PLAYWRIGHT Craig Lucas, who has written his share of screenplays, makes his film directorial debut in The Dying Gaul, a contemporary tale reminiscent of those past films about tragic figures bought and sold in Hollywood. Adapted by Lucas from his play of the same title, Peter Sarsgaard plays Robert, an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter whose personal life is spiraling downhill just as his professional life is on the way up.
Lucas’ many plays include Blue Window (produced in 1984), Prelude to a Kiss (1988), and Small Tragedy (2004), and his writing credits for films include Longtime Companion and The Secret Lives of Dentists. An admirer of Melville and Shakespeare, Lucas is known for the lyricism of his writing and for t
hemes that challenge the viewer’s assumptions about how people should ideally behave and how they behave in real life. The Dying Gaul offers a case in point: Robert recently lost his longtime companion to AIDS and has written a screenplay called “The Dying Gaul” about their last days together. A Hollywood studio executive loves the script, but wants to change the dying man’s gender to female in order to make it more palatable to audiences in Bush’s America. After some reluctance, Robert gives in—and soon sells more than just his artistic integrity as he begins a sexual fling with the (married) studio exec.
On the day he was born, April 30, 1951, Lucas was abandoned in a car in Atlanta. At eight months he was adopted by a Pennsylvania couple. He started his theater career in acting, but when Stephen Sondheim told him he was a better writer than actor, he took the maestro’s advice. Since then, Lucas has written and directed plays for the stage as well as written for the big screen. His awards include the Obie Award for Small Tragedy, the PEN/Laurel Pels mid-career achievement award, Out Critics, L.A. Drama Critics, Dramalogue, Lambda Literary awards, and the Sundance Audience Award for Longtime Companion. He also won the Obie for his direction of Harry Kondoleon’s Saved or Destroyed.
I interviewed Lucas in two parts in early September by phone to New York, where he lives for part of the year. He also lives in Seattle, where he serves as associate artistic director of the Intiman Theater. Although he had a cough and was worried about friends affected by Hurricane Katrina, Lucas was gracious with his answers. — John Esther
Gay & Lesbian Review: Why did you move over to directing for The Dying Gaul?
Craig Lucas: They asked me. Really, it’s getting a little late in life to expect anybody to let me direct my first movie. I didn’t see it as a movie, because it was so “play”—eternal and claustrophobic. [Co-producer] George Van Buskirk, who did not see the play but read it, really felt it was a movie. He wanted either me or Campbell [Scott] to direct it. He kept calling. So I wrote a script and he called immediately. He said, “I love the script. I want to go into production and I want you to direct it.” The Dying Gaul is not meant to be a record of the play or a movie of the play. It’s meant to be a movie, so I threw out a good one-third to half of the play.
G&LR: You’ve said that it is not the artist’s responsibility to provide positive images of gay people or politically correct messages about HIV.
CL: I don’t think it is. You’ll probably recall, there was a certain quarter in our community that said it was irresponsible to show a man leaving his sick lover. That was not particularly representative of the majority of the people who were not abandoning their lovers. The idea that a gay character should somehow be noble or rise to the occasion creates a completely false paradigm for what life is really like. The only thing art has to be is an expression of someone’s imagination. I don’t know a whole lot of people who got better as people because they went through hell. People I know who went through one form of hell or another were diminished and traumatized and often misshapen by the experience. My father’s generation who went to war [World War II]—they came home as half human beings. They didn’t come back like, “Oh, we saved democracy; we’re so happy.” They came back as totally broken people who could barely function. I saw family after family where the mother paid the bills, made the decisions, took care of the children, and was basically the fiber of the family while the guy with an empty shell went off to work every day and drank himself to death! You’re not a better person unless maybe you’re Socrates or someone who’s a self-examining individual.
G&LR: Without giving the ironic ending of the story away, what can you say about your intentions behind it?
CL: First and foremost, I wanted to tell a story that was gripping to the end, that was not predictable. If you look at each tiny little step and lie that Jeffrey, Elaine, and Robert take and make, collectively I think they’re creating a horrible tragedy—not intending to, telling themselves that what they’re doing is fine. I don’t think Robert really allows himself to see what it would mean to be fucking his best friend’s husband. I don’t think Jeff really allows himself to take any responsibility for betraying his wife. And Elaine gives herself permission to go on-line and pretend to be someone she’s not. She feels justified. [It’s] the greed behind all of those choices, the sense that we are entitled to take as much as we can take, that sort of Ayn Rand, Republican greed. I don’t know what to call it. The people in the story—hopefully one has invested in them to a certain degree, because one recognizes something human and familiar. They’re terrible, terrible people. Just like us!
G&LR: Jeffrey asserts that people do not go to the movies to learn. Do you agree with that?
CL: No, but I don’t think they go to be told that they’re learning. I think everyone goes to movies and books and plays to learn how to live their lives better. I truly believe that. I think you can go watch [Steven Spielberg’s] War of the Worlds to learn how to live your life better. You may say you’re being distracted and entertained, and hopefully you are. But I do think people have an innate need to watch re-enacted experience. I don’t know if it’s innate, but it goes back to the beginning of civilization. We watch human experience in which characters are challenged by terrible, seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and they do or do not win out. And watching them go through those struggles is a way—psychologically, culturally, and politically—that we examine collectively our experience and what it means. You don’t really watch King Lear for a different reason than you watch War of the Worlds. Both are supposed to be on some profound level—even if they seem silly, like a Seinfeld episode—they’re meant on some level to be edifying, I believe. I guess I’m like the last of the Mohicans because I know that you got these crappy, appalling Pauline Kael knockoffs now writing about movies in this kind of wise-ass, know-it-all way that’s just so uninteresting to me.
G&LR: Speaking more broadly, what do you think about Hollywood’s treatments of gay people?
CL: We’re as marginalized in Hollywood films as we are in The New York Times, and both of those things are profound distortions of the reality of American culture. There’s no human experience that gay people cannot represent.
G&LR: What do you think about alternative queer cinema? Do you think it is any better?
CL: Yes, are you kidding? It’s fantastic. There are a rich and a wide array of works.
G&LR: Do you think exposure to those films—and art in general—can change people’s politics?
CL: Sure. Books, movies, and plays can show people things they hadn’t thought about and stir them up. I don’t know if you can turn a died-in-the-wool John Bircher into a progressive activist by showing him one movie.
G&LR: Switching to larger political issues, why do you think Republicans have been so successful in using the gay issue to divert attention from other issues, for example in the last presidential election?
CL: I don’t think it was. I think it was a complete canard. I think much of the press created it. I think the real issue was war and being at war and being frightened of an enemy they couldn’t see. People [were]whipped up and manipulated into a place where they were afraid to change course in the middle of a war. It just so happens that the war was arranged on completely false grounds, and it’s being funded by the poor, and it’s being fed on the blood of poor people, both there and here at home, by an amoral neo-fascist.
