In l985, Bob Shacochis won the American Book Award for his first collection of short fiction, Easy in the Islands. The stories drew heavily upon his Peace Corps experience as an agricultural journalist on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean, and led publications such as Playboy to conclude that he was "truly one of the brightest young talents around." His second collection, The Next New World (l988), was almost as well received. Of it, Publisher's Weekly wrote, "Chameleon-like, Shacochis assimilates diverse geographic locales and voices in these surprising stories" that "capture a sense of the enormous compromises that life forces on us as we lurch toward a clouded future." Shacochis was born September 9, l95l in the Appalachian mining town of Pittston, Pennsylvania, and raised in McLean, Virginia. He studied journalism at the University of Missouri (BA, l973), where he also earned an M.A. in l979 after his stint in the Peace Corps from l975-76. In l982 he received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and in subsequent years returned to both alma maters as a short-term visiting assistant professor. One story from his award-winning collection, "Hot Day on the Gold Coast," was first published by Black River Review in l984. Shacochis is presently a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and co-editor of the New Virginia Review. The interview took place in a room at the Ocean Key House in Key West, Florida, where Shacochis was in town to serve as final judge for the l989 Hemingway Short Story Contest and to speak at the Hemingway Days Writer's Workshop. Asking the questions was James Plath, editor of Clockwatch Review and Assistant Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University . . . and a friend of the author's.

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Q: Why aren't you a minimalist, Bob?

A: A man does not live by realism alone.

Q: Okay, but considering The Next New World, with its ghosts and heart-eating episode, a lot of reviewers took that as dabbling in the supernatural or paranormal. They almost made you sound like someone who couldn't decide whether he wanted to be a Harper's/New Yorker writer, or someone who aspired to write like a borderline Stephen King--although that's a bit of an exaggeration on my part.

A: Yeah, you fucker (laughs). It sure is.

Q: I know you've got this big Third World fix . . .

A: So does America.

Q: But it's given your writing a focus, hasn't it?

A: Sure.

Q: Are you attempting yet another version of Magical Realism?

A: No. Magical Realism is a misnomer, for one thing. Magical Realism is a painterly term. The Spanish literary term for that type of writing is Lo Real Marvilloso, which in translation means "the itness that is marvelous and real." And Gabriel Garcia Marquez says that the biggest challenge for writers in the Caribbean and Latin America is to convince the rest of the world that they're writing their reality. They're not making things up. And for the most part, the writers that we call Magical Realists aren't making things up. Those are the boom writers from Latin America. There are other writers like Juan Rulfo from Mexico, who wrote Pedro Parama, and Miguel Asturias from Guatemala, and those writings are magical. But the writings of Alejandro Carpentier, a Cuban who was the first so-called Magical Realist, and then Gabriel Garcia Marquez--except for brief moments in Marquez, nothing's magical as far as they're concerned. When the woman in One Hundred Years of Solitude ascends to heaven, that's a magical moment, but it's the only magical moment in the book. In One Hundred Years of Solitude there's a moment where a woman gives birth to a kid with a pig's tail. When the book came out, Garcia Marquez got six letters--four from Columbia, one from Scandanavia, one from another European country--from women who said their children had also been born with pig's tails, something coming out of their butts. It's that sort of thing. The history of the baroque in the New World is a very wondrous history, filled with marvels. And my own experience in the Caribbean and Latin America parallels that, and I don't think that I'm writing things that are out of line. William Kennedy says that, more or less what I said starting out this interview, there's more to the human experience than realism will allow. There's a spirituality to it that has to be addressed if your work's going to embody the full spectrum of human experience. I have this story called "Where Pelham Fell" in the new book that you might want to think of as a ghost story, but in fact the woman in the story, Aunt Dippy, tries to pooh-pooh that idea, because her husband brings home a sack of bones of Civil War soldiers, and the old Black man who gave them to her husband described them as "noisy bones." And she herself admits that she's had some clairvoyant or preternatural experiences in her lifetime. She knows that this is not an oddball thing, and she tries to tell the reader that by dropping a letter in the mailbox to the Duke University parapsychology department, where they study such phenomena legitimately, and try to separate fact from fiction. So she knows she's not out of the ballpark there. She knows she's not cuckoo. She's writing to the university to add to the weight of evidence that programs like that are compiling about human phenomena that have no ready explanation, but that everybody senses exists to some degree.

