Interview

Michael Hoffman, Director

The Emperor's Club -

 

Stan Williams

November 19, 2002

 

A grand moral tale, The Emperor's Club (A-II, PG-13) recently opened in motion picture theater's nation wide. I highly recommend it. Based on Ethan Canin's short story, "The Palace Thief," The Emperor's Club examines the everyday moral dilemmas that teachers face and how those decisions can have a profound effect decades later. A related theme the movie also investigates is the good life versus a successful life.

 

As in most films, the director has a profound impact on the themes and values that come through such a tale. The Emperor's Club was directed by Michael Hoffman who has directed 11 films and commands the respect of stars such as Michelle Pfeiffer, George Clooney, Robert Downey, Jr., and Kevin Kline. Kline stars in The Emperor's Club as William Hundert, a Classics instructor and assistant head master at a private boys school.

 

One might expect that the historic Greek and Roman content of the movie would be close to a Rhodes Scholar and Oxford student like Hoffman. But, it was the moral nature of the story under girding The Emperor's Club that ignited his passion. He has thought a lot about what the story means, and his enthusiasm shows. One reason for this is that a film like The Emperor's Club does not get made very often by Hollywood; and when it does, it's a long road.

 

WILLIAMS:       For a relatively small film and budget ($12.5 million) the Emperor's Club credits six different production companies, six different executive producers, and four additional producers Why so many people to mount such a relatively small film?

 

HOFFMAN:      When you find this elaborate, Baroque kind-of Byzantine trail of producers, it's because the movie has taken a long time to get together.

 

WILLIAMS:       Seven years just through development, plus production. Why was that?

 

HOFFMAN:      I think it was seen as a very difficult little movie. No one was sure who the audience was. When I read it, I said well, the audience is everyone, especially at this moment in history. Actually, it has played incredibly strongly all over the country, especially in the middle. As was probably true of the earlier producers, when I first read Canin's short story I wondered: "How am I going to make a film out of this?" The issues are complicated. For starters, Mr. Hundert, in Canin's short story, operates like an unreliable narratorÉand so your first thoughts are that you're condemned to make a movie about perception and nothing else.

 

WILLIAMS:       What do you mean by "unreliable?"

 

HOFFMAN:      Sort of like Ishmael in Moby Dick, who you never know whether you can trust everything he says or not. Hundert in the short story, unlike the Hundert in the movie, is a very cloistered man, a very cut-off man, and a very limited man. He's a very neurotic man in the short story. When he tells you this is a "fact" you realize that his perception is compromised by his limitations. You tell yourself, "I don't know whether to trust that." I was interested in making a movie where you don't have a second life that runs in parallel to your first lifeÉwhere you can put aside the first and see how your decisions in the second work out. It's about how we make ethical and moral choices, and the kind-of existential crisis we experience in a moment of having to make a very hard decision. The problem is we live in this caldera kind-of world of the unbearable lightness of being.

 

Now, that was a round about way of saying it, but I think one of the things that was very smart about the translation to the screenplay, was not to deal with someone who was unreliable, but deal with someone who was absolutely reliable who was a man whose ethics were sort-of above reproach. And still, when he gets into the labyrinth of moral decision makingÑwhere you are compromised by your own neurosis, power and your own anxiety about your self-worthÑyou really become blinded in many ways and believe you're making decisions for one reason when in fact you're making decisions for a different one.

 

WILLIAMS:       You've said, "Everyone of us is confronted with the question of what it means to live an ethical life. It's not always completely clear." Some viewers might see the ethical choices that Hundert makes as very clear. Could you explain more about the moral dilemmas Hundert faces and why his decisions are not clear, at least to him?

 

HOFFMAN:      Hundert, at least, considers himself as a very ethical man. Sedgewick Bell (played by Emile Hirsch) comes into his life and challenges him as I'm sure  other boys have.  But Sedgewick gets to him enough that Hundert goes to Sedgewick's father to find an ally. But instead he finds a powerful man who humiliates him and says to Hundert, "What's the good of what you're teaching those boys? You think you'll mold my son. You won't mold my son, I'll mold him. You just teach him his times tables. You teach him who killed who and where; I'll take care of shaping and molding him."

