Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964).
If one were to map the career of Michael Roemer, they would find it closely hews to the history of postwar American independent cinema: in the 1940s and ’50s he worked in newsreels, educational film, and, roused by cinéma vérité and the Italian neorealists, observational documentary. Yet the production methods and narrative strategies of his fictional films, which he made from the early ’60s to the ’80s, diverge remarkably from the work of his contemporaries.
In October, I spoke to Roemer, who is 95, over the phone from his home in Vermont. Our conversation revealed the depths of his independence. It was not a style, not simply a contrarianism, but a sensibility, a fidelity to a certain worldview. This comes across in his thoughts on his most well-known film, Nothing But a Man (1964), which is seldom invoked without descriptors like “groundbreaking.” Indeed, it was a rarity for the period: a film about Black life in America that realistically reckoned with prejudice without restoring to stereotype. It received awards at the New York and Venice Film Festivals and praise in The New York Times and Variety.
Roemer nonetheless said that after it screened he found himself in a deep, unexplainable depression. “I soon realized the film wasn’t what I thought it was: It wasn’t true,” he told me. “This is not to say that Nothing But a Man is a lie, but there were things I knew you couldn't put into a main character and get away with. I knew what was wanted. I put those things into the father, you see—the anger. And I put it into the white racist.”
Looking back, Roemer took issue with the narrative tidiness of Nothing But a Man. Acknowledging its neat resolution and legible characterization is not to diminish it; the film is one of the great American films of the 1960s, and its influence is lasting. As Roemer made clear, however, it is also a debut feature made in the wake of fifteen years in the film industry. Despite the specificity of its setting and sensitivity of its perspective, Roemer felt it reproduced the narrative expectations he learned working in the film industry. “I had it in my bones,” he said about narrative conventions. “I knew what was wanted.”
His subsequent work—the two documentaries Faces of Israel (1967) and Dying (1975) and the three fictional films The Plot Against Harry (1971), Pilgrim, Farewell (1979), and Vengeance Is Mine (1984)—contain the poignancy of performance and perceptive use of the camera that characterize his debut but, per Roemer, “do not conform.” They are sui generis.
This refusal to conform led to a great many obstacles in getting his work funded, produced, and distributed. Many of the films he made after Nothing But a Man have, in turn, been difficult to see. Vengeance Is Mine, in fact, went unreleased theatrically—save for a few festival screenings and a television broadcast on PBS in 1984. The Film Desk recently brought out restorations of that film and The Plot Against Harry, which came out in 1991 after being shelved in the seventies. Both have been given proper, if limited, theatrical rollouts in the US and wider home-video releases by The Film Desk. In addition, Criterion recently announced the release of a new 4K digital master of Nothing But a Man.
After Nothing But a Man, Roemer received offers to work with Hollywood studios but declined them. He told me, “If I could have made popular commercial films, I would have. It isn't really a matter of choice. I believe in something. If I betray it, then I destroy myself.”
This belief in something—this philosophy about art and about life, the betrayal of which had caused him such grief—had been gestating since childhood. Roemer was born in Berlin in 1928, which is to say that from a young age he was “aware of the unpredictability of human existence” and that “life doesn’t arrange itself into neat, coherent patterns.” When he was eleven, Jewish children were banned from all public schools, and Roemer and his sister were sent to England on the Kindertransport.
Nevertheless, Roemer wrote in his excellent screenplay-collection-cum-biography Film Stories, from which I will quote extensively, that he “gladly adopted the faith in cause-and-effect relationships that sustains us and our communities.” He found this faith rewarded as an audience member and later as a filmmaker; for Roemer, cinema existed somewhere in between reality and fiction. Even in a fictional film, he told me, “the camera and the microphone do what I can't do, which is render the way things happen to us.” His credulity as a young moviegoer was such that he remembered watching a Bette Davis movie and thinking, “That's real. That really happened!”
Roemer wrote further that by using the “ordinary surfaces of life” that the camera captures, the filmmaker-sculptor “can structure any kind of situation and story—lyrical or dramatic, historical or contemporary.” This was the approach Roemer took with Nothing But a Man, finding that he and his crew “had met the wishes and expectations of the middle-class audience all the more effectively because we dressed them with well-observed facts.” Unbeholden to narrative conventions, his masterpieces The Plot Against Harry and Vengeance Is Mine allow these ordinary surfaces to stand out.
