"TO TELL THE TRUTH" - HENRY JAGLOM'S CINEMA OF EMOTIONAL VERITE`.

Radiance-The Magazine for Women

I have always felt, both in my personal and my professional life, that my obligation was to tell the truth and try to get other people to tell the truth. It may sound like a mission. But it's much more selfish than a mission: it makes me feel less isolated. It makes me feel less lonely and less crazy on this planet if others say, Well, me too. I go home at night and I worry and I cry and I can't get to sleep. My focus is very much on trying to get those things up on the screen and then let people sit in the dark and look at them and feel that they're not the only ones going through this extraordinary, weird journey of life. "

That's Henry Jaglom speaking, the man responsible for the move Eating. Throughout his twenty-one years of filmmaking, Jaglom has brought sensitive, personal material to the screen in a style Orson Welles calls the "cinema of emotional verite." Jaglom creates an environment and structure within which his actors and (more often) actresses can respond to a movie's theme. Earlier themes have included a young woman's coming of age (A Safe Place, championed by Anais Nin), a Vietnam veteran facing his wartime experience (Tracks), the breakup of marriage (Jaglom's own, in Always), and singles trying to find love (Someone to Live).

While he enjoys the current success of Eating, which has been playing to packed houses in the United States for more than a year, he is editing another film,VeniceVenice. His identification with women was what drew Jaglom to explore the topic of women and food. Thirty-eight actresses and their stories of food obsession helped create the dialogue in Eating.

The following interview was edited from three lengthy telephone sessions with the always-forthcoming director. As you'll see, talking about feelings is something Jaglom not only films well, but does well himself.

Taylor: How did you come upon this particular theme, eating?

Jaglom: Just a minute. To answer that I have to get a cookie.

Taylor: Please do whatever you need to entertain yourself. I'm sure you've answered this question a hundred times already.

Jaglom: That's okay. I don't think of it as the same question because you're a different person. This theme? From my earliest childhood on, I've been close to women. I was close to my mother, close to the world of her and her friends, and they let me in. And as a result of being let in, I felt a kinship with women that I didn't with men, and I felt a sameness in my sensibility and my concerns, my yearnings and my dreams. But there was one huge difference, and that was that I ate and I had no problem with it. Food was there for me, I enjoyed it, I didn't think very much about it. I noticed from my earliest childhood on that girl children and women were very different about this. They were the product of a society that kept telling them with every magazine they read and every television commercial they saw and every movie they watched that they were not going to have realized lives, and they were somehow not going to be fulfilled beings unless they looked a certain way in bathing suits that summer. They were told that exterior things -- how they looked, how their hair was, how their bodies were -- would be the judgment of what they would find in the way of happiness. Men weren't given that message at all.

For women, the message is reinforced by every aspect of society. Then they're told, on the other side, that they are wrong to feel self-involved! So they have to hide the fact that they are totally tormented. That's what annoys me about the criticism of the movie as narcissistic.

Taylor: Well, I think the combination of the LA setting and all of the Southern California-isms, like all the birthday gifts that had to do with self-exploration....

Jaglom: Feel-good stuff.

How precisely I do it is hard to explain, because it's not exactly a script; I sew up the pattern, that's how I like to think about it. The most painstaking part is the editing. You have all these pieces, these moments, these behaviors. You have a smile, you have a tear, you have a look, you have two people confronting each other, you' ve got emotions and feelings all over the place. You've got to figure out how to interweave them all, how to make them into some gigantic ball gown. I have always wanted to sew, but I've never learned how. In my New York apartment I even have one room I call my sewing room.

Taylor: What about the ending of the film? Was that planned?

Jaglom: This was one of the few scenes that was acted exactly as it was written. A year after shooting I was editing the movie and worrying about what had happened to the main characters. We have two protagonists in this movie -- Helene (Lisa Richards) who is giving herself the fortieth birthday party, who doesn't think she can be alone. And the French woman, Martine (Nelly Alard), who thinks that she has to be alone. I thought it would be awfully good if each one of them was able to realize from the events of the day that she could free herself from her preconceptions. So I had fun shopping for their nighties, and then I put the two women together on a little wicker couch outside my office, and shot the final scene one year after the rest of the film. In it the French woman realizes she doesn't have to be alone. She finally understands that she is just one of all the women society has forced into the problem of food obsession. And the other woman, Helene, realizes that she doesn't need to be with somebody to be a person, that she does have an identity of her own. Both those lessons are important at different times for us, and I thought it would be good to have one of each at the same time.