 

WILLIAMS:       But Hundert does try to shape Sedgewick.

 

HOFFMAN:      Hundert I think, has a lot of anxiety about his own personal self-worth. He's the son of a father who's far more successful that he is. He's a man who's never been out in the world and really taken it on. He's a man who probably believes in the dictum, "those who can, do; those who can't, teach." So, there's a way in which Hundert's own relationship with his father is what he sees in Sedgewick. When the gauntlet is thrown down by Senator Bell, Hundert picks it up and says, "No, I will mold your son." At that point, Hundert becomes, neurotically attached to that kid; and that neurotic attachment leads him, at a critical moment, to make an ethical choice when it comes to changing a grade that I really don't think is in keeping with what he would describe as his code of conduct.

 

WILLIAMS:       But it seems natural that a teacher might do that on a regular basis.

 

HOFFMAN:      I think he would rationalize it this way: "This kid needed a leg up. He's doing incredibly well. He's really come so far." But part of why he does it is perhaps attached to his own need for success. His ego is driving that choice in ways that I think he would claim that you should not let your ego do. That is what I mean when I say he makes an ethical choice that is not always clear.

 

And you see how it comes back to haunt him. In the very moment when Sedgewick is saying, "Call me on the carpet, make me responsible, and show me where my father's way is not the only way to power. Show me that your way is a way of power too," Hundert has given up the moral high ground and can't do what Sedgewick is asking. That is a very complex situation.

 

WILLIAMS:       The turning point for Hundert then isÉ?

 

HOFFMAN:      The grade changing scene is my favorite scene. It hangs over the entire movie even in the end and continues to haunt it by asking the question that can never be answered: "What is the relationship between nature and nurture?" In what way can we ever really hope to shape another human being? Is it in them, is it in their DNA, is it encoded into their soul? Where does human nature reside, and what part can we really play in shaping it?

 

WILLIAMS:       My wife teaches middle school, and commented that she has a roomful of Sedgewicks. Does The Emperor's Club have any lessons or encouragement for public school teachers with 24 Sedgewicks and 1 Martin Blythe?

 

HOFFMAN:      Well, no. But, what I have found is that after looking at the movie teachers say, "That's my life. These are the decisions that I am forced to make everyday. I'm making decisions that are going to shape people's futures and I don't always know if I'm making the right decision or I'm not."

 

WILLIAMS:       Might not they find themselves in the position, as Hundert does, that in changing a grade to encourage one child and displace another, the teacher knows that the displaced child will do just fine in the end?

 

HOFFMAN:      Exactly. And you know what's interesting, that is a change that I made in the screenplay when it was sent to me. Originally, Martin Blythe (as an adult) was a broken man who had lived an unhappy life. And I thought, isn't it so much more interesting that Hundert somehow knew that Martin Blythe would be fine. In fact, maybe Martin Blythe (as a child) benefited by not continuing to take part in the family ritual that was this Julius Caesar Contest. I mean, honestly, it's a good thing to realize that your life is not ruined by not placing in the 9th grade spelling bee. I think in the end it makes the movie a lot more complex and more interesting.

 

WILLIAMS:       As you changed it, the movie is more encouraging to all of us. We don't have to have everything go our way.

 

HOFFMAN:      Right! That's good.

 

WILLIAMS:       It also reminds us that suffering develops character. When Martin Blythe as a kid is sitting there under the tree moping, well, it's okay. He's a smart kid.

 

HOFFMAN:      Right. And the very last scene makes such an argument for the choices that Hundert made, because Blythe's son has been obviously so better parented.

 

WILLIAMS:       Did you purposely direct Blythe's son to come in cold like he did and read the plaque with such strong confidence?

andÉ

HOFFMAN:      That was the idea. I wanted the subtextual idea to be that Martin Blythe, for having studied with Hundert, was a much better father to his son than Martin's father was to him.

 

WILLIAMS:       Well, that comes off well.

 

HOFFMAN:      You get to say it in a way that only a movie can say it. It's something you feel energetically in that kid.