In the interview that follows—edited for brevity and clarity from hours of conversation—I talked to Roemer about the evolution of a philosophy that guided his work, a significant contribution to American independent cinema. To do this, I have connected different strands of our conversation with brief biographical notes. We began with a discussion of the faith he had in fictional films, a faith whose character changed as it was tested by history.
Vengeance Is Mine (Michael Roemer, 1984).
NOTEBOOK: You have described having “faith in film” as a child. Can you talk about how this changed for you?
ROEMER: I started believing some movies more than others. I think it's a common experience. I believed Marty (1950). That was a departure, and I thought it was a very good film. I think Citizen Kane (1941) was always a model of a film that seemed true to me. It's about an outsider who, you might say, is enraged. I think he's really not very different from the people who shoot up a department store or a grocery store. He uses [his rage] as a newspaper publisher. That film and Raging Bull (1980) seem to me true to the psychological facts, as well as, you might say, the sociological facts. They deal with a violence in us that finds such destructive expression.
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In England, Roemer attended Bunce Court School, a private school established for young Jewish refugees. There, he befriended the painter Frank Auerbach, with whom he remains friends, and he also acted in student theater productions. In 1945, Roemer enrolled at Harvard University. He intended to study theater, but the college only offered courses in drama as literature. Around this time, Roemer later wrote, the prospect of “moviemaking seemed less remote. I spent an inordinate amount of time in Boston theaters, catching every French, Italian, and English film the day it opened, watching The Gold Rush (1925) five times during a five-day revival, and Children of Paradise (1945) twice a day every day of its run. Nothing else seemed the least bit real.” At Harvard, Roemer met his future collaborator, the cinematographer Robert M. Young.
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NOTEBOOK: What kind of film environment did you enter at Harvard?
ROEMER: We were the first generation of students who were very interested in film. Four or five seniors went into film. Bob [Young] and I liked each other and we had a kind of affinity; we were sort of leaning in the same direction. I remember showing Bob an early script of mine and he liked it. I said, “I think films are more like novels than like plays.” He agreed. He was more interested in documentary, and I was always more interested in fiction. Until you feel your way [through the world], you don't know who the hell you are, or what you think—or even maybe what you fear.
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Roemer saw a notice that a campus club was looking for students interested in filmmaking. He wrote a script throughout the summer and “read every book on film in the library—a total of twelve.” When he returned to Harvard, “it turned out that no one else had written anything. At our next gathering, the script committee announced that my screenplay was incomprehensible, but with nothing else available, it was chosen for production. We then had to pick a director, and since no one had any experience, I could present myself, not very aggressively, as the logical choice.”
Roemer’s film, A Touch of the Times (1949), is considered the first student film ever made in America. It was featured in TIME Magazine, who described it as “a string of imaginative, rather cockeyed episodes about four individualists whose innocent pastimes, like flying kites, somehow set off vast conflicts between businessmen and workers.” Upon graduation, Roemer moved to New York to work for Louis de Rochemont, the producer of the March of Time newsreels. He “worked as an assistant in the cutting room, production department, and on the set, starting over at the bottom each time in the conviction that I should know every area of film-making before setting out on my own.”
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NOTEBOOK: Can you describe your life in New York at the time?
ROEMER: I lived on the Lower East Side when I first came to New York and I loved it. I got very lucky: I found a little apartment for 16 dollars a month. My wife Barbara was from Minnesota; she loved it too. It was an extraordinary experience to know those people and to see the old age homes on Avenue B. They moved them out into the sun and they were all out on the street. I wanted to make a film about that, but I didn't have the knowledge to do it. I didn't go through that experience. I was very privileged. I arrived and I went to college, you know. I didn't live on the Lower East Side as an immigrant.
NOTEBOOK: Were you part of any film scene there?
ROEMER: I was never part of the New York film scene because I had three children and you don't have time to. We lived in Yonkers, which is way out. We never went to parties. I was at a screening where Maya Deren showed her films—I think it was called Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). I wasn’t partial to her films. There was a certain kind of egocentricity that I didn't respond to. Look, to make a movie, you kind of have to be egocentric, but she didn't seem interested in other people.
The first time I saw a film that I absolutely wish I had made was Zéro de conduite (1933) by Jean Vigo. There was a 16mm print and distribution at Brandon Films [the 16mm distribution center]. I sat on the floor and watched it, and I remember thinking, You've done everything I've ever wanted to do.
