COFFEE WITH ...

A film career paved with 'Black-Top'

Famed for 'Two-Lane Blacktop,' filmmaker Monte Hellman talks candidly about his career, his next film and Hollywood today

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Wednesday, July 30, 2008

A thick thread of golden goo drizzles from the head of the upside-down bear. The liquid curls into a spoon, forming a sticky pool. The man holding the spoon looks satisfied, then dunks it into a cup of hot coffee and stirs. When the spoon reappears, it is clean.

If we want to get metaphorical — and we do — Monte Hellman, the man squeezing honey from a plastic woodland creature, has spent 40 years in movies massaging gold (money) from honey bears (producers) and watching it vanish in low-budget films that yield high artistic returns but scant financial ones. In other words, they come up empty. Best known for 1971's pregnantly quiet race car drama "Two-Lane Blacktop," Hellman is a rugged veteran of Hollywood and its grubby margins, and he neatly if reluctantly represents the turbulent arc of the indie-film maverick.

Beginning in the no-budget exploitation factory of Roger Corman, his has been a career of highs and lows, struggle and stagnation.

"Career? What's that?" Hellman says with a sputtering laugh over late-morning coffee.

He's sitting in a yellow-glitter booth at El Sol y La Luna on South Congress Avenue, waiting for the Breakfast Americano, a smallish dish with one egg, half a waffle and two pieces of bacon. ("Sunny-side up and the bacon well-done and dry," he gently instructs the server.)

Hellman is a lanky septuagenarian, soft-spoken and even-tempered. He has sharp features that give way to a large, sloping dome topped with an alarming spray of silver wires that stand atop his head like dancing sea anemones.

The night before, he screened three of his films at a packed Alamo Ritz: "Two-Lane Blacktop," starring Warren Oates and James Taylor; 1967's "The Shooting," an eccentric Western starring Oates and Jack Nicholson, with whom Hellman often collaborated in the '60s; and 1989's "Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!"

Of his own films, they are three of Hellman's favorites. (Another is the little-seen "Iguana.") Which might come as a surprise to Hellman's small but passionate ragtag army of fans, including directors Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson. "Blacktop" and "The Shooting" reside unchallenged in the pantheon. They're praised as smart, ahead-of-their-time art films, while "Silent Night, Deadly Night III" smacks of hack work forged from despair.

Hellman understands the skepticism and explains with a wry smile. He co-wrote and directed the movie as a favor to a producer friend.

"It was a chance to just play," Hellman says. "It's funny. We spoof everything."

Yet it remains misunderstood. "It gets panned by horror addicts because it's not a horror movie, and it gets panned by everybody else because they think it's a horror movie."

That was 19 years ago and the last feature film Hellman directed. (He's made two horror shorts since.) He was the second unit director on "RoboCop." Tarantino asked Hellman to direct "Reservoir Dogs" before Tarantino sold his script for "True Romance" and suddenly had the money to make it himself. Hellman executive-produced the movie.

Things could soon be changing. Hellman — who lives in Los Angeles and stays "incredibly busy" mulling projects and teaching at California Institute for the Arts — is very near to starting production on a low-budget feature he's been developing for years, a mystery-thriller called "To Die Again" with former Austinite Lukas Haas.

"I hold back the excitement not only until we're on the set, but until there's actually film in the camera," he says.

Projects come and go. The business changes. Tastes change. The bear runs out of — or withholds — his gold. And Hollywood is worse than unforgiving; it's callous and indifferent.

"The great Hollywood has been wiped out," Hellman says. "Now you have mega-international corporations that don't care what they're manufacturing. It could be beer or electronics or maybe movies if it doesn't interfere with the theme park."

He says this not with bitterness, but with lament and a whisper of rue.

"Certainly I made mistakes," Hellman says. "I said no to a lot of things that I should have taken. I turned down a lot of stuff."

Now Hellman's name is mostly brought up only when the great "Two-Lane Blacktop" enters the cultural discussion. The Criterion Collection's deluxe DVD release of the film last year — designed to Hellman's overwhelming delight by Austin artist Marc English — has fueled the chatter, as do rare screenings like the Alamo's.

Hellman wishes it was different.

"In introducing 'Two-Lane Blacktop' last night, the guy called it my 'greatest film,' " he says. "In my mind, my greatest film is one of the ones I'm working on, not something I made 30 years ago."

Hellman on some of the movies and players in current cinema:

"A picture like 'There Will Be Blood' is harking back to the greatness that was old Hollywood. It's really an homage to the best of Hollywood. I love that film. They went out on a limb with the ending, but I applaud that. It didn't work that well for me, but that's the way movies should be made. The director should go with his gut and do something really daring like that and the hell with everybody."

"I enjoyed 'No Country for Old Men' because I think Javier Bardem is such a great actor, though I didn't think he had to even get out of bed to do the role. But I thought it was a seriously flawed movie. When a movie has to take its emotional impact out of a voice-over at the end, then forget it. You have to be able do it with the visuals and the story, not by becoming literature."

"I won't see anything with Russell Crowe in it. I think he's really inflated. I would like him better if he wouldn't try to do all these different accents that he can't do very well. Crowe is always slipping between accents and trying to do everything. It drives me nuts. I don't think he can act at all. I hated 'A Beautiful Mind.' I liked him in 'The Insider' up to a point, but I never believed him. The make-up was bad. I'm always aware that he's acting."

"I think Quentin Tarantino is an interesting genius. He doesn't, and he never will, make a movie about life. He's making movies about movies, and there's a limit to how far you can go with that."

"I still love Wes Anderson. I like everything by Paul Thomas Anderson. They're led by their own inner voice rather than anything outside of them. It's authentic. It doesn't matter if their movies don't always work. It works because it's authentic, that's all."