Tessa Louise Salome on The Wild One

Courtesy of Tessa Louise Salome

In Tessa Louise Salome’s The Wild One, she projects light onto a prism that splits an image into many personalities and meanings in her spotlight on director Jack Garfein. It evokes the approach audiences consider when viewing something more than two-dimensional. Garfein, a Holocaust survivor and co-founder of the Actors Studio, was against the status quo in film aesthetics and politics, and Hollywood has censored him when he pushed the envelope in presenting themes of race and homosexuality in his debut feature, The Strange One. Despite discovering the then-unknown acting giants Ben Gazzara, James Dean, Bruce Dern, and Steve McQueen, Garfein has never got his deserved dues until now in this multifaceted documentary. Similar to her previous doc Mr. X on Leos Carax (Annette), she explores the inner functions of an auteur, the circumstances and obstacles that the filmmakers face, and how close peers remember the aforementioned protagonist. 

Below, I got to email Salome prior to the film’s world premiere about Garfein’s legacy, survival, multiplexity of images, and film history. The Wild One made its world premiere at 2022 Tribeca. 

EF: When was the first time you heard of Jack Garfein?

TLS: It was in 2015, in Paris actually, while I was finishing one of my previous films, Mr. X, on French filmmaker Leos Carax.

EF: How much did you know about him before making The Wild One?

TLS: Very little, in fact. That’s one of the main reasons I made the film, since I couldn’t believe such an astounding figure had fallen into relative obscurity. I later learned, though, that many of my acting friends had gone to the Garfein Studio in Paris, where he taught drama classes and directed plays.

EF: Did you get a chance to see Something Wild and The Strange One before making the film? If so, what are your thoughts on the two films? 

TLS: Yes, it’s the first thing I did when I met him. There’s a moral complexity to them that you don’t see in most American cinema of this period. His style is strikingly modern and has more in common, almost, with European New Wave auteurs like Bergman or Antonioni. There’s a focus on image rather than dialogue, a privileging of subtext, a particular use of gestures and close-ups, relationships between characters that are troubled and complex… Because his films are shot through a lens of trauma that is highly personal, they have this powerful ability to unsettle, to make us question things. And I think this makes them extremely important and worth discovering.

EF: Willem Dafoe has an amazing iconic voice. What led you to cast Dafoe as the film’s narrator?

TLS: Of course, I’ve always loved Dafoe as an actor, but some years ago, in a film by Loris Gréaud, I heard a voice—a fascinating and frightening voice, which really filled the space. It was Willem’s. I then became haunted by the memory of this voice, and once I started writing The Wild One, I knew I wanted him to narrate Jack’s story. Luckily, it just so happened that the film’s composer, Gael Rakotondrabe, had worked with Willem on a Robert Wilson play, so we got in touch with him. He liked the film, and we recorded in Rome where he lives.

EF: There has been many docs that take place during the Holocaust and your film employs a breadth of such archival footage that is not commonly used. How hard was it to find rarely-seen archival footage of the holocaust that is featured in The Wild One?

TLS: It was my incredible head researcher, Rich Remsberg, who made this possible, along with the help of many other people.

EF: How much of the film did Jack see before he passed away?

TLS: He did not see so much unfortunately. He mostly saw the rushes of his return to the Flossenbürg concentration camp. But it was not an easy thing sharing these filmed memories with him. It was easier for him to be filmed telling his story than to watch it.

EF: How much involvement Carroll Baker (Jack’s ex-wife), who’s featured prominently, had in the doc?

TLS: Carroll Baker has written a book, Baby Doll: An Autobiography, which was of great help. It’s extremely witty and very well written… about her time at the Actors Studio where she met Jack and about their years together in Hollywood—with a sharp vision of Hollywood show business and of her life with the workaholic, “no-compromise” Jack that ended in a tumultuous divorce. Carroll did not wish to be interviewed in the talking head style, but naturally, she holds an important place in the documentary.

EF: The talking head interviews compliment the archival footage splendidly as some docs feature onscreen interviews that don’t add emotional depth or new directions to the story. May you please describe the process of transitioning back and forth between the present-day images and the archival/films’ footage?

TLS: One of the greatest challenges I faced in making The Wild One was finding the best approach to capturing the myriad layers of Jack’s story. I wanted to breathe cinematic life into his past, which is why I chose to film both him and our interviewees inside different theaters in Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, where magnified archival projections lit up on the screens surrounding them. This, I felt, would allow me to create an immersive experience and allow those who knew Jack to speak more spontaneously about his life and his work as they reencountered them all these years later. As for Jack, we filmed his testimony in the Marlene Dietrich Halle at Babelsberg Studio, which is Berlin’s most iconic film studio, dating back to the Golden Age of early German cinema. This I envisioned primarily as a space of memory—a kind of mesmeric “mise-en-scene” of Jack’s past where images would materialize around him and come back to life as he spoke.

EF: Your film utilizes light from projectors and the multiplexity of film images. What does the light and multiple frames of a singular image symbolize?

TLS: For one, the prism-like complexity of Jack’s life and personality—the many angles from which we can understand them. I think it also symbolizes his own way of perceiving the world—the way he constantly questioned truth and made films that challenged viewers to look at things differently. And last, but not least—given that many of these multiple frames are close-ups of Ben Gazzara and Carroll Baker—this was Jack’s approach to the actor. Irène Jacob has a quote in the film where she describes his method of preparing and rehearsing with the actor as being like “a fabric embroidered from a thousand little scenes, a thousand details and lines, so that, all of a sudden, a whole world appeared.”

EF: Survival is an essential theme in Jack’s life. What do you see in Jack that makes him stay true to his values and not conform to Hollywood’s beliefs?

TLS: In Jack, I see an instinctive defiance. The title The Wild One refers to his rebellious spirit, and it’s also a combination of the two films he made, The Strange One (1957) and Something Wild (1961), which were either censored or had their distribution sabotaged. It’s also, of course, the title of a film starring Marlon Brando, who, like Jack, was central to the Actors Studio and famously described acting as “a survival mechanism”—something which, as you said, is at the heart of Jack’s story. For Jack, these survival and maverick instincts go hand in hand… Scholar Kate Rennebohm also mentions something very important in the film when she says that Jack “was able to see things as an outsider” and that “this freed him from certain fears about losing everything, about challenging the system.” As a survivor of the Shoah, he brought a unique perspective, a critical attitude toward what he called “that kind of denial that is specific to American culture and Hollywood cinema.” He knew the consequences of turning a blind eye to social and political realities, and I think this, too, made him so unwavering in his stance and his values vis-à-vis the studios.

EF: The film is also about memories and history, and how they transfer to each generation. How do you want people to remember Jack and this often untold chapter of Hollywood?

TLS: I want people to remember Jack exactly the way his friend Henry Miller described him: “With a mind like a razor’s edge and a heart to match.” Someone who was as generous, passionate, and sincere as he was astoundingly knowledgeable about so many things—literature, religion, history, philosophy, cinema, and, of course, theater… Someone who lived through one of history’s greatest nightmares but still believed in the goodness of individuals and in their ability to transcend trauma and transform life into art. I want people to remember Jack as an artist who could be confrontational to a fault—sometimes alienating those around him with his explosive temper—but who was filled with humanity and who was a visionary too… An avant-garde auteur who possessed not only tremendous artistry but a keen social justice consciousness—one that remains deeply relevant in today’s landscape of political and societal violence. And this untold chapter of Hollywood history involving Jack is one that I hope audiences will carry with them, as it falls at this unique intersection of Holocaust memory and postwar America and strongly reflects the idea that the past is never buried… That while collective memory may scar the present, it can illuminate it too.