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David O Russell Interview
DAVID O RUSSELL
David O. Russell is an unorthodox director and person to interview. Having now evolved from his wunderkind status with films such as 1994's Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster in 1996 and 1999's Three Kings, Russell now presents us with a mature piece on existentialism. More on I Heart Huckabees later, but Russell remains a director whose personality tends to overshadow his films. Reports from the set of Three Kings suggested he got involved in fistfights with George Clooney, and his new film has been dogged by a New York Times article by reporter Sharon Waxman which Russell is reportedly very, very unhappy with. Waxman accuses Russell of goading and shocking his actors (among them Jude Law, Dustin Hoffman and Mark Wahlberg), writes about how he headlocked British director Chris Nolan until he agreed to free Jude Law from a contract to let him appear in his film, and even quotes one of his leading ladies Isabelle Huppert as describing him as 'very annoying'.
So perhaps it comes as little surprise when Russell responds to our first innocent question of where he got the name Huckabees (which refers to a large shopping chain) from with a steely glare and the answer 'My ass.' This is followed by a silence, which repeatedly punctuates our conversation.
It's a deeply strange film by anyone's standards, let alone Hollywood's, and the director explains its origins. 'I've been trying to write this movie for fifteen years. At college I had this teacher Robert Thurman, who was Uma Thurman's Dad, and a deeply unpretentious scholar, whom Dustin's character is based on. First I wrote another project, based on a Zen centre in New York with a Japanese Zen master that I went to, which is why I spent five years between my last film and this one.' Critics have been hugely divided on the piece, some hailing it as an esoteric masterpiece, others condemning its pretentious appeal. Russell seems to thrive on the film's divisive nature. 'For smartie-pants writers it's a tough one. A lot of them have savaged it but a lot of critics have loved it too.'
Russell clearly eschews the Hollywood norm: 'It's not like I made a heist movie where we'd have nothing to talk about, like maybe that star's hair gel, or he was very funny on set all the time.' What he really wants to talk about is his philosophy of life (which the film is based upon), which leads him to make several grave pronouncements such as 'They're mostly Indo-Tibetan theories, but there is some Zen and Buddhism in there as well. I've read Western philosophy and none of it has captivated me as much as Eastern philosophy, which seems more direct.' Or 'Indo-Tibetan philosophy is more about inter-connectedness and infinity'.
Amidst his earnest philosophising, Russell seems happy to play the obstreperous and even difficult director's card. When asked about the film title's second word and how to pronounce it (it is just a heart symbol) he admits 'If there's any confusion about how to say it then I like that.'
Russell finishes with 'I think the most important thing about the film is its sincerity', and it's abundantly clear that he is very intense about his own sincerity. But whether larger audiences will embrace his latest work remains to be seen.
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