Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) is “a man of letters,” declares a young man who accosts him on the street one day, eagerly explaining he’s stumbled across a poetry collection Saxberger wrote long ago and believes it to be an overlooked masterpiece. Setting aside the relative merits of Way Past Go, which nobody’s mentioned to Saxberger in decades, the young man has a point; Saxberger now works at the post office, sorting other people’s mail. But the tantalizing possibility that his once-lofty literary ambitions have belatedly earned him a following—not only this slightly snobbish student of the arts (Edmund Donovan) but a society of self-described “enthusiasts”—is enough to awaken strong emotions in Saxberger, causing him to reassess his own merits.
“Late Fame,” opening in theaters this week, is the second narrative feature directed by Kent Jones, a former critic and programmer who also led the New York Film Festival from 2013 to 2019. Featuring a rich and contemplative lead performance from Dafoe—much as Jones’ last feature, “Diane,” foregrounded a revelatory turn from character actress Mary Kay Place—this smart and sensitive follow-up co-stars Greta Lee as Gloria, a middle-aged theater actress who aspires to the fading archetype of screen divas Sally Bowles and Marlene Dietrich but hasn’t yet broken through, instead settling into a far less lucrative role as tragedienne-in-residence for this “Enthusiasm Society.”
With the rich chemistry between Dafoe and Lee providing his drama with a gravitational core, Jones—working with a carefully nuanced script by Samy Burch (“May December”), who adapted a novella by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, shifting the setting from 19th-century Vienna to contemporary SoHo—turns “Late Fame” into a delicate, layered examination of the artist’s life, personal fulfillment, and ghosts of our cultural past that continue to possess and compel us in the present.
Ahead of the film’s release, Jones spoke with RogerEbert.com about the appeal of working within someone else’s sensibility, his own memories of the soul of SoHo, moving away from the auteur theory of criticism that originally drove his engagement with cinema, and much more.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
You took decades to complete the screenplay for “Diane,” your feature debut. How did you arrive at “Late Fame,” which was written by Samy Burch—herself adapting a novella by Arthur Schnitzler that was written over a century ago—as your next project?
Pam Koffler, [an American film producer] from Killer Films, called me one day and asked if I ever read scripts by other people—and because it was her asking, I didn’t stop to think about it. After I had read the novella, I went ahead and read Samy’s script. We should all be so lucky to get scripts by a writer like Samy, because she writes with a real movie sense. She has a sense of surprise. There’s nothing expected; inevitably, in a lot of scripts you read, there’s the moment you can sense coming early on, and once it arrives everything that’s been interesting about that build-up suddenly falls away to make way for something less interesting.
There are so many well-trodden paths in movies, some of which are unfortunately rewarded in the reception of the work or treated as if they’re a given. There was nothing like that in Samy’s script. I met with her and liked it even more after I met her, because I liked her. She and I got along really well; now we’re pretty close friends. I’ve reflected recently on how much I liked the idea of working with someone else’s sensibility that’s also at a remove from someone else’s sensibility—which is Arthur Schnitzler. I’m still thinking about that. I really enjoyed that process, but I can’t imagine it happening all the time. We really did connect; Samy also wrote the liner notes for the new Blu-ray of “Diane” that The Film Desk put out.
Where did your sensibility come into play, given the palimpsest quality that emerges from Samy not only adapting Schnitzler but also translating it, across generations and geographies? It’s a quintessentially New York film, and the Saxberger character would have arrived in SoHo around the same time you did; as a critic-turned-filmmaker, as well as the former director for the New York Film Festival, the story’s dialogues around cultural cachet, artistic currency, and the evolution of the city’s literary scene could have struck a chord for you personally.
Upon my first read, I knew that I liked “Late Fame.” I probably thought about these ideas; as we got into working together, these were the qualities of it that I moved toward—or at least that I didn’t move away from. The idea of going out, finding someone, and saying to them, “I read your work from 40 years ago, I think you’re a genius, and you never got your proper recognition” is so familiar to me from a particular strand of criticism.
