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“Drama Appeals to Us is Because It Touches Something Different than the Contemporary”: David Mamet on TV, Theater, Gene Hackman and His New Film, Henry Johnson
Henry Johnson I assumed David Mamet would probably have more opinions about Aristotle than A24 and, indeed, in discussing the 76-year-old playwright-turned-filmmaker’s new movie, Henry Johnson, the former came up while the latter didn’t. Henry Johnson marks Mamet’s return to the director’s chair after a decade-long absence from cinema, and it’s easily his most austere work since 1994’s Oleanna, which like this film was adapted from his own play. Premiering on stage in 2023 at the Electric Lodge in Venice, California, and later staged at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater in 2025, the play follows the unraveling of its titular character, a well-meaning but naive middle-aged man (played by Mamet’s son in law, Evan Jonigkeit), whose attempts at misplaced or perhaps undeserved compassion lead to his downfall.
Comprised of just four long scenes, two of which feature Shia LaBeouf as a charismatic and menacing prison accomplice, Gene, Mamet doesn’t much attempt to expand the claustrophobic focus of his story and indulges in the sorts of staccato monologuing—brilliant, brash, and, depending on your mood or politics, infuriating—that, for his fans, marks him as an utterly singular dramatist and for his detractors is a sign of self-parody. As with many of his projects—his controversial turn to polemics in both prose and public appearances included—Henry Johnson suggests a moral unease within the rhythms of contemporary life as it interrogates the battle between authority and resistance, male ego and institutional rot.
Forgoing (or forsaken by) festivals and traditional distributors, Henry Johnson is being distributed independently by its production company, 1993, and has its west coast premiere at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles today, when it also becomes available for rental directly from its official site. Nationwide theatrical screenings will follow throughout the summer. [Editor’s note: the below interview contains spoilers.]
Filmmaker: How are you today?
Mamet: Well, how are you? How’s things in Malibu?
Filmmaker: Oh, wow, yeah, it’s been a tough time in Malibu. I live on old Malibu Road. I don’t know if you know it, but it’s not far from Malibu Seafood, underneath Pepperdine University. I have a tiny beach shack underneath Cher’s house, perhaps the smallest apartment on the sand in LA County. When I moved to Malibu, I could not have imagined I would live through four massive fires in those seven-and-a-half years. I walked down the beach two days after the fires on January 9th and about two miles from my home going east, across the lagoon, I encountered Carbon and La Costa Beach in a state similar to utter bombardment. It was really stunning to see so close, in the immediate aftermath. It’s been terrible.
Mamet: I’m so sorry. You know, by accident I was up there and drove back from Point Dume down to PCH and so forth. As you say, even when you’re looking at it, it’s hard to fathom.
Filmmaker: I’m more fortunate than many. My home still stands. I wanted to see your play when it went up in Venice a little while ago. You’ve written many that have become movies, directed some although not most of them. But in your career it’s been rare that a show of yours goes up and then almost immediately you choose to adapt it. I’m curious how that occurred. Was there some special serendipity, or was that always the idea?
Mamet: Well, it was the idea of Shia and Evan. Evan is also one of the producers. The play was directed by Marja-Lewis Ryan at the Electric Lodge. We just had such a magnificent time. It was a limited number of performances. We could have run the thing for a couple of years over there, but everyone had to move on. To jigger everybody’s schedule such that we could get the theater plus people available for several more months seemed to be impossible. We all knew, not being a theatrical town, people have different lives. So, they both came to me, Shia and Evan, with the film. That was the inspiration. There you have it.
Filmmaker: It’s been a little over a decade since Phil Spector. The movie business has changed multiple times over since then. What is your outlook regarding the industry at present? Is there something liberating, perhaps, about working on a smaller scale than in the past and rolling a movie out in a non-traditional way?
