Mother Night
Director Keith Gordon
For some actors who turn to writing and directing, filmmaking offers an opportunity for creative growth or better roles. For director Keith Gordon, whose latest film is Mother Night (1996), it's what he's wanted to do all along. He just took a slightly circuitous route getting there.
The 35-year-old Gordon began his career in his teens with a fortunate series of circumstances. The Bronx native was acting in a high school play when he was spotted and asked to come to an audition. Roles in New York theatrical productions followed and by the time he was 18, he was starring in Brian DePalma's comedy Home Movies (1980) and playing supporting roles such as Roy Scheider's younger self in Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979).
He continued his life in front of the camera with DePalma's Dressed to Kill (1980) as a teenaged computer whiz, and John Carpenter's Christine (1983) as the title car's owner. By this time, he had also been an intern at the film department of the Museum of Modern Art, and utilized his free time on movie sets as an informal film school, observing every aspect of the filmmaking process, particularly the directors. He began the transition to the other side of the camera by co-writing and starring in Static (1985), about a man whose TV can tune into heaven.
Gordon became a writer/director with The Chocolate War (1988), about a rebellion at a strictly conformist Catholic boys school, adapted from Robert Cornier's young adult novel. Another adaptation followed, A Midnight Clear (1992), from William Wharton's novel about a young platoon in World War II, which he also directed.
Keith Gordon's relationship with Mother Night author Kurt Vonnegut reflects the strange turns of the filmmaker's career. He become interested in Vonnegut's work after seeing the film of Slaughterhouse Five (1972). After reading and admiring Vonnegut, Gordon would meet him in a most unexpected place: the set of the Rodney Dangerfield film Back to School (1986), where Keith Gordon was playing Dangerfield's college student son. Vonnegut appears briefly in the film as himself, hired by Dangerfield to write a paper about his work for a literature class.
This first meeting was inauspicious. The nervous Gordon barely spoke to Vonnegut during the day of filming, afraid of sounding foolish around someone he so admired. It took a third party, Robert B. Weide, longtime friend of both Gordon's and Vonnegut's, to finally get them together. Weide — writer, producer, and director of numerous television documentaries and comedy specials including Mastergate and The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell (his production company is called Whyaduck) — suggested to Gordon that they adapt a Vonnegut novel. They chose Mother Night based on its linear storyline and the possibility of filming it within a fairly reasonable budget.
The film rights to Mother Night, first published in 1961, had already been purchased, but were about to expire. Vonnegut told Weide and Gordon that if they wanted to adapt the book, it was theirs. The pair were to serve as producers, with Gordon directing and Robert Weide tackling his first feature film screenplay, which he completed in 1990. Gordon admits that he foresaw a process of rewrites ahead, but was pleasantly surprised.
"He just nailed it," says Gordon of Weide's first draft, and the final shooting script didn't stray far from that initial version. After a rollercoaster of funding attempts, the financing eventually came from Fine Line Features, which is also the film's theatrical distributor. At a budget of $5.5 million, Mother Night is still considered a small film by Hollywood standards, but Gordon expresses the feelings of many independent filmmakers who are accustomed to scrambling for every dollar.
"It's all relative to me," he says, "It was the most I'd ever had for a movie, so it was a lot of money."
As the film became a reality, both Gordon and Weide were concerned with Kurt Vonnegut's reactions to the adaptation, even though they had a good working relationship.
"Vonnegut is very unprotrietary about his work. For him, a book is a book and a movie isn't a book," says Gordon. "It's an unusual attitude, but also very smart."
Vonnegut even appears briefly in Mother Night, as one of the concerned faces who cross the path of Nick Nolteπs Howard Campbell, the central character of the book and film. Campbell is an American spy in World War II Germany who paradoxically serves the Allies by being an effective Nazi. The questions that arise from Campbell's circumstances are the crux of Mother Night. When Keith Gordon talks about Campbell, as he did during a recent telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles, he starts with the specific but then quickly moves to the general, seeing the character's conflicts in everyday situations.
"How much in our lives do we always assume that what we're doing is on the side of the angels?" he asks. "How do you know that white lie you told couldn't do tremendous damage? At what point have you crossed that line where you are no longer being such a 'good person' and become destructive? It's ambiguous because I don't think there are any answers to these questions in an absolute way, no lines of demarkation."
Howard Campbell's myopia, his refusal to see what he's doing as anything but good, are what he must come to deal with in the film. There are also the very serious ramifications of Campbell's virulently anti-Semitic speeches and their contribution to the Holocaust. Gordon's film, like Vonnegut's book, is a black comedy that has a skewed and ambiguous take on Campbell's moral situation and how much responsibility he's willing to accept.
"Some people in the Jewish community say you can't have humor in a film about the issues around the Holocaust," says Gordon, who is Jewish. "You're not allowed to tell the story in that way."
But without ever trivializing, Gordon chooses the side of complexity instead of dictating the film's message in a simplistic manner: "You can't, when you're making a movie say 'What if someone doesn't understand this?'"
People will project what they want onto the supremely conflicted Howard Campbell, explains Gordon: "They'll take it the way they'll take it."
"How far do you go with the comedy? It's an interesting line you try to cross," says Keith Gordon, who along with his own sensibilities and experience doesn't have far to look for comedy that pushed the envelope.
His actor and director parents, Mark and Bobbi Gordon, were members of the Compass Players, the group who established a new form of satirical, ensemble-based improvisational comedy and evolved into The Second City and its numerous offspring.
Keith Gordon, still slightly amazed that he was able to negotiate the transition from young actor to serious filmmaker, sees that process of inventive collaboration as one of the great joys of filmmaking.
"The wonderful thing about making a film," he says, "is having all these creative minds working in one place, on one thing."
© 1996, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.