In the opening sequence of Bulworth, the camera pans slowly around the Capitol Hill office of the eponymous senator, as he plays and re-plays the soundbite that begins the 30-second TV commercial for his re-election campaign: "We stand at the threshold of a new millennium . . . " He's in tears. Among the mementoes that line the walls is a black and white photograph of a youthful Bulworth, in a tight head-shot with Bobby Kennedy, both men glowing with a bright-eyed optimism. The photograph is real, except that Bulworth, of course, is Warren Beatty. "We were campaigning in Oregon," he says.
It's only a fleeting moment. Blink and you'd miss it. But, as Hollywood's elder statesman keeps repeating throughout this interview, there are no accidents in the movie. And as writer, director and producer - as well as star - he should know.
For all its wacky humour, Bulworth builds to a savage indictment of American politics. It tells the story of a Democrat, a senator so disillusioned that he decides to commit suicide, hiring a hitman to do the job. Thus freed from the political straitjacket, like a madman he begins to tell the truth - in rhyme - abandoning Beverly Hills for the 'hood, the garbage-filled streets of South Central Los Angeles, taking on the language and dress of a young urban black, falling in love with a 23year-old black girl on the way.
Warren Beatty is probably the only man in the history of Hollywood who could have got away with it. Beatty wears his celebrity as comfortably as an old dressing gown, as only those who have always had it can. He does not stand on spurious ceremony. He wanders around looking for Kleenex for his cold ("I get one every two weeks from my kids"), puts his feet up on another chair, snatches bites from the snack table. However, when the PR suggests the interview should end now, she's shooed away with an imperious wave. In the narrow corridor of a suite in the Dorchester Hotel where we shake hands, the still-muscled bulk, dressed in black trousers and black leather jacket, nearly obscures the light. The legendary charm is much in evidence: he listens, he smiles, he holds your gaze. However, he sees no reason why you should ask all the questions, nor that he should have to answer them. At best he's cagey, at worst he's silent. This is not a man given to soundbites.
The high school footballer, brother of actress Shirley Maclaine, was a film star himself by the time he was 23. Elia Kazan had made a star of Brando in 1954 and it so it was with Beatty with Splendor in the Grass in 1961. Beatty's left-wing politics, nurtured in his academic family in Virginia (mother Scottish from Nova Scotia, father of old Irish stock, both Baptists) went down well in the newly liberal White House. JFK is rumoured to have wanted Beatty to play him on screen, but it was the charismatic Bobby with whom he identified.
In 1967 he produced and starred in Bonnie and Clyde, a watershed film that married art-movie techniques to Hollywood violence and glamour. It made him a millionaire and from then on he could pick and chose. In 40 years he has made only 28 films. Most of these were before 1974. Over the past 25 years he has made only six, all of which he has produced himself, usually involving other credits as well, screenwriter (Shampoo, Love Affair), director (Dick Tracy) writer/director (Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Bulworth). Warren Beatty is no slouch.
In between films he became heavily involved with politics and "had a life". He hung out with cultural icons, but not the ones you would normally associate with a movie star: Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a close friend; James Baldwin still is.
He campaigned for Robert Kennedy, George McGovern, Gary Hart, Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter. Politics began to appear in his work. Shampoo (1977), set on the eve of the Nixon election in 1968, was an attack on the values that brought the star of Watergate into power. The near-epic Reds (1981) told the story of an American communist who chronicled the Soviet Revolution and was an extraordinary film for Hollywood to sanction - let alone give him an Oscar for directing - at the height of the Reagan era.
Now comes Bulworth. What is so extraordinary is that Hollywood let him do it. The deal arose out of an old debt with Fox: he wouldn't demand the money they owed him if they let him make a movie on his own terms.
The plot outline he gave them was limited to the bare bones of the story - depressed man takes out heavy life insurance, arranges for contract killer, falls in love and changes his mind. What he failed to mention was that the man was a white senator that the girl was a black 23-year-old and that the subjects it dealt were the marginalisation of African Americans and political corruption.
It was, he admits, a unique sequence of events that will never happen again.
Fox made no attempt to interfere, he says. "They couldn't legally but they could have tried. There are many ways that you can interfere with someone, but they didn't." He doesn't know why. "It might be a manifestation of freedom of speech. It might be a manifestation of artistic freedom or it might be a manifestation of contempt or lack of interest. It's a very, very big corporation and once you realise that you're making a movie for that corporation that essentially says that the greatest danger to democracy is big corporations . . ." Like so many of his responses, the sentence tails off unfinished.
Bulworth is a political movie, says Beatty, not because it involves politicians but because it deals with "nitty-gritty serious socio-economic" political issues. In this it's radically different, he suggests, from last year's hits, Primary Colours or Wag The Dog. "Mike (Nichols, director of Primary Colours) made a comedy about a man who was running for president and I don't think he got into the dialectics of what that man stood for or what he felt it was necessary to change." If the movie pulled back, he says, "it was because Joe Klein (writer of Primary Colours) pulled back. And he pulled back on a man that pulled back, Bill Clinton, and so what you get is what you get.
