Fashion Neurosis with John Malkovich

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1:25Hi, come in.

1:33Welcome to Fashion Neurosis, John Malkovich. Thank you for having me. Can you tell me what you're wearing today and why you chose these particular clothes? I chose these particular clothes. We're trying to sell our place in France, so it brought a lot of stuff from France, which had just been sitting in closets for years. The pants and the jacket are from Techno Bohemian, which is the name of the second line I did. And the shirt is from the last line, which just had my name, which I don't think was a great idea. But that's okay. So that's what I'm wearing today. Why is it harder? because we were in Lacoste where you've been last week and it was just blazing hot.

2:29It was incredibly hot. And then I saw that in the mornings it's going to be quite cool here mostly. So this is just one of the things I brought to take back to America because it's just been sitting in the closet for five years or something in France. I must say the fabric of those trousers is amazing. I'm just at the phase, I'm just trying to find a few more fabrics. And I remember when we used to go to Premier Vision, the fabric fair together, and you introduced me to some mills where they were really good. And I must find out where that's from. This, I believe, is a company who does a lot, big quantities of quite good quality.

3:17called Subalpino, and it's just a cavalry twill, a fine kind of cotton cavalry twill. I love that kind of weave. It's great. Yeah, they're very good. I've used a lot of their stuff over the years. And we've known each other for many years, and I've never met anyone with the level of obsession with clothes that you do. And in fact, not many people in fashion have it to the degree that you do. And I wonder, where does this come from? And how did your family dress? My father was quite good looking and he was quite an elegant man, but very simple. And he looked fantastic kind of in anything. My grandmother had pretty good taste, actually, and bought most of our family's clothes or at least paid for them because she owned the newspaper in our little town.

4:25But I think I was always obsessed with clothes. I can't really say why. I was always obsessed with looking at photos of adults and of elegant people. and I think when I grew up it was a much more elegant time than pretty much every man wore a suit every day which I did for many, many years. A good probably 20 years or so I wore a suit every day. Wow. I don't know why really. It could have to do with when I was a young kid and up to the age of 15, I think, or so, I was heavy. So I couldn't, it was hard to find clothes that fit clothes that I'd like. Yeah. So it could be partially due to that. But partially that interest was always there.

5:37And I always loved to go see what people make. And I don't think it's so much about me because just yesterday, say, I was at the Dover Street Market and looking at designers. I didn't see any men's thing when I was there. But just to go and look at things, to see what people are doing has always interested me. and I've always had a deep fascination for it, often very specific opinions about what I see. But I always found it a fascinating occupation or calling, however one wants to describe it. I don't know why, and I don't even know if I'd be capable of thinking about it. very profoundly, I don't know.

6:45But it's something, when I would go to the fabric fair where I, over many years often, saw you there, I loved going around looking at hundreds of thousands of pieces of fabric every fair. I mean, just an incredible amount. And I always felt like I could have done 50 lines with completely different fabric choices every time. I know. You've always had that kind of, you've never, I mean, that fabric fair is one of the most grueling and soul destroying experiences. experiences. And I remember once back in the early days of Alexander McQueen bumping into him, sitting there, eating a gigantic baguette and just saying, I hate this place.

7:42How do you manage? And you managed to turn it into something so much more interesting. I loved going around with you. I loved it because I'm probably overly obsessed by details, maybe, but I loved it because it always opened up possibilities to me. I was saying to someone the other day about what makes a good director, say, in my day job, which is often acting in plays or movies or I do a lot of now classical music collaborations. And I think the fabric fared to me is about what I'd say about directors. directors, a director should open a world. They shouldn't close the world. Yeah. And that's how I feel about going to look at fabrics.

