Jonathan Romney: Is Cradle Will Rock about a play called A Cradle Will Rock?

Tim Robbins: Yes, it's also about a couple of other things. As I was doing my research on this monumental production, I started finding these other great characters from the same period. These other stories started weaving their way into the script, and so we have a story of Nelson Rockefeller commissioning Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to paint the mural in the lobby of Rockefeller centre and, much to Rockefeller's dismay, featured prominently in the mural is the head of Lenin. He overreacts in a way that's become legendary. And we found other stories about vaudevillians and rollerskating beavers. Just a wild world of the art world and the theatre world in 30s New York City.

JR: People will come to the film thinking that it's about Orson Welles, but he's just one part of it, but John Houseman was in it as well.

TR: Yes, he's one of many. There's a wonderful ensemble cast of great actors, and his story is one story of many. In this production of A Cradle Will Rock, they come to their theatre one morning to find it has been seized by the US government and locked up and surrounded by armed guards and they have forbidden the performance from happening, so Welles and Houseman sneak into the basement of the theatre trying to make calls to find another theatre to perform in because they have 1,000 people coming that night.

They eventually find a theatre and then the unions forbid the actors and musicians from performing and they decide that Mark'll do it by himself, so they march 1,000 people 25 blocks up town to this other theatre, and what ensued in that theatre was pretty remarkable and inspiring and a legendary night of theatre, and a hidden history which we aren't really taught as theatre students in the States.

JR: One of the stories is about the pressure the federal theatre programme was under, and another story is about the central figure, the dramatist and composer, Mark Blitzstein, who has become part of theatre history and to a great extent forgotten, but Blitzstein was somebody who had studied under Schoenberg and in the film Brecht appears as a dream figure, but he did actually meet Brecht, who said to him, "You should go ahead and turn this song about social prostitution into a musical" and that became The Cradle Will Rock.

TR: Yes, Brecht told him to think about other forms of prostitution. He'd written this playlet about a prostitute and her poverty and he [Brecht] said, "What about the other prostitutes, what about when the church prostitutes itself or the education systems prostitute themselves?" So he wrote this musical which was basically about a labour strike in a fictional US town, and it was pretty controversial at the time - there were labour strikes all over the country and I guess that's why the government figured it should close it down.

JR: It's unusual that someone should make a $32m budget film…

TR: I thought it was $25m. Where did all that money go?! They're bragging about money they didn't give me!

JR: about labour relations and also a very anti-corporate movie that is made under the aegis of Disney.

TR: Yes, but it has ironies and dichotomies in it. For example, their unions tell them they can't do this play, which is deeply ironic because it is a pro-union play. One of the characters is a union leader who turns out to be a bit of an arsehole. And we have the elite represented in some characters and their not all black and white. We have some rich people who were supportive of arts at the time and were trying to help Houseman and Welles. I try not in my films to deal with the blacks and the whites, I try to deal with the greys and ironies as well - because that's how life is.

JR: One of the themes of the film, I don't know how explicitly you were thinking of applying it to what's happening in America at the moment, but obviously the pressure in recent years on the National Endowment for the Arts, and most recently, since the film was made, Mayor Giuliani trying to clamp down on the Sensation exhibition.

TR: Yeah, he's playing right into our hands! The tragic truth of that is there are always going to be politicians that try to gain political hay and votes and publicity by finding the most controversial piece of art and trying to lump all art into one category and saying "Your taxed dollar shouldn't be paying for this sacrilege," etc...

It's happened before and it'll happen again. The trouble with it is that it's giving a lot of publicity to cynical and manipulative politicians who are just interested in talking to constituents and trying to get votes out of it. I try not to mention that guy's name for that reason. He'll never win, but he will intimidate artists in the future, and next time an artist is thinking of creating a piece of work that might be funded by the government, he might be a little safer and that's a tragedy.

JR: I guess this film is autobiographical in the sense that you have been involved in political theatre from very early on. When you were starting out you did street theatre in New York and you were doing a kind of Watergate skit.

TR: I played HR Holderman at one point. I think I was 15. It was a kind of song and dance routine with Holderman, Urlichtman and Dean. We would do these little vaudevilles in the street, funded by the State Endowment, by the way.

The way I look at it I was learning how to act and I think I got paid $20 a week; I think in the long run, considering the amount of taxes I pay now, probably they're coming out ahead on that one! But it was a good way to learn. When you have to contend with trucks passing and mothers calling out of windows for children, you really have to know how to hold focus with an audience.

JR: You grew up in a pretty radical background, you grew up around Greenwich Village and your father was a folk singer, and you used to get taken to anti-Vietnam rallies.

