The Camp of Trying To Get It Together: Scritti Politti

Second-to-last article from the archives: Green Gartside, 1988, promoting Provision. After this Green dropped off the map for over a decade before reemerging with a flinty hip-hop album of varying quality, Anomie and Bonhomie in 1999 and then, finally, in 2006, White Bread, Black Beer, a digital bedsit Carl Wilson-tinged collection that at last reconciled the distance he had travelled from North London to New York and back again. It was the second stage of this musical journey which I inexpertly quizzed him about here. OCR'd from the original RIU interview with a lot of my dumb chatter cut out.

"I was disposed not to like pop songs for a while. When I first started out, nine years ago now, I was concerned, in a silly and juvenile way, to be different. I would have hated the kind of songs I play now if you'd played them to me then. I was concerned not to have things that sounded slick, not to have things in 4/4, not to have verse-chorus-bridge. I was concerned with not doing a lot of things, and that all started to look dead-endish to me. When I wrote Songs To Remember I was just coming out of that and had started writing songs; that album sort of has one foot in the camp of Amateurishness As Virtue and one foot on the camp of Trying To Get It Together."

Green Gartside reconciled with pop in 198l with 'The Sweetest Girl'. The bass and drums were milk and honey, and the lyrics struck a balance between sentimentalism and intellectualising. The B-side, 'Lions After Slumber', showed Green getting into a funky frame of mind. After the Songs To Remember LP he split with the other members and took the band name to New York to recruit two new musicians, pianist David Gamson and drummer Fred Maher. Their first single, 'Wood Beez; (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)', was a pumping piece of groovy and a dancefloor hit. Suddenly Scritti Politti had A Sound: focused, simplified, vodka-clear.

So what made Green get it together -- was it the work of Gamson and Maher?

"A lot of it was to do with the decisions made on my part, the aesthetic moves I'd made that pre-existed my meeting David and Fred. But one of the reasons that we worked so well on these last two albums is that we do have a lot in common. They came from the same sort of histories that I'd come from -- listening initially to pop, then to a lot more marginal rock musics and then R'n'B.

"I think that the Scritti Politti sound which people will be familiar with at the moment is a group sound. If I went off now and made a record with someone else, I don't know how much of it would go with me, or how much I'd want to take with me."

ln New York, the hip-hop scene was advancing hand in hand with new technology. Cupid + Psyche '85 used cut-up techniques and sampling, and Green admits a boyish fascination with the gadgets of dance.

"Musical technology, the advances that have been made in the last six years, that's been completely transformatory, what that's enabled me to do. You can get involved with the possibilities and present yourself with far choices than it's healthy to have. If that's a sin, then we're guilty of it! Once you realise that things can be manipulated in all these myriad ways by tiny increments, your head and ears quickly get into that.

"If Cupid + Psyche was an influential record -- and I'm told by a lot of musicians in America that it was -- it wouldn't have been for those reasons. We swiped the whole sampling thing from a lot of other places. It was our approach to arranging the material, on the one hand, which was popular, and we were quite concerned to push the technology we were using to its limits.

"A lot of the arranging ideas come from David Gamson, but we got a lot of it from groups like The System, and Solar Records, people like Shalamar and Leon Sylvers. I was gonna say it's all been done before (laughs), but that's not quite true; it's all been influenced."

Miles Davis plays trumpet on 'Oh Patti'. Others might regard that as a vindication.

"I hadn't thought of it like that. I was as surprised as anybody when Miles covered 'Perfect Way' and he let it be known through friends we have in common that he'd be interested in meeting up. After I'd written 'Oh Patti' it seemed that it would suit him and it would be nice to get him in.

"Were we interested in getting big names to glamourise our project we could have, for whatever reason -- it and still mystifies me a bit -- we could have got an awful lot of well-established Americans to appear on the record. But Roger Troutman and Miles were the only two people that we wanted.

"Miles is a little bit scary and little bit different, but once we got talking to him and met him on subsequent occasions we found him to be quite charming and very nice to us, and very supportive. He does have a very elliptical and peculiar way of going about things but he's not as crazy as people think by any means. He really is straight these days. He doesn't drink or do drugs or do anything else. He drinks his herbal tea and has his injections of lamb hormones or whatever. He's a regular guy."

