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| Andy Warhol (Paul Bettany) filming Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jeremy Pope) in Anthony McCarten’s The Collaboration, directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah Photo: Jeremy Daniel |
In the second instalment with Anthony McCarten we discuss A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical, starring Will Swenson and Mark Jacoby as Diamond (now and then respectively), directed by Michael Mayer and The Collaboration with Jeremy Pope (terrific in Elegance Bratton’s impressive The Inspection) as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paul Bettany as Andy Warhol and Erik Jensen as Bruno Bischofberger, directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah.
Michael Stewart and Defacement, Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait, Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and an imagined production of Anthony’s play The Two Popes with Whitney Houston (Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody, directed by Kasi Lemmons, screenplay McCarten, opened globally on December 23) playing and a Warhol on the wall of the Pope’s quarters inhabiting the “same sort of eerie waiting room on eternity” also came up.
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| Anthony McCarten with Anne-Katrin Titze on Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat: “Andy representing being reflective of life and Jean being absorptive of life.” |
The Collaboration is Anthony McCarten’s second part in his worship trilogy which includes Fernando Meirelles’s filmed version of his stage play The Two Popes, starring Anthony Hopkins (Pope Benedict XVI) and Jonathan Pryce (Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to become Pope Francis). McCarten, Hopkins and Pryce received Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations. The upcoming third part will focus on the relationship between Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
The filmed version of The Collaboration, directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah with Pope, Bettany, and now Daniel Brühl as Bruno Bischofberger is currently in post-production.
From at first inside a midtown Manhattan restaurant and then from his hotel, Anthony McCarten joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical, The Collaboration, and his elements of invention.
Anne-Katrin Titze: When you start the plays about real people who lived and died at a certain point in time - for instance Michael Stewart died in 1983 and the poster of Warhol and Basquiat was in 1985 - how much trouble is it for you to be flexible with time?
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| 1985 Warhol Basquiat poster shown by Bruno Bischofberger (Erik Jensen) to Andy Warhol (Paul Bettany) Photo: Jeremy Daniel |
Anthony McCarten: Well I’m doing it all very responsibly, I believe. I try to maintain a fidelity to the truth. But I’m also an artist and I believe that the facts only get you to the doorway of the house and that to be invited in and have a cup of tea, you need to have an element of invention. That’s where we need to be to really appreciate a character, is in the house, feeling the hospitality of the character, feeling the warmth, feeling the foibles, seeing the complete person.
And I never think history delivers us the full picture. So I began, and I’ve been doing it for many years now, refining my approach to how you tell biographical stories. And I to some extent feel that critics often misunderstand what the artist’s role is. They see me as a photographer, not a painter. My work needs to be interpreted. I love the story of Picasso painting Gertrude Stein’s picture. He laboured on it and didn’t let her look at it until he was done.
Then he invited her around to his side of the canvas, which is kind of the equivalent of my opening night, or a film premiere. And Gertrude Stein was horrified. And she said “I don’t look like that.” To which Picasso said “No, but you will!” He had seen something in her that he wished to represent.
AKT: I see the painting in front of my eyes, while you’re talking.
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| Neil Diamond (Will Swenson) with the singers/dancers Photo: Julieta Cervantes |
AMC: And my job is no more and no less than that.
AKT: “We ignore life” Andy says.
AMC: We often ignore complexity and we’re attracted to the superficial response, the reflexive response. We don’t look into the nuance of it all. In the nuance you will find a much more interesting picture.
AKT: You have it near the end about Warhol saying that when people die he thinks of them as going to Bloomingdales. I work near Bloomingdales and often think about that quote. This is where all my ghosts go.
AMC: Exactly, it’s a symbol of the afterlife for you.
AKT: In White Noise Don DeLillo has this line that Baumbach didn’t put into the picture: “Here we don’t die, we shop.” The idea of Andy the prophet of where we are now and Jean-Michel Basquiat as the resurrectionist. Would those be the two names, the two professions you were giving them for the play?
