LEEDS:

Did you enjoy it?

MAILER:

Oh, I enjoyed it a lot. The trouble is, I like making movies more than writing now. I'm tired of writing. I've been doing it for forty years, and there's not much fun left. I get a hold of myself in the morning and go into that room and dig more stuff out of the old gut. The gut rebels. It's tired of being called on to perform these yeoman duties. Whereas in making a movie you're really not an artist, more an aesthetic engineer. You've got a lot of talented people working under you and they come up to you and you've got to make instantaneous decisions about matters you know very little about. Like hairdo, costume. And so it's kind of fun. You're using everything you've ever learned to the best of your ability. It kept reminding me about being at war but in a good way. It was like the ideal war. Nobody got killed, but you ate in a different place every day, usually standing up. There were vehicles. The biggest problem, just as it was in the army, was where do you put the vehicles. You know when you pick a location shot, you pick it by its availability to a road. You could be in the deepest forest you ever saw, but it's got to be 100 yards from the road because that's where the trucks are parked. So there's a reverse logic in film making. You start with the costs and work toward the art.

LEEDS:

Did you enjoy working with Ryan O'Neal?

MAILER:

Oh, well, that was heaven in a crazy way. Heaven is the wrong word. Ryan is a very, very bright guy. Word for word, sentence for sentence, he's smarter than I am. He's very quick. He's that way as a boxer. He's a very fast boxer and you can't win exchanges with him. He's terribly funny on the set. He's very generous. And the reason he's difficult is he's too generous, so he gives and gives and gives of himself and then at a certain point he's given too much. Then he gets into a black Irish mood and woe to the first person who crosses him at that point.

LEEDS:

He sounds like Tim Madden.

MAILER:

No, he's different from Tim Madden, but I think he's done an incredible performance in the film. I think maybe it's the best thing he's ever done.

LEEDS:

When's it going to be out?

MAILER:

October, if everything holds together.

LEEDS:

I loved your interview with Clint Eastwood in Parade a few years ago. I'm a big Clint Eastwood fan and I agree with you that Honky Tonk Man is his best film. But do you get the idea as I do that he's really a bright guy who . . . Here's my theory: that he got really mad at the American public when Honky Tonk Man didn't go well; it's such a sensitive film. So in the next one, Sudden Impact, he gets the .44 magnum automatic that takes a shell the size of a beer can and blows up buildings. It seemed to me that this was intentional self-parody, that he said, "You want Dirty Harry, you're gonna get Dirty Harry."

MAILER:

Well, I think so. You know it's very hard to understand the psychology of these big stars. Take guys like Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood and Stallone. I think they're enormously competitive people or they wouldn't be where they are. I think they see themselves as champs in what they do. And they hate losing. They hate losing the way a heavyweight champion hates losing a fight, and so if they make a movie and it doesn't do well at the box office, they can't get it out of their systems. It eats at them. It terrifies them. It terrifies them the way a heavyweight champion is terrified if he loses a fight, or even if a sparring partner makes him look bad on a given day. Their ego has the same . . . I once made the remark that heavyweight champions always verge on the edge of being insane. Because conceivably they were the toughest guys in the world and conceivably they weren't. There could always be some guy waiting for them in an alley, some maniac who one way or another could take them in a street fight. They just didn't know. They couldn't know if they were the toughest guy around or weren't and this has to eat at a man's stability. In the same way, movie stars have to feel: what are they made of, what are their ingredients? I'd hate to be a movie star on a bad day, waking up with a hangover and a dull fight with one's woman and feeling unattractive. That's a tough combination to contend with. I guess that's one reason they're so health conscious. The few I've known take enormous care of themselves, eat very properly. Eastwood's that way. He really watches his diet. Warren Beatty's that way. Beatty, who's a sensitive and very intelligent man, is a little off to the side. He won't put himself in the movies the way the others do. I mean, I think Burt Reynolds is just full of rage if a film doesn't score. You know, one of my favorite teasing notions -- I'm absolutely serious about it, but no one will ever believe it -- is (I would hope by '88 or '92; it probably won't be until 1996) that the best presidential contest we could have would be between Warren Beatty for the Democrats and Clint Eastwood for the Republicans.

LEEDS:

This is a question I've wanted to ask you since 1983. Do you still have the same master plan for the Ancient Evenings trilogy?

MAILER:

No. And the reason I gave it up is the second book was going to be science fiction. And I just came to a sobering estimate of my ability to retain difficult material. First of all, I don't think the economics will ever come together because I'd need a year of serious reading to catch up on all the scientific material because if I were going to do a book on science fiction I'd want to do it so I'd become a sort of master of the medium, and that would take an awful lot of thinking, and I don't think well scientifically. I can tell because I've subscribed to Scientific American for fifteen years now, and I find more and more difficulty keeping up with the articles, which is a measure of your ability to understand those concepts. The concepts of science are getting more and more difficult for me all the time so I thought, what's the sense of writing such a book? I can't if I'm going to end up faking it.

LEEDS:

It really surprises me that you say that about yourself and science because I thought that in Of a Fire on the Moon your training in aeronautical engineering obviously shows through.

MAILER:

It was a help. No, that was not a bad book, and I think that if I was going to write a trilogy which was already in my mind then, I think in a funny way I blew it by writing Of a Fire on the Moon. I was very depressed the entire time I was writing that book, and usually, when you're very depressed writing a book it's because you're not writing the book you should have been writing. You're using up something that should have gone into another book, and I think that's exactly what I got into there. The excitement I felt about writing about science went into that book, and there was very little left over to do the science fiction book and I've been dawdling on it. So that's one reason why I don't think the trilogy will ever be fulfilled, and the other is that I've lost the feeling that it counts. I think there are very few people anymore who really care whether you do a trilogy like that. So you'd be the weekend sensation in The New York Times Book Review and then that'd be it. No one would ever read it. One of the things that startled me was how few people ever made any attempt to read Ancient Evenings. Even people who love my work just said, "Well, gee, I couldn't get into it," so . . .

LEEDS:

It drives me crazy when I hear that.

MAILER:

Well, I do think there's a crisis in literature that's profound. It eats at everyone including me. I've lost some of my sense of high purpose and I think readers of literature have also lost it. TV is the true AIDS of our time. There's no mental immunology left for culture. Culture is totally infected by TV.