Q: A friend of mine who lived in Mexico for a good many years, when I mentioned the "magical" elements in Garcia Marquez--like the very old man with enormous wings--she said essentially the same thing. She shook her head and said, "It's not magical, dear." She said that commuters in the United States leave for work every morning, and regardless of season or traffic conditions, they'll always arrive at approximately the same time, and nothing unusual happens to divert them. But in Mexico and Latin American countries, she said that the unusual and the unexpected happens with much more regularity.

A: It's because of culture, yeah. But you don't have to be a Latin American to have a sense of that, or access to that, or an appreciation of that. It takes place in the United States too, but you do have to have some sort of more harmonious relationship than the average urban or suburban person has.

Q: Did you have that sense of appreciation before your initial Peace Corps experience?

A: Yeah, I did. The ocean is always a source of strange phenomena.

Q: So if someone were trying to trace the source of your writing--its power and appeal--and concluded that it's rooted in your Peace Corps and Third World experiences, the same type of thing people have said of Carolyn Forche, you'd dispute that?

A: Sure, sure. Anybody who lives on the periphery of any geography that has some majesty to it--whether it's the Great Plains, or ocean, or mountains--everybody who is exposed to that environment is also exposed to natural phenomena. Like in the Great Plains, tornados; like on the coast, hurricanes; like in the mountains, rapid changes of weather that are especially challenging to human beings. And in the midst of those challenges life's different, and not everyday at all. A tornado passes through Wichita, Kansas, and everybody has magical stories to tell about what took place. A hurricaine passes over the outer banks of North Carolina, everybody has stories to tell about walking on the beach and it's a carpet of dead birds. Or standing in the center of the hurricane, and it's a perfect, quiet day: birds chirping in the sunlight, lighting a match for your cigarette and the flame of the match rising straight up, undisturbed . . . in the middle of a holocaust. And those feel like magical moments, but they're not. They're quite rooted in reality.

Q: At the Writer's Workshop, I was intriqued by your response to a woman who insisted a writer should trust herself and ignore criticism. You told her that you can dance at home and do pretty much what you want, and people cannot and should not criticize you for it. But if you dance at the Lincoln Center, everyone is going to tell you whether it's good or bad. And you added that you, for one, aspired to dance at the Lincoln Center. Do such aspirations alter the character of your fiction or the approach that you take in your writing?

A: No, absolutely not. Because I'm doing what I've been doing all along, and would do with or without recognition as long as I could tolerate doing it without recognition. I've only tried to calculate the creation of one story, "Stolen Kiss." I'd hoped to write it for The New Yorker magazine, and any time you try to do that you're doomed to trip over your own feet.

Q: Did you feel it was too gimmicky to have a kiss print on the porch post?

A: No, that's a real event. I was painting a porch at Rehobeth Beach in the wintertime. It was a black porch post, and there was the white kiss.

Q: You're kidding.

A: No.

Q: So again it was a matter of tracing the cause for the effect.

A: Ummhmm.

Q: Do you work backwards that way a lot?

A: Yeah, to figure out the logic. Especially in a story like "I Ate Her Heart," where I simply wanted to write something preposterous, ala Barry Hannah, and took a bath and figured out, well, one lover being compelled to actually eat the other lover's heart is pretty preposterous. Now what's the logic that would make it believable?

Q: One of the things I admire about your work is your ability to juggle three, sometimes more points of tension or plot. Could you talk a bit about that? You're always juggling, always weaving things together.

A: Yeah, that's because I'm scatterbrained (laughs). I mean, that's part of it. That's the natural inclination towards that--that the world is full of digressions and so my thoughts are full of digressions. As much as you bear down a focus on your concentration, when you're writing a story you see all the implications: latitudinally and longitudinally. Some of them are so intriquing they're impossible to ignore. And so the stories start to convolute upon themselves. Digressions and convolutions and memories all synch better, in terms of synchronicity. I think.

Q: Did you ever see the movieTin Men?

A: Yeah.

Q: That, to me, is what we're talking about here, but in film.

A: Oh, yeah.

Q: There were digressive elements--especially in the restaurant and bar scenes--that had absolutely nothing to do with any of the sideplots, or even thematics or the Eudora Welty stuff where she suggests that dialogue must do this and this and that. It didn't do anything. It was just purely digressive, and it was wonderful.