TR: Sometimes I'd go on my own. It was all around at the time. I lived about three blocks from Washington Square Park, but for me it was normal. I figured there were these kinds of people everywhere, so when I went to college in '76, I was shocked that there were these other kinds of people because I was used to the freaks and the incredibly creative people who were around the village at the time.

JR: When did you actually get into acting, because you studied acting and then you set up The Actors Gang?

TR: In college, I directed Uboo Wah. At the first public performance of it in Paris in 1896, the audience ripped up the seats and rioted. It's quite an extraordinary play; we did a production of it and then took it out into the LA scene and performed at midnight, and it was quite successful and out of that grew this group of actors who were interested in doing more energetic theatre [than] we were used to participating in.

We all had a punk rock sensibility and wanted to create that energy on stage, so we started wild productions and we're still together now after 18 years. I think we're one of the oldest companies in LA, certainly.

JR: How did you find your way into film? Because in some of the early titles you're involved with there was Fraternity Vacation.

TR: That was originally called Wendell. They changed it to Fraternity Vacation. Can you imagine?!

JR: Was it a sequel to Yentl?

TR: Well, you gotta make a living you know. I think every young actor in Hollywood has to do a "get laid" film. It's a kind of rite of passage. You couldn't get into the union without it. It was fluff, but the nice thing about it was that it was lucrative, and it provided me with the opportunity to produce theatre, and I would do a job like that for six weeks and I would have enough money to produce another play and live on for six months.

I feel the way I survived in Los Angeles was that all my down time was taken up with creativity and trying to make plays and workshop and experiment. I think it's a really dangerous place to be if you're sedentary, if you've got a lot of time and you start hanging out, celebrating yourself and the business. I think that's when it becomes really unhealthy.

JR: When you started out getting smaller parts, was it a problem being 6ft 4in? Did people think this guy is too tall to be plausible?

TR: When the lead actor is 5ft 3in, it just doesn't work. But I never felt that it was a limitation. I got this attitude pretty early on that if I didn't get a part, it was for a very good reason. It didn't have anything to do with career. I figured that if I'd have gotten that part, I would've been driving to work one day and there would have been a terrible accident. That's the way I felt about it.

If I didn't get the job, I didn't get crazy about it, I just thought, "Something's protecting me, I shouldn't have done that job." It's a difficult job when you're starting out and you're auditioning to not take it personally. You go in and you give your heart to something and you audition for someone and think you're going to get it and some other person gets it. If you start getting into the negativity of that, you're dead, it starts feeding on you, so you have to find a mindset, a way to just realise that what is meant to be is meant to be and something will come if it wants to come.

JR: So early on you worked with people like Jerry Shatzberg and Rob Reiner - you did The Sure Thing - and the first high-profile film you did was Top Gun, which is very surprising knowing your politics. It seems a rather militaristic film for you to be in. Did you have any qualms about that?

TR: No, I didn't. You see again, it's in the grey area and it provided me with a valuable lesson in a way because I had grown up in that social protest of the late 60s and early 70s, and for me it was one thing. It was THAT, and doing Top Gun, I met a lot of military people and I realised that I was wrong - it's not black and white; there are people in there that had no other choice in life but to go into that and they're decent people. And yes you have hotheads and you have racists and people who are war-mongers, but the majority of the people are not like that; they are career people, they're making a living and they don't want to go to war, they would not like to risk their life, [but] if they have to, they know it's their responsibility to do it.

It was a perspective I'd never had, and that's one of the great things about being an actor. You find yourself in these situations all the time where you cannot say, "Prison guard bad" because you're in amongst them and you're talking with them and you're dealing with them everyday, and when I was doing Shawshank, I met prison guards for the first time and my perception of them completely changed.

I was talking to one of them one day and I said, "What do you think is the problem with the prison system?" and this very died-in-the-wool, rock solid republican crew-cut guy said, "I think the problem is drugs - they should legalise them." I said, "What?!" and he said, "Here's what's happening: you've got all these kids, 17 years old, getting arrested for marijuana possession, given two or three years, we have a waiting list, GED - which is a high-school equivalency programme and a job training programme - our waiting list in jail is three years. So these kids come and can do nothing except become better criminals. They view it as crime school."

So in their view, they should have two incarcerations. If you're going to incarcerate for drugs, [it shouldt] not [be] with violent criminals. It was a very progressive thought, and it's something you'd never hear a politician say. And I said, "Why don't you say this?" and they said, "They never ask us, they don't want to hear it."

JR: You did Bull Durham where you met Susan Sarandon. She has said that it again gave her a taste for films that had a raison d'ętre and an energy about them. Was it important for you?

TR: Oh absolutely. It was the first lead role I had in a comedy that I liked, and it was an opportunity to work with her and Kevin Costner and Ron Shelton, and I'm also a baseball fanatic and have been all my life. It was an opportunity to have that fantasy fulfilled. You stumble into these great opportunities sometimes and that was one of them, and it opened up my realms of possibility. It also got me out of LA. After that movie came out and was successful, I was able to not have to be in LA to audition. I had scripts coming to me, so I moved back home to New York.