Mamet: Well, I always worked on a small scale personally. When I started out in the field — me and Bill Macy and so forth — we didn’t have any money at all, we worked in very small theaters in Chicago, and we paid for [the shows by] working as washers and cab drivers and so forth. Then I started making movies, and they were all very independent movies, and some were pretty goddamn good. Everybody who gave us five bucks to make [a movie] said “Don’t you worry, if this movie turns out as well as I think it will, we’re going to release it.” And, of course they never did, but that’s okay. too. Things in show business change constantly. Within my lifetime we saw television supplant radio, and radio went dead and then the movies started to war with television, and now an amalgamation seems to have either helped and/or killed both of them. But it’s just the way things work. It’s like the Erie Canal — when railroads come in, it doesn’t matter how good a canal you got. When commercial aviation comes in, it doesn’t matter how you can provide for passengers on Amtrak. Things change, you know?
Filmmaker: Many people were talking about how the golden age of television has sort of come and gone. What had been seen as a writer’s medium, with people such as David Simon, who primarily identify as writers, becoming auteurs, has now receded. Writing jobs in TV are down by some estimates as much as 40%. The industry finds itself in another sort of existential crisis. Although your last movie was for HBO, your career has somehow evaded that space, even as television was absorbing playwrights and movie directors. Was there any particular reason for that, be it a lack of interest on your part or lack of interest on the industry’s part?
Mamet: I don’t know. I grew up during the first television age, and the writers had to come from the stage too. They came from comedy, because who else was going to write them? But what they were writing, those early writers, whether it was The Twilight Zone or Science Fiction Theater, [were scripts] for a half-hour format, which came down to about 22 minutes. So, it was writing what felt like one long scene, which was something the playwrights and comics knew how to do. Then when television migrated to the hour form, it became very problematical for two reasons. One, the form is a bitch and doesn’t relate to anything in human experience. No one had any experience writing for it. Because of that and because of the widespread metastasization of television, you got a lot of drivel. When you had three stations doing eight hours a day of programming, you might be able to come up with enough writers. But if you got 400 stations doing 24 hours a day, there ain’t going to be enough writers.
Filmmaker: So, who’s going to do the writing?
Mamet: You got to bring in a bunch of hacks, right? Because you got to turn out the product. On the other hand, we’re talking about the intersection of technology and creation. People get used to sitting in front of the stupid fucking box and looking at it for six hours a night. You don’t really need a writer because what you’re doing is hypnotizing people, right? And just like with cigarettes, the brand is giving them a reason to explain to themselves why they’re dying of cancer. It’s because they like Marlboro and they aren’t Camel people. What you’re looking at, independent of content, and there’s some very good content, is hypnosis. You want a reason to sit there in front of that screen but you’re going to sit there because you’re being hypnotized, and you explain to yourself, “Oh, it’s because I like this kind of show, or I like that kind of show.” So, everything’s changed drastically. My generation was the first when someone was going to sit in front of the stupid fucking box for six hours a day. My parents were looking at me saying, “Are you insane?” Because they had grown up with radio, and you can listen to radio while you’re doing anything else in the world. So, when the new technology of television, as Marshall McLuhan said, completely supplanted that it seemed like it had a bunch of similarities because [radio and TV] both could offer entertainment, but the differences were vastly greater than the similarities.
Filmmaker: Getting back to Henry Johnson, Evan’s character is very impressionable man. So impressionable that he’s led to his doom because he’s so swayed by other people, whether that’s the guard at the end, or his boss, or his cell mate or the man who gets him into trouble to begin with. I’m curious as to what about this protagonist for you speaks to the way people are living now. Or, why you felt the desire to tell this story at this time?
Mamet: That’s a good question. You know, the answer is that the way people are living now is no different than the way people have always lived. Leo Tolstoy said, “If you say ‘in these times’, you’re not paying attention, and you don’t know any history because all times are the same.” So, the reason that a drama appeals to us is because it touches something different than the contemporary. It’s a mistake to think, as executives do, that we got to be very contemporary to talk to what people are interested in now. Well, the news does that very well, the news being a kind of silly and generous form of drama, right? It’s selling outrage and tragedy and calling itself news. That does a pretty good job of dealing with the contemporary. What drama should do to be most effective is to deal with something which is not contemporary but eternal, that being human nature.
