David Mamet has been famously caustic about the movie industry, from his lacerating 1988 play “Speed-the-Plow” to a 1996 essay in which he lamented that “films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement — they offer not drama but thrills.”
Yet for a man swimming against the current, the former Chicagoan has been remarkably successful in getting where he wants to go. He received an Oscar nomination this year for his prescient screenplay for “Wag the Dog.” He also wrote last fall’s well-received adventure thriller “The Edge.”
Now comes “The Spanish Prisoner,” his first writing-directing effort since 1994’s “Oleanna.” The movie, which opened Friday, finds Mamet revisiting familiar territory: a well-intentioned protagonist slowly becoming ensnared in a con.
Whatever changes may have taken place in Hollywood, they haven’t prevented Mamet from being Mamet.
“One has to say, `I’d like everything my way. It may not be fair, but that’s what I want,’ ” the 50-year-old writer said at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, which gave “The Spanish Prisoner” its premiere showcase slot. “It is a business. That doesn’t mean that the other guy’s got to win all the time.”
You can see why Mamet would be a fierce adversary in business and poker, a game that he enjoys. For one, he likes playing for high stakes, which in part explains why he has shifted much energy from playwriting to filmmaking.
“It’s exciting because it’s the big table,” said Mamet. “There’s a lot of money, a lot of prestige, a lot of work riding on what happens.”
Mamet boasts a quality that serves him well in negotiations, card-playing and storytelling: He doesn’t reveal more than he needs to. In person he speaks in concise, declarative sentences that end with periods the size of cannonballs. In his work, he prefers to let his characters — and audience — connect the dots.
“That’s the subject of drama,” he said. “Truth is hidden. The drama is over when the truth is revealed.”
From his older works to “The Spanish Prisoner,” the 1997 novel “The Old Religion” and even “Wag the Dog,” Mamet protagonists often find the truth to be dangerously elusive. They struggle to be honorable and to understand the forces working against them, but just when they think they have a grasp on what’s going on, down comes the boom.
“(Mamet) has a particular idea of the world and how one is to proceed in that world,” said Gregory Mosher, whose long association with the playwright began when he directed 1975’s breakthrough play “American Buffalo” in the Goodman Theatre’s small auditorium. “You either give in and become a trickster, or you try to remain what David calls `an excellent man’ and find that life subsumes that effort. I think that’s true whether it’s a chamber play or (Mamet’s script for) `The Untouchables.’ “
“I think the human capacity for self-delusion is endless,” Mamet said. “Part of it makes for great entertainment. It also makes for war. We have the capacity to use our great intelligence to convince ourselves of anything in the world, true or false.”
This capacity allows Mamet to play his own games with audiences, though he does not consider himself a con artist.
“What a con artist is doing is using his or her understanding of human processes of cognition in order to steal. What a dramatist is doing is using his or her understanding of human processes of cognition in order to entertain or to please,” he said, innocently.
The con, he added, is “particularly well-suited to film because we get the information so quickly and blatantly with the picture.”
His movies have a different quality from his stage works, which revolve more around his rhythmic, often elliptical dialogue.
“A screenplay should be a description of pictures that the cameraman’s going to shoot, such that when those pictures are shot and cut together, they will tell the story,” said Mamet, who cites Alfred Hitchcock as an influence. “Dialogue doesn’t have to be great in a screenplay. I don’t speak Italian, but I certainly think `The Bicycle Thief’ is the greatest film ever made.”
“The Spanish Prisoner” is the name of a confidence game involving a wealthy man, the transportation of his sister and money from a foreign place, and a dupe. It also was the title of one of Mamet’s more obscure one-act plays, which premiered in Chicago in 1985.
“I loved the title, and I love the idea of that specific confidence game,” said Mamet, noting that the movie otherwise bears no resemblance to the play.
In the movie, Joe Ross (Campbell Scott), a businessman, has developed a lucrative plan for his company and fears he is not being properly compensated. Meanwhile, he has struck up a strange friendship with a shady aristocrat (a quietly menacing Steve Martin), who may be helping him.
Rebecca Pidgeon, an accomplished stage actress and singer before she became Mamet’s wife, plays Ross’s adoring secretary who keeps asking, “Who in this world is what they seem?” Having performed in Mamet works such as “Speed-the-Plow,” the Broadway version of “Oleanna” (as the hated sexual harassment fingerpointer) and the recent anthology play “The Old Neighborhood,” Pidgeon has become adept at the clipped delivery and deadpan style common to Mamet veterans.
