Alan Ball, the creator of the HBO series Six Feet Under

DATE December 14, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Alan Ball discusses his series "Six feet Under"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

This week, HBO began rerunning "Six Feet Under," its series about a family in
the funeral business. My guest, Alan Ball, is the creator of the series. He
won an Oscar for his screenplay for the film "American Beauty." He was a
playwright before he got his start at TV writing for the sitcoms "Grace Under
Fire" and "Cybill."

I spoke with him last summer when "Six Feet Under" was first shown. The
series follows the Fisher family, which owns and runs a funeral home. Each
episode opens with the death of someone whose funeral will be handled by the
family. On the first episode, which ran on Wednesday, it was the father,
Nathaniel Fisher, who was killed in a collision with a bus while driving his
hearse. His wife is breaking down, his son David(ph), who was already working
in the business, plans to take it over. David's sister, Claire, is still in
high school. His older brother, Nate, moved away years ago trying to distance
himself from the family business.

After their father's death, Nate's first impulse is to convince the family to
sell the business to the corporation that is trying to buy them out. But then
he reconsiders. In the kitchen with his family, he tells David he wants to
keep the business and become a partner. David's sarcastic response will give
you a sense of the family dynamic.

(Soundbite from "Six Feet Under")

Unidentified Man: So now you don't want to sell?

Mr. PETER KRAUSE: (As Nate Fisher) I know it sounds crazy.

Unidentified Man: Oh, no, not at all. We'll keep the business for the rest
of the day, then sell it again tomorrow for a few hours.

Mr. KRAUSE: Just hear me out.

Unidentified Man: No, no, this is a good system. We'll sell in the mornings,
keep it in the afternoons, and maybe sometimes we sell again in the evenings
when we really can't make a decision.

Ms. FRANCES CONROY: (As Ruth Fisher) David, you're not being fair.

Unidentified Man: When I didn't want to sell, you could've cared less. And
when Nate doesn't want to sell, you listen.

Ms. CONROY: OK, I'm a terrible mother who's responsible for all your
problems. Happy?

GROSS: Alan Ball, welcome to FRESH AIR. How would you describe "Six Feet
Under" to someone who hasn't yet seen it?

Mr. ALAN BALL (Creator, "Six Feet Under"): Well, our log line(ph) on the set
is "Knots Landing" in a funeral home; it's sort of an existential soap opera.
It's a show about a family that runs a funeral home, and as such, you know,
death is their business and they're surrounded by it. But it's not a show
about death. It's about life in the face of death and, you know, people who,
because of their chosen profession, you know, are surrounded by death and how
that affects their outlook on life.

GROSS: Now the idea of setting a show in the funeral industry was proposed to
you by an HBO executive. What was the original proposal, and what did you see
in it?

Mr. BALL: Well, I had lunch with Carolyn Strauss, who is the head of HBO
original programming, a few weeks after "American Beauty" was released, and
she said, `I've always wanted to do a comedy about a family run funeral home,'
and something in my head just went, `Wow. Wow. That's really interesting.
That's something I've never seen. That's spiritual and dark and weird, and
I'd love to work on that.' However, at the time when I was having lunch with
her, I was doing this sitcom for ABC called "Oh Grow Up," but it got canceled
relatively soon after, and I just sort of wrote the pilot for "Six Feet Under"
without even pitching it to her, without pitching the characters, and I wrote
it as an hour show as opposed to a half-hour, which is what I think she was
originally looking for. And I sort of did it as a pre-emptive strike, just to
avoid having to go back into network sitcom land, because I felt like I'd
spent my time in that particular gulag, and I didn't really want to go back.

GROSS: Was the pilot that you wrote the pilot that was actually broadcast?

Mr. BALL: Yeah. Well, I wrote the pilot. I took it in to HBO and we had a
meeting and they said, `It feels a little safe. It feels a little network.
Could you make the whole thing just a little more screwed up?' Well, I had
never gotten a note like that in TV.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. BALL: And I just sort of, you know, looked up at the ceiling and said,
`Thank you, God.' And I said, `Yeah, yeah, I can definitely screw it up,' you
know. And I didn't go in and screw things up just for the sake of that, but
you know, when they said that to me, I sort of felt like I had carte blanche
to really go into the nooks and crannies of these characters' psyches. And
then it got really interesting.