A: It's rare when I proceed in a linear fashion, because I'm not intrigued by that in my own imagination. But reading them, if they're done well . . . shit, they have a power that is inescapable.

Q: You were both a student and a teacher at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. In recent years there's been a lot of criticism about the whole factory element in creative writing programs. How would you explain the difference between so-called "workshop fiction"--something we need to get away from--and "honest fiction," something we maybe should be moving towards?

A: You presuppose that you can get away from and move toward things, and that these things are as solid as the Constitution of the United States. They're natural facts incorporated or institutionalized into systems. How can you get away from smart young writers who are going to present smart young work, but it's never going to get beyond that certain stage? I mean, they shouldn't be in a workshop. And they're ambitious, so as an editor you're going to see their stories. But they've plateaued. They're at the heighth of their talent, for the most part. And the people who consistently pop out of there, the ones you'd know and the ones you'd like to publish, are the ones who have a natural inclination toward what you call "honest fiction." I'm not sure that it's talent, but it is a combination of hard work (which everybody does) and experience (which not everybody has) and common sense (which not everybody has) and literary wisdom (which not everybody has), and then simply wisdom of the world. And that's an acknowledgment that art and commerce have always interfaced. Don't expect that you can somehow skirt that law of civilization, and don't whine about it. If you're doing what you want to do, you should know if it's commercial or not, or has that potential or not. And if you know that it doesn't, don't whine about it that you're being ignored by the world of commerce. That's a lack of common sense. I think all those things come together to make the honest fiction that you point to, but there's no way you're going to manipulate those things. That's like manipulating religion or something. Those are big things. The criticism of factory workshops is simply criticism of the factory. But not everybody inside the compound of the factory is working as if they're in a factory. They just happen to be in the community. They're doing what they would do in or out of the community, and that's writing good, original fiction. But you can't presuppose that--Iowa has a hundred and twenty students at one time--they're all going to be wonderful writers. So you're going to have two or three or four of them that are, and the rest of them are going to be generating very competent work, but work that has nowhere to go, really. And when you're going to be seeing a lot of that, you're going to easily label it "workshop fiction." But what did you expect? Why would you expect otherwise? Every program does it. Every program works circumscribed by the same set of dynamics.

Q: So what we end up seeing is technically competent writing, but writing which lacks a creative inventiveness?

A: I don't know why people are so concerned about second-rate work. Why worry about it?

Q: I'll tell you. Because most of the people that are going to read interviews such as this will be aspiring writers in workshop scenarios, or, as I heard them referred to the other day, "wanna-bes."

A: Well, wanna-bes already presumes that they're not-gonna-bes. The people who are going to be something don't concern themselves with those questions, I don't think. How many Michelangelos came out of the studio there? He was a student himself, and there were a lot of apprentices in that workshop.

Q: Does that mean you were unconcerned, as a developing or emerging writer, as to what it would take to become a successful writer?

A: What you need to learn about writing you've learned from reading, and from writing yourself. You don't learn it in a workshop. Anybody who arrives at the Iowa Writer's Workshop or any of a dozen good writing programs already knows how to write and write well. Now, do they know how to make their work sparkle, be original, have a voice that never fades in your memory after you read it? That's another story, and you don't get that from workshops. You get that from life, or you get it from an imagination that won't quit. And that makes you somewhat of an eccentric or oddball person, and that's why artistic people or wanna-be artistic people seem very affected sometimes, because they think, well, the way to be an artist is to be a little queer. And I think that's a joke.

Q: It makes me wonder, though, if one of the self-destructive mechanisms that have been built into these programs is that you now have a lot of writers writing about the same things: students and professors and the campus scene. A narrowing of subject matter?

A: The subject matter hasn't narrowed a bit. Go into a bookstore. Look at what's on the shelf. It's not narrow in the least. It goes from A to Z. It has all the colors in the rainbow, and it's as good as it can be. You can't read all the wonderful literature that's published in America each year. You can't read all the first books published by new writers. Most of it's very good, and occasionally it's excellent. I don't see the problem. I think the problem is a chit-chat problem, rather than a real problem that can be realistically addressed.

Q: Let's shift gears then. Your own work tends to depend upon cultures coming into contact with each other. I wouldn't necessarily call them clashes, but if this were art I would talk about chiaroscuro--two different values butting up against each other in striking contrast. And very seldom do you stay within one single culture. There's always an outsider. Can you talk about how important the cross-cultural element is for you?