Filmmaker: And what about human nature? Do you feel like Henry’s tale suggests our innate impressionability in front of those who are more charismatic or who have more dynamic arguments?
Mamet: Here’s the thing: we’re all impressionable, we’re all suggestible. If you look at Othello, he was the greatest general of his time because he understood warfare, which meant he understood a lot about people. But he had an Achilles heel that could be exploited, as do we all. Magicians say the more intelligent a person is, the easier it is to exploit him because he believes in his own rationality. So, to a certain extent, like Othello, Henry is a character who gets through life by being accommodating and calling it “being helpful.”
Somebody, I think it was Rebecca West, said, in one of my favorite quotes, “There were wise fools and ignorant fools. There are old fools and young fools, but there never was a fool who wasn’t cruel.” I thought about that, my god, that’s true. All these people will say, “Oh, look at so and so, they can’t help themselves, and they constantly seem to be getting into trouble and reaching out for help, and they made this unfortunate mistake and blah blah blah.” Well, if a person does that continually, that’s their party trick. That’s how they get through life. And there are some people who do that continually and some of us who do it intermittently. We all have the capacity to act foolish now and again. There are some people who, that’s their thing, and it became important to me at various times in my life to be able to recognize that and say, “Okay, let’s put our what you call ‘compassion’ on hold.”
For example you’re going down the street by the Veterans Administration, and there’s a guy with a sign saying, “I’m a veteran, give me some money.” One might say, “Oh my god, he’s a veteran, God bless him for his service, let me give him some money.” But, wait a second, the veterans administration is right there. They exist to help him. What does he want the money for that he can’t get at the Veterans Administration? Well, he wants it for drink or for drugs. Okay. So, I have to use my reason to see what’s really going on here. Similarly, I’m trying to use my reason as a writer to look at this kind of character, who exploits those around him. His great trick is his biddability. The thing I thought was interesting, that you mentioned earlier, is that he gets taken advantage of by his boss. He gets taken advantage of by the guy who sends him to prison. He gets taken advantage of by Gene, but he also gets taken advantage of by the guard, right?
Filmmaker: Yes.
Mamet: Because the guard does the ultimate taking advantage of him. He leads him down the garden path to the point where Henry gives him the gun and the guard kills him.
Filmmaker: You’ve been obsessed with marks and with hustlers for your entire career. I can’t recall you in your previous works ever focusing almost solely on the consequences that a mark receives because of their inability to perceive the truth. However, in this movie, you have these giant ellipses that are very faithful to your play as opposed to doing what many would do, which is fill out the narrative with more cinematic beats. You stick primarily to depicting these moments of consequence that make up the four scenes. Were you tempted to deviate from the original text at all? Was that primarily a decision driven by finances? Was it important for the integrity of the piece to be as faithful as you were?
Mamet: Well, that’s an excellent question. In Hitchcock, a guy hangs up the phone. He says, “I’ll be right there.” He gets dressed. He runs downstairs and hails a cab. He drives to another event. He gets out of the cab. He goes into a building. And then you start to play, right? It’s not easy to make a film out of a play. It’s just not easy. I think this is a pretty good film. But most of the time if you look at a lot of movies in the ’30s, especially in the late ’30s, they’ll say “based on the play by…” and that’s usually a dead giveaway that the movie’s no good because what they’re doing is filming a play, right? A play is meant to work in a proscenium, with one point of view to the audience and with no tricks and jokes. It’s all about dialogue. But a film is about something else, right? A film is about the succession of images telling a story to the audience.