Provision is also more of a regular album -- Cupid + Psyche '88 -- but what it lacks in innovation it makes up for in maturity. The most it has in common with the days of the Confidence EP and Songs To Remember are the puns and references. Green is the only lyricist cheeky enough to rhyme "Gaultier pants" with "Immanuelle Kant" but po-faced journalists fail to get the joke. I mean it is a joke, no?

"Oh, of course. I think the lyrics are always tongue-in-cheek. They're meant to be funny. It's not side-splitting humour but there's a lot put in there in the hope that it' ll be appreciated with a wry smile. Not enough people get the joke and realise that Scritti has to send itself up, having arrived at this faintly preposterous position. To be fair, I can get into all that after a few pints. If people want to lead me that way I'll be a bar room theorist with the best of them. But that's certainly not the whole story. I don't read interviews anymore. They're so painful -- they never get right or I never get it right. It never, ever comes out right.

Would Scritti ever leave the dance floor, especially now it's become so crowded?

"British pop has always been indebted to whatever version of R'n'B is current, from the Beatles to the Stones to the Bowies, and it will continue to be so. But you're right; there is a lot more black music in the charts at the moment. Hip-hop is very healthy; it looked a bit jaded about three years ago, for a short while, but it's coming back strong. That's the sort of thing we think about. We thought, should we make a hip-hop album and fairly promptly decided no, even though we all listen to a lot of it. Many hip-hop records are made fairly quickly, cheaply and nastily, and I like a lot of that.

"Having said that, I don't know what's next, and I could well imagine being lured elsewhere."

As well as Miles and Roger Troutman, you've worked with Chaka Khan and Arif Mardin.

"I don't feel proud. I don't ever feel particularly confident about myself or about what I do, and in a way working with people, moving up or across a couple of rungs doesn't exactly impart confidence to you. In a way it makes you a little more worried about your own worth.

"As much as one would be fairly frightened of failing, there's a certain kind of fear attached to the threat of success as well; being able to live up to it, or feel that it's honest or you're worth it. So it hasn't had that effect on me; perhaps if it did I'd be able to work a bit faster, or be a bit bolder."

Provision comes after a break of three years. Green says only two were spent in the studio ("on and off -- more on than off"). In the interim he gave away one song, 'Best Thing Ever', for Madonna to include on the Who's That Girl soundtrack.

"'Best Thing Ever' was recorded between albums, and everybody at Warner Brothers had a copy and Madonna heard it and we were asked if we would mind it being included and I didn't mind at all. I didn't go and see the movie and I've no idea what they did with it. I didn't feel proprietarily interested in its fate; it was just something that I'd done and it was gone and out of my hands.

"As soon as l've finished something I don't want to hear it again. All that I'm concerned with is that the album gets a fair hearing and I know that's an impossible wish but that's the most I could hope for. I'm thrilled with it now. That's all I can say. And I'm through with it now -- make of it what you will."

(1988)

An Opera Sandcastle: Dieter Meier

Conceptual artist, gambler and pop star Dieter Meier is one of my heroes so I was excited to get him on the line from his home in Switzerland when Yello were promoting Flag circa 1988/89. I wrote up a version of the interview for Rip It Up but this the full transcript. I've corrected some of the grammar, but he really did talk like that. 

I'm sure I asked more questions than this but chose to save precious time by not entering them into the RIU computron's floppy disc input panel. The faded dot-matrix printout has been sitting in a box since 1988 waiting for a time when I could photograph it with a pocket digital camera, transfer the images to a pencil-thin SSD laptop and upload them to a OCR translator to be shared online. But now that time has come.  

CT: Hi Dieter.

DIETER MEIER: Hey you sound very close! Ja, we have an incredibly good line. I am in the house and I was about to fall asleep.

CT: Have you had a busy day?

DM: Today? What did I do, well let's see ... we were discussing several things, we are planning a film in Poland , this is a little Yello opera which we are hopefully beginning in Breslau in a big old film studio, and we were getting closer to the beginning of this.

The film is a fantasy-type story, based on music which was written for it about a young man, a young musician who is kidnapped from planet Earth by the underground empire of the Duke of Shadows where he is used to create images of the world with his music. He plays an instrument down there, and playing this instrument creates real opera scenes inside a snowball. This is the title of the whole movie -- and this snowball is a huge opera set.