Once, at my office, I heard someone announce over the PA system that [frequent Vigo cinematographer] Boris Kaufman had arrived for his appointment. I was 22 or something like that. I went out into the lobby and there was just one man sitting in the lobby. I said, “Are you Boris Kaufman?” He could tell that I knew who he was. I said, “Can I send you a script that I want to make?” He said, “Sure.” I’m embarrassed to have sent it now. I ran into him a few years later and we started to talk. I showed him the script that I had written, maybe the same one I showed Bob. Boris said, “If you can get the money to make this, I’ll shoot it for you.” That saw me through years of rejection. It made me feel like I wasn’t hopeless.
Boris was a wonderful person. Later, Bob and I would visit with him and his wife, Helen. I remember sitting in their living room and once again asking him something about Vigo, and Helen would say, “Always Vigo, always Vigo.”
NOTEBOOK: You spoke of primarily being interested in fiction, but you worked in newsreels and you were making educational films for the Ford Foundation. The two influences you’ve identified, Boris Kaufman and Bob Young, both began as documentarians. What did documentary offer you?
ROEMER: What influenced me was the fact that they were able to record so-called ordinary, human interactions that were deeply meaningful. There was no other way of recording them. You couldn't put them on the stage. If you put them in the novel, they'd be meaningless. As soon as you saw them on the screen, you understood it was just like your life. The work of the early vérité filmmakers had a profound effect on me: [Drew Associates’] Mooney vs. Fowle (1960), and the Maysles’ work. A film called The Quiet One (1948), made by Sidney Meyers. There are a few moments in that film where nothing appears to be happening, but a lot is happening. The camera makes it a significant moment. That is what made me work the way I did. Years later, [Wiseman’s] Titicut Follies (1967) and Hospital (1970) moved me.
In my scripts, people always say nothing happens. And I say, “Yes, something is happening. You can't see it yet.” They can't find it in the script because it doesn't say “I'm in a rage,” or whatever people expect. It's the way it is said, and where it's said, that it becomes devastating or wonderful or whatever. I remember seeing Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). There's a moment when the priest whom she has trusted all along turns away from her. He won't answer. He won't nod the way he has been nodding, telling her to say yes. And she has to condemn herself.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw that at the Cinemathèque in Paris, which was then a very small apartment. Barbara and I used to go to the nine o'clock screening—I’m sure the whole Nouvelle Vague was sitting in the theater, since it was always the same people there. Afterward, I wrote Dreyer a letter. He said, “Come ahead and visit.” We spent a couple of days with him. He had very cold eyes. Barbara and I were just married, and I was confused about marriage. At first he wasn't too warm and friendly, but he could see that I knew his films and that I understood them reasonably well.
Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964).
After working for de Rochemont, Roemer began making educational films in 1957, and went on to make over one hundred. In 1962, Roemer was offered a job making educational films in Paris. Robert Young, who was then working for NBC, invited him to shoot a documentary about an impoverished neighborhood in Palermo called Cortile Cascino. Roemer accepted Young’s offer.
The shoot lasted six weeks. NBC immediately objected to its unfiltered depictions of poverty and prostitution and canceled its broadcast. According to Roemer, “NBC urged us to stay on the payroll, no doubt because the cancellation had prompted inquiries from the New York Times and strong protests in the documentary unit of the network.” The filmmakers resigned.
“Bob had been deeply impressed by the Nashville sit-ins when he filmed them in 1960 [for NBC’s White Paper documentary series] and suggested we make a feature on the lives of African-Americans in the South,” Roemer later wrote in Film Stories. They raised $15,000 and gained the support of NAACP leader Roy Wilkins. “I had met few African-Americans before going on this extraordinary journey, but found that my childhood in Germany gave me some access to their situation.”
Upon returning to New York, Roemer and Young adapted an earlier screenplay of Roemer’s and began to raise money for production. Irwin Young, Robert’s brother, assisted; Young later ran DuArt film processing lab, where he offered lenient payment plans to young independent filmmakers like Spike Lee and Michael Moore, both of whom credited him as an important figure in their careers.
The film, Nothing But a Man, stars Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln, was mostly shot in New Jersey.
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NOTEBOOK: What was it like to work with actors on your first feature?
