Deadwood: Trusting The Process with David Milch

oh that's so sweet i don't think anything goes on this set that david doesn't affect alter correct delete ad he is sculpting this as he does he's not monitoring himself he definitely doesn't monitor he definitely doesn't filter what he says or or uh how he's going to react to something and that's you know that is that's inspiring to be around that [ __ ] woe now how stupid does that look he pushes it because he knows that what he's trying to find is truth will cut quote era demonstrated i like that he doesn't treat the audience like they're idiots he's not afraid to use circuitous serpentine sentences and big words and subtext and in inference it's just it's just a treat to say i don't think that's overly optimistic and you know i don't like this tea as if it's a logical connection yeah yeah quite honestly i don't think i understand 50 of the stuff he's saying but when he's done talk and i think we might win a nobel prize you know when you please david you know when you don't it doesn't take a lot of words [Music] [Applause] he reminds me of the looks my father would give you like are you [ __ ] that stupid you know what i mean is that look if you say another word i'm gonna kill you it's that look watching him light up when he's happy with the scene that's that look you know when you did good and then there's the trusting part where when he you know you do a rehearsal and he walks away you know it's all right that's good feeling that's what i look for in working with david those four [ __ ] [Music] things [Music] the experience of working on deadwood is unlike working on anything else and that can be attributed to david [Music] first of all it's almost an impossibility that you would work on a project and you wouldn't have a script we often start shooting and we don't have a script it's almost impossible that you would begin shooting a scene and then have it completely rewritten after rehearsal before you shoot but that's the way david works this is the prospective room for today's perspective wedding and right now i intend to wait on him the story doesn't get written in advance it doesn't get written in advance passed to the network executives they say okay and then you start filming it grows one thing happens as a result of another in fact an episode may start with one single scene how that scene plays out then suggests what's going to happen to the writers every actor wants four days to learn this stuff what do they say you give it after four days learning stuff it'll take them four days give them four minutes it'll take them four minutes you know what i mean when your ass is on the line it seems to sink in and you get through it congregation says amen consider the [ __ ] china sometimes it can be a little worrying when that fax machine goes another night and eight pages come through and there's a page of dialogue but you get used to it it's kind of a challenge he stays like a workshop it's like doing the feature it's not like doing any television i've ever done in my life it's very exciting it's very thrilling as an actor if you like acting it's a fabulous place to be with a look he can say uh it'd sure be a [ __ ] help if we tag team this [ __ ] you know this is where you are now and at a certain point you come and sit down and it's a great pleasure the swearingen who probably turns you know at that point and the three of you go over it together that'll be good double dash would that just be you conversing with the mirror question mark lose the rest i suppose over the course of time if you have any sort of humility about you you know you try to learn what your limitations are and accept those and work within them period bring that fella to my office i've come to recognize that the more isolated i am the more disposed i am to obsessive processes why don't we try uh put in the davey scene i find that by writing out in the open i'm less likely to for example begin to write the same sentence a thousand times or hang upside down like a bat in the corner of the room you know or smoke crack claps his hands twice double dash i think he's a genius because he solved a huge problem which is that writing is really lonely and it's brutal to sit down and be by yourself and write he eliminated first by the dictation by having the typist and now he's totally eliminated by having a room full of people at least one only for special for special occasions it's a hell of a lot more fun than sitting alone in a room and feeling depressed chinese work tunics by writing out in the open i'm able to make my process available to others and to the extent that they are able to benefit from that that's a plus for me as a producer go forward there's no way to know what's going on unless you're in there because everything here changes 600 times a day you change the actors that we need on an hourly basis we change the scenes that we're doing we change who's in the scenes and if you're not in there with him you don't know you're just helplessly behind or you're writing material he's already written what i'm saying is that guys like swearagen are the avatars of organizers although they don't realize that they are nor if you presented them with the idea you know they would reject it out of out of hand but what swearingen understands is that his self-interest lies in the empowerment of the individuals one thing about working with david that i've found that he has never made a scene worse and you know that has not been my experience with the majority of humanity so he'll either improve it and stick it in or stick it in let's first get the [ __ ] thing organized and then we'll rob them senseless we get this [ __ ] organized if we get this [ __ ] thing organized we will rob these [ __ ] senseless believe me come if we get this thing on its feet we will rob these [ __ ] senseless [Music] if we get this thing on its feet please believe me if we get this thing on its feet come i will defer to no one robbing these [ __ ] senseless if we get this thing on its feet i will defer to no one robbing these [ __ ] senseless swearings and studies the document i spent some time in the writer's trailer this season observing and i decided to time him once it was a two and one third page scene he spent five hours rewriting that scene i swear he would change his sentence 20 or 30 times he distills the language down to its most potent form as it's like he takes a big chunk of coal a bunch of words that are a chunk of coal and you just keep pressing and pressing them until they become that diamond of dialogue see this i don't know what this means see these horns here this this either means i'm the boss or i'm a cuckold but um understand it and and spit it out and come out with it as if it's it's natural dialogue even if it isn't natural dialogue because it's usually inverted telegraphic correspondence which on every count has ameliorated the terms in the document before you beat that try and be quiet in the document before you in favor of the deadwood camp the little you know uh good jerry is saying to you shut up little man shut up little man and bad jerry says just make sure he understands and then you'll be quiet make sure he understands and then you'll be quiet and you can't [ __ ] shut up i speak in uh pseudo legal backwards gibberish a quasi-shakespearean with clauses inverted this statement continues my character speaks in this almost impenetrable sort of victorian slash elizabethan vocabulary it's probably a little difficult sometimes to literally know what the heck he's talking about but it's fun the words are so amazing that they've all learned you know how to adapt to it and i think they really love the process there have been some amazing scenes that we've shot some of the best scenes in the show have been written and shot on the same day i had a scene with ian where i'm walking past him in the street and it was literally um you start over here you start over here just walk toward each other and i was going but but trust the process and he in no time flat created a really lovely little interchange between me and ian the normal course of events is when a scene is about to be shot david will show up and do a little background on what is at stake in the scene and what the connections are and throw a few curveballs in in fact make some changes on the spot save me a trip trixie huh well hell star hard to catch the [ __ ] it is just say let it hit her in the reminder of the old days or let it hit her in the eyes remind her of her last escort she'll let it hit her in the shots reminded her last escort there you go we can't start until david shows up to say what's at stake in this scene because there's always some other depth one another dimension that that he illuminates not apparent and first reading the import of that letter you know really needs to register with trixie and john without knowing exactly what it means that this is a generous gesture on his part at different moments as i'm working on the piece i'm trying to get the the physical situation right a moment later from the same set of materials i am trying to amplify or qualify a a theme which may be economic or philosophical or religious uh or sexual and i think trixie is really you know shy embarrassed at how happy she is and how she looks set background it's always collaborative with david he he never was dictatorial is suggestive put your hand down sir i mean you no harm but i can't guarantee i can't vouch for captain turner now without doing this or anything else you just act as if god's speaking to you put your hand down sigh i hear you lord and generally his suggestions are on the money i mean even if he's using some kind of analogy that i don't quite understand the emotion that comes through it i tend to get what i believe that he means and we go ahead and take it to another level george that's what letter you referred to lord he takes what you bring and uses it to create he's so open guys we're gonna start we went to shoot a scene trixie and i just before alma and ellsworth are married in which trixie says this is that you can't back out as the scene is written and as david spoke talked about where roma was at in the scene that she's resolved in this decision to marry ellsworth and now feeling pretty good about it and i knew that it wasn't right but you know sometimes you can't find what it is that's going to make it right molly parker came to me in distress because she felt that her acceptance of ellsworth had not been adequately prepared for she must be excited and she was absolutely right we talked a few minutes and then i sat down and wrote it in just sort of talking about it he started to write out la i mean basically say well you know what well she needs to to have this conversation that we're having with someone else and there's no one to have it with so it must be with her dead husband perhaps i confide to you because you cannot tell anyone i am to have a child and i have a child in my care those experiences are so rare anywhere and here they happen and with david they happen in a way that for me always makes me feel as though the collaboration happens out of your experience of the work every day and his experience of what he sees us do which is why he writes for the next day so this is a scene we were working on yesterday with that rehearsed and wool cut where hurst confronts wolcott with the fact that he hearst has been told by toliver that wolcott has murdered these uh prostitutes go to the top of the scene have you read this scene is it a fastidiousness on her part to separate connection with wolcott it seems to me the way we've talked about him in the past that he would