This Elvis rocks the interviews
Movie lovers - real movie lovers - are in for a treat with TMC's new limited talk show series "Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence," starting today and running every Monday through July. Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Elvis Mitchell, a former New York Times film critic, sits down with eight prominent filmmakers for chats that quickly evolve into smart conversations that entertain and reveal on levels those shallow late-night talk show interviews (read: disguised movie promos) don't.
I contacted Mitchell to get a take on the movies, as well as his new program that starts tonight with the late actor/director Sydney Pollack and whips through Bill Murray (July 14), Laurence Fishburne (July 21) and Quentin Tarantino (July 29), In November, guests include Joan Allen, Edward Norton, John Leguizamo and Richard Gere.
DG: You have a very relaxed and smart interviewing style. What's the secret?
EM: "The only way to do that is do as much preparation as I can, so people understand that I take them and their time seriously. You've done your work and you have developed a point of view and you have questions to ask. Another key thing is they haven't come in to pitch a project, which takes a lot of genuineness out of it. You've got to steer the conversation back from 'It was like a family making this movie' and those other programmed responses that are so often part of interviews."
DG: When you interviewed Mr. Pollack, did you know he had cancer?
EM: "He hadn't been diagnosed at that time."
DG: I spoke with Robert Redford late last year and he knew about Mr. Pollack's cancer, but hadn't spoken to him in quite a while.
EM: "They made seven movies together. That's a lot of very intense time together - 12- to 14- to 18-hour days for months at a time. That's surprising to me that Redford hadn't spoken to him. Pollock really understood what made Redford a movie star and did a great job of bringing out that quality. I think he's as responsible for making Redford a star as anyone."
DG: You got more out of Bill Murray in your conversation than most reporters ever get.
EM: "What people don't know about Bill Murray is that he's a smart guy and a thoughtful guy. He takes films seriously. He's a student of the medium."
DG: How did you become a film critic?
EM: "It was better than going to law school, frankly. I really did kind of fall into it. I was working at a college public radio station in Detroit. I was asked to fill in for the film critic, who had just quit. I said sure. It happened that way. I had the opportunity to meet Pauline Kael and she said that I should stick with it because I apparently had an affinity for it."
DG: How important are movies, really?
EM: Oh, my god! It gives us a sense of community. We may watch movies on our cell phones, but we still go into theaters and share that experience together. It's influence in the way we develop socially. In the way we court. In the way we dress. Our first model of ourselves comes from film. Now, kids start training with films even earlier by watching movies in the back of the family van before moving into the theater experience. There's nothing near the physical size of movies in the popular culture, where you can go and experience six-channel Dolby and be overwhelmed by a film in the way nothing else in popular culture can.
DG: Name one of the greatest influences the movies had on you as a youngster.
EM: "The great moment that the old white guy slaps (Sidney Poitier) and he slaps him right back (from "In the Heat of the Night"). There was a gasp in the theater when he did that. One of my great joys was to see a movie within the culture. Portier was someone who did that for me."