"I think Mike's movie dealt with the means of popularity in campaigning, and the fun of it. Barry's (Levinson, who directed Wag the Dog) movie, which I enjoyed a lot, deals with public relations also. It deals with the mechanisms of the facade, but the two movies don't get into social issues."
What both films do address is sexual morality, which Bulworth doesn't touch. Perhaps because it's too close to home, not only as throughout his career Beatty has been credited with a Don Juan-length roster of sexual conquests (Madonna, Bardot, Christie, Keaton, to name only those recognisable by a single name), but rather through his close involvement with Gary Hart's campaign to secure the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, a campaign - indeed an entire political career - that was destroyed thanks to a sexual scandal.
The Clinton impeachment process, he believes, has little to do with lying or perjury. He sees Clinton as sacrificial lamb offered up to the altar of American puritanism, a 300-year-old legacy that the country could well do without. "I think the fall-out from this farce is that it will no longer be possible to return to the sexual puritanism of the past. America has the highest divorce rate on the planet and I think it's possible that if this sexual hypocrisy decreases, maybe the divorce rate will decrease and I think the stability of the family is not a bad thing to have."
He speaks with the conviction of the converted. After a lifetime of serial philandering (Woody Allen once said that if he were reincarnated he would like to come back as Warren Beatty's fingertips) the reformed Lothario is now the father of three children, Kathlyn (seven), Ben (four) and Isabel (two), is married to their mother, Annette Bening, and seems extremely content.
For someone who is prepared to stand up and be counted in the most public way possible, Warren Beatty remains strangely reticent about voicing his disenchantment with the present US administration, which surely, I suggest, was the impetus behind Bulworth.
"I couldn't define it and I wouldn't want to be reductive about it because it wouldn't be accurate. Because I've spent a lot of time in politics, I had this opportunity to put something into this pot. . ."
In the mid-1970s he was serious enough about politics for friends to commission a poll in California to see whether he should run for governor. The results were overwhelming. "I thought about it for 12 seconds and I just didn't think I would like that kind of a life and that I probably would not succeed at it very well and I walked away." Today he wouldn't even give it 12 seconds.
He no longer even campaigns and his anger is palpable. "Practical politics, becoming elected, is mainly about raising money, just as releasing a movie . Getting elected is about spending money, and releasing movies is about spending money - tremendous amounts of money on television on 30-second spots. An interesting statistic: the election this past November, only one-third of one per cent of news broadcasts in California were devoted to the election, including debates. That's what used to be called free media. The rest is paid media.
"It's the same when you release a movie. A really sophisticated company would think it was quaint that I was sitting talking to you. A really sophisticated company says, `let's do market research, let's see where our core audience is, and let's spend and get them. And if you can't spend and get them, let's not waste our time.' "
Changes in the political arena, he believes, are possible only by changing the law, limiting expenditure and giving free air time. As for movies, he thinks it's only a matter of time before audiences grow tired of being deceived by 30-second trailers.
Among those who gave Beatty the moral confidence to move into a world so removed from his own were James Baldwin and Leroi Jones, the pre-eminent revolutionary poet of the 1960s, now known as Amiri Bakara, and Bakara himself is the only obvious non-naturalistic element in Bulworth, as a black hobo, a disenfranchised Everyman who speaks straight to camera. (Although Beatty also stresses that the relationship between Bulworth and the ultra-young black girl should be seen purely as a metaphor and not as an exercise in 60-year old vanity.) Yet for all its liberal heart, I suggest, doesn't Bulworth's portrayal of blacks simply reinforce white stereotypes?
"What you always fall into when you deal with African Americans in movies or plays or pretty much anything else is the problem of what Jimmy Baldwin called the Burden of Representation. If you saddle an actor with the burden of having to represent his entire race how can he play a part? And the type of comedy that I do, you could make an argument that every character, white and black, is a stereotypical character whether in Bulworth or in Shampoo.
`So I have to turn away from that discussion, because it has nothing to do with the things I have been taught to do, with the art of acting, the art of directing. It has something to do with interesting things about image. I don't debunk them. But it doesn't have anything to do much with what my work is." And there has, he says, been almost no negative reaction from the black community "because it's so clear where the picture's heart is, so the reaction is `wow, he sure took a leap there'."
Although set in the 1990s, Bulworth offers answers to racism and money-politics that seem curiously nostalgic, inspired less by 1990s pragmatism than by 1960s idealism: honesty and the sexual melting pot ideals that Bobby Kennedy, through his untimely death, will always embody.
So should Bulworth be read as a homage to Kennedy? The clues, I suggest, are all there, the Californian primaries, the Los Angeles hotel shooting, the final frame of the film outside the Mount Sinai hospital where his body was taken after he was assassinated. And, of course the photograph that I hadn't spotted but which Beatty pointed out. Beatty smiles the Mona Lisa smile that he regularly uses in place of an answer. "Bobby is not a ghost, he is a spirit." He adds after a long pause, "There is nothing in that film that is not on purpose." And the ambiguity of the ending? Like everything else it was intended. "What Amiri Baraka is saying is that you've got to be a spirit."
Warren Beatty believes Bulworth to be the best movie he's ever made, and the critics, he says, agree. Does their opinion matter? "Of course it matters. I'm that kind of guy."
Bulworth is now showing at selected Irish cinemas
