Novelist Mailer Turns His Latest Book into a Movie
David Sterritt's Christian Science Monitor interview (4 September 1987), in which Mailer calls the Tough Guys Don't Dance film 'not a realistic picture' and argues for cinema as dream-logic rather than instruction — 'a way for the soul to say, you're not living in the proper fashion at all.'
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
“Novelist Mailer Turns His Latest Book into a Movie,” David Sterritt’s interview, ran in the Christian Science Monitor on 4 September 1987 (19–20). Interviewed in his Provincetown attic studio, Mailer calls the Tough Guys Don’t Dance film “not a realistic picture. These are not typical American citizens,” meant to depict “a kind of greed and irresponsibility loose in American life in the last four or five years.” He frames his theory of the medium against fiction and theater: “film doesn’t work on our minds. It works on all the places that have never been worked on by other art forms — all the synapses between our memory and our emotions and our nerves and our sense of time.” Film, for Mailer, runs on “dream logic”: “a dialogue between your soul and your self.”
A full transcription, held in the working archive pending rights clearance, is at full text.