A: Well, I guess it's of the utmost importance, but I didn't have to leave the country to experience it, because my family is more or less an immigrant family. My grandfather didn't speak English. I was born in a poor coal mining town in Pennsylvania, l00 percent Lithuanian in a community of Irish people (laughs). And there was always cultural conflict around me. It's always been there in my life, just as it's always been there in the history of America. From the minute a White man stepped ashore here, there were cultural conflicts, and they've never relaxed. The outsider is just one of the many traditions in literature, and it's one that I write in because I lived it. I wasn't one of the people who got elected to class office in school, or was part of that fashionable set. I've always felt that I've been an outsider, and am more comfortable being an outsider now. When I was a child, I wasn't. And it just so happens that my lifestyle parallels an esteemed storytelling tradition in literature. In fact, it's the outsider that usually is the storyteller, the witness, in some of our most memorable works in Western literature. The Heart of Darkness, for instance, is told by an outsider.

Q: You've downplayed the American-abroad experience as a generative factor in your writing, but your first collection was clearly and cleanly unified by that Caribbean experience. The stories seemed to flow. Did they come out of you as smoothly as it would seem?

A: Sure. I was writing those while I was at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and I realized that I was writing quite a few of them. For a while there I thought, I don't want to be known as a person who can only write about the Caribbean, so I wrote other stories which are now in The Next New World. But when it became time to sell a book, the Caribbean stories made a nice, clean package.

Q: Would you recommend cultural conflict to other writers as a credible source of tension?

A: Well, I have no admiration for clubhouse fiction. I have no admiration for writers who want to homogenize American fiction. I have absolutely no admiration for the editors of the Best American Short Stories collections who simply publish facsimiles of their own work or their own environment or their own group. I have no admiration for a writer who says, I don't want to be known as a Southern writer, or I don't want to be known as a Black writer, or I don't want to be known as a woman writer. I think those writers are dangerous to our sense of American literature--the plurality of American literature, the fullness and richness and diversity of American literature. And I think that for most of the history of American literature, it's been run by these clubhouse sort of personalities--most of them white, most of them male. In fact, all of them white, all of them male, and all of them Anglo-Saxon.

Q: Agreed. But again, the question was posed with a specific audience in mind. As Joseph Parisi said, we're a nation of writers, not readers.

A: You're servicing an audience that's out there and wants those things, but it's very ironic, because the audience that wants those formulas and tips have already shot themselves in the foot. They're not going anywhere.

Q: Let me ask you this, then. The Paris Review has built an incredible series of interviews over the years. Do you see value in published interviews with writers and artists?

A: Absolutely. Just as I see value in being a student in somebody's workshop. Being exposed to their personality expands the universe of your world.

Q: And this happens with every person you meet.

A: Absolutely. And when you meet a great writer, when you sit in a workshop with a Barry Hannah, you're affected by it. There's an osmotic process that takes place. It isn't how to punctuate a sentence. It isn't how to get published in The New Yorker. It's something else. A vision of the world. A sensibility about life. And those things are the most important things to writers. Those things can't be taught. For the astute student they can be learned, but it's not because somebody's teaching you those things (laughs). I would guess.

Q: You're laboring now on a novel which has passed several deadlines. What are some of the problems you're facing in the creation of a longer work? What's the learning process here?

A: Well, I had to go through an apprenticeship. I didn't write novels when I was in my twenties, like my peers. Most of the people my age who ended up being writers had done at least one novel during this period. I was writing journalism. So for three years I labored away, hating the product of my work, and ended up throwing away the first five-hundred pages--that was in l986. And teaching and journalism took away a lot of the time that I could have been spending on the novel. Because of my lifestyle, coming back to the book each time and trying to remember who the characters were and where they're going has been difficult for me. But the biggest reason is that I had to work through an apprenticeship. I was writing an apprentice novel. Now I hope that's not true.

Q: If the journalism takes so much of your time, why do you continue to write such pieces as "Gringolandia," which just appeared in Harper's? Is your motivation political, financial, or developmental?

A: I would say all three. My heroes are George Orwell and Mark Twain. Those are my models for what a writer should be in the twentieth century. They did both fiction and journalism, and I've always respected the art of non-fiction as much as the art of fiction.