8:47I kind of go, oh, well, if I use that, then I could do this like this and not just like that. So although it is grueling and you have fabric in your eyes and in your ears and down your throat and under your fingernails, et cetera. Because it's hard to explain to somebody who's never done it that there are millions of pieces of fabric there in many millions, I think. And to kind of have to narrow that down in this very limited time is a pretty tall task but I always loved to go and look at it I never that's something I never would have complained about it yeah and you said in an interview you said I had an older brother and I can remember he and his friends driving by and throwing beer bottles at me because of some outfit choice I'd made in the sixth grade and I was always interested in how things look and giving some visual cohesion and I wondered why did that matter more than the expense of being seriously mocked uh I don't think I really cared about that um that much my brother tortured me most of the time anyway.

10:25And chances are if he was with friends, that would have been a factor that would have lent more gentleness or even humanity to the mockery rather than if it was just my brother with me. But I think it probably didn't bother me because I always had my interests. And I think I always, somewhere I think I must have known that there's, I mean, you and I, I think, have talked about this before. You've done fashion for a long time. I did, I think, 24 collections, full collections. There is a price in life for doing what you want, I think. Yeah. And especially in fashion. Yeah, absolutely. And it can be not just a financial prize, but in a lot of other ways.

11:31But I think I've kind of been used to that since I was a kid. And if I wanted to experiment with madras on madras, then, okay, too bad for the rest. and I think I was comfortable with that from the time I was a child principally because my father not just said but but kind of beat into me the notion that you decide not not me not your mother not your teacher you decide what you're gonna do what you're going to be, how you feel about it, how you regard it, how you think about what you do. And that really filtered into most elements of my life. But more than anything, it filtered into how I work.

12:41Right. And fashion, I think, can be a sort of surprisingly profound, maybe not to people who look at it and people who don't care about it, which I understand very well. I'm sure you do too. But to people who care about it, it's a very profound form of expression of self-expression yeah so the idea that i would take say being in a movie any more seriously than these buttons which i just replaced in Poland a month ago because they'd driven me nuts for a year since I first rediscovered this jacket in my closet and friends because they were way too small for the buttonholes. And anyway, everything about the buttons irritated me.

13:42And somebody else probably could care less. Yeah. And I understand very well.

13:54but I'm not that person. Yeah, you have that sort of obsessive, compulsive thing that is essential to be in fashion. Yeah. I remember first meeting you and listening to you describe a few things and thinking, wow, you've got it, you know. And you described your father as darker than I ever realized. And I wonder how that manifested. My father, he was...

14:36My grandparents were supposedly Croatian. I only say supposedly because we really don't know. because I remember my mother once saying to me after hearing or reading something where I said I was Croatian, half Croatian, or supposedly half Croatian, she said to me, why do you say that? You're Montenegrin. I've heard I'm Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian. Not that I would care. They're all fine by me. When I finally got my DNA done, according to that, I'm 43 % Romanian. My father's father sold mining equipment. He was an immigrant at any rate to America. He went there, I think, in 1913. I found out when I was already in his 50s that I knew he hated his father, who he said was the biggest liar who ever lived.

15:41And I knew that wasn't true because my other grandfather was actually the biggest liar that ever lived. And so I knew that was an exaggeration on my father's part. But he really disliked his father, who was very beautiful and who I found out in his 50s, listening to an interview with my father on a university radio station, that he was a union thug with brass knuckles and a pistol. Wow. And my only real memory of him was they didn't have a TV, I think. They would come over to our house, and this is when in America there were three channels, and last he was on Sunday night, I think before the Walt Disney Hour, if I remember correctly.

16:36And my grandfather, my father's father on my father's side, was kind of utterly heartless and very sentimental, but only about Lassie. Like if one of us had fallen off of a building and gone splat, I don't think he would have blinked an eye. but always in the second act of a Lassie drama, Lassie would be in trouble or be being attacked or Lassie had some very bad luck, what have you. I don't remember. Some disaster befell Lassie. And my grandfather would just, you could see him go into a rage and he never really learned English, lived there 50 some years he learned all swear words only really and he would watch last he would get there almost literally be frothing at the mouth and he would go those sons of bitches and you know you're you're just a small child and you think my god what's what's wrong with you it's a tv show it's a tv show with a dog with a collie calm down my father normally was very patient man very charming and extremely funny with a great sense of humor but when he went off it was best to not be in the area.