 

WILLIAMS:       Let's talk about parents for a moment. The movie reiterates the theme that the sins of the father weight upon the son. What does the story tell us about our ability to break the patterns set by bad influences in our lives, say by bad parents?

 

HOFFMAN:      I do think there is a way you can see the movie as a fairy tale about a kind-of evil wizard (Senator Bell, Sedgwick's father) who has enchanted his son; and Hundert is an alternative good wizard who might have the power to break that spell. But, because Hundert compromised his self, he loses his power to do that. So, Sedgewick Bell never escapes the belief that his father is all-powerful.

 

And I think that the other truthful and logical thing that happens is that Segewick, decades later, brings Hundert to the corporate retreat as a surrogate father to punish, something he was never strong enough to do with his own father. That's like the equivalent of a man who compulsively sleeps with women and then abandons them because he can never actually confront the fact that he's resentful and angry about having to take care of his own mother. Or that he has too involved a relationship with his own mother. I do think that is a lot of why Sedgewick calls Hundert back. Of course, it's about the competition and more to the point about Sedgewick announcing his run for his dad's senate seat. But, I think also it's about punishing Hundert for Hundert having failed him,Éand punishing Hundert, again, for never being able to stand up to his own father. 

 

WILLIAMS:       What message does the film have for parents, and fathers in particular?

 

HOFFMAN:      (Michael pauses a long time, before answering.) That is something I'm very concerned about because I'm a father and I care deeply about my three children, ages 9, 6, and 1.  One reason is that I have a difficult relationship with my own father. I was very, very anxious about taking on the role of father and really thought a lot about how I wanted to parent. So, it's a question that I want to make sure I answer thoughtfully, because it matters to meÉ.It's funny, but I don't spend a lot of time thinking abstractly about what the movie should mean for anyone, really.

 

WILLIAMS:       Well, what does it mean to Michael Hoffman, as a father?

 

HOFFMAN:      I think it's something about freedom. It's something to do with providing a kind-of love and being free enough from your own narcissism that you really encourage that person, to give that person a base of love and support. I think that is why Sedgewick Bell responds so strongly when Hundert comes in and says, "I believe in you." Because Sedgewick is desperate for a paternal voice that's saying that. I think that notion of believing in your child is absolutely critical. At the same time, I think you have to love kind-of critically. You have to love unconditionally, and at the same time you need to provide instruction, both moral and otherwise. And you do need to be seen as a person who stands for something.

 

But, what I think the movie is about for parentsÉwell, I wouldn't describe it as a movie about fathers and sons in the same way that a lot of Arthur Miller's plays are about that. I think it comes back to this notion of belief. It's amazing how many people single out that moment when, ahÉ

 

WILLIAMS:       Hundert says, "I believe in you."

 

HOFFMAN:      Yea. "You can do this if you want to. But, you're going to need to work to do it." In that statement you give someone freedom and in the same moment you demand responsibility. I guess that is what I think being a parent isÑyou give people rights and you give people freedoms, and you try to give them confidence in themselves. At the same time, in the same breath, in the same sentence, in the next phrase, you have to tell them that a lot of responsibility comes with that freedomÑthat it's understood there are expectations. That idea, as traditional as it is, operates in the movie.

 

WILLIAMS:       Let me shift a little bit. When people first heard about The Emperor's Club they said it was another Dead Poet's Society movie. In terms of the moral messages, how are the movies different?

 

HOFFMAN:      Dead Poet's Society I would describe as fundamentally romantic in its approach. John Keating's (played by Robin Williams) message to his students is seize the day, live life to its fullest.

 

WILLIAMS:       Go against the status quo.

 

HOFFMAN:      Yea. Go against repressive authority. But Hundert's message is more culturally conservativeÑlook back at what this culture has come to value. Instead of looking to popular culture and what ends up getting a lot of attention and focus and what's glitzy and faddish, he would say look back at the ideas and values that have grown up organically out of culture and embrace them as a guide for living. So, it's a very different message.

