The price of city life

Interview, Oct, 1995

DL: What was your experience on Sea of Love?

RP: I spent nine months shoehorning that script into a thriller, which I never meant it to be. I wanted it to be this moody, mopey thing, a character study. The worst thing you can say in a meeting with the studios is, "This movie I'm about to pitch to you fellas, it's like nothing you've ever seen before." They immediately say, "Well, in that case, get the fuck out of here." You sell a movie by its bloodlines, like you sell a racehorse. You tell them, "This is sired by Die Hard out of Do the Right Thing." Or, "It's The Crying Game meets Jurassic Park, dinosaurs and transsexuals."

DL: Were you happy with Kiss of Death?

RP: Yeah. But I didn't like the ending - I felt I was pressured into it. That's the kind of pressure you're under now; it's not enough for the guy to survive. He's got to bring down the Mob in some silly way. The first time I was told it was going to end like that, I felt like crying. The movie was at this finely calibrated level of reality and then at the end this big pinata of bullshit explodes.

DL: Nicolas Cage was good.

RP: Yeah, and I was worried about him. He's like a balloon that's unknotted that goes zooming around the room, and I thought, His character's supposed to be scary, and if he's going to do another goofy Nicolas Cage performance, we're in trouble. But apparently everybody loved him.

DL: YOU adapted Clockers from your novel - the first time you'd done that. And you co-wrote It with Spike Lee, a director of strong character and vision. What was that like?

RP: We never worked together. If you look at a film's credits and there's an ampersand between the names of the writers, it means that two guys sat down at a table and wrote it. If there's the word "and," that means one guy did it and "Bye." Then the second guy came on. When Spike came in [as director and co-producer], I sat down with him and he said, "I read the book a whole bunch of times, I've got all your screenplay drafts, and in all due respect, I only direct what I write." At which point I was so tired of the story that I went, "Good luck, I hope you do well." So, basically, I was off. I didn't write anything after that. He rewrote my script. He kept most of my choices about what to take and what to lose from the book, he lifted a bunch of my dialogue - which is what he's supposed to do - and he kept the sequence of events. But it's all got his spin on it, his particular agenda, his idea of characterization, as opposed to mine.

DL: Which is?

RP: I don't want to get into that. I think his thing fight now is that everybody should take responsibility for their own actions. If he has a specific political message that I get from his movie, which is not mine by any stretch, it is, "No more packing. Nobody is going to stop the killing except yourself. You can play at being the bad man, but you die for real." Which is a totally honorable, responsible message. It's just not something I was specifically shooting for. But there are things he did that I thought were brilliant, that really transcended what you can do in a book. A look on an actor's face can take ten pages in a novel.