Matt Tyrnauer Discusses His New Film

KALA HERH I’m sure you’ve been asked this question a lot, but can you tell me why you chose Roy Cohn as your subject for this movie? 

MATT TYRNAUER Roy Cohn created a president from beyond the grave, which as far as I can tell, is an unprecedented achievement in the annals of American history. That's the principal reason. However, this project goes back to 2016. I was making a previous film of mine, Studio 54 that year and watching a lot of archival of Roy Cohn because he is the lawyer for Studio 54. He was an explosive character on screen and I knew that he was Donald Trump's mentor. So with the political campaign serving that year, I kept thinking to myself, Roy Cohn is an incredible character for a documentary, one that's never been done before. But, the only reason to make such a film is if Donald Trump wins and it's impossible for Donald Trump to win. So as soon as I thought of it, I banished it from my mind because I just didn't think that it would be the film to make in 2017. When Trump won the Electoral College, I began working on the film the next day because I think that if you want to understand Trump, you have to look at Roy Cohn. That is why it's so. 

HERH You talked a little bit about Studio 54 and his appearance in that. What during this process resonated with you about Cohn?

TYRNAUER Well, you know, I make a couple of types of documentary. One is cinéma vérité, where the characters are around and I follow them with cameras. That type of movie has a particular feel and structure to it. When the main character is no longer with us, you have to depend mostly on archival footage. There was no one who lived more of a paralyzed life, who wasn't an actual TV personality than Roy Cohn. He began his career in the infancy of television during the early McCarthy period and then lived with paralyzed life until his death in 1986. So the wishes of archival were tremendous. And that became evident to me in watching all of the footage we were getting in the Studio 54 films. He was a public character and he was a consummate performer. That was part of his very calculated persona. He understood that people wanted to be entertained and he entertained them on the news for us or in the newspapers for his entire life. And there is, of course, there is an oblique connection to Trump, who's also an entertainer, these two guys are no laughing matter. Cohn was a dangerous, manipulative, malign demagog and demagog whisper and Trump is the most powerful man in the world and the most dangerous man in the world. 

HERH During your process of filming, I imagine that you developed an intimate relationship with Roy Cohn. Did your opinion, during this whole process of filming and archival, change when you finished the film? 

TYRNAUER That's a great question always because generally when you start to do any big project, you learn a tremendous amount and your opinions and your perceptions shift because you take on a huge amount of information. Making them making a movie or writing a book is in some ways like doing a Ph.D. thesis.

HERH [laughs] I never thought about it that way before.

TYRNAUER I mean, it's an enormously detailed and elaborate process. The joy of it is the real love of learning and exploring all of this incredible material and then coming to conclusions. You know, I never thought that my opinion of Cohn would change in the sense that I would find him to be a good person at the end of this. And indeed, I did not. I think that, if anything, he is much worse than I thought he was. And again, that's why I made the movie because I suspected he might be. He's also someone famously who was empathy-free. It's very hard to have empathy for someone who is a lying narcissist who is free of empathy. So I don't have much for him. And I do think that he was even more of a hypocrite than I knew. So I think my perception of him changed and became even darker. However, I wouldn't say the movie is the heaviest going film made this year because I discovered that he was so quirky and strange and bizarre in a dark way, in the way that a supervillain has incredibly dark, sulfurous aspects of their character. But, their bizarre behavior creates a level of intrigue. People made an interesting point that Where's My Roy Cohn and the Joker are sometimes playing side by side in movie theaters. I would say that Zeitgeist often shows us things that we're not perceiving in the way that suddenly Hollywood started cranking out film noir pictures in the years after the war, which was really a sunny time in America. It was a time of enormous prosperity and the baby boom was happening. People were building white picket fences and digging swimming pools. But at the same time, the Holocaust was revealed and the nuclear bomb was now a reality. So the content of Hollywood films in large part became very dark and somewhat sinister. I think we're in this another time like that right now where even if the stock market is, you know, going to new highs and unemployment's at an all-time low since the 60s, there's a tremendous amount of angst around the world. I got a tremendous amount of angst on a global scale. Right now, we're living in very uncertain and very dark times that are potentially cataclysmic. Art is starting to reflect that. Arch-villains are probably the order of the day in the cinema. I don't think that's going to stop for some time. So there probably is some sort of reason that the Joker and Where's My Roy Cohn are side by side. 