There really is no solution to the food thing, because you can't stop eating. It's the attitude that has to change, not the eating. So the realization that you can move on in life and grow was all I thought I could give these people in the end.

Taylor: Why did you choose to set the film in Southern California, in such an upper-middle class, almost upper class, milieu?

Jaglom: Because I believe, and I've been taught from everything I understand about life, that you make art from your own experience. I can't go into a ghetto and try to make a film about what it's like to live in a ghetto -- I don't know about that. The people I know are comfortable. They have enough to eat, enough to dress themselves and house themselves. The issues they are concerned with are beyond survival.

Taylor: I'm hearing two things from people. Some say that they can relate to the movie even if they are of a different socioeconomic class or have a different political bent or are a different size than the actresses, and other people say that they can't relate to the film for the same reasons.

Jaglom: I've got a real unpleasant answer to this -- but I at least want you to know that I know it's unpleasant. I think that the division is really between people who feel that they have permission to care about their feelings and indulge that caring and people who don't feel that it's all right to do that.

All I know is that if people are in pain, people are in pain. And if they are upper-middle class people who are in pain, it's just as real as if they are working class people in pain. And if thin people think they are fat, if can be just as painful as heavy people being concerned about being fat. If the pain is there, the pain is there.

If I'm lonely I can tell myself all the reasons in the world why I shouldn't be lonely and about all I have that makes me luckier than anybody else, but I still experience loneliness. The choice is, do I allow myself to experience it and explore my feelings, or do I pretend I'm not lonely? In the same way, women have a choice. Not a choice about whether to feel these feelings, but about whether to acknowledge these feelings and not feel bad about themselves for having them. Whether to acknowledge these feelings and do something about them, or to tell themselves they have no right to their feelings when there' s a famine in Ethiopia.

I just saw a review of Eating from the Atlanta Journal. The whole basis of the reviewer's attack is, How dare you do this when there' s a world full of hungry people and here these women have more than enough? They're spoiled and they're sitting around indulging their feelings. A woman wrote this. She has obviously been conditioned by male society into thinking it is wrong for women to feel this way. It's just not serious enough. Men will tell you it's not serious. Yet these are issues that can cause people to die, to kill themselves.

A very famous old American movie director, Elia Kazan looked at my movies recently and said, "Well, you know, they're all very good, the acting's great and I like your directing, but none of them are about anything." And I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "A war, a bullfight, a boxing match where somebody wins and somebody loses -- these are important. But whether your wife leaves you or not, how important is that?" That's why we have to live our lives the way we do. Because we live in a society that has told us we aren't supposed to feel what we really feel. That it's not important enough.

Taylor: You've said before that you don't especially consider ourself political, but your statements about the right to express feelings are very political. Your politics of personal expression are very strong.

Jaglom: I like that. The "politics of personal expression" is a very nice way of putting it. Did I tell you about my conversation with Anais Nin about this subject?

Taylor: That's where she said, "All you can hope to do is make people feel"?

Jaglom: Yes. It was 1973 or 1974, and I called her from Paris because I felt a little bad. I was preparing a movie, and I was feeling somewhat decadent because I thought I should be dealing with more socially relevant things than people's feelings and emotions. So I called up Anais and she said this extraordinary line: "If you make people feel, you humanize them, and there is nothing more political than humanizing people." I have never looked back since that moment. I knew I didn't want to make the movies I thought I wanted to make when I was a kid, about political action. The world keeps changing. One can't be so clear about who's right and who's wrong. What's clear is telling the truth, humanly sharing life with another person. Trying to be an equal in a world with other equals is humanly correct. If you make people feel less bad about themselves, if you help them feel not as crippled as society makes them feel, then you're doing something that is political.

Taylor: Why were there no large women in the movie?

Jaglom: That's a matter of relativity. In the Southern California entertainment culture, half the women in the movie consider themselves fat and are considered too overweight to function in their careers. Hopefully this movie will create a bridge between women of all sizes.

Taylor: A few people have brought up that the two black women show up in the film only very briefly...

Jaglom: Not any more briefly than thirty of the other women. They' re not major characters. One of them happens to be my oldest friend. She's the one who gave the political statement about feeling her body has been colonized.

Taylor: Why didn't you pursue this?

Jaglom: I didn't pursue it because she had nothing more to say on it. I also know her extremely well and I don't believe her. She' s trying to protect herself with her politics from facing her unhappiness about being what she considers overweight. The other black woman had an interesting slant on body size which I didn't know about -- how black men and European men relate to the body differently. But she's got the same neurosis as the other women about trying to change herself to please people. It's so disturbing.

