David Salle's 'Search and Destory' mission

The famed painter's brush with a bigger canvas - the movie screen - that's attracting a number of ambitious artists these days

David Salle is one of the brightest and most talented of the artists to have emerged from the generation that came into prominence in the 1980s. In addition to his painting, Salle has always had a passion for dance - he's designed sets and costumes for the choreographer Karole Armitage, among others - and for film. Now Salle has directed his own feature film, Search and Destroy, Joining a growing number of visual artists who have been drawn to the diver screen, including Robert Longo, whose film Johnny Mnemonic will be released in June, and Julian Schnabel, who's working on a film about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Search and Destroy, which opens next month, stars Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, John Turturro, Ethan Hawke, Rosanna Arquette, and Griffin Dunne. F.T.

FREDERIC TUTEN: What drew you to Search and Destroy, and what made you decide to do it as a film?

DAVID SALLE: It was an Off Broadway play that Griffin Dunne had been the lead in. I was approached by the producers to do it. The play was funny, and I felt like I could inject some of my own concerns into it without distorting it. It had wonderful dialogue, some great set pieces, great speeches, some comedic opportunities. The story was open enough that a lot of things could happen, and yet there was enough of a structure to work with.

FT: If someone asked me, "What is David's first film like?" I'd say, first of all, that it doesn't look like a first film. It looks like an accomplished film by someone who's made many films, and it's totally outside of the structure of theater.

DS: When people say, "We're opening up the play," all they really mean is they're photographing some scenery that they couldn't get onto a stage. We did just the opposite. What we did, essentially, was to make the play feel even more enclosed. I took the abstract descriptions of settings and made them more fantasy-oriented, without any real concern for, quote unquote, opening it up. And I think the result was that it is opened up much more than it would have been if it had just been adapted in some traditional way.

FT: What thematic concerns attracted you? I find that the story has a very Scorsese element to it, let's say In The King of Comedy and other films, when people go outside the law and find themselves rewarded by the society - in fact, are given credit for the very things that they were guilty of. In your film, this sort of dedIcated and Insane loser with the potential to become grandiose commits a crime, and yet at the very end of the film he becomes a successful movie producer.

DS: I initially saw it as an allegory of a society in which the most ordinary people think of themselves as put on the earth for some very special purpose. I had been reading all these interviews with celebrities. There's a whole category of celebrityhood in America, where really bad actors, really bad writers, people who do something at a very low level, are supremely rewarded for it. All these people say they felt, at an early age, that they were destined for greatness. It is also about what happens when you discover that not everyone thinks as you do, when you encounter resistance to your idea of "greatness." It's a story about wanting to be taken seriously.

FT: Some people become directors because they're failed actors. But what makes you - an artist who's perfectly successful in your own metier, who loves to have the control over his own art - what makes you want to enter a world where you really are dependent on a thousand other factors for control over your vision?

DS: On a very basic level, I just need and embrace change. There's a line in the movie where Griffin says, "I'm about change." Everyone focuses on the loss of control in the filmmaking process. On a certain level, you can't control what watercolor does! I would say that the impression of absolute control in art is just one more myth to dismantle. And the point about making a film is not control or lack of control. The point of making a film is the form of film. I see the form of filmmaking in the same way that I see the form of painting or the form of stage production. Or the form of writing, for that matter. It's a way of making something. If the form fits my interests and concerns, then I feel like it's worth giving it the time. It's true that certainly as a first-time, low-budget filmmaker, there are many, many things out of your control. But the level on which one does have control - in my experience, it was the same as making art. It was just a different set of tools to make art with. It's part of my general attitude about art making, which is that I don't have to initiate or control every aspect of something for it to be mine. Sometimes total egomaniacal, obsessional control results in good work, and sometimes it results in terrible work.

FT: I was thinking of all the artists who have made films. There is a long tradition, a long and beautiful history: Cocteau and Calder and the surrealist filmmakers, Hans Richter and others. But when you look at their films, you think, These are artists making an art film. And the films are clearly reflective of visual concerns in their own work. But Search and Destroy really seem to me not to fit that category. It's an artful film, and it's a beautiful film, but I wouldn't say it's a film by an artist making a film that is an extension of the immediate preoccupations of his art.