April's favorite fooler

GRAHAM FULLER: As with House of Games - the first film you directed - your latest, The Spanish Prisoner, is about a seam. What, for you, is the cinematic potency of confidence tricks?

DAVID MAMET: The public loves them; I think we all like to be fooled. One of the things movies can do strikingly is show, visually, that things are other than what they are, which is what special effects are about. It's like being delighted by a magic trick - watching one thing transform into something else.

GF: Isn't there a risk, though, that playing mind games in a film results in a cinema that's more cerebral than emotional?

DM: As you suggest, cinema is a melodramatic medium. We go to it to exercise our emotions rather than our thoughts. I'd rather read a book than go to a movie that asks me to think. And if we're not having a good time with a light thriller like this - if we're not being shocked and delighted, and we're not going "ooh" and "aah" and laughing at the funny bits - then the filmmaker, me, has not done his job. But I hope that's not the case.

GF: Did you begin the script with the "Spanish prisoner" anecdote?

DM: Yes. It's an ancient confidence game, a way of taking advantage of someone by suggesting that if they help you out, you will give them all or most of your fortune, which is in the old country, and hook them up with your beautiful sister - neither of which exist, of course. It's a game that's still being played on the streets of big cities today.

GF: Do you ever find yourself wanting to go against the rules governing the structural logic of a movie scene, which you wrote about in your book On Directing Film [1990]?

DM: No, I'm not tempted to break them. I'm often challenged to live up to them. The precepts involved basically come from Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage, where you cut shot A together with shot B to get the effect of shot C, rather than simply follow the protagonist around. The great movie sequences I've seen are based on that understanding of film.

GF: Is writing a script for you a matter of constantly refining a discursive story?

DM: No. I start out by trying to tell the story in twelve or fifteen lines on one side of a sheet of paper. Once I've done that, I go back and flesh out the lines into scenes. The main work in writing a script is making up the outline. Curiously, if one sits, as one sometimes has to, in a room with studio executives in Hollywood, they'll say - and it's their legitimate concern - "What's your take on the thing?" or "Give me a broad outline." "Give me the pitch," in effect. But at the beginning of a project, one doesn't know the pitch, one doesn't know the take, one doesn't know the outline, because when one knows the outline, the movie's done.

GF: Do you think you directed The Spanish Prisoner any differently from the way you directed House of Games or Things Change [1988]?

DM: I think I directed them in the same way, but The Spanish Prisoner is the fifth film I've directed and I'm still a neophyte. I hope that there are some things I'm learning how to do better. There are probably some "excellencies" of exuberance and naivete that I've dropped, but as far as I know, I'm still doing the same thing.

GF: You're a prolific writer. Does that come out of a happy state of mind, or out of anxiety and restlessness?

DM: Probably both.

GF: Do you have a specific time set aside for writing?

DM: I call it "all day."

GF: What emotion would you want people to come away with from The Spanish Prisoner?

DM: It's my job to tell a story - that's what I get paid to do. I hope people have a good time, but other than that, it's not my place to think what else they might bring away with them.

GF: What do you think about the state of American cinema?

DM: I've seen some pretty good movies the last couple of years, as we all have. I think I have to say that no doubt things are unfolding as they should.

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