Jim McBride: US director in Cork to talk about Breathless, The Big Easy and working in Hollywood
Jim McBride on the set of Breathless with Richard Gere.
When Jim McBride was emerging from film school in New York in the early 1960s, cinema was going through one of its most exciting periods. The filmmaker, who worked in independent cinema before turning his hand to big studios, recalls feeling a sense of optimism in the air.
“I went to film school with New York University, and at the time there were very exciting things going on in film, particularly in New York," says McBride, in advance of his visit to Cork to coincide with the screening of a season of his films.
"There was the French New Wave, but there was also what they would call at the time underground films, which were small experimental independently made films with very little money which were shown in very obscure places. And then there was a whole Cinema Vérité movement starting out, and a lot of it was based in New York. All those three things were happening at the same time — very exciting times.”
Before long, McBride was very much a part of that world. His mockumentary — a fictional tale of a director documenting his own life — opened to strong reviews and remains influential to this day. In time, the US director would go on to make several studio films.
He worked with Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky in (1983), an English-language adaptation of Jean-Luc Godard’s beloved French classic. Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin were among the cast in (1986), a witty and sultry crime thriller set in New Orleans. (1989) is a biopic of Jerry Lee Lewis, the colourful and controversial wild man of rock’n’roll.
Next week, Triskel will screen a programme of those three films called Fugitives, Cops and Rock ‘n’ Roll with McBride in attendance for the latter two, followed by a Q&A.
It’s been “100 years” since he saw and he jokes, and he’s looking forward to seeing them on the big screen again. “I'll spend three or four days in Dublin before we come down to Cork, and we'll spend three or four days in Cork as well, where I've never been, and which I'm looking forward to getting to know,” says McBride.
“One doesn't really get a chance to interact with audiences very much. When the film comes out, sometimes there's a lot of hoopla about it, but you never really just sit with an audience and get the feel of what they're feeling. Two of the three films they're going to show, I haven't seen in years, and I'm excited to see them and really excited to see how people react to them.”
Born to an Irish Catholic father and a Russian Jewish mother whose father was also Irish, McBride previously worked on these shores, filming 1997 Irish republican drama for US network Showtime. “It was with Timothy Dalton and a bunch of Irish actors. That was a great experience.”
McBride cut his teeth in the independent film scene in New York, at a time which he recalls was very exciting in the film industry. “It was a world I wanted to be in, and after working in the industry in minor jobs for several years, I managed to make my first film, which was called ,” he says.
“That was very much of that time and place and I continued for a while to do that sort of thing. It wasn't very monetarily rewarding, it was very rewarding in other ways. Months and years passed. We did various things, and eventually the way of making films that way, in that place, sort of dried up, and so eventually I went out to Hollywood to try my luck.”
and saw him collaborate with stars such as Richard Gere, Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin. Gere, at the height of his early stardom, was unsure at the prospect of working with a director who was making his first major studio film.
For a time, British filmmaker Franc Roddam ( ) was attached to direct and cast Gere before departing the project to make another film. As pre-production started to take shape, McBride was again attached, with Gere expressing reluctance to work with the director who had largely worked outside the studio system.
“At some point I called Paul Schrader, who had directed him in , and he called Richard Gere and said: ‘You’ve got to meet with this guy’, and we met, and eventually agreed to do the film together. It was a long agonising process, but once we sort of looked each other in the eye, and decided to do it, it was great,” says McBride.
“He was great to work with, and it was very good because I hadn't really directed actors before in any kind of serious way, never mind movie stars. I was able to say that to him, and we ended up working together very well.”
Both in his independent film and Hollywood films, McBride always loved the spirit of collaboration that he thrived upon. “Most of the writing I did was usually a collaboration, and often it was a guy named Kit Carson, with whom I wrote , and another man named Lorenzo Mans. That kind of collaboration was wonderful,” he recalls.
“I have to say that when I started working in the big time in Hollywood, the collaboration of everybody on the crew was tremendously exciting to me. Wonderful cinematographers, production designers, fashion designers, all manner of people who were so professional. These were tremendously exciting things to me, to see what you could do and what people could do to help you get the thing you'd half imagined in your head.”
But he says that in spite of his years working within the film industry, he never really felt part of it. Everything he managed to make, he says, came out of some great struggle. “I don't mean to even disparage the powers that were. It was just that I had a different sensibility and a different feeling about what we do.”
Now in his eighties, his love for movies remains undimmed, and like many of us he’s partial to a strong streaming series. He remembers at one point, many years ago, putting forward the idea of making a novel over the series format. “Nobody wanted anything to do with that, and now they're doing it all the time. I'm very much addicted to that kind of story.”
- Fugitives, Cops and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Three Films By Jim McBride, begins at Triskel in Cork with a screening of Breathless on Monday June 22. McBride will attend Q&As following the screening of The Big Easy (June 23) and Great Balls of Fire! (June 24). See triskelartscentre.ie