 

WILLIAMS:       It seems that they go in the opposite direction. The Dead Poets Society says to live for today and self, and The Emperor's Club seems to be saying live for the values of the past.

 

HOFFMAN:      Yes, absolutely, and also about living for society and the community.

 

WILLIAMS:       As in one of Hundert's speeches related to the plaque that hangs over the doorÉ

 

HOFFMAN:      Yea, he asks "What contribution will you make? Will history remember you? And also, when they read that plaque back to him their point is that Ð I can't remember exactly how it goes Ð that a teacher's life is almost invisible, his life goes over into other lives. There's some notion of what you contribute to the good of others is at the very center of what this movie is about.

 

WILLIAMS:       And that is what Hundert struggles with when he's leaving his classroom. There are the shots of his belongings in the box and the plaque is sticking out of the box. It's an ironic shot because you know that this teacher has affected hundreds of lives [is that where the name Hundert comes from?] and yet he may never be remembered.

 

HOFFMAN:      And you can see the way his own ego involvement has gotten him off his path. I mean, it's a very Franciscan notion about Hundert.

 

WILLIAMS:       Why do you say Franciscan?

 

HOFFMAN:      Because St. Francis talks about how the bird prays by flying. Well, Hundert prays by teaching. And when he stops teaching there's a way in which he stops praying. The connection, to wherever his inspiration and power comes from, sort of dies.

 

WILLIAMS:       Let me ask you about your upbringing, and about the presence or absence of any religious faith in your life?

 

HOFFMAN:      O, yes, of course. Certainly. My paternal grandfather was a revivalist preacher, a Free Methodist.

 

WILLIAMS:       Michael! What a small world. I also came from a Free Methodist background.

 

HOFFMAN:      O, that's wild. Well, you know exactly where I came from.

 

[Reader Note: The Free Methodist Church is a very small, Evangelical Christian denomination founded in Pekin, New York in 1860. "The founder, Benjamin Titus Roberts, was an outspoken critic of many current practices of the Methodist Episcopal church, including pew rental and other discriminatory practices that favored rich over the poor, the failure of the Methodist church to stand against slavery, and the increasing "formalism" in worship, including the hiring of professional musicians. In addition he joined a number of other exponents of the necessity of a "second work" of grace beyond salvation during which a believer was thoroughly sanctified, made holy, and set apart to serve God with a whole heart, mind and strength." Today, Free Methodists number less than 100,000 in North America (about 100 members per church), although there are more overseas, especially in Africa. (http://www.fmcna.org)]

 

WILLIAMS:       What was your grandfather's name?

 

HOFFMAN:      Harold T. Hoffman

 

WILLIAMS:       My grandfather, on my father's side, was Free Methodist circuit-rider preacher in the Midwest by the name Jeremiah Williams.

 

HOFFMAN:      I'll be darned.

 

WILLIAMS:       Where was your grandfather a preacher?

 

HOFFMAN:      Well, he came from Iowa. He was like a railroad worker and had a big alcohol problem, and got saved at a tent meeting. He became, just on-fire about his conversion. He had a kind-of interesting Napoleonic physique. He was about 5-foot, one. He was an absolutely, very, veryÑI mean a true believer. I don't know how many churches he started, but it was incredibly difficult to be his child. At certain points he just left the family or put them in foster homes. He and his wife lived out of missionary barrels, and made only 75-cents a week. The kids were shuffled around from one family to another because nothing was as important as saving another soul.

 

WILLIAMS:       My grandfather was not a very good father either. He too was gone most of the time from his family preaching.

 

HOFFMAN:      My father had a terrible time. He grew up really believing that his father was God. He could not distinguish between them, and always kind of lived in a fear of his father.

 

WILLIAMS:       So, how did your dad raise you religiously?

 

HOFFMAN:      My father never rebelled, at all. The thing is with the Free Methodists, you don't have to do much to feel like you're rebelling. If you played a round of golf on Sunday afternoon you're courting damnation.

 

WILLIAMS:       You're not kidding.