18:28And I don't think that had a huge influence in my life, to be perfectly honest, except probably as an inheritance and as a warning.

18:49so as an inheritance it became a kind of product that in a certain way I was able to make a very good living from and as a warning it was just when I was a little fat kid there was a Halloween contest and the winner with the best costume got 50 silver dollars. Gosh. And my father had been an art and journalism major. And, you know, I was a fairly accomplished actor when I was a small child and was great at throwing fits based on real or imagined slights or alleged emotions or wants or desires or needs or what have you. I kept whining about this Halloween contest coming up and now I really very much needed to win the$50 probably to buy candy bars or whatever, something more to eat.

20:07and he took it upon himself finally to say, Johnny, I'll make your costume. Shut the fuck up. Shut up. I'll do your costume. You'll win the contest, but you shut up. So he drew really beautifully. he made me a Cyclops costume out of an old sheet and some, I don't know, hook or something, and an incredible third eye in the middle of my forehead. Gosh. But I don't think the third eye was for a Cyclops one eye. I think it was a kind of message to me to maybe develop a bit of a third eye in the kind of religious sense. God, that's so interesting. And, of course, my sister won the 50 silver dollars with her store-bought princess outfit, unsurprisingly, in my hometown, which is maybe not the kind of bastion of taste.

21:28in art or even fancy dress. But I think it was a kind of lesson to me. As my dad once said to me, I was a baseball pitcher and pretty good one. And my father once said to me, Johnny, if you cared about playing baseball as much as you cared about the way you look playing baseball you would be very good but i kind of knew then yes dad but that will never happen okay never forget that um and i don't really think that ever changed just why is much harder because i think when we look back at our lives, we misremember much. We underestimate the pulls and tugs and forces that act upon us, including ourselves and our desires and our wants and our needs.

23:00But it's hard to say why, But I think I was always like that. And I don't think that ever changed at all. Because your classmate and close friend, Russ Smith, said you were training to be an ecologist, but you became infatuated with a cool girl on campus who was studying theater. And I wondered if you remembered what she was wearing, which attracted you so much to change your career direction. Yeah, what she was wearing definitely, but also, A, she looked like Carly Simon. Wow. And she had a shag, quite a kind of in the kind of low spark of high-heeled boys style. Oh, yeah. She was called Joanne Kirkland and she was a potter.

23:59and she told me I should take a theater class. It was actually Orlin Terp, it was called, because she was taking it. And she was pretty much a hippie-dressed girl, so very low-slung bell-bottoms, wide belt, hippie purse, hippie vest of print blouse or that that would be the kind of normal uniform with the kind of susie quattro hair exactly i love that hair so much it was so good because i remember seeing you first i saw you in burn this at the hamster theater in 92 two playing opposite Juliet Stevenson. And I remember being incredibly shocked by this thing your character said, I'm out of here.

25:01And I found that so rude and the rudest thing you could ever say to a woman. And I wondered, was that supposed to be provocative then or was that just me being totally green? No. Well, it could have entailed a certain amount of greenness. It's a very New Jersey expression. It's New Jersey Italian, I think. So certainly common in New York. But I would think it's more New Jersey. It's just, you know, instead of, thank you, it's a lovely evening, but I really should be heading home. It's just like, I'm out of here. um i mean it's so normal now but then it was p english people didn't say that and you're i mean you were so wild it was one of the i'll never forget seeing that play and i've never forgotten how i felt when i came out as though i'd just the adrenaline was so extreme as if i was going to pass out.

26:11It was so amazing. Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded, so you can take the time, all that time once spent on folding and sorting, watching and waiting, to finally pursue a whole new version of you, like birdhouse building you. Yeah, the birds are going to love this. Or dollhouse building you. Yeah, the kids are going to love this. Or maybe house DJ track building to the bass drop you. Oh yeah, the kids are going to love this.

26:57Do you love it? Oh, that's a good you.