Q: Given the fact that you're plugged into the New York literary scene through your journalism, would you agree with Hemingway's assessment of New York literary society--that it's a bottle of tapeworms feeding upon each other?

A: There are some writers who are infatuated with the business of literature and the personalities of literature. These writers become the spokesmen of the day for the literary scene. My own tastes are a little more far-ranging than that. I'm more interested with the world at large than who taught whom, than who slept with whom, than who published this one or that one, than what this critic said or what that critic said. I'm more interested in the forces that make the world the way it is--the larger world. And so I share an interest in politics with these writers, but I would like to think that my interests are global and national, rather than hermetic and self-absorbing. That's the only difference, in my own mind, between myself and the crowd living in New York City.

Q: You, like many contemporary writers--John Updike comes immediately to mind--also write book reviews. Do you think critical writing is a good way for writers to improve their own creative work?

A: No. To train themselves to talk about their work. We don't really allow our serious writers to get away so Scot free. If they're going to be our serious writers, they're also going to be able to talk about literature. And there's just a limited number of places you're able to talk about literature in a way that you want to. If you're an academic, you have an unlimited number of ways. But if you're not an academic, and you're simply somebody devoted to the reading experience who's also a writer, you need to write book reviews. You need to somehow have an outlet for your opinions on the work of your colleagues and your predecessors.

Q: You just left yourself wide open, and so I'm going to jump right in.

A: Go right ahead.

Q: If a writer should be able to articulate and talk about judgments and responses to literature, how would you criticize your own work?

A: Actually, I didn't leave myself wide open at all. I meant that a writer should be a critic of other's works. Why would I criticize my own work? Why would I do that?

Q: Forget "criticize." How would you characterize you work, in essence?

A: Pussy and guns (laughs). I'm full of glib answers. Keep pumping me. (Pause). I don't know. In a way, it's a bullshit question for this reason: you're asking me to either . . .

Q: shoot yourself in the foot . . .

A: or flatter myself. And I don't want to do either of those things. You know me well enough by now to know that my ego is healthy, but it's not overblown, I don't think. So I don't want to congratulate myself. If you make me, I'll shit on myself. But I'll try to do it with some self-respect.

Q: I don't think that we need to get into fecal matter.

A: I'm writing about pate for GQ, and that's all I can think about is fecal matter.

Q: I've been giving you some good-natured shit the past few days because of your extensive vocabulary. Tell me how you manage to balance a natural voice with, some might say, an unnatural vocabulary?

A: I'm not sure what you mean by "unnatural vocabulary." What in the world could an unnatural vocabulary be?

Q: Well, how many times, for example, do you use a word like "thaumaturgically" in your everyday life. That one popped up in your last book.

A: (Laughs) I can use it at home.

Q: You can do anything in the privacy of your home, but do you?

A: Sure, that's an operative word for me. Let me give you an example. When I was a student in the workshop and wrote "I Ate Her Heart," some of my fellow students objected to my character's use of the words "reprehensible" and "odiferous."

Q: They thought it broke character.

A: They thought it broke character. And the response to that is, You fucking shits haven't been watching Don Meredith emcee with the Monday Night Football games. Here he is, the typical redneck boy--aw shucks with shit on his shoes--who uses words like "reprehensible" and "odiferous." Throws them in, one a night. They're there. It's not out of character. "Odiferous" is a wonderful redneck word. It's a wonderful Southern word.

Q: How do you acquire words? Do you collect them in any special way?

A: Yeah. I pick them up off the street, just like I pick up pennies (laughs). From reading, where else?

Q: You said you wrote "I Ate Her Heart" in the workshop?

A: Yeah. All but a few of the stories in the new collection were written much earlier. "Les Femmes Creoles" was the last one I wrote.

Q: I loved that story. It was one of my favorites.

A: Really? A lot of the reviews read, "Starts weak but ends strong."

Q: I thought just the opposite. I thought you put your best stories at the front. "Les Femmes Creoles" was a great opener. Were you being deliberately symbolist with that story, or did I just read too much into it, as English professors are accused of doing?

A: No, absolutely. It's all smoke and mirrors . . . and insider jokes. Because right at the beginning there is the Black man drawing the voodoo symbol in the dirt. The voodoo symbol summons the spirits.

Q: Like Shakespeare, invoking the muses.