When I was young, I came out of the auteurist school of thinking—which was all retrospective, and even when it wasn’t, it was. I mean that, if somebody was writing about Ingmar Bergman, they would write, “But Howard Hawks is better, because he was less pretentious about it.” And people actually wrote such things, if you can believe it. That vision of retrospective criticism had started in France, because all of these films had flooded into France after the war, but that was what had attracted me to criticism; the first piece I had published in Film Comment, for instance, was about Olivier Assayas; long before Assayas was recognized in this country, I’d seen “Paris Awakens” and didn’t understand why nobody here knew who he was. He’d been programmed in a few series, but I was very taken with him and became—like many others—invested in really promoting certain filmmakers.
I recently learned that the critic Tony Rayns had died and was recalling that crazy, buzzing energy between him, Pierre Rissient, Peggy Chaio, Berenice Reynaud, Max Tessier—all these critics focused on European and Asian cinema, some of them on Iranian cinema too. There was a lot of competition between them, but they were all very passionate in that sense. I felt that same passion for Monte Helleman very personally, because the first time I interviewed him was before “Two-Lane Blacktop” was restored and reclaimed by history, and I felt he’d been almost forgotten; that feeling was very familiar to me.
The more we got into “Late Fame,” the more I wanted to deal with poetry on a real level. Samy told me poetry was not her area of expertise, and she’d had a poem in the script that was very good but too close to Schnitzler, we thought. I knew something of the New York School of Poets, [who’d lived and worked in downtown Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s,] through my friend Pete [Gizzi,] to whom “Late Fame” is dedicated. I’d read a lot of that poetry, and I wanted this film to reflect that, but there’s also the sense of the memory of New York of an earlier moment in time, and the ghost of it, in the story.
In the first draft, it was the West Village where he wandered, but he was supposed to be an older character at that point, and then, when we started working with Willem, I realized that Willem and I both came to New York around the same time, and we both had that sense. He was a founding member of The Wooster Group, named for Wooster Street in SoHo, along with Richard Foreman. Anthology Film Archives was there, and SoHo was a very different place at the time. Then, suddenly, that was all gone, which was crazy—but the ghost of it is still there.
Physically, it just isn’t that different, you know? I find SoHo very haunting, its arcades and those little buildings, all its cobblestones. That became more of a presence for me in the story, as it all developed.
What brought you first to New York?
I just moved to New York because I wanted to move to New York. Then I did a year at McGill, and then I took a year off; I was just focused on movies. As a matter of fact, Godard came to Montréal, and I saw him give a few of his “Histoire(s) du cinéma” lectures. I met him when I was 17 years old. That was crazy. I took a year off, then I went to NYU because I had this romantic dream of coming down and studying with Nicholas Ray—which of course never would have happened, and he was dead by the time I got there anyway—but that was because they’d all come to New York.
How did memories of your experiences around that time inform the quasi-vérité way that you chose to film the literary salons, the spaces where The Enthusiasm Society elects to meet and the way those gatherings unfold?
Those kinds of mythic places that people recall, or that they try to emulate—like Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris, or the Algonquin Round Table, or the Cedar Bar—I tend to think they happened spontaneously. It was interesting, because I had a friend who lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side, and she started inviting people over to her place on Sundays. And there was a conductor, some musicians, some theater people. I was there, too. At a certain point, after a few weeks, she said, “Everybody, I’d like to make an announcement. It’s always been a dream of mine to have a salon. And I’ve realized that’s what we’re doing now, and I just want to say, ‘Keep coming!’” It all fell apart, almost on contact, the minute that she named it.
What I wanted to do was to have people gathering in a place that felt out of time. It’s not really a kind of place that exists in New York anymore. The bar itself, all the interiors for the film, were shot in New Jersey, and so that café is very much a Jersey place—but it feels like a New York place from 30 years ago or even more. It was the same with the performance space at the end. It’s almost like Bushwick, but not really; it’s a different, more surreal art community that lives out there. I wanted to create a space that would be ideal for those kinds of gatherings, the kinds of places people wanted to be at, but never really were, and had these ideas of earlier moments when people were. I knew people who had been to the Cedar Bar. Alfred Leslie was a friend of mine, and he knew a lot of people who had been part of the New York poetry scene.