JR: And Jacob's Ladder which came after that was your first film in the dead centre of the screen and it's a very disturbing film. It looks like a supernatural thriller, but turns out to be a political movie in the end.

TR: I guess so. I'm very wary of that term political, but I see what you're saying, yeah.

JR: But I understand you found it psychologically disturbing to make?

TR: Yes, it was horrible. Everyday there was a new demon on the set. It was the most awful locations in New York City. If you could pick every ugly corner, it was in Jacob's Ladder. And it was also physically exhausting, I had to writhe and shake. I think it's a really great movie and Adrian did a great job with it, but it was very difficult to shoot. You're confronting demons in yourself as well. I'm not particularly a method actor, but I have found that when you live with a role for a while, it starts to enter you, you start to be really affected emotionally and physically by it.

JR: Robert Altman, who you worked with three times, was a major influence on you. I think it was Nashville that opened up the possibilities for you.

TR: Yes, I was a senior in high school when I saw that movie and I understood that film could be so much more than I had seen before. I love that format, I love the way he juggles so many different stories and so many different characters with that, and I was inspired later when I was writing Cradle Will Rock to do the same thing. He's also a film-maker who's totally unpredictable, and he's capable of so many different tones in his movies.

You compare Nashville with McCabe and Mrs Miller and you think they're two different film-makers. And when I had the opportunity to work with him I leapt at it. I met him originally on Short Cuts because he was trying to set up Short Cuts before The Player, and he remembered me and asked me if I wanted to do it and was actually told by his financiers that they wouldn't do it with me and he said, "Then I'm going to walk". I owe a real debt to Robert Altman. I think The Player opened up a lot of possibilities for me.

JR: And when you were Griffin Mill, the studio executive in that film, was that your way of getting back at studio executives? Did you base it on anyone?

TR: A couple of people who shall remain nameless; they're all out there. As a matter of fact when the movie came out, Bob [Robert Altman] said, "I think we've been too nice, they're a lot worse than Griffin".

JR: Because all the studio people loved it, saying, "Yes, he's really torn us apart".

TR: Yeah, they love it if they're celebrated in any way. (Laughter)

JR: Another Altman film which I guess must have been important for you was when he did Tanner 88, his political satire on TV. Was that a model when you did Bob Roberts?

TR: I hadn't seen it to tell you the truth, and then when I was in pre-production on Bob, I looked at it and yes it was influential. That was a great series. Bob Roberts was mostly influenced by that Pennebaker documentary, Don't Look Back, and also by Spinal Tap. I love that mock-documentary form. There's a great film which came out a couple of years ago called Waiting for Guffman, which is also in that format.

JR: It's Christopher Guest who was in Spinal Tap.

TR: Yeah, really, really funny. I could watch it any day of the week. But I love the format, the limitations that it presents because, for example, you couldn't really see the back room of Bob Roberts, you could only see brief glimpses of it in his eyes, it was a nice challenge as an actor, but also as a director to give little hints of the real person.

JR: You described the character as "George Bush with a guitar", but it's an interesting point that the film was made, fortuitously, just when Ross Perot was emerging…

TR: And Clinton was playing his saxophone on television. As it turns out, I might have been wrong, it could have been Clinton. That's a shame.

JR: In some of the pieces written about the film at the time, you are fairly positive about Clinton, and since you've expressed your disappointment.

TR: I think we all had high hopes that were somewhat dashed. I think he behaved with foreign policy the same way Bush would have, and the "war on drugs". I'm so disillusioned with the whole process now. I'll still vote democratic, but the only reason that I'm doing it is to stave off the radical, Christian right. I feel they're truly dangerous, they get into the court system and try changing things around. Recently, they can no longer teach Darwinism in Kansas, it has to be creationism. So you have these pockets of ignorance throughout the country which these politicians play into. It's not much of a choice, but I'll still vote defensively.

JR: What's really scary is this religious right have now started making sci-fi blockbusters as well.

TR: Yeah, that's scary.

JR: The next film you directed, Dead Man Walking was something Susan Sarandon brought to you because she met Sister Helen Prejean while making The Client in New Orleans. What made her so passionate about it. How did she persuade you that this was the film to make?

TR: She understood before anyone else did that at its heart this was a love story. I was wrestling with Cradle Will Rock at the time, I was trying to write a new draft of it, and she brought this book to me and asked if I was interested in writing and directing it.

I said yes, but I wanted to do Cradle first, until finally she said, "Are you going to do it or not?" and I decided to do it. (Laughter) For the betterment of our life and our children's lives, and I'm glad she did because it was a really great experience and relatively easy to write because the dynamics of the story were so strong. The only thing left was to cast who was going to be opposite her. I thought we'd go after the best actor in America, and we got lucky.