CT: Are you directing?

DM: Yeah, sure.

CT: It sounds like a very typical Yello idea.

DM: Ja ja, it has a lot to do with Yello. People call us film soundtrack makers and our music is very visual. This time we are fulfilling the visuals with the reality.

CT: Do you draw inspiration from films?

DM: No, I never go to the movies myself. It's more based on fantasies; it's not real movies, but movies for your head, movies of your imagination.

CT: Will you appear in the movie?

DM: Definitely! Boris [Blank] is playing a part, I'm playing a part and [so is] an English actor called Paul McGann. And a lot of Polish actors because the whole thing is basically a Polish production.

CT: Do you think of yourself as an actor rather than a singer?

DM: Ja, that's true, ja. I've said this before. I don't think I'm a typical rock star; as you said, I'm an actor in Boris's sound pictures for your head. I change my part for each song -- always the same actor but with a different part.

CT: The part has seen you travel the world musically.

DM: Yeah of course, but it's intentional to be very open and to use all kinds of musical subjects. It's not intentional to write an African or a south American piece. It's like two kids sitting at the beach, building a castle made of sand: an opera sandcastle -- a South American or African sand piece -- it's not an intentionally based on a technological piece of music. When there is a rhythm you land in certain territories, and not in others. Like Norwegian is not a rhythmical piece.

CT: And you have no fear of the studio.

DM: Ja that's of course all Boris who is responsible for this. I never touch any equipment and Boris touches it every day for ten hours. Our advantage probably is that, starting with little cassette recorders and later a four-track machine, we really grew with the jungle of technology. Boris is at ease with it: it's not an enemy you have to overrun, it's a friend with whom you are talking. I always said that for Boris, all this technology is nothing more and nothing less than a jungle of the 20th century. For him, the whole studio is one big instrument.

CT: Are you comfortable in the 20th century?

DM: Yeah, sure. Well, in classical music I think in the 20s and 30s -- people from the new school -- everything more or less stopped. And the other things that came out of this century after the 30s to me are either endlessly experimenting.

Of course it is very good to have music that experiments but it gets kind of boring, this sort of John Cage approach. It's a historical monument if you are destroying things, if you you are destroying a piano -- if you are fooling around with sounds, that's important -- but I think that nothing really came out of this after a while.

I think pop and rock -- I believe that till the early 60s apart from some examples, this was a very slow movement. Then rock and pop made this incredible step -- early Beatles and Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix -- [they were] just like an explosion, and now you see mainly the last little tiny glowing fires of this explosion. Now there is not much, for me, happening.

If you listen to the English charts for example, it's more and more producers squeezing the last drops of blood out of young musicians; young musicians who bleed for a producer's musical non-impact. It's a very dull moment right now. Of course, there are always exceptions, but basically I think most pop and rock music now is very epigonal.

CT: Yello is an exception.

DM: As I say, I think we were very lucky to grow with all the technology and then I think we were lucky not to come out of a country where the last drops of life have been squeezed out of the rock circus. We truly had to invent ourselves, invent something else. To be to become ourselves, because of course rock music has no tradition at all here [in Switzerland] -- if people and bands are moving in the traditional rock and pop direction they are to me like yodelling Japanese: technically very good, but they are doing something that is not their thing, their spirit, their movement. They become as ridiculous as yodelling Japanese -- they change their style, they listen to that then they do that, it's sort of epigonal fashion.

Because we never started as a commercial band, we just did what we had to do to become like this. We had all the freedom and the commerciality of it, at the beginning, was a highly unimportant sideline. It was not something we aimed at because if you aim at becoming an international act then you should be sent to loony home straight away -- it is impossible. So you have nothing to lose, and a lot of time to become yourself, because you don't belong to any traditions. Being alone in a territory without rock and pop in this age was an advantage to us.

CT: A lot of bands that start off sounding different soon fall into traditional forms, yet Yello sound more and more like Yello.

