Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Charlie Rose 20161204

I believe in the character we read about on the page being more real than the man who stands beside you. Jack. Jack, can you hear me . Jack . Jack. You, their history. Men need to know that real actually lived here. I have grown accustomed to a great divide between what people believe and what i know to be real. How would you like him to be remembered . There is no crying. There should be more horses, more men, more cameras. What is wrong with you . You dont have to do this. I will march with jack. Alone if necessary. Im guessing you wont allow me to write any of that. Im guessing you wont allow me to write any of that. No, because i never said that. A. O. joining me is the director of the film, pablo larrain, and natalie portman. First ladys former jacqueline kennedy. This movie tells a story that is very familiar. People remember where they were, seeing the zapruder film. What was the appeal of going and what new dimensions were you looking for . Pablo i am from chile, so not related directly to the story. I was invited to this opportunity to get into this womans life, which is what the film deals with. There is the first ladys side. Jackies i guess in this story. But the story that attracted me was the one of a woman and a mother. One who is normally protected by other people and ends up protecting those around her. I think it is what we tried to share with the audience. A. O. natalie, what was it like for you . I mean, this is one of the most famous women in American History and yet, she is somewhat enigmatic. She is someone we have seen in the photographs, we have seen in the pink suit and hat. But who we dont really know. How did you find your way into the character . How did you discover the dimensions, intimate and emotional dimensions we see in the film . Natalie yeah, i think its interesting because she is so wellknown, but one of the things we know well about her is how private she was and how much protected she was in her life. One of the famous things about a famous woman. It was scary to take on someone who everyone feels like they have a handle on, but there is very little out there. Amazingly, youtube is an incredible resource, just a treasure trove of old interviews even from early campaigns, where you can get a sense of when she is a little rougher, less polished, and of course when she is much more polished in the white house, which we recreated. And then of course, the books that basically every person in her life wrote about her, from the nanny to the bodyguard. Every Single Person had their own book about jackie. So theres a lot of clues. A. O. how important was the voice . It is very striking in this film. I realize that while Jack Kennedys voice is one you can hear in your head and summon up, her voice is less wellknown and is also very particular. It is not a matter of dialect coaching and getting some sort of regional accent. I dont know if anyone talks like that anymore, if very many people ever did. Natalie the sort of aspirational midatlantic movie star kind of accent, and breathiness, combined with this sort of like long island bouvier, grey gardens, eccentricity. It is pretty fun. I think the first day i did onset i saw pablo go, what . Pablo you get used to it. Natalie then you saw the real thing. Its unusual. A. O. how is it to play a real person who is so wellknown, who is such an almost mythological presence in peoples minds and kind of collective National Memory . What are the challenges of finding the person, the emotional dimension of that persons experience . Natalie well i think pablos approach of seeing her as a human and not as an icon and allowing these moments of real imagination and having that sort of license to go places you would not do with someone you revere, the questioning of god and all of these things that we would not necessarily associate immediately with jackie, were helpful in creating more of a round human being. But the i think the Biggest Challenges were when we had to really, you know, like recreating the zapruder film. We did not recreate that. It is different camerawork, of course. But we know exactly what she did facially and physically in such an extreme emotional moment. You are limited by the truth that people are very familiar with. Those scenes were much harder than like, the walk with the priest, where there is a lot of liberty. A. O. i feel like what you are watching and what is so unusual and powerful, but also disturbing about this movie is you are watching both a public event, a political event, hugely consequential act of political violence, tragedy. Youknows, you know have a sense of the chaos that is swirling around jackie kennedy, but it is also this moment where a woman had lost her husband and you feel the collision of the marriage and political life. I mean, how did you kind of organize those themes in a way . Did you come at it from the kennedy story, from the public story and try to go in for jackies experience and try to build out . Pablo we had a great script. And then, i guess, yeah, it is how she built this narrative. She sort of protected jfks legacy and made him a legend. Without kind of knowing it, she became an icon. That is one of the Biggest Challenges. She is very well known. How long does it take for the audience to assume