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27:50You don't have to be a designer to generate images, rewrite text, and create effects. That's the beauty of generative AI that's commercially safe. Teams all across your business will be psyched to collaborate and create amazing presentations, videos, social posts, flyers and more. Meet Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content. Learn more at adobe.com slash express slash business. When you starred in Liaison Dangereuse, you had a love affair with perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world at the time, Michelle Pfeiffer. And I wondered what happened. It's not something I ever really talk about.

28:38I'd put it this way, Bella. In our work, the work I do normally,

28:48you make emotional bonds with people very quickly. It's it's that's kind of part of the work. Very rarely those bonds extend beyond the work. For me, she was someone I valued greatly as a colleague.

29:19was great fun and moving and with me incredibly fair. And I probably wasn't. I mean, I certainly wasn't.

29:42so that's that's what happens I think I've learned over the course of my life that a great colleague is actually kind of rarer than anything yeah gosh that's interesting and when that relationship that relationship becomes more than collegial or more than a friendship, even a profound friendship, then at least in my experience, and it might be my particular psychology or stupidity or ineptness or all of the above, then you lose a great colleague and before we started I was mentioning Ingeborg who we both worked with many years ago on Lady Behave and who I met in 92 doing the second play I did in the West End called The Sip of the Tongue as an actor that's ingeborg adapt canighty right yeah yeah ingeborg and i are still 33 years now working together yeah and have remained great friends and colleagues because there was a line never crossed and a border never crossed.

31:27Yeah. And that's kind of what I've learned, that when a thing like that happens, it's probably, might be not retrievable. because we met when the producer Herky Belleville introduced us and I came to Paris to try and persuade you to direct a short fashion film and you were in the middle of making John being John Malkovich and you said I can't do this I don't have the time and and you said why don't you ask Spike Jones to do it and I said it has to be you and then you suddenly said okay I'll do it I've got one and a half days on this date, be ready. And then there was the storyline which I'd come with my kind of presentation of tweed and First World War lesbians, and you'd read a story about a Japanese man who'd become obsessed with tsunamis and made himself a pair of rubber underpants that would blow up in case of an emergency and they blew up on the Tokyo subway.

32:47And how did you know this was the right story for a fashion film? I think you never know, Bella, and it would be lacking in decorum to pretend that one knows, I think. You can only have an instinct. You can only have a hunch. And so I looked very carefully what you were doing, what you were designing for. And I read the novel about Joe Cuthart. Oh, yes, it was. Carstairs, which was fascinating. But I couldn't see that being done inexpensively and quickly in a way that we could have a little story and yet spend a lot of time looking at the clothes and their texture and how they looked on and how they moved and how they were structured.

34:01so I thought of that story which I'd read some years before in an issue of Esquire magazine and then I thought this could really though be funny that we just have a little Japanese guy who has his little rubber underpants um made I don't know how you made them but they were kind of fantastic um And I thought we could do this in a day and a half. And if we just have enough women to show up and if they don't mind just goofing around. And if we have all the clothes we need and the shoes we need, which which seemed all pretty ready when when we did it. I thought we could have something that could be entertaining.

35:02I think with all of our films, this is what I said to him, that you were one of the best colleagues I ever had in anything, one of the very best. And that if anybody asks me, what is really indicative of your work, meaning in this case my part of our work i would say those three films that's actually tells you who i am and and on a certain level they couldn't be more girlish in that they just couldn't be more girlish I think because I remember you saying I said what do you think you know about the story and the the references and you said this is what I think you told me this story which was two lines and I thought well he's John Malkovich he must know what he's doing so great let's do that and And it was so fantastic because I think one of my, I love to believe in someone else's vision.

36:23Me too. And it was just so enjoyable to go through your prism and just, you know, see what happened and your certainty. And then we made three short films together. that one's called strap hanging and then lady behave and hideous man and you did these amazing drawings for the storyboard and i remember showing them to my dad and he he really admired them and that's hilarious i know so that's too far it was just great oh yeah well those to me i i could have gone on doing those for a lifetime because when i each time and the all those three collections were very distinct very distinct and like i said about a director or i said about looking at fabric i'd say that also about a collaborator.