“It’s more than their felicity in staging or their skill with actors,” Zwick writes. “There’s an ineffable humanist signature common to each show they do that feels like a legacy of what we started.”
He also reflects at length and with acute insight on the differing approaches taken by some of the leading actors he’s worked with over the years. They include Denzel Washington (on Glory, Courage Under Fire and The Siege), Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins (Legends of the Fall), Tom Cruise (The Last Samurai and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back), Leonardo de Caprio (Blood Diamond) and Daniel Craig (Defiance), Meg Ryan (Courage Under Fire) and Anne Hathaway (Love & Other Drugs).
Michael Steadman (Ken Olin) and Hope Murdoch Steadman (Mel Harris).Credit: MGM
On the other hand, there was Matthew Broderick, whom he directed in Glory and whose mother went to extraordinary lengths to try to undermine the production. Hindrance disguised as assistance. For Zwick, her nagging about how he should go about building her son’s character in the film spoke of the frustrations of her thwarted career as an artist. Then there was the problem of producer Harvey Weinstein, with whom he seriously fell out after becoming involved in the initial preparations for Shakespeare in Love, although the convicted rapist has probably heard a lot worse said about him.
He gratefully looks back on those who assisted him along the way, such as Woody Allen, for whom he served as production assistant on 1975’s Love and Death. And Sydney Pollack (The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor), who became his much-valued mentor, providing good advice about how best to approach his craft: “Listen, kid,” he remembers Pollack telling him, “Plot is the rotting meat the burglar throws to the dogs so he can climb over the fence and get the jewels, which are the characters.”
Daniel Craig as he appeared in Ed Zwick’s 2008 film Defiance.
Zwick has spent his life making some of the better films and TV shows of the past 40 years, and Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions reveals him to be an astute observer of the creative process and the workings of Hollywood. He takes his work seriously, although it has been a constant battle to make it the way he wants to.
“Throughout history, popular storytellers have always been the default moralists of their time,” he writes. “To abjure that obligation in the name of creating mindless ‘entertainment’ is to surrender a kind of sacred duty. It’s not enough to make films that drown out the growing sound of screaming in the world beyond the Hollywood bubble.”
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He regards that bubble as a problem place. “Deliberately or not,” he notes scathingly, “a studio will do anything to make a script more ‘accessible’.” And he has little patience with those in charge, borrowing a couple of sharp quips to explain why: “I remember Cameron Crowe describing an executive as someone who claims to know the way, doesn’t have a map, and can’t drive a car. As Steven Soderbergh once told an executive, ‘You confuse having an opinion with having an idea’.”
Full of tips for those who’d like to be doing what he is and insights for those interested in his impressive body of work, Zwick’s book is perceptive, illuminating and entertaining. He says that, without his wife, soulmate and creative collaborator, Liberty Godshall, it and his life might have followed a very different course. He adds apologetically that he can’t find the words to thank her enough, although he knows what her response to that line would be: “Try.”
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