to accept that person is jackie . Kennedy, youjackie know . That is i guess what cinema does. It is hard to describe. There is a limit on it. There is an element of mystery of filmmaking, what natalie is doing, and allowing us to create the allusion of what we were looking for. What i think is very beautiful is somehow she was trying to organize something that ultimately she would not be able to control. That lack of control creates a gap in between the intention and the result and that is where we can work. A. O. i think we have a clip that illustrates that a little bit, where she is talking about the plans for the funeral, you know, with jack valenti. You see a little bit of what you are talking about there. Ive come to discuss tomorrow. The attorney general relayed to me your desire for a more modest ceremony. I changed my mind. Im sorry . I changed my mind. We will have a procession and i will walk to the church with a casket. Even if we could make the arrangements, i am sure the secret service has concerns. And president johnson . President johnson would like nothing more to fulfill your wishes, but i have to ensure his safety. The country could not endure another blow. If it were up to him, he would do anything that might bring you comfort. And who is it up to, mr. Valenti . Were expecting close to 100 heads of state. 103. I am sure thats right. I suspect they will make their own decisions. Based on what . A great deal of classified intelligence that i cannot get into. We intercepted a threat against general degaulle from our people in geneva. Refuses to if he march, others may follow. I understand. I wish there was more we could do to accommodate your wishes. Im sorry. Dont be. You have done so much. Mr. Valenti, would you mind getting a message to all of the funeral guests . Inform them that i will walk with jack tomorrow, alone if necessary, and tell general degaulle that if he wishes to ride in an armored car or a tank for that matter, i wont blame him. I am sure the tens of millions of people watching wont either. Why you doing this, mrs. Kennedy . Im just doing my job. [end video clip] a. O. talk a little bit about the scene but also what is going on behind it. The funeral and the plans for the funeral, which jackie keeps changing her mind about, is one of the key dramatic central issues in the movie. Talk a little bit about what is going on with her and what she is trying to do and how her thinking and feeling evolved around that. Natalie yeah, so, its like you were saying, such a crazy thing to be experiencing something so dramatic and devastating and terrifying personally and also have to worry about a country at the same time. And it is one of the things that is remarkable about here is that she was so aware of it immediately. From the moment it happened, she immediately. From the moment it happened, she refused to take off her suit that was drenched in blood, which is to be in the moment and recognize that your image is important for people and will help tell the story of how it happened was incredible presence of mind. Initially, she wanted to have this big procession to sort of you know, mirror the lincoln funeral procession. It was in order to have a legacy of lasting as important as lincolns, but it is also terrifying because her husband just got shot on her lap in that kind of crowd atmosphere. When we were filming in some of the real places where they eventually did the procession, you see there are windows and roof tops. There are thousands of places for someone wishing pablo but she knew what she was doing, thats what makes her so fascinating. She looked more naive, but she had an incredible sort of communication and sense and smell. All of these things feel like they happen so long ago, but not like that. Fidel castro died 60 years later. What jackie did was, she would keep the pink dress so people knew what happened. She would walk eight city blocks from the white house to the church and would be fully exposed, walking in the eyes of the world, so people would know and she would know what she was doing. There is something in that control that is interesting, because it feels very natural, but at some point i think she knew which he was doing. That is interesting because that is what the movie is about. A. O. there are these moments where she does seem to be asserting control and she is very much a political player dealing with her late husbands brother and the johnsons and the whole complicated washington situation. There are also other times where she feels so isolated and so alone and so vulnerable and just like a woman whose husband had suddenly been killed. There is something about that this is a story about private, personal grief but also about this enormous public event and about how quickly people start competing for control in the story. As soon as something happens, the question becomes whose narrative is this going to be and what is my role . Lets look at another clip, speaking of that, with a scene of jackie and bobby, who is played by peter sarsgaard. Excuse me. Do you know who James Garfield was . No, maam. You know who William Mckinley was or what he did . They were both u. S. President s killed while in office. And what about Abraham Lincoln . Do you know what he did . He won the civil war. He abolished slavery, maam. Thats right. Thank you. Bobby, please