DM: That's true. Of course sometimes people, especially in England, they tell you since the first Yello album, they all sound the same, and I am very proud of this, because if you have found your style, how can you change over the years? When a painter has found his way to dance, to express himself -- how do you call it -- 'on canvas' that is a very slow process, and there is not a dramatic change each year. Only people who have no style change their style every year, because they haven't got one. If you listen to the Cure, it's always the Cure, and if you listen to Mozart, even if you have heard only three pieces from the chap, you can immeditely say, 'Aha! This could be Mozart!' Every strong artistic movement has a style which slowly develops, and does not change like fashion.

CT: You have a lot of other singers on this album -- I'm assuming you don't suffer from ego.

DM: No, I don't suffer from it at all. In fact, I'm the promoter of this idea because Yello really is soundtracks for your head -- movies for your head, and these movies sometimes employ other actors. On the last album we concentrated more on me again, but you can never tell.

CT: How'd you come to use Shirley Bassey?

DM: A friend of mine knows Shirley Bassey very well: and he heard that she kind of likes our music, and she expressed that if we had a track for her, she would be interested in singing it. So we wrote 'The Rhythm Divine' and she liked it and came into the studio. It was very simple. You could get Michael Jackson to come in and sing a few tracks if liked them -- it's not a big trick.

CT: And Billy MacKenzie?

DM: Yeah, he's a friend.

CT: You are known as a performance artist. Do you consider Yello an extension of that?

DM: Well ja somewhere in one way it is, I think. Boris and my performance is always live in the studio -- it is live. People ask me why don't you ever play live, I say, we play live every day.

My role, which in very much that of a painter, is painting life. Painting is always life -- you're not reproducing, you're only producing. You're not like a band which is writing a piece, then rehearsing it and then sometimes bringing it to the studio to reproduce it -- we only go to/the studio to produce. We are a very live band.

CT: Did performance art give you confidence in that process?

DM: No. If you ask me now why did I do this, I can't even tell you. It is to me a very strange wonder how I became a performance artist, how I succeeded in having museum exhibitions and becoming quite known in this area. It was something where I obviously followed a track where I somehow had to go, but I never started with the intention of becoming a conceptual artist or a performance artist -- it just happened to me, like everything. I never planned to become a feature film maker. I always wrote down little ideas and little scripts and someday somebody asked me to direct one of these little ideas, and I said why not? I became a movie director overnight -- I never intended to be one.

CT: You also used to gamble.

DM: Mm-mmm. Not seriously, now. If you do this, you are either a professional or a hobby free-loader. If you do it really you do it like a job, an everyday's work. But that was years ago, I stopped when I was 23.

CT: What's it like as a job?

DM: It's the most complete escape from the world possible. Like being a boxer. I only played poker, and with the very simple idea of standing in the ring to knock down your enemy, the sooner the better, and he wants the same thing. This is such a thrilling but simple parameter of existence that you can consider it an escape from the world. You are living in a hermetical situation, standing in this boxing ring, only when you play poker you can play it 14 hours a day. You can't box 14 hours a day -- well, they did in the 19th century, but this would be crazy. Poker, when you sit at the table, you're given a new hand each few minutes, and you can work with that hand, and you're carrying your fate in your hand, and this thrilling moment is the most total escape: it makes you feel good, it makes you feel important, it gives you immediate sense for those minutes.

CT: Francis Bacon was a gambler, a blackjack man.

DM: That's interesting. I never gambled in casinos -- I was interested only in poker playing. When you're gambling with and against individuals.

CT: Since Dada it's been respectable to draw a direct line between chance at the gambling table and chance on the canvas, in the studio.

DM: Well, it has a lot to do with this. This is, of course, true.

CT: What's in store for Yello's future?

DM: Well, the movie is Yello, you know? The most logical extension of what we've always been doing in our video work, this time, it's a feature story and hopefully strong enough to entertain people for 100 minutes. There has never been anything more Yello than this opera. I think this is gonna be the future, I think we will make more films like this. I'm also planning some other features, more in the thriller area. I hope we will enjoy ourselves, and be good entertainers.

CT: Is it a musical or a written idea?

DM: We did have a verbal idea, which was then turned into music which is now turned back into a movie, with a lot of verbal ideas.

I hope to make it sooner or later to your most beautiful country. A cousin of mine was there for two months, and everyone says it is one of the last resorts. Is that true?