“I find it similar to — don’t laugh — I do find it similar to Shakespeare, because he writes in iambic pentameter a lot, and also sometimes a line has more than one meaning,” the Scottish-born Pidgeon said. “Or your line and my line connected together have different layers of meaning, which happens in Shakespeare too. I’m not obviously — well, I suppose I am comparing him to Shakespeare — but there you go. I think he’s a great writer.”
She’s not the only one. Mamet’s influence is becoming increasingly apparent — in the harsh street lingo employed by Quentin Tarantino, in Neil LaBute’s cold-blooded depiction of office politics and misogyny in last year’s indie film “In the Company of Men,” and in the upcoming film “Jerry and Tom,” a tale of Chicago hitmen written by ex-Chicagoan Rick Cleveland and starring Mamet veteran Joe Mantegna.
Does Mamet see his mark on others’ work? “Oh, probably. It’s kind of inevitable if you do something long enough,” he said blankly, noting that he enjoyed “In the Company of Men.”
“Everybody has influences,” he added. “I was very influenced coming up by Harold Pinter, who was very influenced by Beckett, who was very influenced by Joyce and Yeats. So if someone is influenced in turn by my work, it’s very flattering.”
Mamet, who splits his time between the Boston suburb of West Newton and a cabin in rural Vermont, is now in London finishing the filming of his adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1946 play “The Winslow Boy,” starring Pidgeon, Nigel Hawthorne and Jeremy Northam. He has certainly had a prolific stretch.
“He has a great time doing his work,” Pidgeon said. “He needs to write like other people need to have breakfast, lunch and dinner. And that’s always been the same as long as I’ve known him.”
What has changed, she noted, is that recent plays such as “The Cryptogram” and “The Old Neighborhood” are “more autobiographical.” They deal with troubled families that have parallels with the writer’s upbringing on Chicago’s South Shore.
Mamet, however, wouldn’t acknowledge any shift in tone. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It all takes place in the spontaneous, simultaneous present.”
His sister Lynn Mamet, a California-based writer, suggested to The New York Times last year that he has mellowed since being “the angriest man who was ever born.”
He didn’t exactly embrace the suggestion. “Oh, that’s that woman in California who’s been claiming to be my sister all of these years,” he said. “You know, what would have been gained by keeping her incarcerated? Nothing, really. I think the capacity for anyone to get from 9 to 5, whether it’s a halfway house or it’s full freedom, is laudable.”
Right-o. But is that characterization of him wrong? “There was some talk, and I think it might have been substantiated, that that person didn’t actually exist, and it was an Internet fiction created by — although I know this sounds crazy — Duncan Renaldo, who of course played the Cisco Kid in the 1950s,” he continued with a straight face. “I can’t say that that’s true, but it’s an attractive area for someone to investigate.”
Mamet, of course, is not a con artist. “Me? No.”
He added, “I don’t think I was ever angry. Or if I was angry, I don’t think I’ve ever become less angry. One or two of those things is probably true.”
DAVID MAMET FILMOGRAPHY
Films written and directed by Mamet
“House of Games” (1987)
“Things Change” (1988)
“Homicide” (1991)
“Oleanna” (1994)
“The Spanish Prisoner” (1998)
“The Winslow Boy” (in the works)
Mamet screenplays for other directors
“The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1981, dir. Bob Rafelson)
“The Verdict” (1982, dir. Sidney Lumet)
“The Untouchables” (1987, dir. Brian De Palma)
“We’re No Angels” (1989, dir. Neil Jordan)
“Hoffa” (1992, dir. Danny De Vito)
“The Edge” (1997, dir. Lee Tamahori)
“Wag the Dog” (1997, co-written with Hilary Henkin, dir. Barry Levinson)
Film adaptations of Mamet plays
“About Last Night. . .” (1986, based on “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” dir. Edward Zwick)
“The Water Engine” (1992, TV, dir. Steven Schacter)
“Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992, dir. James Foley)
“A Life in the Theatre” (1993, TV, dir. Gregory Mosher)
“Oleanna” (1994, dir. Mamet)
“American Buffalo” (1996, dir. Michael Corrente)
Mamet said he has been happy with all of the films made from his scripts, but he still wishes he could have directed one of them:
“(Studio executive) Sherry Lansing asked me to write `The Untouchables,’ and I said, `I’d love to write “The Untouchables.” Do you think you might consider letting me direct it?’ She said, `Yeah, if the script’s really really good.’ So I gave her the script, and she liked it, and I said, `Would you consider letting me direct it?’ and she said, `No, it’s much too good.’
“I thought Brian (De Palma) did a real good job, but I really would have loved to direct it. Obviously it would have been a different movie. I’m sure it would have been darker.”
