you have to be really political you have to pick your battles I was such an idealist at that point I would fight about anything I mean I would fight about I would fight about anything that I saw as kind of the effect of corporate mediocrity affecting my movie clearly I think the thing you need to do when you're working in an environment like this is A) pick your battles and B) sometimes you can win them quietly without pitching a fight.

We got it.

Check the gate, please.

I'm not a director that's easy to pigeonhole.

I've made it almost my business to move from one genre to another to another, which has been one of the great good fortunes of my career is that I'm allowed.

People give me the money and allow me to make a movie that's a wildly different genre on one after another.

But in a way, part of it comes from a desire to connect to the kind of grand old tradition, the old Hollywood tradition where directors move from comedy to drama to adventure with ease, where we weren't anointed by our second picture as the master of this genre or that genre.

And that to me, what's interesting about my own career to myself is that I keep learning.

What I learned making a thriller in Identity, I brought to Walk the Line.

What I learned making Walk the Line, I brought to Yuma.

What I learned making Yuma, I brought to Knight and Day.

That in each film, even though I'm crossing a genre, there's always a lesson about that genre that really was a great lesson to bring to a completely different kind of film.

Make this one pick up here.

Make this one pick up here.

And also, Bob, I'd pull.

When he turns at A, I'd pull.

Lastly, I'd say the thing I care most about in my movies is character.

Is authenticity of character.

Is that no matter where we get with the technology of special effects and we've come a long way.

Very few films are remembered in people's hearts because of a special effect.

But very many films are remembered forever because of an effect they have on your heart.

And that the number one job, the number one goal I have no matter what genre I'm working in.

Is to make sure to try and deliver that ultimate special effect which is somehow touching you.