Interview With "Angels in America"'s Tony Kushner
Based on Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name, HBO presents Angels in America, a collage of AIDS-related stories revolving around a bisexual Mormon, his despairing wife, an AIDS patient and his lover.
Directed by Mike Nichols from Kushner's adaptation and with an all-star cast including Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson, along with Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Justin Kirk, Patrick Wilson and Ben Shenkman, HBO is airing the epic two-part, six-hour movie event over two Sundays, Dec. 7 and 14.
In the following interview, Kushner speaks out on the process of getting his award winning play made into an HBO film, working with the incredible cast and the continuing relevance of the themes in the play.
What effect did writing Angels in America have on your life?
Tony Kushner: It changed everything in my life. I mean, it gave me a kind of a freedom and chance to really concentrate on my work, in terms of economic security, and it was overwhelming in the amount of attention that it got, because I wasn't as old then as I am now to deal with it, so I had struggle with that a lot. I was given a kind of platform for political talk that I didn't have before because I'd written a famous play. And that was fun because I'm somebody who's interested in politics and political talk and political action....
Can you describe the process of getting the play made into a film?
I don't believe that every play must be made into a movie in order to prove its worth. Cary [Brokaw, the producer of the play] asked me, can I show this to Mike Nichols and I said, "well of course, that would be thrilling, but I can't imagine that he is going to want to do it." And I was thrilled that he wanted to do it, and we met and we talked and we really got along, as we have continued to get along. I think he's an amazing man. Anybody who really knows what they're talking about is going to say Mike Nichols and HBO pulled off a kind of a miracle here. This thing could so easily have not worked, and it worked because everybody committed themselves to it so ferociously, and, astonishingly, without any friction. You think, a ten-month shoot of a strange play turning into a film with incredibly big-name stars clearly not working for their usual fee, and think this is going to be a nightmare.
Did adapting the play into a film give you more opportunities as an artist?
I made some mistakes that I think people make when they start out writing screenplays. I thought, you know, I have to give the camera angle, and I failed geometry and I don't have any idea of how to do that. It's not something I've ever thought about. But I always felt that was part of what a screenplay is, you have to construct the shots, [and Mike Nichols] said, don't do that. That's what I do. That's what the director of photography does. That's what the designer does. You give us the story and the dialogue and then we'll make that stuff up. And there are things that you couldn't do in a play that you can do on film, obviously. I learned about the difference in language. A lot of language from the play was preserved, but I learned that not all of it could be because of the intimacy of the screen experience. You don't have the kind of cooling distance of a theatre space. You don't have an audience watching, [and the need to] sort of refocus its attention over and over again.
[Nichols] wanted to have Al and Emma play all these different people. Just like we did in the play. And I thought immediately, okay, this is somebody who kind of gets that there's something in this story about that kind of dream-like thing of seeing the same actors playing different people, giving you the opportunity to think about the similarities. What is the connection between a nurse who keeps telling a patient, "stay put," and an angel who's saying the same thing. Why is Emma playing both of those parts? And also, it keeps you thinking critically. You look at it and think. It engages you in a different part of your brain because you watch Meryl Streep play Ethel Rosenberg and she's astoundingly moving and scary and great, and you're also watching Meryl Streep playing Hanna. I love that, and that's what you get in theatre that you secretly don't get in movies.
I think there's a value to the power of a really, sort of almost overwhelmingly convincing illusion that's sometimes both working and not working at the same time, and I think that's what theatre is about. You believe it and don't believe it simultaneously, which engages a certain part of your brain that has to do with being skeptical about the nature of what you're experiencing in life. That's why theatre is important. You learn to go out into the world after you see a play that you really loved and look at politics and love and all sorts of other human phenomena in the same way. It's real and yet it isn't.