give him a chance to say i won't do it his state of being has now changed there is no way for him to say i didn't think about it does he then become a different person if he allows wolcott to continue in his employ there was a lot of discussion on the question of whether hearst would abide that behavior you know hearst has plenty of blood on his hands so the question is is it because it's a step removed then he could have bought it or you know and i think david really struggled with you know what their relationship was what do you think of that i liked it the original way which is that he fires yeah but like i said i don't know if that's because i have such a desire to see him punished at this point or whether it's the right way to tell the story i don't know if wolcott is not punished uh does that bleach the story of credibility for you or uh does it frustrate you as the way uh oh geez uh alexis carrington i i can't wait to tune in next week to see that [ __ ] get what she deserves or whatever name i don't remember one of the issues that came up was would the character hurst be credible if walcott's sins go unpunished well then this new character coming into the camp be a credible character that people would be willing to invest in i suppose if we were to see in this case wolcott eliminated which i i i mean i had no problem with doing that then it finally just came to him that hearst would not be able to sit there that he would have to say we must have our connection and that's the real turning point in the story of who he is and in some ways it makes him hypocrite hearst i have no latin david's very dedicated to doing the unsentimental which is one of the beautiful things about the show it's moving but it's not sentimental go forward the thing that's stunning about his work is that there are no psychological discrepancies he takes the time to be in the moment and if something is wrong he he's happy to go back and change it and do what's right because he can he won't live with those kind of mistakes okay let's put it out never speak to me of it again the scene is often about just the opposite of what you think it is it usually angles toward i think pain and conflict in the characters and even guessing along those lines you're often wrong as to what he wants good good and and and then essentially bully the transition yeah david said how much he loves melville and that melville had said the only truly great scene is actually about the opposite of what it appears to be about and that's really what i feel happens every time we come to work here and he'll come in and say here's what's psychologically going on and you're like oh it's the opposite of what i thought even and that's even better than just playing it straight when you talk to the girl before you murder you say i i don't want to be seen i don't i don't want to be known and he her gift has been to seem not to know because the earth was busy talking to him he must believe it's a benign conversation that the earth is having with him he says it just tells me where the color is my god my god just tells me where the color is your god tells you you must die my initial approach to the scene was simply a profound loss because there was obviously this almost father-son relationship between hurst and walcott and then david added a new element to it with one word after that thing he says that you murdered that he disposed their bodies well okay you know take the beat and then something we've never heard to finally lose patience with him and shout at him and just one word well but really really shouted and that moment turned the entire performance for me even though what toliver has said suddenly it's like a series of lights going on for you you know he's telling the truth it's like a master class every time you talk to him he gave me this big cigar and i'm upright and erect and he said you know he's he's acting the part of a man i think this cigar for you always is a little bit of an expectation but when hurst yells at you the cigar goes out it's like his last symbol of manhood goes out and he shrinks you know and the only thing left that is a man is his voice otherwise he's a little boy but by the end of the scene he's sort of the reluctant disciplinarian and i'm you know i'm wetting myself a little bit out of fear and sadness it's heartbreaking it's the end it's over at that point he knows he's gonna die deadwood is unique it is individualistic and it is very much david it's filled with his humor it's filled with his political awareness it's filled with the essence of that historical time violence fear and desire you realize that history isn't true at all because in real life things just don't happen the way a history book tells them when you talk about history it's a machine these forces are at work that cause this to happen and it's like describing quantum mechanics in some kind of weird way but history really happens because people are very human and i think that's what he's done with this things kind of happen for for really just for the completely the for unexpected reasons for reasons that don't make sense um for because we're just because we're humans [Music] i'm a big admirer of our country and i admire it so much that i love to chronicle its its shortcomings and its disasters and its unfairnesses and aberrations because i think that's the way you testify the love i want to glorify america and my idea of how to glorify it is to show it whole as best i can [Music] i believe that it withstands that scrutiny and uh so i look at it hard and that's a joy [Music] you

Channel: Flaccidus Minimus

Views: 56,451

Keywords: Deadwood, David Milch, South Dakota, Westerns, Writing, Brad Dourif, Powers Boothe, Television Writing, Ian McShane

Id: ZHLtOKlHBFI

Length: 23min 36sec (1416 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020