In honor of the Criterion release of Dogfight, an underseen romantic gem starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor, I spoke with the film’s director Nancy Savoca and her husband and producer Rich Guay!
BOSTON HASSLE: I love Dogfight. I got to see it a few years ago when TCM was doing a program highlighting female directors. My friend saw it on the schedule and recommended I watch it and I really enjoyed it.
NANCY SAVOCA: I’m so glad.
BH: When I saw it was coming out on Criterion I was thrilled. Can you tell me how the restoration process for the film got started? I know one of your other films, Household Saints, was just restored too.
NS: Household Saints is a way more dramatic story because we actually lost it. We couldn’t find the elements and thought we would never see the film again. And then we found the elements and lost the rights, and then we were looking for those.
RICH GUAY: It was very dramatic. With Dogfight, we got an email from Criterion saying they were doing the restoration and inviting us to help. Dogfight has been great and a pleasure. And they came up with the brilliant idea of Mary Harron interviewing Nancy and Lili [Taylor].
NS: And they put together the most beautiful package. They always do.
BH: I need to watch the interview. When I think of Mary Harron, I think of Lili Taylor and I Shot Andy Warhol. Another one where I’m wondering, “Where’s that Blu-Ray?”
NS: That’s another missing movie! She’s working on that. When you see the interview with Mary, Lili, and me, you’ll hear a story I had never heard. Mary saw Lili for the first time in Dogfight. When she approached Lili to play Valerie Solanas, Lili had her own mind blowing story. She said, “Oh, you saw me in Dogfight and want me to play Valerie Solanas? Well, while we were shooting Dogfight…” While we mostly shot in Seattle, we had a couple nights in San Francisco. We had a scene in front of the City Lights bookstore. During a break that night, Lili went into the bookstore, and what caught her attention was a photograph of Valerie Solanas and underneath was SCUM Manifesto. She purchased it, read it, was so intrigued by this woman, and then soon after Mary approached her to play her.
RG: We knew nothing about any of this.
NS: This came out of that interview.
BH: Where did you first encounter Lili? Obviously she’s the star of this and Household Saints.
NS: She’s one of the greatest actresses we have. I knew of her work, but I actually met her at an audition because I had the great honor of working with the legendary casting director Marion Dougherty, the casting director at Warner Bros. at that time. Marion brought in every single person of that age group, the most talented of that group. Lili was Marion’s first choice, and as with every single other role in Dogfight, Marion’s first choice ended up being in the film. I ended up agreeing with all of her first choices.
RG: As a quick aside, there’s a documentary called Casting By about casting and Marion Dougherty, the first person to ever get the credit “Casting by.”
NS: Highly recommended. You really get to appreciate what a casting director does. Once you’re cast, there is a flavor added to the story that you’re just filling in. The greatest contribution.
BH: How did River Phoenix get involved?
NS: He was attached before I was on. He was 19 years old. Once I got approved by Warner Bros. to work on the film, the last person I needed to talk to was River since he had director approval. We had the most wonderful conversation that lasted several hours. He was in Florida, I was in New York. He talked about how this role was really important for him because he wanted to start playing adults. More importantly, which was the real challenge, he wanted to play someone that was nothing like himself. His curiosity and his courage to take on this character was extremely exciting for me. There are actors who understandably need to preserve an image, so they will play an image from movie to movie. They will preserve that image that audiences have of them. But then there are actors who want to do exploration, and River was absolutely someone who wanted to do some exploring. That was very exciting.
BH: That makes a lot of sense. Even in the transformation of his character throughout the film you can feel that. Just a transformative evening.
BH: Where did the story actually come from? I initially assumed it came from a novel but realized that was not the case.
NS: It was based on life experience. It was based on the screenwriter Bob Comfort’s life experience. He had been a Marine. He had attended a party like this. To what extent it was autobiographical I don’t know for sure, but certainly the events and the feelings about the girl that he chose was definitely what he experienced. That courage that he had to write that story, most of us don’t want to write about the time that we screwed up. The fact that he wanted to write that story and gifted us with this really challenging story, I’m grateful to him.
RG: He did go to Vietnam and he did lose friends.
BH: When I rewatched the film, something that stood out to me is that Rose finds out about the dogfight very quickly. There’s a version of this where the whole movie she doesn’t find out, then she does right at the end, then they fight and make up. But the whole movie is Birdwell saying “I messed up, let’s talk about this.“
NS: I love the structure that Bob chose for this, the most difficult structure. The whole movie could be, “Is she gonna find out, will she, won’t she, oh no she did, oh but they’re gonna kiss and make up and it’s over and everyone’s happy.” That is the most simplistic and dangerous version of this story. The fact that it’s not that and we’re forced to sit with these people while they’re dealing with the aftermath of this expulsion is the privilege of being a voyeur in this story. That was Bob’s choice in how to structure it.
NS: It got us into deep trouble because in the original screenplay, the moment when he comes to apologize to Rose, she cries, tells him how much she was hurt, he apologizes and then the story goes on. We tried to film the scene like that, and it didn’t work. At that point, we had all been doing so much homework on the raw honest emotions of being in these situations that the dialogue wasn’t working. So we had to literally shut down our production that night, though shutting down production on a low budget movie means you break for lunch, and we weren’t breaking for lunch every day. Rich and I sat with River and Lili and tried to figure out how to do this. My first instinct was to run to Rich and say, “Hey, she can’t forgive him! It’s impossible! Look what he did!” And then he goes, “Well, Nancy, if she doesn’t forgive him, we have half an hour of a movie. What do we do for the rest of it?”
RG: She has to forgive him, so we had to figure out what that looks like.
NS: That was the job in front of us.
RG: The basic thing for Lili’s character was that she had done her crying in her room to Joan Baez.
NS: She had done the explosion at the bar.
RG: She had exploded, she cried alone, and what was it that she was carrying and what was it going to take for him to convince her to give him a chance?
BH: I wanted to ask about the legacy of the film, since we have the Criterion release now, but there is also a musical. How involved were you in that?
NS: Because we did not have writing credit, they worked with the estate of Bob Comfort. The creative team that did the musical reached out to us and invited us to see it. We were surprised that it was happening. I had the biggest out of body experience watching people sing the dialogue.
BH: I can imagine.
NS: For a little bit I felt outside of the story because I knew it so well and then I was like, “You mean they imagined this as a musical???” I loved that, but I couldn’t get past that. Finally I let go, got involved, and it was really lovely. The performances were terrific. The music was great and audiences seem to really enjoy it.
BH: It’s stuck around a bit and now Lindsay Mendez is doing Merrily. The whole cast is all over the place.
NS: It’s even playing in different countries, it’s wild.
BH: I’m glad Dogfight finally has a nice release on Criterion so more people can discover it.
NS: Buy a DVD player, play it like vinyl! It’s yours!
BH: Especially with this soundtrack.
NS: And Rich does great interviews with the crew!
Dogfight is now available on Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection!