CT: "The last resort"... yes.

DM: A very famous Austrian painter, Hundtertwasser lives there, keeps a big farm in new Zealand. The only problem is there's a lot of work here and it takes a long time to travel.

(1989)

The Rules According to Ice T (1988)

Digging through paper I discovered some articles I wrote for Rip It Up, including this interview with Ice-T at the Regent Hotel in Auckland in 1988. He was in New Zealand to promote the Power LP and play the Box. Photo by Darryl Ward. 

Darlene says 'Hi darlin" as you come in the room. And Ice T opens his mouth.

"Man, I've been doing 38,000 interviews. I been waiting on yours, though. I been doing so many interviews for the past year and stuff. I'm just used to it. I don't mind talking, that's why I'm here.

"My style of rap is a very opinionated rap, a rap that isn't set for everybody but for a certain group of people who have a certain opinion about certain things. And of course it's gonna get people uptight because we're very blatant, my rap just says 'Yup, this is how I feel'. So whoever disagrees is gonna be uptight about it, but I think that's what makes it sport.

"To me being an artist is being opinionated. It's saying what you feel and not trying to go down the middle of the road. It's too easy to do that. Radio can't deal with it because radio has to deal with what they call a safe format, they don't what to end up getting anybody mad so they end up playing Tiffany, bubblegum. Nobody SAYS anything on a record anymore.

"Rap came to music with the DJs in New York playing the breaks in the record. Islam was my producer, and he explained to me that it came to the point where the break on the record was what everybody was waiting for. He'd say, 'Here comes the break, here's where I do my best moves and move in on the girls' and all that kinda stuff. So the DJs said, why play the rest of the record? The break was perfect for talking over, and the DJ would give the MC a mike and say 'Tell everybody how great I am'. Notice the early raps, the Furious Five and the Grandmaster Flash, the raps were always about the DJ. And the kids would dance to the breaks in the music -- that's where breakdancing came from.

"You'd get young, 16, l7 year old kids telling sexual stories or stories about how much power they had. But you gotta remember you're dealing with street kids, and that's the only sorta thing that's gonna hold their attention. So you'd have to sneak a message in, like 'I was with this girl, she was real fly, man and she said -- come on, let's get high, but I don't do do that, 'cause I don't need dope' -- they slipped that message in. But the main point of the rap was how wild could you talk.

"The sampling brings it almost back to the original sound. When they first did it they had no drum machines, so they would cut records with music, with a bassline. So the sampling brings you the actual feel of a record being cut. You listen to the samples coming in and say, 'Hey remember we used to rap off that?' When Run DMC cut 'Walk This Way', that was a break people used to rap off.

"Now people are begging for an original form of rap music, saying can you do it from scratch, but it's not really the point of it. The point of it is to take something tha's yours, and make it mine -- not steal it, but take it and flip it and make the funkiest thing.

"And the kids don't know where it came from; the joke is, 'Look how funky I made something you didn't know was funky.' That's what it's all about.

"Also radio programmers are susceptible to playing something with a musical content they can remember. One of the funniest stories is when I made 'I'm Your Pusher' I was down South in the States and some old guy said, 'I don't like rap but once I heard that Curtis Mayfield singing on your record I thought, if it's okay for Curtis then it's okay for me.'

"Now you get rap at all these different levels. Public Enemy is more like war politics, Black awareness. I'm more street politics. I deal with the police level, I don't take you any higher into govennent.

"Run DMC have unwantonly shot themselves to a full commercial level, marketing themselves to the point where they can no longer be street, they're on the Michael Jacksons Of Rap trip. Then you have the hardcore rap, like the Circle Jerks or the Black Flag of rap -- people like Easy E and NWA who just don't give a fuck about nothing. They're just saying fuck everybody, fuck the police, fuck life, I'll kill you. Which is another form.

"Then you get people like Tone-Loc who are getting dropped in as superstars, who haven't found where they are, don't have a rap base anywhere, and are kind of being loved by the pop audience.

"My environment is being reflected all over the world at different levels, though. You don't have gangs like LA, but you have gangs here. People can listen to my music and I can take you to a trip to Los Angeles. I'm like a motion picture, people are interested. Hip hop is universal, hip hop is gonna get in here where RnB can't. We sell more records than Bobby Brown and Al B Shure in Australia, sneaking in through a different route, through the kids. Kids out here don't care if it's white or it's black. Pretty soon you're gonna have a big rap scene here.