Taylor: Have you been aware in your own relationship of women trying to mold themselves to please you?

Jaglom: Gender has such conventional trappings. I think that when two free people have a free exchange and an equality, there aren't these socially prescribed role-playing things. People adhere to what they feel comfortable with and who they are, based on what's happening in their lives.

I think everybody should be everything in a relationship: the man and the woman, the mother and the child, the father and the child, the adult and the infant. All these roles should be interchangeable, based on what is needed at the moment, by whom, and what's comfortable between the two people, rather than on somebody else's description of what people of a particular gender should or should not do.

Taylor: And you learned this from your mother, to whose memory Eating is dedicated? Jaglom:

Jaglom: Oh, sure. I was playing with it. I never wanted to be a girl. But I loved playing at it. I would be a completely boyish boy, and then enter into this feminine world. It stayed separate. Maybe because I had a very loving male to identify with in my father.

Taylor: What about your father?

Jaglom: My father let me into the male world, but I didn't find it appealing. It was a world of figuring things out with your head, not your heart. It was all about power and structure and discipline and order. He is still, at ninety-seven, working in international trade and finance.

Taylor: Where did you grow up?

Jaglom: Manhattan. Some summers in Switzerland, some at camp in Maine, which was terrible because it was an all-boys' camp. But I got to play the girls' parts in the camp plays.

Taylor: How did the boys respond to you?

Jaglom: They got very flustered. I don't mean to sound immodest, but I think I made a very pretty girl.

Taylor: Where you sorry to leave that early period of your life?

Jaglom: No, I don't think so. Because I got very caught up in being a guy. I started falling in love left and right. But unlike most boys, I not only fell in love with girls, but I wanted to go shopping with them, too.

Taylor: The way you say that your mother and her friends "let you into their word," it sounds as through it was an honor.

Jaglom: Oh, it was. I consider there to be a direct link between that and being voted an honorary woman at the Toronto film festival last year. To be an honorary woman, I feel that it is the greatest honor I could possibly achieve. There are still a lot of weird male aspects to myself that once in a while shock me. The impatience, arrogance, aggressiveness -- I have tremendous access to all of that.

Taylor: Which is all necessary to make a movie, isn't it?

Jaglom: Yeah, but I want it to empower the female part of me, which I think of as the artistic, the creative, the communicative part of myself.

Taylor: How did you first learn filmmaking?

Jaglom: I never learned filmmaking. I never went to any school. I didn't want to know too much about lenses and what could and couldn' t be done. All my life I've had crew members -- cinematographers and sound people -- tell me, "You can't do this and you can't do that. It won't work." My luck was I didn't know anything, so I could keep asking for things. And of course it all worked. The first movie I made was A Safe Place in 1970.

Taylor: So when you first started playing around with filmmaking, you did it seriously?

Jaglom: Yes. I arrived on a set and I did it more seriously, in some ways, than I've ever done it since. I had a crew of 125 people; now I'm down to a crew of about 12. I had a studio -- Columbia Pictures -- financing it; now I have independent financing. I had rules and unions and regulations, and now I'm totally free. And I had Jack Nicholson and Tuesday Weld and Orson Welles waiting for me to tell them what to do. The crew of men looked at me -- this was in 1970, right in the middle of the Vietnam war -- with my ponytail and white ballet shoes, and they were very unhappy with this young kid. So the next day they showed up with American flag pin. But that first day we shot in Central Park and I thought, Well, this is exactly what I thought it would be. I didn't have a single moment's tension, fear, or worry about what to do. I just felt like I'd been doing it all my life.

Taylor: But how did you get yourself in a position to do such a big first production?

Jaglom: In 1967, during the Six-Day War in the Middle East, I had friends in Israel in military intelligence and in journalism. I thought it would be amazing to see what was going on there, and I decided to film it. I had always wanted to be a director, but I didn't know what that meant. On the way to the airport, I bought a camera. But because I'm very bad at technology, I didn't even buy one with a zoom lens -- I was sure it would be all out of focus if I tried to use it. So I went with my friends into the occupied territories. I would go up to a tank column in the Sinai and film very close up, and then I'd run down the sand dune and film a long tracking shot. Then I' d run uphill again and shoot close-ups of the shoes of Egyptians who had run away, leaving them behind. Then I'd run back and do a wide establishing shot. Then I'd get some close-ups of the faces of Israeli boys who were soldiers. What I didn't know was that I was doing something called cutting in the camera. I just thought this was how you made a movie, by running back and forth, and fortunately, I was young enough that it was easy.