tell them i want to focus on lincoln, not his funeral. A. O. this movie is about an assassination and transfer of power. It is also about a marriage. What did you come to think about this is a marriage that has been dissected and talked about endlessly in books and articles and we might think we know all the secrets of it, but with you feel like you learned about jack and jackie . Natalie well, it is one of the most interesting aspects of the story to me because she was a woman who really defined herself sort of in that era through her husband and took that role on for herself and thought the most important thing in her life was to be her husbands wife and to be the best wife to him as possible. She says, and we have her in the movie with a real quote, that it was their happiest years in the white house because before she was seen as this liability to the campaign, and he tried to hide her away because of her sophistication and everything was alienating to American Voters who wished to see her with flour up to her elbows, baking. When she got to the white house, she became so popular and women started doing their hair like her and emulating her and learning french. She set off a craze. This amazingound mannequin this jackie film. He put into the she was so happy that he valued her. That made her feel better than ever. The assassination, not only does it take away her president , and the grief with that, but it takes away her identity as a wife and then has to reestablish that, which she does, despite her own intentions to define herself as a wife. She cannot help but be herself and cannot help but assert her humanity, her independence, her complexity. It is wonderful to see that a woman who has internalized everything that society has given her cant help but be incredibly strong and powerful and complicated. A. O. did you find sometimes that as a woman of the present era that it was hard to get back into that reality and that mindset, that sort of older, more traditional set of gender roles and expectations . Natalie no, because i think we know now more than ever that we live with that very, very deeply still. I mean certainly i had my grandmother as that American Woman in the same mold that i grew up with and you feel it as a woman still, but that is very much of value and part of your identity. That is part of how you see yourself. A. O. most of your other films you have made have been about men and often ordinary characters who were caught up in politics, especially during the pinochet dictatorship. I mean, how was it for you to make a film for a central female character and also to come into a different social and political reality, to come to make a film, not only an american story, but an american story that every american thinks they already know . Pablo that is hard. I dont know. If you think for one second what you are actually doing, it might be paralyzing. So it is a complicated issue for a lot of people and there was a lot of pain involved and a lot of historical evidence that i am not in control of. I guess the key here was how she would take the character and how they shot the movie. The rest of the cast, we were around her. We were capturing her all the time. The biggest challenge for me was to make a movie about a woman and capture it as the specific sensibility that comes from a strength that we dont have, that we dont necessarily understand, and try to put that weight on her life and on her behavior and her performance. I understand there are a lot of issues around the voice and many things, but i think what we are actually doing here is a story of a mother, someone who, at some point, opened a huge umbrella and everyone felt protected by her. That is something that is hard to express. That is why we make movies. We need to use that media to express things that otherwise would not exist. There is no other art form that could actually travel in time and create an illusion. Absurd, toimately so have all these people recreating something you know so well. There are something there want to try to understand. We keep chasing that. I dont know, i thought it was very beautiful, this womans strength. A. O. can you talk about one more element of the movie that anyone who sees it, and anyone watching this program, will notice that the music, it is a strong score and it is used in an unusually expressive way. Can you Say Something about how because i think it does help to complete the picture, to give some of the emotional power that you were talking about and to help us see that we are seeing a story, maybe a new story in a way we are not expecting to see it. Pablo the composer did this incredible soundtrack for us. What happens also is the movie is divided by different jackies and the moments of those eight or 10 days. The music helps to put everything together, to reunite her. All those ideas seem to be so separated and thanks to the music, it seems to be one single thing. Even though the music is very different. What it really does is it creates a sensation and a mood. It is made not only by the storytelling, but the atmosphere. It helps create emotional tension with the audience. Very unsettling sometimes, and sometimes you can relate. It will never be very easy. You get away from it, you are close again, you feel projected onto it and then you will feel settling and