“It is about the theater and theater of ideas,” Zwick says of historical fiction. “The notion that in some antique circumstance, there existed themes and relationships that are contemporary. That there is such a thing as the living past.”
Zwick believes that choosing to portray the past through the eyes of an outsider, as is done in both The Last Samurai and Glory—in which the white protagonists become the minority—serves as a useful method of underscoring the contradictions of the time.
“I think the observations that the protagonist has are often contradicted by some of the behaviors that we see around him. I think it lends an opportunity for humor and for a multiplicity of shadings that wouldn’t otherwise be there,” Zwick says. He adds that, in the case of The Last Samurai, relying on the white American Cruise as narrator serves to alleviate problems of language.
Zwick’s keen eye for contradictions that later crop up in his work doesn’t limit itself to observing worldly issues. Asked to describe himself, a long pause seeps in, and he scrunches up his face as though he’s tasted something sour.
“I don’t know if I can,” he says. “I think that because I am most interested in contradictions of others, I am most aware of them in myself.”
Despite the great success that the bulk of his work has achieved, Zwick occasionally questions his place in the film industry.
“As far as the business is concerned, I continually marvel that I’m able to still have a place in it. Those things that most interest me are increasingly marginalized,” Zwick says. “I sometimes feel as if I’m walking a razor’s edge between some kind of commercial viability, at the same time trying to hold on to whatever artistic integrity I need and deem important.”
Much of his artistic integrity, though, may remain intact due of Zwick’s ability to swap and combine the roles of director, writer and producer—a skill that earns him a large degree of creative control over his projects.
Asked whether he prefers one role over another, Zwick replies, “I love being inside the bubble of writing. But film is not a uniquely written medium,” he adds. “It has to be executed. For me, to write is only half of the process. As I write the film, I’m already directing it, and as I direct the film, I’m re-writing it.” He pauses, wrinkling his brow. “I’ve never said that before. I think it’s true.”
His ability to combine these roles may have developed at Harvard, where Zwick, a literature concentrator, took exhausting trips to the Carpenter Center to shoot and cut his own 16mm film. Yet his experience at Harvard is as contradictory as the societies he portrays in his films.
“I think in the burnished light of retrospect they’ve taken on this lovely nostalgic glow,” Zwick says of his college years, “whereas in the middle of them they were convulsive, tortured, gleeful, lonely and delicious, and every other combination of feelings that you might have between the ages of 18 and 21. They were all that they needed to be,” he says.
Zwick has nothing but positive words about his experience at the heart of Harvard’s theater community, back when the Loeb Drama Center was entirely student-run and he “was able to make a fool of [himself] many times a year on the [Loeb] Mainstage.”
“I do know that a lot of the time that I have spent in the years since [college] has been a kind of feeble attempt to recapture some of the intensity of being in those productions, or directing them in those days,” he says.