HERH That’s an eerie reflection. Roy Cohn seems to be a character literally born of politicking, with his father marrying his mother to get a judgeship, how does the story contextualize either aesthetically, visually, or audibly this aspect of his personality?

Yeah, so the palette for this film is the palette of film noir. But its kind of color noir and I looked specifically at the TV show Columbo, which was one of the greatest achievements on television in the 1970s. It's actually happened to be a show that my father wrote on, he was a TV writer and producer. I've always admired it. I was too young to watch most of it when it was on. But I went back and watched all of them. And I think they're really wonderful. It so happens that a lot of the film noir cinematographers worked on those shows and they were working with color film because TV at that time had to be in color. And that palette really struck me. When I looked at the archival film of the real Roy Cohn tooling around on his nefarious missions and mob attorney tasks in the late 60s and 70s, there was a similar dark cast to this color footage. So I created a static that was color noir, basically, and that's how the dark nature of the character is expressed cinematically. 

HERH Beautiful work that chronicles his life and his ascent to power. Let’s take a departure for a second and talk about your process of filming. What were acquiring interviewees, sifting through archival footage, and overall just working with the subject like?

TYRNAUER I have the same process generally. I find out who was around to speak authoritatively as a primary source, or has done the most research. Then I generally arrange that list of potential interviewees by descending order of age to make sure that someone who is a senior age is willing to partake as soon as possible. Just, you know, in case something should happen. So that's the first step. You find out from people who are primary sources about other people. You have to be flexible. In terms of the archival, we find out where unseen footage goes, sort of staggered pursuits. Usually in my films, a lot of the archival as never before seen because I like to be that way. And I think it adds a certain reality and professional aspect. So visually and also in terms of storytelling and it's a very thorough process -- probably a lot more detailed and difficult than a lot of people might realize. I get very involved in every selection of frame, probably more so than other filmmakers, but I personally obsessed with it and enjoy it. If I don't like what I see, I frequently ask for other options and probably draw everyone a little bit crazy until I get the best. 

HERH I’ve also read that you’re a writer! When and why did you decide to make the venture into documentary work? 

TYRNAUER Well, you know, I for quite some time editor at large at Vanity Fair, which is to say a writer of feature articles for the most part and always had a great love for film from childhood. I was a film major in college and I was working as a journalist very happily. But there was a certain type of documentary approach that I took to my journalism. If you read these long magazine articles that I did for Vanity Fair, they were frequently observational characters, who spoke at length in their own voice. And I really felt that I was very influenced by documentary and direct cinema. For example, I featured the movies by the Maysles Brothers like Gray Gardens in my journalism work. So it seemed to me that documentary filmmaking could be a type of extension to all of that journalism work that I did. And I was looking for years for a subject that would lend itself to a documentary film that would be my first. I finally stumbled upon it with Valentino and his business partner, Giancarlo Giamatti. I had written a Vanity Fair piece about these two men and it seemed like a movie to me. I asked them if they would take part and they said yes and that I was awful making this film. I was feeling my way, using all the knowledge that I had from academic major and film, but no real practical experience. And it turned out OK. It was a kind of a surprise hit documentary. It had a huge success at the theatrical box office. It really opened the door to an entirely new career. 

HERH That’s very interesting. Just a brief mention about Valentino, if you will, what did you find harder to tell in Where’s My Roy Cohn compared to Valentino: The Last Emperor? How was the filming process different? 

TYRNAUER Well, they're very different types of movies. The archival movie is much more contained because you have two types of footage, generally speaking, which is interview footage which you shoot and that archival which you acquire and then cut down and shake cinema verite. This is the genre of Valentino and another film of mine called, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. So you have all of this shot footage that you have to structure into your narrative. By large in archival film is slightly less challenging to cut than a cinema verite. Every film is really different and presents unique challenges, but archival film you have slightly fewer wild cards because when you're shooting cinema verite you're never sure whether you're going to get really what you need. So I would say that you can kind of see your path more clearly with an archival film which may make it a slightly less challenging operation. 