disappointing. I think it is proper for a movie like this. A. O. it matches what the character is going through, also. I mean what the audience is feeling but also as a goes back and forth in time from the immediate aftermath of the assassination to the interviews that she is doing later with journalists, to her memories of time with jack. There are so many different emotional notes that you have to strike. And yet somehow being the same person. I guess to wrap it up, her sense of who jackie is having, or was, having gone through the experience of becoming her, or at least pretending to be her. Natalie yeah, well, i think it is almost impossible to say who anyone is, even yourself, is a challenge. So to do that for someone you have never met is hard. She is still a mystery to many, with a lot of really impressive Life Experiences and acts that she did, which are both brave and, at times, weak. At times, wild. She was really a complicated person. A. O. the movie is jackie, and it will be in theaters starting december 2. Im so glad it has brought you here to this table. Charlie Regina Spektor is here. The russian born singersongwriter has been called her generations Joni Mitchell. Equal parts whimsical storyteller and classically trained pianist. Tom petty called her one of the most talented musicians alive today. Her seventh album is a return to her musical roots, remember us to life. Rolling stone says the album is full of brilliant, underdog songs. Here is Regina Spektor performing older and taller in our studio. Charlie im pleased to have Regina Spektor at this table for the first time. Welcome. Regina thank you, charlie. Im so glad to be here. I just love you and the show very much. Charlie thank you. Were honored to have you here and congratulations on this, this is quite something. Regina thank you. Charlie youre quite something. Does the reference to Joni Mitchell please you . Regina very much so. To me, shes one of the most incredible and unique musicians and when i discovered her music, it actually gave me the realization that i could maybe try and write some songs too because i think in my mind it was sort of relegated because i loved so many bands like the beatles or queen or the moody blues and then there were the russian bard singers. It was all these men and for some reason, i just thought i dont know what i thought but i didnt think that i should be writing songs. Charlie tell us about your musical journey. From russia to the u. S. Regina i think that my journey has a lot to do with kind people who decided to help, because both my parents are artists and artistic and they really believed in, you know, share art, share classical concerts. Music was always playing in the house and they decided to teach me music and even though my mom was a piano teacher, she really thought that it would be better for me to study with a separate teacher because then you dont have this kind of oppressive childhood where your parent is your teacher and they know what you should be doing. And so she was able to help and i had an amazing teacher in moscow. As a matter of fact, that was really the only thing that was kind of holding my parents back when they wanted to immigrate to america, was knowing that i probably wouldnt learn music anymore. Charlie from the same teacher . Regina from the same teacher, or maybe at all. Because, you know, i mean, you have to pay for Music Education and nobody spoke the language and they really didnt know what kind of life they were going to have here. Now that im an adult, i see what they were facing and its just its mindboggling to me the strength you have to leave your country, leave your language to start a better life for your children. Charlie leaving everything. Regina everything. All your things. I mean you know, the piano i played on, we had to leave. I didnt have a piano for years after that and the reason why i was able to continue my studies is that we moved to the bronx and my father took a night job and he was coming home on the subway back to our neighborhood in kings bridge and there was a man on the train who was older and he had a violin case next to him and my dad had played violin and they started a conversation because my dad is very much a people person and he loves to know peoples stories and the man invited us all to their house, to him and his wifes house to hear some Classical Music being played, because my dad mentioned that we hadnt heard concerts in a long time and we werent really going to because thats not what we had the money to be spending on tickets. So when we went to their house, i asked sonia vargas and the gentleman was samuel marder. I asked her to be my teacher and she said of course. And thats really the reason why i was able to study music from the age of 10 onwards and have the skills. Charlie and what did you want to be . What did you want to do . Regina this is interesting because, when i was really little, i kept saying i wanted to be a composer and it was explained to me by very nice, commonsense people that its very hard to be a composer and you have to be brilliant to be a composer. But you could be a classical pianist if you wanted to and you could play brilliant peoples works. Somewhere along the line, i stopped saying composer and said i wanted to be a classical pianist. Except when i hit the teenage years, the thing they