We Got This Covered: So you just mentioned Tommy and yourself made some tweaks to the script, and one line I absolutely love is when Tommy mentions showing some “good old-fashioned American Swagger.” Was that originally in the script, or was that one of the lines tweaked between Tommy and yourself?
Peter Webber: That wasn’t tweaked, that was there, but I’ll tell you the line he added – a line, one line that he added. At the very end there is an insult, and he didn’t like the insult that was in there – I can’t remember what it was originally. He came to me on the morning of the shoot with something like thirty different American insults written down, which was great because he didn’t just come with one line, but he came with all these options. The one I liked the best, which I never heard beforehand, was telling someone to go “piss up a rope,” so that was great. He’s not someone who just comes to you with problems though as you can see, he comes to you with solutions, and you can’t ask for more from your actors. As a director, often actors will kind of go “Oh my character wouldn’t do this, my character wouldn’t do that,” but to have someone who comes along and says “I don’t think this is good enough, I think we can do better,” that’s fantastic. That’s what you want, you want a collaboration where everyone’s pulling together and going in the same direction.
We Got This Covered: Talking about how Tommy embodies General MacArthur, when you look at the picture that’s snapped when he meets Emperor Hirohito (Takatarô Kataoka), and to marvel at how closely it mirrors the actual picture, how rewarding is that as a director to know you re-created a piece of history?
Peter Webber: Well that is fantastic, and it’s all the different departments coming together. It’s the costume, set design, acting, but it’s a great feeling when you finally do it. It can be nerve-racking before that, when you’re working on something that is based on such a well-known photograph, but it was a good moment.
We Got This Covered: Do you find anything more rewarding when creating a historical drama as opposed to just straight fiction?
Peter Webber: Not necessarily. Different films have different rewards basically. It’s a fantastic privilege to do this for a living frankly. I was a film nut for a long time, and I worked as an editor, so it was far from certain I’d ever get to the point where I could direct movies with major movie stars. I don’t think it really matters, there’s a continuum there. You find pleasure in different parts of the process, you get to pick and choose, and every film has something different to offer you. You find something in the material you’re interested in, and you work towards the formal considerations of the medium to try and address those. I sound so pompous, “formal considerations of the medium.” You basically figure out a way to tell the story using the tools you have, that’s what I’m trying to say. For me, it doesn’t matter if it’s a contemporary piece, a historical piece, you find you burrow into it, and different ones have different pleasures.
We Got This Covered: Did you feel any pressure making a film mostly based on historical data?
Peter Webber: If you care, you feel pressure with every film. I’m sure that even directors of the dumbest action movies feel pressure. Everyone wants to make a great movie, I don’t know anyone who goes off and says “Well I’m just going to go make a shitty movie.” It takes as much effort to make a bad movie as it does to make a good movie [laughs], and what is a good movie? I’ve made films that were badly reviewed in the past, then you speak to people and find they have an audience, so it’s very much in the eye of the beholder.
We Got This Covered: So what’s next on your plate after you’ve finished promoting Emperor?
Peter Webber: I’ve done my long talky historical film with Emperor, so I’m actually in talks to do a kind of vicious, nasty, action-filled spaghetti-western with very little dialogue at the moment, so I’ll know in the next week or two whether that’s coming up. If it is, it’s actually to be shot where they did a lot of the original spaghetti-westerns in Italy itself.
I’m an enormous fan of film history, I love re-creating film genres from the past basically which I did with Emperor which is kind of like a film noir, so I’m very into doing something like that and worrying about how people hold guns other than how they approach history. I think that would be a nice change.
We Got This Covered: [Laughing] That sounds a hell of a lot easier, doesn’t it?
Peter Webber: [Laughing] I don’t know if it does, I actually think it might be a little bit harder in some ways, trying to come up with a fresh take, but there you go, different challenges, that’s the important thing.
We Got This Covered: Well you’ve also done a Hannibal film in the past, is there anything you’d want to return to horror for?
Peter Webber: Yeah, I think so. Hannibal Rising was one of those things where when it came out, it was really, really, savagely attacked by the press. I can only remember one good review out of San Francisco in fact. I’m on Twitter a lot though, and I’ve discovered a whole community out there of people, especially teenage Goth girls, who absolutely love that film! Now they love it because they’ve probably never seen Silence of the Lambs, and they come to it without expectations. They come to it thinking “Oh there’s this film with this cool kid in it,” and they really warm to it. It’s not something people my age love that much, but for me that’s a wonderful thing to see, that a film can find it’s audience like that, and I’d happily go back to that genre, yes.
We Got This Covered: So just as a question, what would be the perfect film to give to those Goth girls?
Peter Webber: Ohhhh, my gosh. Listen, I’m going to have to get back to you because rather than give you my idea, I’m going to write a treatment and try and sell it I think [Laughs]. I don’t want to give my ideas away for free!
Thanks so much to Peter Webber for taking the time to talk with us. Be sure to catch Emperor, which was limitedly released on March 8th, 2013!