Film

Impish Twinkles

A Short Interview with David O. Russell

by Sean Nelson

When I sat down to interview him last week, our 20-minute session was interrupted--or preempted, rather--by a torrent of distractions that issued straight from the filmmaker's mouth. After speculating wildly about the sexual proclivities of the editorial staff of the Christian magazine whose interview with Russell preceded mine, the director grabbed my little microphone and sang a few bars from a couple of songs ("Tainted Love," "Do-Re-Mi"), made me do the same (Billy Joel's "The Stranger"), accepted a cell phone call from an actor (Said Taghmaoui, best known as the Iraqi captain from Russell's Three Kings), and favored me with a disparaging impression of the previous night's presidential debate. While there was an impish twinkle in Russell's eyes during these interruptions, they seemed to be part and parcel of a discussion of I ♥ Huckabees, a film that doesn't so much defy classification as contain almost any classification one can throw its way. You can't synopsize a film whose subject is a gestalt of every major philosophical premise from Zen to nihilism and whose unfolding incorporates every primary cinematic genre. It follows that you can't really ask the maker of that film what he meant to say by making it. So I asked him--at length--who the ideal audience for his movie might be, and his answer was as simple as a Chinese poem: "I mean, you know what I mean?" Russell replied. "All I can say is, 'People who want to see something that's different and smart and funny.' They're going to go see this movie."

By then, our time was almost up.

When I sat down to interview him last week, our 20-minute session was interrupted--or preempted, rather--by a torrent of distractions that issued straight from the filmmaker's mouth. After speculating wildly about the sexual proclivities of the editorial staff of the Christian magazine whose interview with Russell preceded mine, the director grabbed my little microphone and sang a few bars from a couple of songs ("Tainted Love," "Do-Re-Mi"), made me do the same (Billy Joel's "The Stranger"), accepted a cell phone call from an actor (Said Taghmaoui, best known as the Iraqi captain from Russell's Three Kings), and favored me with a disparaging impression of the previous night's presidential debate. While there was an impish twinkle in Russell's eyes during these interruptions, they seemed to be part and parcel of a discussion of I ♥ Huckabees, a film that doesn't so much defy classification as contain almost any classification one can throw its way. You can't synopsize a film whose subject is a gestalt of every major philosophical premise from Zen to nihilism and whose unfolding incorporates every primary cinematic genre. It follows that you can't really ask the maker of that film what he meant to say by making it. So I asked him--at length--who the ideal audience for his movie might be, and his answer was as simple as a Chinese poem: "I mean, you know what I mean?" Russell replied. "All I can say is, 'People who want to see something that's different and smart and funny.' They're going to go see this movie."

By then, our time was almost up.