hadnt realized was that more than your love of music, your emotions, your desperate need to play, you also had to have the talent for a certain kind of work ethic and that work ethic is a talent in itself and i didnt have it when it came to sitting those hours and hours and theres that its like the plane taking off. You have to reach that certain kind of speed to become a Classical Musician, which is basically an olympian of music and i couldnt reach it because i wanted to, you know, scribble thoughts in a notebook or charlie you wanted to write songs . Regina i didnt know it yet but yeah, i wanted to write songs. I wanted to write poetry. I wanted to read books as opposed to sit and practice. Charlie so how did you get to where you are so that tom petty and everybody else thinks youre so terrific . Regina i was always humming and singing to myself and singing a lot in the shower and i didnt realize i was doing it. And then i went on this trip as a teenager to israel on a scholarship and the trip was basically for teenagers that were interested in the arts and interested in discovering more about their Cultural Heritage and i was always, since coming to america, i was very interested in learning about my jewish heritage because it had been so forbidden in soviet russia and so when we got to america, i went to yeshiva and i learned about the holidays and it was just another part of figuring out my peoples story, and when i went there, hiking in the desert was so difficult that i guess i was singing a lot to myself as i was hiking and so all these kids started kind of hiking around me and they said, you know, you have a really good voice and you should try and write songs and you should learn an instrument and that was sort of i think i am one of those people, it takes me to the very obvious thing and that is when i started to write songs when i got back to new york. Charlie and you still play the piano . Regina yeah, no, i love playing and i love writing. All these songs have been written in the last few years. All my previous albums have spanned sometimes 10 years of picking songs from yesterday and from, you know, 10 years earlier and theyve been mixed. This is all new work. And its really hard to analyze your own work but i felt like these songs needed to be together because i felt like i was changing and i was i was sort of in some strange way growing up, because during the making and the writing of this album, i had i had previously lost people in my life they loved very much and it was sort of my first, like, deep dive into grief, which i had really been sheltered from. And then after that, i had my i was pregnant and then had my child, my son and so all of that was this strange, i dont know this strange experience of a new type of living in a new type of reality where i felt like i wasnt the child anymore. I was now the parent and i wasnt maybe carefree in the world. I was experiencing what so many others have been experiencing for a long time. I just sort of stepped into it and it was this kind of bittersweet welcome into, uh, this new type of reality. Charlie take a look at this. Were going to show a clip from the music video from the trapper and the furrier. Trapper and the furrier went walking through paradise they took some for now and they got some for later and they marveled at the pelts not a bullet hole in them. And they filled up the cages with pets for their children what a strange, strange world we live in where the good are damned and the wicked forgiven what a strange, strange world we live in charlie how would you describe your sound . Youve described it as using orchestral colors. Regina i think its hard for me to think of myself and a sound because i am generating music a lot of the time and it comes from just being in the world and oftentimes walking, especially in new york, when i walk to a place, i will write and then once that once i have to come in to actually really write, not just in my imagination. Then i have to go from these abstract imaginary sounds into real life. So i could hear a sound in my head but then when i touch the piano, it instantly its like being woken from a dream and you kind of remember the abstracted sounds of your imagination but this is a real life physical thing. It has hammers, it has strings. It was built and so youre translating yourself. Youre kind of translating your soul through these physical objects like violins and voice and piano. So i just kind of explore as much as i can because trying to reach those imaginary colors and not just completely ignore them but be in the real world is a struggle. Charlie how are you evolving as a musician . Youre no longer an emerging artist, are you . Regina i feel like i am. You know, i dont know. I think that my interest lies so much in the discovery of music and just the pleasure of making art is so great and the moments when i get to do it, i feel so privileged to do it that thats what i think about. So its hard to know where i am in the trajectory of how im perceived or what i should be doing. I just sort of think, oh, this is this song. What does it need . Ok, thats done. Now this is this song. Oh, it needs something completely opposite. Ok, i can do that. You know. Charlie how much of your work is autobiographical . Regina also very hard to know because so much of the fun for me comes from the