It’s possible to make a good film out of a play. There are many. James Foley did it with Glengarry Glen Ross. But a perfect example is Sidney [Lumet] when he did 12 Angry Men. He may cut back and forth between two close-ups, but he never repeats a setup ever. He shows a setup for the amount of time it takes to make a point, whatever it is, and then someone else will intervene, and you will shift to a completely different setup, which is not the way most people film a play. They film a master, and slowly the audience goes dead with boredom. So, my question was not how do you film this play but what is the movie that you want to make? That was the question that I asked, and the answer was to divide it up into the small sections. It had a lot to do with blocking because what we learn in the theater is the blocking is all important. The job of the director in the theater is to offer the play to the audience. It’s not to direct the actors. The actors are going to do just fine. The actors understood the script when they read it. No more understanding is necessary. What is necessary is to stage them in such a way that the audience understands what’s going on. You’re using movement and stage picture to dramatize that for their benefit. The reason in the old days people would move across the stage was to get a cigarette. Now we don’t have cigarettes no more, it’s a goddamn shame.
But another reason they have to move is to obtain something from the other person. For example, if people are downstage talking to each other and one of them starts talking, and the other one wants to move into a different position in order to gain an advantage, to be upstage of him, to be in a different position to make the other guy turn, now you’re using blocking in order to help the audience understand what’s going on. Blocking A and B in order to turn the actors so that when they’re speaking they’re facing out toward the audience, that’s what I did. I may be getting a little bit too technical here, but that’s what I did in breaking down and planning the film.
Filmmaker: You wrote one of the more influential books about directing movies relatively early in your career. Now, later in your career and looking back on the body of work and experience you’ve had since writing it, do you have any amendments to that provocative vision of filmmaking you put out?
Mamet: No, and here’s why. I didn’t write that book based on my own experiences, per se. I wrote that book to a certain extent based on my experiences directing a couple of films, but I directed the films based on my technical investigation of what it was that I was actually going to do. My interest in the technique of moviemaking began pretty early, when I was at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York and I started reading the works of a lot of theorists about film. So, putting those together with the fact that I’d watched 8,000 movies, and I’d read Aristotle’s Ethics, led me to approach my first films, in fact all of them, with that understanding. What’s happening? What’s the audience seeing? What does the hero want? What happens when he doesn’t get it? What am I taking a shot of? And how do two shots put together equal a third idea in the mind of the viewer?
Filmmaker: I would be remiss to ask about your reactions to the recent deaths of the leading men of two of your movies, Gene Hackman and Val Kilmer. What have your thoughts been on both of those men since they passed and the muscular action thrillers in which they starred, Heist and Spartan, both of which are the type of lower-budget, thinking-man’s action movies that seem to not have much of a place in the multiplexes anymore.
Mamet: I loved working with those guys. I’ve been blessed to work with great actors, and those guys were two of them. I was just thinking about Gene last night because I watched The Getaway for probably the 80th time and, as far as I can tell, it’s just an absolute perfect movie. When I started out doing these movies I said, “Oh, I don’t know how to do action,” and thought, “Well, that’s stupid. Why don’t you learn how to do action?” Everyone said Sam Peckinpah was great at action, so I looked at his movies and I saw what he was doing. Just coverage. He’s shooting a lot of coverage. I said, “Well, okay, that’s a good base, a good place to start off. You know, I could shoot a lot of coverage, too.” That led me to try to understand how to shoot action, and the answer, of course, it’s no different than anything else. What story are you telling? How are you telling it?
This is one way to look at it. And the other thing we used to say is “Sherwin-Williams.” Sherwin-Williams was a paint company whose motto was, “Cover the earth.” If we were covering the earth, we called it “Sherwin-Williams.” Okay, so then I’m looking at The Getaway and I’m thinking, “Geez, this is a hell of a movie, this is so much better than his westerns.” Then I asked why. I remember Gene said something to me. I had planned this scene between him and Delroy [Lindo, in Heist]. It was a goodbye scene. The two great partners are parting, and I’ve got it all planned out outside, and Gene says, “I don’t want to shoot it outside.” I said, “Well, okay. Why?” He says, “No great scene was ever shot outside.” I said, “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I ain’t got time to figure it out today. So, we’re going to shoot the fucking scene inside.” I’ve always thought about that. I wondered if it was true. I still wonder if it’s true. And other than panoramas, I don’t know that great scenes are shot outside.
Filmmaker: I can think of a few great scenes that were shot outside, but who am I to contradict Gene Hackman?
Mamet: Well, I feel exactly the same.