"The bottom line is that music doesn't have a colour, people give it a colour. Rock 'n' roll was always followed by white and black kids together. There will always be a racist out there saying, 'I don't like white girls screaming for Little Richard, I don't like white boys pumping their hands to Ice-T' but the kids aren't dealing with the politics of the world, they' re just dealing with what they like. That's some real healthy shit.

"Gangs in LA. are double, triple times as bad as what you saw in Colors. Now you've got cocaine in there. You got 16, 17 year-old kids making half a million dollars a week. Now to tell them to stop, it's like me taking a couple of Columbian drug dealers up to a hotel in Vegas and saying, 'Hey, now why don't you guys quit?' Now they're dealing in the capitalist system, where the ends justifies the means. I can try and get some of them out alive. It's like genocide out there.

"You used to watch the old gangster movies? When the people saw Colors they saw the drive by shootings and got scared. But the Crips and the Bloods didn't invent drive-by shoootings, I used to watch those in old Al Capone movies. It's gang warfare.

"As long as the world is corrupt and people are kept down in certain areas, people are going to join gangs, they're gonna say, 'Hey, we can't get employed -- fuck the system.'

"If we're all working, we're okay. That's why New Zealand and everybody else has be concerned that everyone has a job. Why are they breaking the law? It's because you ain't giving them a job. That's what's going on In Los Angeles.

"You can't manufacture cocaine in the United States. You can't manufacture it in New Zealand. Somebody is letting it in here. LETTING it in here -- that's the enemy. It's above the police.

"It's deep man. I wear a peace symbol round my neck because every year the president takes my money and says he spends it on peace. To me that would be making jobs, opening schools. But they just spend it on weapons.

"The sad thing about me is that people will say, you're just pessimistic. But I don't feel that. I'm a realist. There's never been peace in the world since the beginning of time. It's always been global. But what you gotta do is stay out of the system, don't become a piece of firewood while the big guys are making all the money. The world is so uptight right now, who knows, they might even give Ollie North a sentence. But the day they put Ollie North into jail, the same people that jail him will move a hundred tons of cocaine into the United States.

"People have to learn to discipline themselves, and that's the bottom line. Everybody in the end is only in control of their own actions. Like Angel Dust was big in the States until kids said, it ain't hip. And that's what'll happen with crack. People like me say it ain't hip, and kids will say, yeah, I don't want it. Rap is slowing it down, to an extent. But if there wasn't rap saying that, who would tell them? You haven't heard any RnB records sayin' it. The only person you've heard is Nancy Reagan, and she looks like she's on dope. We're the only music that really spends time talking about the situation."

Ice-T shuts his mouth.

© Chad Taylor 1988

Snapshots

Needle and the damage done

Sunday was the wrap for REALITi. Director Jonathan King finished the principal shoot and pickups with a reshoot of the first scene, going in tighter / darker / better. Big ups to actors, crew and our location hosts for the day, Chow Wellington. After thirty non-sequential days of shooting the micro-budget has brought out the best in everyone.

Now all there is to do is the editing, some digital trickery, ADR, sound mix, colour timing, score...

When the sun shines they slip into the shade

Thom Yorke talking to Alec Baldwin (2013):

Thom Yorke: A break is due because what I've found with a break is it can be an incredibly exciting, that thing of thinking of all the stuff you want to do, but you just force yourself not – you just force yourself to wait and get back into just time and space.

It's like anything. You start to go in small circles, so you've got to stop when that happens.

There's a threshold... if you want to shift with your work, if you want to shift. If you're writing, if you're being creative at all, you kind of have to stop to make that shift. Because if you just, "I'm constantly creating, I've got this mountain of brilliant ideas," you're making the basic mistake that you're assuming all your ideas are brilliant.

Brian Eno talking to Lester Bangs (1979):

One or two of the pieces I've made have been attempts to trigger that sort of unnervous stillness where you don't feel that for the world to be interesting you have to be manipulating it all the time. The manipulative thing I think is the American ideal that here's nature, and you somehow subdue and control it and turn it to your own ends. I get steadily more interested in the idea that here's nature, the fabric of things or the ongoing current or whatever, and what you can do is just ride on that system, and the amount of interference you need to make can sometimes be very small.

