`I went to a premiere, and also with some friends (later). At the end, I turned to the person sitting next to me and said, “Gee, I’m glad I’m a novelist.” The things I like to do artistically, you basically can’t in a movie: to contemplate, to investigate the complexities of something, to ponder. Those are things you can’t do in a movie.’ — Author Jane Smiley
Q. How involved were you in the making of the movie?
A. Oh, very, very little. The director asked me a couple of questions, we talked maybe for a half an hour once and that was all.
Q. I had heard that you had been consulted.
A. They told me that they consulted the book a lot and had all the scenes marked in the book, but that was consulting the book. It wasn’t consulting me.
Q. How would the movie have differed if you had been consulted?
A. Let’s put it this way: How would it have been different if I had edited or had some oversight?
I would have somehow tried to include Ginny’s attempt to poison Rose, because that is what takes the book, in my opinion, out of the category of being a melodrama, because instead of having Ginny focus on what happened to her, she comes to focus on how to contemplate unthinkable things as manifestations of humanity. And that is the difference between her and Rose. Rose is always angry and angry to the end and takes the position that, “This has been done to me and it is honorable for me never to forget it.” That is a position a lot of people take and need to take. But having done her own perpetrating, Ginny had a different view of evil, and although I don’t think she ever reconciles with her father or even forgives him, she recognizes that passions and judgment and being out of control lead you to places you never intended to go. So I would have tried to work that in.
There are specific scenes based on “King Lear”–the storm scene, the divvying up scene. I thought that in the movie those went by too quickly. I think in the storm scene, the director should have lingered and lingered and lingered until the audience was writhing in their seats. Instead of focusing on how they were looking for Larry, follow Larry into the storm. One of the things missing from the movie is resonance of the play. That would have given a grandeur those scenes needed to be prolonged–maybe only a minute or so–so that they echoed the play.
I would have backed off those women–literally–with the camera. It’s not that they had too many scenes. It’s that they were too big–their faces were too big and too closeup, so you didn’t get a sense of their context.
But I will say this. The way Hollywood works, nobody was ever going to make that movie without those two women (stars Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer). What I was told about the making of the movie was that every time the company got cold feet, the producers trotted out the two women . . . and they used their power and influence to get the movie made because they wanted to make it.
The movie that we see was actually a depiction of the way the movie got made, because it only could be made with them pressing for it and pressing for it. And the company only felt confident about the movie with the star power, so obviously the stars who have the power and are the power are going to be big on the screen. So the way we see them is a manifestation of how the movie got made.
Q. Aside from whether the book translated to film, do you think it was a good movie?
A. When I saw the movie, I realized that I would never know whether it was a good movie. It’s just impossible for me to know. I went to a premiere, and also with some friends (later). At the end, I turned to the person sitting next to me and said, “Gee, I’m glad I’m a novelist.” The things I like to do artistically, you basically can’t in a movie: to contemplate, to investigate the complexities of something, to ponder. Those are things you can’t do in a movie.
Q. What about the male characters? Did you think, for instance, that Larry, played by Jason Robards, lacked complexity in the film?
A. If they had prolonged some of his scenes a little bit, they could have given him more of a chance to make those references to Lear that he was clearly capable of making.
A character I thought was very good in the movie, and I thought the actor did a good job in the movie, was Keith Carradine as Ty, because he really came across as farmerlike. He had the walk, he had the talk, he had the body language. He was definitely a good-looking farmer, but there are plenty of good-looking farmers. I felt at the end, in that last scene between him and Ginny in the diner, that was simultaneously reserved and poignant. You realize that he had a tragedy, too, and he had been lost along with everything else, and in some ways he would never understand what happened to him. Ginny and Rose would understand what happened to them, but he never would. I felt that the actor was really responsible for that role.
Q. What about the setting? It seemed more like a Ralph Lauren ad than a real, working farm.
A. I found it uninteresting. I would have tried to bring a wider lens to the whole thing.
I do think that among the various critics, one thing has gone unremarked, which is remarkable to me. I went to another movie over the summer that got far better reviews than “A Thousand Acres.” . . . When it was over–and this is in the context of (critic) Janet Maslin saying that the male characters in “A Thousand Acres” were ineffectual–I thought: What’s the Hollywood definition of an effectual man? It’s a man who hits you, knocks you down, punches you, makes an ironic comment and maybe shoots you.
If you see “Men in Black,” they’re good because they’re shooting aliens and it’s funny. If you go see some other movie, they’re good because they’re shooting criminals. If you go see a supposed quality movie, their morality is compromised because they are shooting each other. They are all defined in the same way as men: They hurt people. In my opinion, part of the reason that the movie “A Thousand Acres” was difficult to make and, in some ways courageous for those women to make, was that it critiqued male violence absolutely. There is nowhere in the movie where a man commits a violent act out of necessity and is forgiven for it. That is the usual pattern in a Hollywood movie. You might call it the “High Noon” effect, where a good man is not the man who doesn’t commit violence, he is the man who commits violence out of necessity.
Well, for most of us, any violence that erupts in our life is absolutely destructive. We can’t say, “We want our husbands to shoot only bad guys, or want our children to commit violence if they have to.” We teach children not to commit violence at all. So, to my mind, the whole cultural view of Hollywood–of what a man is–is skewed toward violence, and for there to be a movie made that ultimately, overtly and straightforwardly condemns that is not only a critique of farm culture or whatever, it’s a critique of Hollywood itself.
I’ve already said I don’t know whether it is a good movie and I can’t judge it, but it is the only movie this year that critiques violence absolutely in that way. Every other Hollywood movie I’ve seen uses violence as a plot necessity to make it a feature of male identity.
The movie was never going to affect me very much, because I didn’t get a good deal. The best I could ever hope for was that the novel could get back on the best-seller list and it did, so great. The book is the book.