JR: I understand you really had to tone down the execution. There is this very forensic scene with the injection, but you chose to do that rather than deal with the electric chair, which was the method used on these two prisoners.

TR: That's correct. In the book they're both electrocutions and then Louisiana went over to lethal injection after the book came out. It was based on a discussion I had with Sister Helen, I wanted to show how - because it will be outmoded and it will all be lethal injection - inhumane that is. In all its scientific precision, it's still taking of a life, so I wanted to make it hard on us.

Also, there were two inmates in the book: with one, it's really questionable whether he did it or not, and then there's one who clearly did it and I wanted to model it on the one who clearly did it because I wanted that choice a difficult one to make as well, so that when someone's seeing it, they're not being manipulated in that way - at the last minute he's innocent. I had long discussions with Sister Helen about wanting to make the choice difficult because ultimately if you manipulate, you make him innocent or you use electrocution, you can get an audience for the hour or two that it takes - and probably for the next day or two.

But what happens when someone they know has to face that decision, or someone they know dies and they have to face that decision, then that's really what this movie is made for. You have to respect the other side, there is a great deal of anger and rightful anger in the victims' families and I didn't ever want to portray them as crazy or irrational, I wanted that to be given its dignity, and I think it has been very beneficial because we have made those changes.

Sister Helen calls me every month or so and tells me what's going on, and her work has gotten, she says, so much more important because when she turns up to talk at places, a couple of years ago 20 people would turn up, now there's 2,000, and now she's had audiences with the Pope, and the Pope has seen the film, and we know the Catholic church has changed their policy on the death penalty. What was before was they were anti-death penalty, but allowed the state to determine whether to use it or not. Now they've eliminated that from their policy and they're absolutely 100% opposed to it now, with no conditions.

And I think most importantly the amount of letters that we have gotten from people, whether they were involved in situations of murder or not, this redemptive quality that the film has had for people emotionally who've had problems with parents or they've had situation where they've felt they could not forgive, where the film has allowed them the vocabulary to find ways to communicate again with people in their families.

JR: That film resulted in Susan's Best Actress Oscar, but it was interesting that a few years before you both had made yourselves rather unpopular on Oscar night by making a plea for Haitian internees. Did they have to swallow their hostility to you that night?

TR: I don't know who exactly they are.

JR: No one does!

TR: I think what we did was justified. I glad we did it. It wound up with that internment camp - people were being interned for testing positive to the HIV virus which is criminal - and the Clinton administration was behind it. By that act of protest the camp was closed and those people were let out of a very dangerous situation for their health.

So considering that everyone was wearing those red ribbons and that's supposed to mean an awareness of Aids, I thought it was totally appropriate and so did Susan. We were banned for one year from the Oscars. (Laughter) We were probably not invited to some parties (Laughter), but neither of us can complain because we're doing fine.

JR: But have you ever had trouble being politically committed in Hollywood?

TR: What I find the most frustrating is being labelled political because I really don't think that I am. When you mention the word political or politics or politician, for me it brings up negative connotations, it brings up manipulative, cynical, self-serving, all of which have nothing to do with the two latest films I've done.

Certainly Bob Roberts was a film about politics, but Dead Man Walking was, I think, a film about humility and compassion. Cradle Will Rock is about creativity and freedom. All of those words have nothing to do with politics. Politics is about acting in a certain way so you gain a certain thing, so I feel that is a negative description. I feel that when a critic says, "This is a political film", I don't feel that is a particularly strong drawing card. (Laughter)

I feel there are certain people who are uncomfortable with people like me and I won't be invited to their parties and maybe I won't be invited to be in their film, but there are also people that know it's not necessarily a black-and-white issue with me, I do have a sense of humour and I can provide in a job. And there's enough of those kinds of people around, so I've never had any problem being employed in all of it. What Hollywood is I don't know, there's people who do like me and there's people who don't like me.

JR: And having that image, there's a rather lovely twist of casting when you get to play the right-wing fanatic in Arlington Road. What attracted you to that part, apart from breaking with your image somewhat?

TR: I'd been aware of these militia and right-wing groups for quite a long time. I'd written this play with Adam Simon called Carnage, which was a story of a struggle between the old-time Huxter evangelists and the new wave of the evangelist which was the zealot.

I guess I'd rather a Huxter rip me off and steal something out of my wallet than a zealot try and steal my soul, and that's what the play was about and we were quite aware of these very dangerous, usually white supremacist, racist, religious groups that are around, and when Oklahoma City happened, there had been warnings of that for years that had been ignored. So when the script presented itself, I just leapt at the opportunity because I felt I had an idea who this guy was.