ROEMER: I think I'm very good at that, but you know, it's all in the script. It isn't just the acting. You just don't push performances; you go as far as the scene allows, but no further. Everything I do is kind of understated. The audience has to come toward it rather than have it broadcast. In Nothing But a Man, the reason the sound is so good is because we used lavalier mics, and nobody was using them on feature films. That meant the actors could speak at a normal level, which made a tremendous difference. People commented on it. Filmmakers said, “How did you get that sound?”
In The Plot Against Harry, there's a scene in the subway car. We had to put the noise of the subway into that scene. The train sound, which is very loud, was suppressed to the point where you could speak normally in the subway train. And then I made them shout as though they were shouting over the noise. But in fact, I had to put the subway sound into the scene. A union sound man would have walked off the set. The fact that we were completely outside the parameters of the industry meant we had to do things that nobody would do. Bob was a wonderful person with that. He really is kind, and he lit everything with great affection. He cared about everything—I think we all cared a lot on every film.
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While editing the film, Roemer wrote that he “paid a chance visit to the office of a friend who represented a small Detroit record company. When he heard what we were doing, he handed me a stack of their singles. Motown was then-unknown in the white world, but after listening to the samples, we jumped at the chance to use their music for a small share of the profits.”
In the late sixties, Roemer and Young purchased an option on Elie Wiesel’s Dawn, a novel about the Holocaust, and accepted a documentary assignment from PBS, Faces of Israel, to further explore this subject.
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ROEMER: We went because we had no other source of income and because we were going to make a film about the Holocaust. Fortunately in my view, we didn't make [Dawn]. I spent six months researching that material, of which there wasn’t much in the 1960s. I sort of avoided reading about the Holocaust until then, but I was ready. I read a lot and we went to Israel and spent time on the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz. I thought perhaps we could make it, but after six months, I just knew it wasn't going to be a good film. In my view, there was no way you could make a fiction film about that experience. There were incidents that I picked up while reading about the Holocaust that I thought one could put into a film, moments that would make the Holocaust real to people. I remember telling Elie about one incident—it was the only time I had anything that he didn't know already.
There were two Jews in a concentration camp. They were working on a road and they offended the German officer. He ordered them to dig a pit, and then told them to get into the pit. He ordered a Polish prisoner, not a Jew, to bury them alive. The Pole said, “No, I'm not going to do it.” Everybody expected the German to shoot the Poles. “You just committed suicide.” The German didn't do that. The German—this is an ordinary German, no brilliant genius—told the two Jews to get out of the pit. He said to the Jews, “Bury him.” They started to bury him. When he was almost buried up to his neck, he said, “Okay, now dig him out again." They dug him out again. He pushed them back into the pit and he said to the Pole, “Bury them.” This time he did. The German stamped the ground closed.
After that, I said, I can't make that. That story tells you what the camp was like. That story shattered me, that you can destroy a human being like that. I’m very glad I didn't make any attempt. I read a lot—there’s no one in Dostoyevsky who comes close to that kind of evil. This is a man who knew instinctively that the Pole was every bit as great, as brave, as heroic, as Germans thought of themselves as being. He had to reduce them to nothing. He reduced three human beings to nothing. I've never encountered evil—I mean, an intuitive evil—like this. Everything he believed was in question. It’s so awful, even telling that again… I remember a Jewish friend of mine said, “I wish you hadn't told that story.” I don't know what I would have done. I hope I would have refused. I would much rather have died. But who knows?
Later, I was offered [the opportunity] to direct an adaptation of Phillip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, but turned it down because I was already working on The Plot Against Harry. I wanted to make my own film involving Jews. I knew that psychology, you know. The producer of the film, I told him he was lucky because it wouldn't have made any money if I made it.
NOTEBOOK: You began teaching filmmaking at Yale in 1966. Did teaching affect your script-writing process?
ROEMER: I don't think so. I think what it gave me was the sense that I was useful to people. Because first of all, nobody produced [my scripts]. In film studies, Hitchcock was given credit in Psycho for having the main actress disappear halfway through the movie. This was a radical departure. I remember I didn't argue with people but, I just thought, My God. If that’s radical, then I’m Robespierre.
The Plot Against Harry (Michael Roemer, 1971).
Roemer’s next narrative film, The Plot Against Harry, went into production in 1969. The movie begins with Harry Plotnik’s release from prison. Harry is the kind of small-time Jewish mobster who was already becoming anachronistic in the early seventies. While visiting his sister in the suburbs, he encounters his ex-wife, two estranged daughters, and former brother-in-law. This inaugurates his attempt to play the family man; Roemer finds magnificent gallows humor in Harry’s desperate search for relevance and identity.