 

HOFFMAN:      No. And then my mother came from a very different background. I think she grew up United MethodistÑ[a mainline Protestant church and a far cry from Free Methodism and its adherence to a holiness-legalistic life style]. Her parents were in this little town in Idaho and her dad was a big baseball coach, and Coke-a-Cola bottler, and they very respect in the town. Mom was the bell of the ball in high school. Why or how they got married I don't know, but when they did marry it was an unfortunate accident for both of them. They didn't have a particularly good marriage.  She was someone who always felt connected to God, and I think my father felt haunted by it. It was a funny thing with Free Methodism. What always impressed me was that there was almost no sense of forgiveness.

 

WILLIAMS:       Ah, yes.

 

HOFFMAN:      It took me going to the Riverside Church in New York City and listening to William Sloan Coffin stand up and say after the prayer of confession, "You are forgiven." It was the first time in my life, I think I was 27 at the time, that it actually occurred to me that this notion of forgiveness, which is quite obviously at the center of Christian faith, had any relevance whatsoever. It never crossed my mind. It was so weird. How could you spend all of your childhood in Christian churches and never, ever feel that forgiveness could be on some level of reality?

 

WILLIAMS:       Well, that was my experience in Free Methodism. When I was a teen, we were always going forward to the altar [rail] every Sunday night to get re-saved.

 

HOFFMAN:      That was nuts. Just nuts. Anyway, in an attempt to make the marriage work and get the family back together - - since my Dad wouldn't go to the First Methodist Church - - my mom decided we would all go to church together. So, at 13 I was thrust into this little country church that my grandfather had started. That was the first time I was ever exposed to the Evangelical thing, and it was shocking to me. It was confusing and it created a great deal of guilt and anxiety, and every week there were these altar calls. There was all this pressure to be saved, because I was part of this legacyÑI was the grandson of Harold Hoffman. At the time, I thought, "This is really strange. I'm not feeling anything. It all felt trumped up and kind-of hysterical to me. They were nice people, but again it seemed strangely narcissisticÑthis obsession with the state of your soul that would prevent you front taking any action in the world. I was much more drawn to the notion that if this is relevant, it has to be relevant in the world. And that is one reason I've been drawn to Catholicism.

 

WILLIAMS:       Are you Catholic?

 

HOFFMAN:      I'm not, but I've spent an awful lot of time at Mass. I have a number of Catholic priests who are friends of mine, and I'm in constant dialogue with them.

 

WILLIAMS:       That is absolutely fascinating because my wife and I were raised Free Methodist here in the Southern Michigan Conference, which was one of the more liberal conferences of the denomination.

 

HOFFMAN:      Which isn't saying much, I imagine.

 

WILLIAMS:       We both graduated from a Free Methodist college. While I was working on my doctorate in Film Studies I was studying logical fallacies, and that led me to finally made a break with Evangelicalism. I could finally give names to the theological and philosophical contradictions that haunt Evangelicalism. I jumped around for a while to other Christian churches but then, my wife and I became Catholic, just five years ago. It was like coming home.

 

HOFFMAN:      That's wonderful. We understand that.

 

WILLIAMS:       Could you please tell me aboutÉ

 

HOFFMAN:      Éwhen I finally had a kind-of conversion experience?

 

WILLIAMS:       Yea.

 

HOFFMAN:      It was in a movie theater.

 

WILLIAMS:       O, fabulous. I want to hear this.

 

Hoffman:         There's this phrase in Nazarene circlesÉwhen they say "you're under conviction" it means you're ripe for some kind-of, ahÉ

 

WILLIAMS:       Catharsis or conversion?

 

HOFFMAN:      Yea, it was like that.  I felt like the character is WISE BLOOD (John Huston, 1979)Éwho no matter where he looksÉor where I lookedÉI was seeing something that said, "Jesus Saves." It was like the world was attacking me. It was this weird phenomenological kind-of constant anxiety.

