Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
American stage and film director and novelist, best known for directing A Streetcar Named Desire.
On the island
Eight records
It has the deepest feelings of sentiment, of nostalgia, of love for the background and culture that it represents. And it meant a lot to me.
I was a street kid. I was part of the jazz world when I was a boy and Benny Goodman was one of the great classic musicians.
Vassilis Tsitsanis with Marika Ninou
This third record is an improvisation by a great Greek musician, a Buzuki player. Buzuki is the classic Greek Anatolian instrument.
Theme from A Streetcar Named Desire
Elmer Bernstein and His Orchestra
I would like to hear the themes from all the movies I made. This is one of them. They would remind me of things in my past that meant a lot.
I got interested in Bessie Smith and she meant a lot to me and this record is one of her great songs.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
What it represents to me and why I would take it along is that a lot of my writing... has to do with the sort of underside of American life, the kind of spirit that's exemplified by the Rolling Stones in American life.
Eberhard Wächter and Graziella Sciutti
This whole opera, Don Giovanni, meant a lot to me. It opened, oh, I don't know, sort of spiritual ranges of thought and feeling.
String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132Favourite
It has some of the grandeur of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but to me in a clearer and more moving form.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:46How old were you when you went to the United States?
Four. I was four. My father went ahead of me, and then, as is the custom with Greek families, Anatolian families, all, all immigrants, he brought the whole family over when he had money enough to keep us.
Presenter asks
5:50As a boy, what was your ambition? What did you want to be?
I really had no positive ambition. I had a negative ambition was not to be sucked into my father's rug business. Also, to find something to make a living that I enjoyed doing.
Presenter asks
5:50How did the theater come into your life?
Never did. I had no interest in the theater then. But when I got through college, again, I had this problem of what was I going to do... And I had a chance to go to the Yale Drama School. And I wasn't really very interested in theater at first, Roy.
Presenter asks
9:55How early on did you get it in your head that you wanted to direct?
The keepsakes
The book
Homer
The last five books of the Iliad of Homer are as great as anything ever written... They're unforgettable and they also have depths that you can read it again and again and again and get a lot out of them.
The luxury
I would spread them over the island because I like the desert and I like dry climate, but I'm very, very fond of the piney woods. Where I live in Connecticut, I have many pine trees, and sometimes in the summer I go sit under them, and I would take a big boatload of pine needles.
Before I even became an actor, I was a stage manager. But in those years, at the very beginning, I saw films by Podovkin and Eisenstein and the great Russian films of the 20, and I said, that's for me, that's what I want to do. And at last, I had a goal.
Presenter asks
15:35What went wrong with [your attempt to build a national theatre company in the Lincoln Center]?
I don't think I was the right person for it. I think I failed because, first place, I'm an impatient man. I don't like to see the same people every day... I'm not an office animal at all. I just can't stand an office. I was the wrong man for it.
Presenter asks
18:59Why has [James Dean] become such a cult?
In America at that time, he represented all the rebellion against the parents by kids who were disappointed in what their parents were doing... And he represented all that resentment again. And still, with all that, Roy, a craving for the... love of the father.
“The first piece of music that I would take along is the soundtrack from America America. It has the deepest feelings of sentiment, of nostalgia, of love for the background and culture that it represents.”
“I don't think that you're aware of how intense a culture I live in and how violent it is and how... how uncontrolled it can be. And therefore, I think my books correctly reflect what I see, just as your taste correctly reflects the life that you all tend to live.”
“Writing a book is the most intense experience I've ever had, Roy. It's something that's obsessive. You do wake up in the middle of the night and your wife says, what in the world are you doing? Why are you putting the light on? You say, wait a minute, kid. And you take a pen and you start writing in the middle of the night at three in the morning.”