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NOTEBOOK: There’s a Brecht line about how “tragedy deals with the sufferings of mankind in a less serious way than comedy.” I thought about how you made The Plot Against Harry right after doing months of research about the Holocaust. Were the two connected?
ROEMER: Absolutely, in the reduction of the individual to inconsequence. The anonymity of each one of us has haunted me all my life. In that sense, The Plot Against Harry came from that sense of helplessness. It is really a film about a helpless man. He doesn't know what he's doing and he doesn't know what's happening. In the end, if he goes to jail, nobody's going to miss him. He won't have been alive. I love Kafka. How can one not be alive today and not feel that you wake up as a cockroach? The Trial is a marvelous book, and I think that uncertainty of who we are pervades The Plot Against Harry. I don't think Harry knows who he is. I'm not sure he is anyone. I think he simply adapts to whatever circumstances he encounters. Money is who he is.
It's easy afterward to see what you did, but I don’t think I was terribly conscious of everything. While you're doing it, you don't really know. I can only tell you that when that film was shown, the first screening of it was for the crew and the cast, and it was one of the darkest experiences I ever had. I mean, all those people worked so hard for so little money, and no one liked the film, not a single person. I thought it was a total failure. You can't blame the audience. The fact that people now laugh and enjoy the film is a very strange experience. If I had died two years ago, I wouldn't have known that The Plot Against Harry would have an audience. It was just luck.
NOTEBOOK: Why did you want to make a film about Jewishness?
ROEMER: I'm very Jewish, and I mean very deliberately Jewish. Somebody spoke to me after one of the screenings, and said she was dealing with her own Jewishness. I said, “Well, I'm a Jew before I'm a person.” But that's because I grew up in a fascist country. We have an ethnic memory. We do. I mean, no African American can ever forget slavery. You can't. It's in your bones, whether you're totally free of it or not. That's the way I feel about being a Jew. I feel especially close to the Eastern European Jewish community. I don't feel very close to the German Jewish community, which is very assimilated. I mean, there were anti-Semites in my family. I don't mind if you publish that, because they're upstairs. It's unfortunately true. A branch of my family was very, very rich, and because I was at Harvard, I would be invited to their house. Once, I was reading Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim. She said, “Oh I used to know Buber.” I said, "What was he like?” She said, "Oh, he was a little old Ostjuden.”
NOTEBOOK: What was the time after Harry’s release like for you?
ROEMER: I remember showing it to an executive at Columbia. He looked at me afterward, shook his head and said, “Mike, I don't have a Jewish sense of humor." He was a Jew, but that's what he said. The film was a complete dud. Nobody got it. I showed it to people in my neighborhood. And they said, "Mike, we don't know what's going on in your film.” Twenty years later, I invited one family, the same family, to see it again. They didn't remember it. And afterward I said, “Did you understand it?” They said, “Yeah, why wouldn't we?”
After The Plot Against Harry failed, I fortunately didn't fall apart. I was in great danger of it, but I didn't. I wrote many films, but I couldn’t get any money for them.
NOTEBOOK: What was so anathema in the scripts?
ROEMER: There was something in those stories that went against the grain of the industry film. I remember I wrote a very nice love story, an offbeat love story, about a guy who meets someone who reminds him of his dead wife. He wants to marry her, and it's a very funny, touching film—perfectly harmless. But I sent it to a very successful former student of mine. He said, “You're trying to do two things at once.” Of course I was.
Genre, however, was not going to help me. I didn't start out doing that, and I wasn't going to go there next. That is what I would have been hired to do, but even after Nothing But a Man, certainly after The Plot Against Harry, I couldn't do it. There was no way. I knew that genre movies were just giving people the full sense of security because they knew what was going to happen. I knew that life didn't work that way. History didn't work that way.
Elia Kazan, the first day he was on the set, the cameraman said, “What's the garbage for today?” I don't consider the time I spent on a script, which was somewhere between one and two years, garbage, you know. It was hard work. I won't say all of my scripts are equally valid, but they all have ability, you know. I don't, as I said, feel the least sorry for myself. I think of all the so-called independent filmmakers, how many of them get to do more than one film, you know?
NOTEBOOK: Can you talk about how Dying (1974) came about?