I came home and bored all my friends with this five-hour silent movie. One of those friends had been a counselor at that boys' summer camp I had gone to when I was younger. Two years later, when he was helping to produce Dennis Hopper's movie Easy Rider, he asked me if I wanted to help edit it. He said, "You're a good editor." And I said, "I am?" I didn't know what he meant because I had just run back and forth, but I had never told anybody that. So I worked for eight weeks editing in one cutting room, and Jack Nicholson was in the cutting room next to me. We had actual editors sitting at a table with gloves on, doing what we told them to do. On the first day I asked one of them, "Can I take this piece out here and put it over there?" The guy looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Yeah." So I said, "Yeah, of course. So would you do that?" And that's how I learned about editing.

Easy Rider was so successful that each of us involved got a chance to make our own movies, and mine was A Safe Place. It was a poetic, dreamlike film about a young girl's mind and how hard it was for her to grow up. I cast Tuesday Weld in it as me -- it was an autobiographical film emotionally. It was inevitable that nobody quite understood why I cast a woman to play me, but when my mother saw it she said, "My God, I feel like I've made the film." It really was a film made by my mother's daughter in me.

Taylor: What do you think is your most important movie? Or do you think about your films in this way?

Jaglom: No. I think each movie reflects where I was at the time I made it. That first movie was the freest movie I'll ever make because I thought, Well, they've made a terrible mistake. They've given me all this money, and they're letting me make a movie of my own choice an from my own script. Nobody will ever do that again, so I'd better put everything I know about life -- my twenty-seven years of life -- into this movie, because it's a one-shot thing. And I made a major poetic film at a studio that thought it was bizarre and didn't know what to do with it. But Anais Nin found the film, and she became may sponsor and my champion.

Taylor: Was that when you first met her?

Jaglom: Yes. She came into my office, crying, after seeing the film at a screening sponsored by the National Organization for Women. She hugged me and said, "Now there are two Henrys in my life." So she put the film, which had been a disastrous flop when it opened, under her arm and took it around to college campuses and used it to illustrate the role of the feminine in art. She said the only mystery about it was that a man had made it, because, she said, it was a completely female film.

Taylor: You see, we really can't get away from the topic of gender. You speak of men and women as if we had two completely different cultures. And women's culture seems to you to be morally superior.

Jaglom: I believe that to such an extent that if I were politically in charge I would take the vote away from men.

Taylor: Personally, I'm trying to become more understanding of men.

Jaglom: I don't believe that's the right approach, I really don't.

Taylor: I did notice that every time a man was mentioned in Eating, it was in a negative light.

Jaglom: I didn't do that. That's what the women had to say. And I think that women are correctly evaluating men as oppressive to them. I don't know why every woman isn't gay. I'm doing a film about gay women, three films down the line. I can identify so easily with being a woman. I just can't identify with being attracted to men when you can have this wonderful, sharing, real open love with women, who can give and take and share and communicate. That's why I've been referred to as a male lesbian.

Taylor: But don't you find it interesting that some men are trying to change those made stereotypes?

Jaglom: "I don't know any. If you're talking about Robert Bly and those people, I don't relate to rolling around in mud and grunting like pigs. What is that about?

Taylor: You sound like an angry, disappointed woman. Do you have many male friends?

Jaglom: No. My closest male friend was Orson Welles, who gave an interview to the French press and made a big headline about our friendship. They asked him, "How come you and Henry are such close friends? You're generations apart, you come from such different places." He answered, "Henry and I are girlfriends." And he was right! The kind of intimacy we had most men just don't know how to do. He was a real girl.

Taylor: And that's a compliment?

Jaglom: It means you allow your warmth and your openness and your sharing. I wrote a line for Karen Black in Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? based on the statistic that three and a half times as many boy babies as girl babies beat their heads against the side of their cribs. Boys are angry and tense. Until men can be more like women, I don't want to hang out with them. Besides everything else, they're boring -- everything they deal with is outside themselves. They would rather watch a game of basketball than try to explore how they're feeling.

Taylor: You're voicing what some of my more angry women friends say about men.

Jaglom: I've been alone with men. I've listened to them. It's terrifying. It's so terrifying that you either spend your life knocking your head against the walls of male disturbances or you say, Look, I'm going to lunch with my girlfriend. I just don't have any desire to break down those walls in my personal life, but I do hope I can begin to do that with my movies.

CATHERINE TAYLOR is a freelance writer, editor, and poet living in Berkeley, California.
She is also the senior editor of RADIANCE.