HERH Another note on Valentino: The Last Emperor, the fashion world is also in some ways about ego. In your opinion what if any is the connecting thread or theme that weaves the personalities of fashion and Roy Cohn himself? 

TYRNAUER Megalomania and narcissism are endemic to the world of fashion. But even the most difficult and notorious fashion designer couldn't hold a candle to someone like Cohn, who was probably a victim of narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder or both. He used his formidable intelligence consistently for evil.

HERH With Valentino and Studio 54, you were a producer in the process as well as a director. In a documentary, do those roles morph into each other? 

TYRNAUER Well, you know, I think producing and directing can be very similar and very different tasks. The producer-director is generally someone who is creatively involved and also structurally involved in the project, but there are no good or great directors without great producers. There has to be someone other than yourself collaborating with you. If you look at the people who stand out in the field of directing, there's generally someone who is either partnering with them on the producorial side or backstopping them. It's very hard to maintain a level of quality in a career without a great producer if you are in the business of directing. Creative processes are always messy and that's why it's so brilliant and fun to partake in, but you always need to bring order to the chaos and the producer, when they're doing their best work, generally is the person who does that. So directors who are hitting their marks have a lot of thanks to their producers. 

HERH I never knew that filmmakers would so be engaged in their work even down to the frame. You discussed interviewing and the wide scope of people you did interview. Is there anyone you wanted to interview, but said no? 

TYRNAUER Yes, Barbara Walter. I want to ask her "WTF, what was going on?" I made several approaches through intermediaries and she hasn't given any interviews in quite some time. And I think she hasn't been very well. Another one was Robert Morgenthau, who was both the U.S. attorney and district attorney of Manhattan in the 60s and 70s. Throughout his career, he was the person who went after him most assiduously but never managed to get across a conviction on three indictments. Morgenthau, while we were shooting the film, was alive and I think was over 100 years old. Unfortunately, he died, I think, right when we were releasing the film. My understanding is that he didn't want to speak about Cohn because it was such a disappointment for him. That he was unable to achieve a conviction. And I think that was a real loss because he was someone who made a valiant attempt but didn't succeed. I think it would have been nice to hear from him. 

HERH What was the most challenging part of making the film?

TYRNAUER Taking a character who is so relentlessly malign, so dark just having that sort of soul in a way and not an assault on the audience was the biggest challenge. Other than the fact that he's not around anymore, and bringing a character back to life is always a significant challenge when you're making an archival film. But, by having his story not be a business assault on the audience, but having it be 90 some minutes of informative and at times frightening entertainment with a very serious loss to it was the biggest challenge. 

HERH I imagine there are such great stories — are there any that didn’t make the cut that you miss? 

TYRNAUER There were a lot of stories that were involving unsolved murders. I spoke to a retired police detective in New York City and several other people who said that they had a lot of documentation. A lot of these crimes are really terrible and involved in one case, underage boys, things that were really really sinister. However, there wasn't enough to go on in the movie really. Given the urgent political crisis we're all living in right now, I limited the scope. But I wish I could have had a few more hours to tell the story. 

HERH If there is one thing your audience could take away from Where’s My Roy Cohn, what would it be?

TYRNAUER A deeper understanding of the current political crisis and the symptom of that, Donald Trump. There's an aphorism by the philosopher George Santayana, "Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it." At this point, it’s almost a cliche, but it’s something that we really need to remember. The movie was made as a political statement but as an oblique essay of a film to make a point about where we’ve come in our politics. If we don’t understand the origin story, I don’t think we’ll be able to finesse our way out of this frightening political moment. 

HERH Do you think you’ll choose to make feature films or stay with documentaries as a genre? 

TYRNAUER I’m set to direct a feature based on an article of mine from Vanity Fair called “Once Upon a Time in Beverly Hills”. We’re involved in casting and trying to put the project together. Any film that gets made is a miracle. I would love the opportunity to direct this process because it is material that I reported on and created from scratch.

Interview first published on Musée Magazine

Photos courtesy of Sony Picture Classics