Barry Gifford talking to Robert Birnbaum (2003):

Let me tell you. One thing I love about writing, serious work, painting. [long pause] This is all subjective. It's not a competitive sport. I was an athlete -- you know that -- I mean the thing is, in a game is to score more points than the other guy, the other team. This is not that way. I prefer to think of it as entirely subjective. "Comparisons are odious" as Gary Snyder once famously said to Jack Kerouac when discussing Buddhism. And I really embrace that philosophy.

I basically write when inspired. I don't feel it's necessary to write every day. When I start on a project then I go I through to the end. Then I am devoted to it and I stick with it. I don't sit down everyday at the typewriter. I actually write in longhand and then go to manual typewriter. The thing is, I don't feel I have to sit down every day with a blank sheet of paper in front of me and wait for what comes or try to force something. I have never been that way. I try to sneak up on it, I don't know how else to say it. I like to do it without a certain kind of pressure.

Smoke

The Insider, again. Some days it seems like Michael Mann and Kathryn Bigelow are the only American  directors who matter. Which is wrong, of course, but the modern language of meetings and business, the euphemisms of corporate blandness, the power of the telephone and the text message, the dead cold hand of unfeeling legal procedure -- who else now really gets that? Fincher (Sorkin) in The Social Network, but that was that movie's subject. The Social Network wouldn't exist without the visual vocab that Mann minted: documents, coffee cups, whirring photocopiers, sodium lights, rain on the car windscreen. The Insider depicts the modern urban world where everything's talk but the pictures say it all, wordlessly.

Mann talked to Salon.com about directing the subtext:

There seem to be five things going on in every scene.

I wanted to direct, I tried to direct the subtext. That's where I found the meaning of the scenes. You could write the story of certain scenes in a code that would be completely coherent but have nothing to do with the lines you hear.

For example, in the hotel room scene, Scene 35, when Lowell and Jeffrey first meet: All Lowell knows for sure is that Jeffrey has said "no" to helping him analyze a story about tobacco for "60 Minutes." He doesn't know yet that there's a "yes" hiding behind this "no." There's a whole story going on that's not what anybody's talking about.

If you wrote an alternate speech for Jeffrey, it would go: "I'm here to resurrect some of my dignity, because I've been fired, and that's why I dressed up this way and that's why I have these patrician, corporate-officer attitudes." And you could do the same for Lowell, and have him sitting there and saying, "This man wants to tell me something that is not about why he's meeting me."

Al Pacino just took over Lowell's great reporter's intuition to sit there and laser-scan Jeffrey with his eyes. You know, he looks at him, looks at him, and doesn't move, until, after all the fidgeting and shuffling with the papers, Russell, as Jeffrey, gets to say his great line — "I was a corporate vice president" — with the attitude "Once upon a time, I was a very important person." And that [Mann snaps his fingers] is when Lowell has it.

CBS reporter Mike Wallace criticised the film's dramatisations as "excessive".":

Two-thirds of the film is quite accurate. It was dramatized excessively.

How was it watching Christopher Plummer play you?

Mike Wallace: Listen, I could have been a contender if I was that good-looking. He did a good job, I thought, he got some of my tics. But, the basis of the film was that I had lost my moral compass and had gone along with the company and caved in for fear of a lawsuit or something like that. Also, Don Hewitt, who is the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, but mainly me. That was utter bullshit. It was done for the drama involved. Then finally, at the end, I found my moral compass again, except it was not true.

In a quote from the movie, your character says, "I'm with Don on this." In other words, "Yeah, we should kill it." You didn't do that?

Mike Wallace: Certainly not. In the broadcast that we did do at that time, I did a mea culpa on behalf of CBS. I negotiated it with the people at CBS, which permitted me to say that for the first time in the history of 60 Minutes, for the first time in the history of CBS News, as I know it, I was told not to do something. We weren't going to broadcast something that I had done for fear of a law suit or something of that nature. God, that happily is not my reputation, and it was a lie. But it made it more dramatic.