"WRITE ABOUT FILMS THAT MOVE YOU" : THE TAKING OF NEW YORK'S AND THE CINEMA OF QUENTIN TARANTINO'S ANDREW RAUCH

Andrew Rausch is one the hardest working writers out there. I covered two books he had this year The Taking Of New York, about New York crime films of the senties and a collection of essays on The Cinema of Quentin Tarantino he co-edited with Kieran Fisher as a third, Generation Tarantino, came out. Still catching up, I got chance to talk to him about the first two.

SCOTT MONTGOMERY: The Taking Of New York is such a big and sprawling subject. How did you take it on?

ANDREW RAUSCH: I love crime films, especially crime films of the 1970s. About a decade ago, I had considered writing a more general book about crime films of the 1970s, but ended up not doing it. Then one day a couple of years ago, my agent, Lee Sobel, called me with an idea. I was in the middle of Walmart, pushing around a cart of food through a crowd of people. But the idea was New York City crime films of the 1970s. The moment I heard Lee's idea, I knew this would be a perfect book for me. I loved it. The book took a lot of research. Since I decided to make it also cover the history of the city throughout the decade, it took even more research. I interviewed a lot of actors, directors, screenwriters, and crew members for the project, so I could get as many new details about these films as possible. I'm very proud of this book. I've written more than sixty books in my career, but I feel like this volume is my greatest achievement.

S.M.: The story of each movie is very concise, yet very informative in reflecting the movie and city. How did you approach writing those?

A.R.: The coverage of the films is kind of formulaic, and that was by design. I wanted readers to feel comfortable with the format and know what kind of information they were going to find about these films. I felt like it was very important to cover certain aspects, so I tried to adhere to the guideline I set for myself in the beginning. Then within that guideline, I tried to give the reader as much information about each film as was possible. Someone complained to me about there not being long synopses of each film, but that would have doubled the size of the book. I tried to give a few sentences to let the reader know what the story was about, without detailing the entire plot. My book is about the creation of the films in the milieu in which they were made, and their eventual impact on society and at the box office.

S.M.: I loved the fact that you included the film's bad reviews as well as the good. Why did you find that important?

A.R.: I wanted to show these films in as much scope as was possible, so I felt it was important to show the good, the bad, and the ugly, be it reviews or actions behind the screen in their making or questionable aspects regarding the stories themselves. But I tried never to make judgments about the films. Yes, I'm well aware that a lot of people are unhappy today about racial slurs in The French Connection, but I didn't take a stance on it. I just presented the films as objectively as possible. But that kind of stuff never bothers me all that much anyway because they're movies. They're not real. They're art. If someone says or does something "bad" in a film, it's really just imaginary characters doing imaginary things. And taking that a step further, I would ask if the actions are realistic to the types of people the films are about. So the question would be, is it plausible that white cops in 1970s NYC would do and say racist things? Of course, it is. I think it would be completely implausible if they didn't. Like the saying goes, depiction isn't endorsement. So movies about bad people, be they criminals or cops or someone who is a bit of both, would have to have those people doing bad things to be anywhere close to being accurate depictions. And in the case of that particular movie, we know as a fact that the cops the film was based on really did do questionable things, because Gene Hackman adamantly took umbrage with them during filming.

S.M.: It made me think while blaxploitation. gangster, and cop movies, but I can only think of the Shaft films and Shamus that featured a private detective which was in a lot of L.A. movies of the time. Why do you think P.I.s got the short shrift in The Big Apple? 

A.R.:  I'm really not sure. The true "noir" genre, which was basically private eye films and books, had died out quite a bit during that period, so that makes it a little more understandable. But why most of the neo-noirs that were being made were taking place in Los Angeles is beyond me. Seedy NYC would have been the perfect locale for those.

S.M.: What would you pick for the three most quintessential seventies New York crime movies?

A.R.: I think my answers are probably the same as everyone else's--Taxi Driver, Shaft, The French Connection... Those are the ones that really stand out for me right now. Taxi Driver is probably the top one in my mind. It's why Taxi Driver is on the cover of the book. I wasn't there to experience it firsthand, but it seems to me that that film captured the grittiest, most seedy aspects of NYC during that time.

S.M: What drew you and Kieran Fisher to edit a series of essays on Quentin Tarantino?

