The Outsider

James Toback is one of a handful of veteran American independent filmmakers that deserves to be called a maverick-a funny, energetic, deliberately disreputable writer-director whose movies fuse meticulously scripted dialogue and freewheeling improvisations while exploring the tension between art and commerce, and the collision of race, sex and class. His filmography includes Exposed, The Pickup Artist, Two Girls and a Guy, Black and White and last year's When Will I Be Loved.

A stockbroker's son with degrees from Harvard and Columbia, he spent much of his 20s as an English teacher at CCNY, then became a freelance sportswriter, a gambler, and a close friend, longtime houseguest and biographer of football icon Jim Brown. Toback's Brown biography led him into screenwriting; his first produced script was 1974's Dostoevsky-inspired The Gambler, directed by Karel Reisz and starring James Caan. His directorial debut was 1977's still shocking drama Fingers, starring Harvey Keitel as a young gangster who collects debts for his domineering loan-shark dad while aspiring to be a serious pianist.

On June 30 at 7 p.m., the Museum of the Moving Image will screen a double feature of Fingers and its energetic, imaginative remake, The Beat My Heart Skipped, from French director Jacques Audiard (Read my Lips), with Toback in attendance. The Beat My Heart Skipped opens locally July 1. Toback is also the subject of a feature-length biography titled The Outsider. The following is a truncated version of a conversation that occurred last Friday. A longer version is available at nypress.com.

Whether I like or don't like one of your movies, or any aspect of one of your movies, I feel like there's no wall between the filmmaker and the moviegoer, for better or worse. In all of your movies there are scenes that make me think, "He probably shouldn't be telling me this." Do you know what I mean?

I know that I have that tendency. Often when I'm aware of it, I try to go even more in that direction and am irritated by any inclination to withdraw from it. If you start (as a filmmaker) later in life, as I did, you get to a point where you realize, "This is why I'm around. If I weren't doing this, life would be fundamentally different and less worthwhile to me, no matter how many people I am affecting." And once you've realized that, you don't really have a choice in the matter.

I worry that the industry has conditioned audiences to equate success with financial success, to be uncomfortable with contradiction and to have difficulty appreciating movies that are flawed in some ways but wonderful in others.

I've felt that way for a while. For a long time I've felt that the (MPAA) ratings board was a pathetic organization. But ironically, the ratings board is not the main problem with movies anymore. The main problem now is self-censorship by people who have forgotten the need to go up against the censor mentality. The censors' values, the corporate values, have sort of been transmitted to the studios and the filmmakers via osmosis.

Is that why movies made at the Hollywood studio level, which weren't afraid to disturb moviegoers in the 1960s and 1970s, generally don't go there now?

The problem has become something much more insidious. It is affecting what is acceptable thematically, what is an acceptable ending, who are acceptable characters, what kind of behavior can be presented in a movie without an implicit moral stance being taken in relation to the behavior by the movie itself. We now have a world of journalists and critics who for the most part confuse the behavior of characters with [the movie's] attitude toward those characters, and who feel the need for moral judgments to be constantly imposed on movies. It's a kind of an across-the-board epidemic.

I first noticed this tendency in 1965, in no less an august publication than the New York Review of Books, reading Philip Rahv's review of Norman Mailer's An American Dream. Rahv condemned the novel in part because he felt Mailer did not sufficiently condemn the homicide that (the protagonist) Rojack committed? If a critic of Rahv's stature could be guilty of that kind of thinking, we should not be surprised that audiences now demand soft movies that have conventionally acceptable main characters, and movies that have, if not happy endings, than at least neatly resolved endings.

Are there any endings to your movies that you would consider happy or neatly resolved?

I like to think most of my movies have a fundamental, relentless integrity, which is to say the propositions they set out to resolve are resolved on their own terms, without softening the conclusion at all. Think of the ending of Fingers, with Harvey looking into the void-that's the one major divergent point between Fingers and The Beat My Heart Skipped, the point that Audiard chose to go away from.

The one time I felt I did a happy or neatly resolved ending was in The Pickup Artist, as kind of an experiment. When it ends, one can reasonably infer that the movie is suggesting the main character has resolved a lot of his sexual and romantic dilemmas and now he's going to have a real shot with the girl. The truth is he's probably going to be back behaving the same way in six months. I like The Pickup Artist. I think it's a nice movie. But I don't want to stake my claim on survival on nice movies.

What constitutes an honest characterization, or an honest movie?

When the filmmaker has decided what the characters are, and has accepted the proposition that he owes it to the audience to be true to the implications of the characters' personalities and behavior, and not lie about it.

Of course there's no shortage of low-budget movies that break taboos or that otherwise satisfy art-house expectations of edginess, right?

That's true. But I would point out that the movie world tends to suck up and take over people who try that sort of thing in their first movie or two. And the fact is that a lot of these movies you're referring to are mainly about getting attention. They're auditions for bigger budgets. And unfortunately a lot of the honest filmmakers either don't get invited to the big-budget world or they just disappear. There are exceptions, people who have made 10 or 15 movies their own way, without saying, "Okay, that was nice, but now I'm ready to go make some money." But those kinds of success stories are rare, and the fact that they're rare is fundamentally discouraging. I often feel I exist parallel to this larger system.

Does your way of making movies require a definition of success that's different from the Hollywood norm?

Yes. My tendency to make things as hard on myself as possible is one of the reasons I've made 11 movies in 30 years, instead of 30.