ROEMER: PBS asked me to make four half-hour films about death and poetry, death and painting, death and music, and funeral customs around the world. That's the project that had been funded. I wouldn't touch it. And because they liked me and they wanted me to make the film they said, “What would you do?” I said, “The only people who are going to have any say in this matter are people close to death.” There’s no point in talking to people who haven't died and I don't know anyone who has. They said, “OK, we'll back you.” The response to that film was very positive. They got an incredible amount of coverage for it. They had a whole page in TIME Magazine and so on. I said to a nice functionary, “Now that the good reviews are in, are you willing to back my way of doing something?” Perfectly friendly, he said, “Mike, we'd rather have you fail on our terms than succeed on yours.” That was the response to a successful film. I don't feel the least bit heroic.
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“Under the impact of my recent experience with people facing death,” Roemer wrote in Film Stories, “what emerged was Pilgrim, Farewell.” The film, coproduced by American Playhouse in 1980, is as nimble as it is haunting. It is about a terminally ill woman (Elizabeth Huddle) who attempts to make amends with the people in her life.
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NOTEBOOK: What was the production of Pilgrim, Farewell like?
ROEMER: I had a very regular middle-class life to the extent that I could. Our kids went to school, I had to make a living. So I went up to New Haven for a day and a half each week. We shot Pilgrim, Farewell in the summer and I used students of mine as the bulk of the crew. I had a very close friend [Franz Rath] who came over from Germany to shoot the film. It’s shot beautifully; it isn't self-referential, the camerawork, but it's awfully good. Pilgrim, Farewell is the most confrontational of the films, but it was a wonderful experience. I think there are moments in that film that are not easy to watch. There are moments that scare the hell out of me still. It has really, really good performances.
Vengeance Is Mine (Michael Roemer, 1984).
No less confrontational is Vengeance Is Mine, then titled Haunted, which played at the 1984 Berlin and London Film Festivals and aired on PBS. Jo (Brooke Adams) has come home to Rhode Island to see her surly mother, but soon gets caught up in her neighbor’s deeply dysfunctional family life.
Jake Perlin, founder of The Film Desk, told me, “Vengeance is Mine fell between a lot of cracks. The title is unclear, it isn’t TV or a movie in the traditional sense, it had American Playhouse money behind it but could have been a theatrical release.” Everything working against the film “is just overcome by how great the film is,” Perlin said. “That's been incredibly great, especially for [Roemer] to see.”
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ROEMER: I was always afraid of the melodramatic aspect of the whole thing. I'm so afraid of melodrama, but I think I've accepted that it was valid. In Vengeance is Mine, nobody wants to do what they did. Everybody had to do it.
NOTEBOOK: Ari Meyers plays Jackie, the child of Jo’s neighbors. What was directing her like? It’s an incredible performance.
ROEMER: She understood that film best when we were shooting it. She and I were on the same page; I never said one word to her. She knew everything because of her own autobiographical experience. That was uncanny. A lot of it is luck. I remember when she came into the office, I looked at her and I said, “If she can act, she can have the part.” I read a few lines with her and that was it.
NOTEBOOK: The film has deeply disturbed me. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. I’m beginning to think, in fact, it may be my favorite of your films.
ROEMER: I think it is a harder film to like. We do things and we don't know what their consequences are, and we're not necessarily free when we do them. We do them because our fate is to do them. I don't hold a lot of hope for human freedom. This makes me a total anomaly. I was very taken with Hemingway and Moby Dick and all the great American writers. I don't think Hemingway had any freedom. I think he had to stand out there with a rifle and face a charging rhino. Why does he have to do that? He had to live in the moment because he couldn't live in the past. His father committed suicide and at a certain point in his life, his mother sent him a package with the pistol with which his father shot himself with a note saying, “I thought you should have this.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, an enormously gifted writer, escaped the past. The Great Gatsby is all about people who are not in touch with their own past.
NOTEBOOK: In Vengeance is Mine, and in Pilgrim, Farewell and The Plot Against Harry, characters return home and have violent encounters with their pasts. Perhaps it’s too easy to read your biography into this—
ROEMER: Certainly I'm a product of a particular moment in time. But I think that my only freedom is to know what is making me do what I'm doing, or what I might be doing. If I get angry, for instance, to understand why I'm angry and to make sure that it's legitimate. I always had a very profound sense of helplessness. Of course, I do everything I can to mitigate it. You get a lot of energy out of that. I think that Pulp Fiction (1994) is very close to The Plot Against Harry, where people do things that they don't mean to do. Nothing works out the way it's supposed to, everything is upside down. The guy gets shot in the toilet because a stove clock goes off.