imagination and trying get out of my own perspective and experience other perspectives. I think that when i think of my tribe, i think of fiction writers and poets. And also playwrights. I really love charlie like . Regina oh, like salinger and chekhov and pushkin. Charlie philip roth or Regina Philip roth, i feel like hes much more well, maybe ill get there. Hes darker than i am. [laughter] but i feel like with everything thats happening in the world, i might get there, you know. Charlie but its more classical playwrights like chekhov and regina and also gogol and kafka. Thats where i feel at home. In the real world, i have to almost pretend because it seems so surreal to me. Charlie there are those who say that your music is autobiographical and that this album is more so than previously. Regina i think that in our world we have created a false divide between confessional artists and fictional artists and then theres this narrative that the confessional people really care and theyre putting their real soul into it and its soulful and honest and that fiction writers are just making things up and theyre sort of arms length. But to me, a dylan song is not any less about even though its surreal and has images from biblical and historic and all these other things that hes pulling from, it is not any less of his soul than Joni Mitchell, who is writing from her life story and i feel like my soul and my personal experience is in everything but if i engage my imagination, then i can look at something from multiple perspectives. As a man, as somebody who believes the opposite than i do in the world. We have to push ourselves to look at things from other sides. Otherwise we get really stuck, and also, wed get these superiority complexes. His destiny was just too big to spend so he broke it into smaller bills change by the time he tried to buy the things he needed charlie this is the first album in four years. Is that because you were having a baby and all of that . Regina some of it is that. Thats a lot. Charlie he was born in 2014 . Regina yes, but, you know, i think some of it is just that it takes time to make to make art the way that you really hear it. I mean, there are songs on here that much, you know, maybe more than 200, 300 tracks in one song where we have sounds and layers and where we went down one path and then scrapped and it went down another path. So it just takes time. Charlie how then do you create art, how then do you write a song . Regina i feel like if i knew exactly the answer i would have a lot more songs, first of all. But second of all, i think its but second of all, i think its a combination of letting certain stories and certain emotions theres like an intake process and then an output process and then when things kind of live through your system and you meet certain inspiring individuals, you read certain inspiring things, you see enough stories unfold before your eyes, then you are compelled to in that moment to write a song. But i dont really know. I do feel like its inspiration and sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesnt. Charlie when you write songs, do you think of melody . Do you think of the music . Or is it simply words that youll find the music for later . Regina no, i usually write at the same time. So i will go to the piano and i will sing the words and play the piano and it kind of comes out at the same time. And then i sort of play it over and over, maybe sometimes 500 times in a row until it all just settles. Charlie did you once write all the lies on your resume have become truth by now . What does that line mean . Regina its really hard to say. The thing is, i just came off a tour and i was just playing these songs i just played in the u. K. And europe and i was playing these songs, a lot of them that are new to me from this new record and on different nights, different lines would hit me a certain way. Andy own lines that i wrote think oh this means that. We found out about the election result in the u. K. And certain songs that i had played in one way, the lines meant Something Else to me after. And i feel like they are my friends and i lean on them and i dont fully know what they mean but the comfort that i have of playing them year after year is that they they mean more than i know so i dont want to limit them with my understanding of them at this moment. Because in five years, it could mean Something Else to me or something could happen and that line will take on a totally different meaning. Charlie is this both pop and classical . Regina yes, and i love both very much. Classical is my home. You know, its before my consciousness even. Like it was just there. It was always there, kind of like air. Till the dawn comes no one sleeps at the grand hotel chauffeured cars stay a day, stay a week. Heres the tunnel, take a peek just call up your friends at the front desk dawnft sheets til the comes hotel sleeps at the grand minibar chauffered car just call up your friends at the front desk any hour at the front desk call up your friends at the grand hotel youll always have friends at the grand hotel carol welcome to bloomberg businessweek. Im carol massar. Oliver we will talk about what the future holds for those just starting out. We are talking about a how to build your nest egg. Businessng your persona. Carol all that ahead on businessweek