AMC: That’s a very interesting description of their roles. I tend to think of Andy representing being reflective of life and Jean being absorptive of life.
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| 1982 KONK vs. LIQUID LIQUID showdown Tompkins Square Park, New York City, courtesy Ed Bahlman Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
AKT: Absorptive?
AMC: Yeah, and Andy says that we’re all surfaces, don’t let it in. That’s the way the world is and accept it. And Jean says, no we have to wrestle with it. We have to wrestle with the dark forces as well, the good and the bad. And that is still the world we live in.
And we have to come to terms with that and it’s painful. It’s more painful than you’re allowing. They’re the two positions that they occupy. Like any good drama, there’s conflict and a type of resolution or reconciliation between them. Not just of them as people, but of their philosophies of art.
AKT: Did you work on it during the summer of 2020? The Michael Stewart connection seems so very much of the recent past as well.
AMC: No, I’ve written it before. It seemed a way to access Jean’s method of art. He did paint an extremely powerful picture about Michael, called Defacement. Again this is my interpretation of Jean’s method because he didn’t really speak and didn’t live long enough to speak very fulsomely about what he was aiming to do with his art. But it’s clear to me that inside it was a deep interest in the metaphysical. It was ritualistic, it was codified religion, it was incantations. It was evocations of the supernatural, summoning the dead back to life.
And there was something resurrectionist about it. This is very much at odds with Andy with his mass-producing Marilyns. You know, pretty little pictures. And yet, Andy has a point too. We are increasingly limiting ourselves just to a superficial surface existence. And nobody does mean anything they say anymore. It’s all just turning into a lie, you know. These are the two positions there. But you probably have said it more elegantly than I have in one sentence.
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| Basquiat hoodie sweatshirt at the last preview performance of The Collaboration Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
AKT: Well, when I spoke with Michael Mayer about the Neil Diamond production, I told him there were a few times when I had to think of the genre of afterlife Hollywood films of the 30s and 40s, such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan or Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait. Characters talk about the past in this other realm and it feels comforting but also eerie.
AMC: It’s to animate the past. It’s exactly what you’re saying. These films do exactly that. And they either do it in the context of an afterlife, I choose to do it in the context of a therapy, where you summon to the stage characters in your past in search of reconciliation.
AKT: You could wish that Edward Everett Horton sat next to you, holding your hand during therapy, making a joke once in a while. I love Michael’s light touch. I have money thrown from the stage [in Funny Girl] and those orange paper strips [from A Beautiful Noise] - it’s very playful. This is your first musical, isn’t it?
AMC: It is, yeah. I did a sort of young people’s musical. It was done by a school in Germany, based on a novel of mine. But that was a sort of experiment with the form and it never went very far beyond its opening night, I think. So this is really my first full-blooded attempt at a musical. If you see it you see the hallmarks of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.
AKT: But then you also have the hallmarks of your director, Michael, who knows very well what he’s doing.
AMC: It was very good, because I basically said: Here’s a play and it’s a play with music. Now you have to help me to deliver on the expectations of a Broadway audience. But this is what I know how to do.
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| The Neil Diamond performing in Oakland, 1976 Photo: Danny Gutierrez |
AKT: In The Collaboration, before the play begins, we can hear Whitney Houston. Is that placed there on purpose to foreshadow?
AMC: I think there’s somehow some masterwork eventually that you’ll have a production of The Two Popes and you’ll see Andy Warhol on the wall in the Pope’s quarters and Whitney Houston will be playing and all these places will inhabit the same sort of eery waiting room on eternity.
AKT: That’s just for you!
AMC: Yeah.
A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical is on at the Broadhurst Theatre.
The Collaboration at the Manhattan Theatre Club Samuel J. Friedman Theatre has been extended to January 29, 2023.
Read what Michael Mayer had to say on Anthony McCarten, A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical, and a connection to Hollywood films from the 30s and 40s.
Read what Anthony McCarten had to say on The Two Popes, Andy Warhol, and his worship trilogy.