 

Well, I was up in Seattle where I went to this film festival and saw a Krzysztof Zanussi movie. Krzysztof's Polish and Catholic and the movie was called IMPERATIV (1982). It's about a guy who's in the midst of his own existential crisis and he's alienated this woman who deeply loves him. He's all by himself; he's like aggressively alone. He goes to a Russian Orthodox Church. There's a priest there but there's no congregation, none. No one is every there, except the priest. So he starts harassing the priest: "Why would you do this? Why does this matter? Why would you waste your time when in fact there is no one here? What good is this religion?" In the meantime he finds out about the Holy of Hollies in the church. At one point, when the priest goes out to get groceries, he goes in to profane the Holy of Hollies and test God. He reaches behind the screen and touches the icon or something, I don't remember exactly what it is. In the moment he touches it, he goes mad. There's a long sequence where he's institutionalized and he can't speak. It culminates in a moment when he's working in the kitchen chopping food with this huge knifeÉand he chops off his finger, the finger that had profaned the Holy of Hollies. And in that moment, the movie, which has been so far in black and white, goes to color, and he's healed.

 

WILLIAMS:       Wow!

 

HOFFMAN:      And he's talking againÉwith this girl that he had pushed away at the beginning of the movieÉand he's joyful. He quotes St. Augustine from the Confessions saying:  "You have sought me because you have found me." As soon as I heard those words I began to cry and I must have stayed in that movie theater and wept for half an hour.

 

What was interesting is this: I realized that all my life it was God that I had sought. But because I had so much intellectual curiosity and capacity I had been taught at home, all my life, that I was on the road to hell.

 

WILLIAMS:       (laughs)

 

HOFFMAN:      No! It really was. My father never saw a movie until he was 18 years old. They never danced.

 

WILLIAMS:       Yes, that's how it was, maybe still is.

 

HOFFMAN:      I was in this constant sort-of battle with feeling like there had to be some room for alternative truth,Éand somehow in that moment, it felt very much as if those words, "You have sought me because you have found me" were addressed to me. Since then I have never had any anxiety, ever again, about any of this stuff. Never, ever, one minute since that moment. Yet, I feel very free to question and explore with these Catholic priests who are friends of mine.

 

WILLIAMS:       That's great. So, do you go to church now, with your family?

 

HOFFMAN:      Yes. But, to tell the truth with the finishing of this movie it's been difficult. But my wife is not particularly interested. She was raised like an atheist, very secularist, but very moral and ethical. She is less so than her parents. So, I'll take the kids to an Episcopal Church weeks in a row. But sometimes I'll say to her, I'm not going to fight you anymore about this, we're just going to have home church. So, I take the kids upstairs to my office and I teach them hymns, and read them Bible stories, and I found a couple of books that have homilies, and we talk about what matters and what matters in terms of behavior to each other. Also, in the Thomas Merton tradition, we sit and meditate together for a while.

 

WILLIAMS:       That's great. One final question. Just as a protagonists have physical and spiritual goals, what are Michael Hoffman's goals, especially as it has to do with movies?

 

HOFFMAN:      I always want to tell stories that are somehow about the gap that the Cross describes, the intersection of the terrestrial and the spiritual, the gap between idea and matter, the ideal and the real. That's what I loved about The Emperor's Club. Ethan Canin always posits this kind-of idealistic protagonist, and sticks them in this non-idealistic world. Ethan is a medical doctor, a scientist, and he has a Darwinist prejudice. No question, he's a determinist, he's a materialist, he believes that a tiger is always a tiger and the snake is always a snake, and that Sedgewick Bell will always be Sedgewick BellÉthat human nature is pretty much immutableÑwe are what we are. But, then he introduces an idealistic protagonist like Hundert, and sticks him in the real world. That creates the tension between a man who wants things to be better and different and malleable and changeable and progressive, and a world that is an onward plodding, biological reality. In that gap between the hope for things to be other, or for something paradisiacal or perfectible, and the kind-of resistance that matter manifests, that's the relationship that interests me.

 

The USCCB rates The Emperor's Club A-II -- adults and adolescents for mild sexual innuendo, fleeting topless photos and a few instances of profanity. (PG-13). The full review is available at: http://www.usccb.org/movies/e/theemperorsclub.htm.

 

Stan Williams, Ph.D., is a writer, producer, and director for SWC Films, a feature film development and production company.