Zwick given CB Film Fest lifetime achievement honor
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Jacob Spetzler | Special to the Times
Ed Zwick
Ed Zwick is a legendarily prolific filmmaker, producer, TV creator and writer who has owned a home in Crested Butte for decades. During his tenure in Crested Butte, he has written, produced, and/or directed films such as “The Last Samurai,” “Blood Diamond” and “Love and Other Drugs.” In February 2024, he published a memoir called “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood.” This year the Crested Butte Film Festival will honor his career with a “Lifetime Achievement Award,” which will be followed up by a Q&A with Zwick. The event is slated to take place at the Crested Butte Center for the Arts on Saturday, Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m. The Times had a chance to speak with him over the phone. The conversation ranged from his history with Crested Butte, how it has impacted his creative life and what he sees in the future of filmmaking. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)I understand you've been coming to Crested Butte for almost 35 years. How did you first discover this place?Both my wife and my sister went to college in Boulder, so they had known of it, although it wasn't until our son was born that we had some good luck with some things that we sold and we went looking. We drove around the West. We went to Steamboat, we went to Telluride, we went to Durango, every place. But this place really just won our heart. I mean, obviously it was a little less developed than it is now, but compared to what we could sense was going to happen, say, to Telluride, it seemed to have the best chance of retaining some of its unique character.That would have been the mid-80s?Around '86 or '87, something like that.As a creative person and filmmaker, has Crested Butte played a role in your creative life, either as inspiration or as a refuge from the bigger cities and the industry?Those are two very different questions, really. The first is as an inspiration, meaning being in a small town in the West, getting to know a little bit about its history and seeing what it's like to live there. It's had an influence over several movies I've written. I think that “Legends of the Fall,” having been writing it and working on it while I was there, was certainly an inspiration. I also have written another script which was never made, which is very much about a small town.I have also not just written scripts in Crested Butte, I've also cut about four movies there. We rented a room in the old schoolhouse once. Another time we rented a room up on the mountain. We did it in my garage. That has meant bringing a crew up there, my editor, his assistant, sometimes a [production assistant].We'd also often hire local young kids to help us, and one of them ended up becoming an editor, and that's Pierce Romer [editor of Tenet by Christopher Nolan, among others]. He was a great assistant. I took a shine to him and helped him get more work. And he's a full-fledged editor now living up in Canada and cutting movies.Were you literally bringing editing equipment like a Steenbeck or Moviola up to Crested Butte?We were past Steenbeck then. But we brought the whole Avid up there on a truck and we worked on an Avid. We were in these small rooms and it felt like a stakeout from the CIA, what the hell we were doing in the schoolhouse or in a rented condo or whatever. It was the whole dog and pony show, and sometimes I've even had actors come up there to look at what we were doing and get their blessing.Is there a way to describe the state of mind you're able to enter into in Crested Butte? Why do that deeper creative work here versus in LA or New York where it's easier to get to?All you need to do is compare the ambience in New York, Los Angeles, with Crested Butte. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that there's less stress and it's a wonderful ambiance. Also, my editor loved it, and he would often take a big bike ride in the morning and then we'd cut in the afternoon and evening, or vice versa. It was unconventional in our hours that allowed me to do stuff with my kids or even for myself. So it was very romantic, actually.I know you went to the American Film Institute for graduate school. Do you feel you need a robust creative community like the one you had at AFI to do good creative work, or does solitude play an important role too?I think it's utterly idiopathic. I think that you look at what someone like Barry Jenkins has done down in Florida and created this little community of filmmakers and what Steppenwolf did as a theater project in Illinois. It doesn't have to be [one way]. But for me, it was really important to be surrounded by very switched-on, very aspiring filmmakers at AFI, and I think I probably learned as much from them as I did from the instruction.[AFI] was a hothouse. And I'm not sure every filmmaker, I'm not sure every film program is like that. I do know that it's on the model of a conservatory, which is to say, you go there and it's deep into the pool, and you start shooting and you criticize each other. A lot of other schools, I think you learn in order to work, meaning you learn in order to make films. And this is the opposite, because you make films in order to learn.What drew you to filmmaking originally? You went to Harvard first for an unrelated bachelor's degree, didn't you?I loved movies and somehow felt I wasn't going to be able to make them, because I had never learned how to thread a Bolex or how to work a Moviola. And I was lucky enough to work with a director and saw that he was a writer who surrounded himself with hugely talented people, and that there was a chance that I could do