A: Absolutely. The story wasn't always called "Les Femmes Creoles: A Fairy Tale." It was called "Les Femmes Creoles." But after it got rejected by everybody in New York, I thought, You stupid fucks. I've got to put on the title that this is a fairy tale.

Q: They wouldn't accept it as a symbolist work?

A: They wrote back, "unconvincing." And that's the last thing in the world a fairy tale has to be, is convincing. So I was very disappointed by that experience. My favorite stories in the book are, in this order, "Where Pelham Fell," "Hidalgos," "Les Femmes Creoles," and "Squirrelly's Grouper."

Q: Why "Squirrelly's Grouper"? That one I felt was a bit predictable.

A: You knew he was gonna be a Nazi?

Q: Not exactly, but I thought it was too gimmicky of a metaphor--that fame has its price. And I thought, a Nazi war criminal? That's going too far.

A: Absolutely not. There are war criminals being dragged out of everyday life and handcuffed. "Mr. Hoffennager, he's not a war criminal. We've lived next to him for thirty years. He works at the tire factory."

Q: But you can't deny that it rather dramatically illustrated your basic underlying point: that fame has a downside.

A: Basic underlying points are very simple. Always. In the greatest literature and the most unsuccessful literature, the basic underlying points are always that simple. A penny saved is a penny earned. Very basic, that it has repercussions throughout the most complex situations in life. I mean, you're the one who reduces the story to that. The story is an expansion of that basic principle. It resists the basicness of principles.

Q: Are readers today trained through their own newspaper experiences and through culture to cut to the bottom line, to reduce and condense?

A: No. Mass audiences don't do that for a second. Only critics do that.

Q: Is that bad?

A: No. But it should be the first point in establishing a dialogue about the work, not the last point. It's the easiest way to open a door into the story.

Q: Once it's open, then were do we go?

A: Where do we go from there? That fame has a very complex impact on people's lives. We can talk about it in terms of aphorisms and maxims, but the individual personalities make it much more complex than that. Here was a man who reluctantly accepted his fame. Once he crossed that line, his true nature showed. The community in the story was seeing the real Squirrelly for the first time: the Squirrelly that led a secret life and had been a guard at a concentration camp forty years ago. And you can call that a trick, but it's right out of the newspapers, man. There are plenty of stories like that in the l980's. When you say "Nazi," everybody of course says, Oh, a Nazi. Well, shit, that's Stephen King or that's Tom Clancy. But Naziism is an everyday thing too.

Q: When you say it revealed his true nature, isn't it just as possible that it could have produced an unnatural effect as the result of excessive pressure? Or are you implying that pressure is always a magnifying glass, a purifier?

A: Pressure always produces the truth. Absolutely. It always cuts to the bone. And you find with Sean Penn and his celebrity something infinitely different than you find with Robin Williams and his celebrity.

Q: And a Mike Tyson.

A: And a Mike Tyson, and a Eudora Welty. Eudora Welty could be beating photographers with her umbrella, because she certainly is hounded by them. But she's a gracious lady, to the core. Sean Penn is a little shit, to the core.

Q: I don't mind pressing this one bit, because it's a fascinating topic. When some people get less pressure than others, are you suggesting that we can never really tell their true characters?

A: Yes, because they haven't been tested. They haven't been blooded, the way that the dog and most especially the kid was in the story that won this year's short story contest. Which is another factor in it's being a good story. The more severe events are, the more your true nature has to come to the forefront. For instance, we've just had a terrible plane crash in Sioux City, Iowa. People are walking away from that plane crash talking to God. There's no room there for dilly-dallying about what's in their hearts or what's in their souls. They've been through a very severe test, and they're not walking away agnostics . . . no matter how they got on that plane in Denver. And the article in the Miami Herald today expressed that, how on the other side of that severe test their lives changed forever. Became more real, in their own words and in their own minds. Something like fame is a severe test. It never distorts personalities. It always clarifies them. That's one of the major themes of literature. Put somebody in a severe situation and see what their true nature is.

Q: It's been said that all the themes and all the stories have been done. And the only thing left to do is re-combine or update. Do you buy that?

A: Yeah, absolutely. And updating shouldn't be pooh-poohed at all. We all record and chronicle our own age, and it's a very important task. What would be more important than that? What would be a higher goal than to leave a record of how it was for us? That's what everybody else had done. And the questions have been the same from the very beginning, which would lead you to believe that human beings have been the same from the very beginning. It is both good news, and bad news.

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