Notoriously difficult. Notoriously different. David O Russell's latest, weirdest offering, I Heart Huckabees, is perplexing critics and cinema-goers alike. After tales of Russell rubbing up against actors and grabbing their genitals on the set of the film, a worried Donald Clarke meets the controversial director
The woman from BBC Radio 4 gives me a what-on-earth look as she emerges from the hotel room where David O. Russell is meeting the press. It transpires that the peculiar film director, who in no other fashion resembles the late Paula Yates, insisted that the journalist snuggle up next to him on his four-poster bed throughout the interview. One can only speculate about where they placed the lady with the microphone.
The bed incident is very much in keeping with Russell's reputation for singular people-management skills. In an already notorious profile, written on the set of his latest film I Heart Huckabees, New York Times journalist Sharon Waxman describes Russell rubbing up against actors, grabbing their genitals and calling Lily Tomlin "the crudest word imaginable." Elsewhere in the article she suggests that he once got the director Christopher Nolan into a headlock and enjoyed fisticuffs with George Clooney while making the acclaimed 1999 Gulf War flick Three Kings. This is not how we expect our celebrity Zen Buddhists to behave.
"There are actors who like to figure things out one way and don't like it when you depart from that," he says. "And if you do that a lot - which I do - then it is not going to be pleasant."
But were relations really that difficult with George? "Clooney and I famously didn't get along and he has since made a federal case out of it," he says. "It is just so tedious to me. If it's such a big deal then let's take it to court. He will tell you five million bad things about me from now until sundown, but I think that one of the biggest problems was just work methodology. Spike Jonze and Mark Wahlberg had no problem with it on that film. Ice Cube had no problem."
What did Dustin Hoffman, once famously truculent, now mellower, make of the director's methodologies on the set of Huckabees? "We kind of reached our mutual understanding at pre-production, which was a mutual staring down," he says. "And when you respect one another, you can have fun together. Typically, actors will protect themselves; they will pick a safe way of doing it then tell a director they are trying to do it his way, but they are usually lying because they don't trust the director. But Dustin really would try, because he did trust me."
It is perhaps about time that I pointed out that Russell has seen fit to rise from his bed and make his way to a chair for our conversation. But he still comes across as pretty darn weird. With black, collar-length hair and unforgiving, immobile eyes, he carries about him the aura of the cult inductee. He talks in a slow monotone. He rarely laughs. If he offered you a leaflet in an airport, you'd probably take it.
Should you wish to get a clearer notion of what it is like to meet Russell then rush along to I Heart Huckabees, as odd a film to grace the multiplexes this or any other year, in which Jason Schwartzman plays a very thinly disguised version of the director. Albert, a political activist for an ecological organisation, becomes confused by a series of odd coincidences and hires a pair of married "psychic detectives" (Hoffman and Tomlin) to try and work out what the events might mean and how they may explain Absolutely Everything. What happens next defies summary.
"It's a page right out of my life," says Russell. "I didn't become a film maker until I was 30. I was an activist and these are my favourite kinds of people - those who defy convention for any kind of spiritual or political end."
Adam comes across as more than a little arrogant. Is that how Russell remembers himself? "Sure. You just don't understand why people don't see things your way at that age. A spiritual adept might have sat down and done things a different way."
Born in 1958, Russell studied at Amhert College under Dr Robert Thurman (father of Uma), who would later become the inspiration for Hoffman's character in Huckabees. After graduating, he worked for a while in Nicaragua, taught literacy in Boston and eventually wound up in New York City, where he began to experiment in film.
"I was always motivated by following my own visions - whether that was to be an activist or a journalist or, later, a film-maker. I started using video equipment to document housing conditions and immigrant conditions and then moved on from there." As far back as 1990 he toyed with the ideas that would eventually form themselves into I Heart Huckabees. But his first film turned out to be acerbic, uncomfortable comedy Spanking the Money (1994) in which a young man thinks about his mother in ways no young man should. "I haven't seen it for a while and I wouldn't want to see it now," Russell says. The picture created a stir at the Sundance Film Festival and Russell found himself crowned that season's indie darling. He followed up Spanking with a more conventional relationship comedy, Flirting With Disaster, and then came Three Kings. The film, a cynical western relocated to occupied Iraq, was a major critical success (even if it didn't make much money), but Russell says he will never tackle such a huge project again.
"It wasn't the bigness of it - though that was part of it - it was working with people who I instinctively knew I wouldn't work with again. You just become miserable and I can't live with that anymore. You really shouldn't work with people you know you are not going to mesh with." I think we know whom he means.
If Three Kings was a step towards conventional, commercial cinema then Huckabees, though often very funny, is a giant leap in another direction.
"I had this dream where I was being followed by a woman detective who was sexy, but was following me for metaphysical reasons," he says. "And that tickled me as being quite funny. What amuses me is juxtaposing something like that with conventional reality." Featuring meditations on quantum theory, flirtations with nihilism and an appearance by Shania Twain, the picture follows Tomlin and Hoffman as they uncover a plot by the imaginary Huckabees retail chain to infiltrate Albert's ecological group. Mark Wahlberg is a fireman. Naomi Watts is a model. Jude Law is a sly executive.
"I think the most daring thing about the film is its sincerity about philosophical matters," he says. "They are typically treated in a very dark way like in The Matrix or in a very satirical way. This film does neither."
He must have been taken aback by the critics' responses. I can think of no picture that has received such disparate reviews from respectable sources. "For those who wake up and read the morning paper with dread and wonder if we'll ever wake up from our nightmare, well, have I got a movie for you," the New York Times enthused. "Huckabees is godawful, a mirthless, bilious bore," the Washington Post thundered.
"I was not surprised in the least," he says impassively. "I knew the film was a risk. I think there are people who are used to expecting comedy to be in one place and spiritual insight to be found somewhere else entirely. They think the twain should not meet." Ask Russell to explain the philosophical basis of the picture and you are likely to be bombarded - if that is the word for a monologue delivered in such sleepy tones - with an overpowering payload of verbiage. "Comedy and spiritual realisation have the same root which is the subversion of the self . . . Religion has become separated from soulfulness and it doesn't serve humanity any more . . . There is a prejudice within science that has evicted the soul." It is tempting to tune out. But he does have interesting things to say about the way humans avoid considering the really big questions while going about their daily lives. Though the events of September 11th are only alluded to in passing, shadows of the catastrophe hang over this mad comedy.
"September 11th? What struck me was that people were suddenly asking questions with intensity that I had been asking my whole life," Russell says. "Politically, spiritually, philosophically: why do people only ask themselves deep important questions when something really bad happens then forget about it 10 minutes later?"
There is more than a touch of arrogance to Russell. Observe how he feels the need to point out that, unlike poor empty us, he never stops musing upon huge metaphysical issues. And he stubbornly refuses to give an inch to those who found Huckabees baffling. As he is saying good-bye, he tells (warns?) me that a sequel might be on the way. The folks at the Washington Post take note.