the same and work my way into it as a writer and then indeed surround myself and learn from all these amazing people.Do you mind if I ask who that director was?That was Woody Allen. I got a job being an assistant and go-fer. And that was between my undergrad and going to AFI.Was there an early film experience that was like a revelation, this moment where you thought, "Oh, this is an amazing medium"?Too many. But I lived in Paris and in those days, the Cinémathèque was like the shrine. They would have three films every night, every night of the year, at six o'clock, at eight o'clock, and at ten o'clock. And one night it would be Fellini, and the next night it would be John Ford, and the next night it would be Kurosawa. And you would sit on the floor, and depending how high you were, you would stay there for hours. And it was amazing. It was that experience, rather than any specific film.Do you have a secret or a mentality for getting so much work done across both TV and film?It was very much about doing more than one thing at a time, because there's never the notion that one thing will find its way to the starting gate. And while one thing didn't work, you have to have real equanimity, and you just love it, and you devote yourself to it, and then you accept the fact that it seems to have faltered and you move over to the next, which has been running on a parallel track.And then sometimes that thing that you put away, it wasn't the right moment for all sorts of reasons, the cast was wrong, or the script hadn't been working, or the financing wasn't in fashion, or whatever, but then its time comes later.The TV thing was really amazing, because I was able to keep having a television job and do these shows, which meant that I never had to take a movie that I didn't love. I didn't need to take a movie to support my lifestyle, my family. I was able to wait, and I was able to take the time that it took, and it's usually longer than you think. But the fact that I had this thing that I actually loved, this very different thing, the television business, having those things simultaneously was a kind of adaptation.Do you have to enter different mentalities when you're working in those various roles as producer versus writer versus director?Yes, and you have to be all those people, and you have to be able to shimmer from one persona to the next and they're all very different. And I think that speaks to something about my own personality that served me.There are wonderful writers who only want to write, and there are wonderful directors who just want to direct and producers who live for producing. And there are people who are magnificent in television, but have no interest or ability in film and vice versa. I guess what you're describing is a certain promiscuity, which I think I had from being trained in the theater, where you would do Strindberg one night, and Ionesco the next and Sam Shepard the next. So you were eclectic.I'm curious about your thoughts on the current state of the industry, where it feels like there's a divide between these larger spectacle-style movies, the superhero and action films, and then the more auteur-driven work.I'm going to do a Q and A [on Saturday night], and I'm sure that we'll get into that. And it's a very long conversation, if you want to be accurate, if you want to be specific about what has happened and why it has happened and what the future might be. I think I've obviously thought a lot about it, and so have my friends. I have always seen a kind of resilience in the movie business and I'm praying there still is. I'll just leave it at that until I have to, like, bloviate for an hour.Maybe a similar question, but what are your thoughts on AI coming into filmmaking? Do you think it's going to democratize the medium further, or disrupt the value and preciousness of film?I think the issue of copyright is very important and the fact that they are using everyone's work and not identifying it when they do that, I think, is really problematic. On the other hand, as a tool in the workflow process of post-production and of CG, I think it's going to cost a lot of people their jobs to a certain degree in that aspect.I think there's this very weird thing that happened in CG and will happen with AI, which is because you can do a thing, therefore you do it. And I think that creates a whole nomenclature of film language that is often against the interests of authentic storytelling, and people don't know why they are put off by it, or they identify it as CG or AI, and that pulls them out. And I think that's the detriment to authenticity in stories.It will also change the audience's set of references to what is real. You remember, there was a time in which Disney animation was the gold standard. And when you first saw some of these computer animations, you went, "Oh, really." And then Pixar comes along, and that just becomes the standard and the audience accepts it. There's a period after these innovations where the public and certain people who are attached to the old way feel a sense of loss, and then the next stage takes place and people just accept it.This is such a big question, but when you look back at the career you've had so far, do you have any specific feelings or thoughts about it all?I think that is an impossible question to answer. All I would say is that I would very much like to continue. There's always going to be a point where you fall out of fashion, or there's ageism, or there's just fatigue on your part to the struggle. That hasn't happened to me. It might happen to me sometime, I don't know. I'm still as engaged by it as I ever have been.(Jacob Spetzler is Gunnison photographer and freelance writer.)
Ed Zwick
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