NOTEBOOK: You wrote a good deal after Vengeance Is Mine, several scripts that were collected and published as Film Stories.
ROEMER: I wrote twelve scripts after Vengeance Is Mine, and I was perfectly happy. I would have liked to make them, of course, but just continuing to explore the whole conundrum of having to believe that what you're doing makes sense. I mean, it's like Adam and Eve. They didn't know they were going to get sent out of Eden, you know. And didn't God know that they were going to do that? He was all-knowing and all-powerful. So why did he make them do that? If you tell a story, the people are innocent.
NOTEBOOK: That reminds me of a line you have about “the preclusive nature of narratives” in Telling Stories, your book of film theory.
ROEMER: With that book, I was trying to be part of the academic community. I always wanted to be a part of things that excluded me. The position I took was against the postmodernist perspective and a very traditional sense of our existence. Every story is over before it begins. If you're the storyteller, you can't know what's going to happen. You can only tell the story if you don't know. Hemingway said it beautifully. He said, “If I know the story, I don't have to tell it.” That’s the essence of why I couldn't be a professional screenwriter. You always know the story before you tell it. In a successful commercial movie, the audience is getting a known thing. They're going there, you might say, the way they go to a sermon, because they know that the minister is not going to say, “I'm not sure that there is a God.” That’s very important. I don't mean to make fun of anybody. Neither the minister nor congregation, but it's not how I experienced life. I don't know what's happening. And I don't know what's going to happen.
NOTEBOOK: With the recent interest in your work, how do you look back at your place in what can only lamentably be called the film industry?
ROEMER: I don't think I can answer that. I just feel very lucky that I got a chance to make films. You get lucky. That's really most of it. It's mostly luck and persistence. It’s damn hard and it costs too much. My family paid for what I did. They love me and I love them, but there are a lot of things I should have done, like spending time with my oldest son. I was away for eight years, off making movies. I see my son-in-law with his son and I see what I didn't do. Barbara didn't mind. She didn't mind my absence because I think she liked being queen of the roost, you know. I didn't make any sacrifices. I had to do what I did. It's the people who love me and whom I love who had to make the sacrifices. You don't even think about it. You just say, “This is what I have to do.” But I’m on good terms with my children, and my wife died sixteen years ago, so she isn't angry at me and she never really was. No, for moments she was.
NOTEBOOK: What about the body of work?
ROEMER: I was lucky to be able to do what I did. It was against the grain. When Bob and I made the first film together, it wasn't put on the air. You either play along with the system and then everything is okay, or you don't. My identity has been that I haven't one, you know. Now that I’m a very old man, I try to have one. I'm grateful that I'm still alive and I'm grateful that there are people who now respond to the work. How can one possibly feel anything but grateful that one survived? And also sorry that one didn't do better with many things. But there certainly is no sense of great accomplishments or anything like that.
NOTEBOOK: Was that sense of accomplishment something you sought when you began?
ROEMER: I wanted to be distinguished. I wanted to do something wonderful. That was all delusional but you probably had to feel that in order to do anything. Do I think my life was well spent? I have great doubts about that. I didn't choose to do any of it. I had to do it. I didn't tell this to the students, but those who said, “I want to make films,” weren't the filmmakers. The people who made films were the ones who had to do it. That's all they could do. I think that's what happened to me. I didn't know that—I thought I wanted to do it. But it wasn't that I wanted to do it. It's that I had to do it.
NOTEBOOK: We spoke earlier about your faith in film. Did that apply to faith that your work would eventually be seen by a larger audience?
ROEMER: It’s biologically necessary to be hopeful and to carry on. I don't think we are allowed to see that when we're young. It's biologically conditioned, so that we can start a family. I didn't get hit with the truth as I see it now until our children were well along. Then, I began to see that my life was largely a matter of luck—not of my own doing and not of my own will. I could have gone under so many times, and in so many ways, both physically and psychologically. I think people have to believe that they can do something about their lives and that they are in charge of their faith. And I don't think they are. I got lucky, being sent away from home and the care of our governess to a very wonderful school. I marched forward; I thought if I tried really hard, I would get to do what I needed to do. Circumstances conspired to make it possible.