A.R.: I've written a lot about Tarantino, have interviewed him, and am a huge fan. So when I met Kieran when we were both writing for Diabolique, we hit it off. We both appreciate a lot of the same kinds of films. I had long been a fan of the academic essay books and was already considering doing one, so I mentioned that we should write that. We also considered doing a book about John Wick at the time, but that kind of fell through the cracks. But in the end, this is the book that emerged. It took a long, long time to get this book together. Much longer than it ever should have, but we kept having essayists drop out or simply disappear, and there were rewrites and countless layout issues. This book was tough to assemble.

S.M.: What what makes him a continuing subject for you?

A.R.: It's primarily the writing for me. I have appreciated Quentin's writing from day one.To be honest, I had actually missed Reservoir Dogs when it was first out, so I didn't discover Quentin's writing until the opening night of Pulp Fiction. Seeing that movie changed me forever. That was the film that made me start to really see film as art and to recognize the ways that it could be used and some of the things that could be done with it. But again, it's mostly the writing for me. Quentin has a lot of talents, but in my estimation, his writing is what he does best. He has an ear for dialogue--yes, that old cliche--but it's more; he has an ear for good dialogue, but then he Quentin-izes it and makes it something that has the illusion of sounding like real dialogue but is actually something heightened and sharper. We say this same thing about writers like David Mamet, Shane Black, Elmore Leonard, Joe R. Lansdale, and others, but Tarantino's dialogue has a musical quality to it. His work, especially the dialogue, has something unique--something difficult to pinpoint--that is instantly recognizable as his and could only be his. But in short, his writing is just damned good, and that's what I like best and that's what has drawn me to his work over and over again.

S.M.: Did any of the takes the contributors gave surprise you?

A.R.: The contributors went all over the place. None of them was particularly predictable. Maybe the one that surprised me most was Bryan Jack's essay about a historical figure--an escaped slave--whose story was very similar to that of Django. It was well-written, which I knew it would be having known Bryan for as long as I have, and that's a long time, but it was unique and sort of outside-the-box from the essays everyone else was doing. They were all great, all in their own unique ways, but Bryan's was the one that most surprised me.

S.M.: How did you and Kieran decide on your essay?

A.R.: Kieran and I weren't sure what we were going to write about. It took us a while, I think, to come up with the idea of focusing on The Hateful Eight and asserting it to be a remake of John Carpenter's The Thing. But once we hit upon that subject, it kind of all just came together. It was a fun essay and it was great working with Kieran.

S.M.:How has your critical writing influenced your fiction writing?

A.R.: The critical writing hasn't influenced my fiction writing, but Tarantino's work absolutely has. I write crime fiction, which is a genre that Tarantino excels in. I focus a lot on the dialogue and I like the idea of taking the novels into strange and unexpected places, similar to what he does. But my fiction was also heavily influenced by Joe R. Lansdale and Elmore Leonard and Max Allan Collins and George V. Higgins and Mamet. Tarantino's work was my first major influence, but all of those other writers have since had equal or more influence on my work. To be honest, I would say Joe R. Lansdale's influence on my writing has been almost as great as Tarantino's. With Joe, the influence has been his bravery regarding mixing genres and taking his stories to absolutely unexpected places, and again, the dialogue. Joe, like Tarantino, writes a sort of stylized, heightened dialogue that is sharp, but it's something completely different. And like Quentin's stories, Lansdale's stories are just pure fun. No matter how dark they get, they're really, really fun.

S.M.: What advice would you give to someone on writing about film?

A.R.: The main piece of advice I would give someone writing about film is to write about the films that move you. If you do that, I think that passion will come through in the words, making it a better read. The reader might not consciously know that's the driving force behind the writing, but hopefully they'll be able to feel it. Beyond that, it would be the normal stuff: research, research, research, so what you're saying is correct. And if you don't agree with the so-called experts on whatever the film is that you're writing about, don't just fall lock-step into that company line. If you feel something different or see something different when you watch the film or films, express that. Try to change the reader's mind or at least make him or her reconsider what they believe about the film. Also, don't be afraid to tackle subjects that you're not sure if other people will care about. If you feel passionate about some obscure filmmaker or someone controversial or whatever, write about them anyway. Express that. After all, the book is yours, right?