It's 11 am and Sam Shepard arrives for our
interview dressed like the all-American hero he has so
often portrayed. Wearing jeans, a navy T-shirt and a
leather jacket, his blue eyes are disguised by a pair of
heavy-duty shades and he has a lit cigar for comfort. On
his hand, a tattoo of a crescent is just visible. Now
62, despite his skin weathered by the elements -
doubtless the result of spending much of his time
farming his 400-acre ranch in Minnesota - he's still
remarkably handsome. With his swept-back brown hair only
just beginning to grey, he still has that rock-star
swagger cultivated when he toured as a drummer with Holy
Modal Rounders and had a fling with Patti Smith.
That was 35 years ago, at the time
when the California-raised Shepard was beginning to
establish himself as a writer, after co-authoring the
script for Michelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point"
and completing his early plays, "La Turista" and "The
Unseen Hand." But Shepard, the so-called "playwright
laureate of the West," as The New York Times dubbed him
when his play "Buried Child" won a Pulitzer Prize in
1979, has spent a lifetime tackling American mythology
while gradually establishing his own iconic status.
Right down to the fact that he still refuses to use a
computer or a fax. "I don't relate to any of that
stuff," he growls. "It just left me in the dust. My kids
are very good at it, so if ever I need it, I just put
them on it."
If technology has passed him by, you
get the impression that life itself hasn't. Yet Shepard
refuses to be seduced by the notion that, alongside
Arthur Miller and David Mamet, his work is paramount in
the pantheon of American playwrights. "If you get
carried away with that in your mind, you get far away
from what your real intention is," he says. "It's not
possible to do good work if you're thinking about how
it's been received. If you think about that then you're
not focused. You have to be much simpler and close."
While his plays, such as "True West"
and "A Lie of the Mind," have frequently been revived,
with just three new works produced in the 1990s, it will
come as no surprise to learn that his latest effort is
for the screen, not the stage. That said, "Don't Come
Knocking" is the first screenplay he has written since
the 1994 western "Silent Tongue," which he also
directed. It also marks a reunion with German director
Wim Wenders; the last time the two collaborated was on
the highly successful 1984 film "Paris, Texas," the
story of a drifter searching for his family, which won
the Palme D'Or in Cannes.
Similarly, "Don't Come Knocking"
tells the tale of a father in search of a son he never
knew he had. While it comes nowhere near the brilliance
of "Paris, Texas," it's clear Shepard has hit a
universal nerve. "It must have to do with the way things
have collapsed, in terms of family - which doesn't have
the same strength as it used to," he says. "I don't know
why it's coming apart, but I feel that. I think there's
a desperate air about it all. Part of the reason that
this Right Wing thing has come back so strongly is that
people do feel the loss of something, and they're trying
to replace it with something rigid. The rise of the
Christian Right is an attempt to bring back some
strictness. The reaction has come full circle. It's very
strange."
To an outsider, Shepard's life must
feel like a movie - given that he lives with Lange and
their two children, Hannah and Walker. Lange, who
appeared in Shepard's much-maligned 1988 directorial
debut "Far North," plays Howard Spence's estranged lover
Doreen in "Don't Come Knocking," the first time they
have appeared on screen together since 1984's "Country".
Shepard admits it wasn't easy. "It's very difficult
because you know each other so personally, but in the
end it's worthwhile because you touch on certain things
that are deep."
Ironically, you can read Howard as
Shepard's own fear of movie-stardom. He began his life
as an actor in earnest in 1978, when he played the
farmer for Terrence Malick in "Days of Heaven." But
after Philip Kaufman persuaded him to play American
astronaut Chuck Yeager in "The Right Stuff" five years
later, Shepard suddenly found himself thrust into the
limelight as he was nominated for an Oscar for Best
Supporting Actor. While he went on to appear in Robert
Altman's film of his own play, "Fool For Love," Shepard
admits he was nervous about his expanding profile as an
actor.
"There was this feeling that my
credibility as a writer would go in the toilet if I
suddenly became Robert Redford," he says. "I didn't want
to be a movie star. I didn't want to have this thing of
being an icon. It scared the shit out of me."
Frequently cast in Hollywood as the
authority figure - reminding us his dad was an officer
in the Army Air Corps - this year alone, Shepard is set
to star with Salma Hayek in "Bandidas" and Brad Pitt in
"The Assassination of Jesse James." Yet by taking an
increasing number of secondary film roles, a case can be
made that, as he becomes more of a low-rent celebrity,
the sheen is systematically being wiped away from his
early achievements. As the myth surrounding Sam Shepard
is slowly dismantled, is he as finished as Howard
Spence?
Not quite. Currently planning "an
old-fashioned" Western with Wenders, I suspect the
curtain has yet to fall on Sam Shepard's third act.
|