“Late Fame” asks these questions about whether art can reflect authenticity, and that’s this element of Saxberger’s poetry that the younger generation responds to, or at least that they interpret or infer in writing that’s from—as you’re saying—a place and a scene that came before their time. When Saxberger is reading his poetry aloud, there’s a slight edge that led me to think about Dafoe potentially harkening back to his own time as a member of an experimental theatre company. Greta Lee, in a much showier role, is constantly performing for this group of young admirers. Tell me about working with the layers of performance you wanted from these characters.
I had very few conversations with Willem around this, but we were of like minds, basically, and needed to iron out certain scenes and lines of dialogue. When we were shooting, Willem was the guy who just wanted to keep going, to move ahead, because the moment is everything for him. Every actor is different, and sometimes there would be little adjustments I’d ask him to make here and there, but there was never conscious thought about that. It’s more like Ed is confronted with this situation, and he’s lured into it—in a way that we all would be; who wouldn’t respond to that? And there’s a part of him that recognizes the fragility, the borderline craziness, of the situation, and there’s another part of him where the state and the feeling of being young come back to him very suddenly, like muscle memory. When he’s reading the poem, that’s quite different, because he’s not expecting to read it, but then [Gloria] can’t keep it together to read it for him; when he reads the poem, he’s confronted with it in the moment, returning to this piece he wrote as a younger man about a woman that he was in love with. And he just gives it a good reading, I think.
With Gloria, it’s a little bit different. Greta is playing a character who’s playing a character, quite often, under every circumstance, in every different circumstance, with the sole exception of an awkward moment when he goes to her apartment. She’s someone who’s traveled the toughest road of all the characters, because she is someone who came to New York probably a little bit late and who’s singing a song in this environment, something that would have been the lingua franca of New York 30 years earlier but not so much anymore. She’s giving it her all—but the edginess that you’re talking about is definitely there. It’s present, it’s part of my sensibility, and it’s also just part of the story. I wouldn’t want her to be singing Rodgers and Hammerstein, so it had to be Brecht and Weill.
Her performance of “Surabaya Johnny,” in this downtown cabaret, is one of the scenes that leaps to mind first when I think about “Late Fame.”
That was one of the rare instances where, if you’re talking about film references, I was thinking a lot about the way that it couldn’t look. I’m an extravagant Fassbinder aficionado, but the way he filmed those musical numbers in “Lola” or “The Marriage of Maria Braun” has such a bare-bones quality.
You spoke earlier about coming out of this auteur-theory school of criticism, embarking on your own path as a filmmaker. “Late Fame” is engaged with all these ideas about what it means to be discovered, to be celebrated, to consider oneself esteemed in the arts. Did the process change your own thinking about what constitutes a successful artistic life?
I would say, on the one hand, you have to just keep going—to keep making films, as many as possible—but also never waste your time on bullshit, because there’s a lot of it. It’s always hard to make independent films—that’s the nature of it, that’s what it is, those are the circumstances. There are a lot of people who think about getting into movies, but they think about it from the inside out; they want to have made something, rather than to be involved in the actual making, which is a completely different experience.
The auteurist part of criticism was a tool for me when I was young; it was getting me into other people’s work and into seeing it along a certain wavelength. I still think of it as valid; it is true in a way that’s what a movie is. But then, on the other hand, what it isn’t is people deciding on a theme and elucidating it over 40 movies. It’s not the theme; it’s the practice, and there are the preoccupations, but that’s for other people to figure out. What it’s really about is not wasting your time on bullshit, because there’s a lot of it out there. Some of it comes with a smile, but there’s no time, and especially not for that.
“Late Fame” is in select theaters August 7, via Magnolia Pictures.