GROSS: Can you give us an example of something that was less screwed up
initially that got more screwed up after you got that suggestion?

Mr. BALL: Well, in the pilot, you know, Nate meets Brenda at the airport and
they have sex and then...

GROSS: Just for people who aren't following the series, Nate is the
brother--OK...

Mr. BALL: He's the prodigal son. He's the oldest son...

GROSS: Right.

Mr. BALL: ...who left home because he did not want to go into the business.
And he's been sort of a Peter Pan, you know, hippie, basically, and he comes
home, you know, for the Christmas holidays and his father's killed in a car
accident on the way to the airport to pick him up.

But in the pilot, he meets this woman on the plane, Brenda, and she's kind of
very, very sexually assertive, and they end up having sex in a broom closet.
And then in my original draft, she just was kind of really nice and then she
showed up at the funeral and said, you know--after Nate has this scene where
he sort of insists on picking up the dirt actually with his bare hands and
throwing it into the grave, as opposed to a more sanitized procedure that's
standard for the funeral home. And she sees that and she sort of goes, `Wow,
you know, that was really impressive.' So she was just basically kind of like
the nice girlfriend, you know.

And so I went back and I made her a little more brittle and a little more
mysterious and put in a phone call where, you know, she calls him and, you
know, just to check out how he's doing, and he sort of flirts with her and
says something along the lines of, you know--he sort of, like, calls her on
some of her stuff, and she just snaps and says to him, `You think you're not
easy to read, you know? Guys like you are good for, you know, a roll in the
hay and that's it,' and she hangs up the phone. It just sort of makes it more
complicated, you know.

GROSS: Why don't we play back that phone call that you just described?

(Soundbite from "Six Feet Under"; phone ringing)

Mr. KRAUSE: Hello?

Ms. RACHEL GRIFFITHS: (As Brenda Chenowith) Well, it's about to start
raining frogs here. How are things on your end?

Mr. KRAUSE: God, I'm glad you called.

Ms. GRIFFITHS: Really? Why?

Mr. KRAUSE: I don't know. Because you have a calming effect on me.

Ms. GRIFFITHS: Uh-huh. Are you familiar with the psychological term
`projection'?

Mr. KRAUSE: Are you familiar with the psychological term `blow me'? Come
on. Grew up with all that psychobabble. Rebelled against it every chance you
got, still do, and that includes having sex with strangers in closets at
airports.

Ms. GRIFFITHS: And you think you're not easy to read? Coasting by on your
looks and charm isn't working like it used to, but you have no idea what else
to do because you've never had to learn. Any woman with half a brain looks at
a guy like you and thinks good for a hot (censored), but believe me, that's
it.

Mr. KRAUSE: I...

(Soundbite of phone being hung up)

GROSS: Alan Ball, I'm glad you brought up the character of Nate's girlfriend
because in some ways I still don't know what to make of her. I don't know
whether she's a kind of really smart person, a life force, or whether she's
really troubled, whether she's beneath all of this a really troubled person
who's going to do a lot of damage as the series plays out.

Mr. BALL: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Do you want me to be confused?

Mr. BALL: At this point, yeah. A lot about Brenda gets explained over the
course of the first season. A lot of why she is the way she is is explained,
and you understand where she comes from. And she's also--underneath that,
she's incredibly vulnerable, much more than she would even like to admit to
herself. And we eventually get to that place.

But what was interesting to me about Nate and Brenda as opposed to, you know,
the traditional--they're kind of like the Hope and Michael from
"thirtysomething" of our show. But the traditional sort of main couple of a
show is usually very well-adjusted and very, you know, committed and very good
about expressing their feelings. And these are two people who don't have any
experience in a long-term relationship, each for their own reasons. And
they're both smart and they're both good people, but they don't necessarily
have the skills to maintain a relationship, but they're both at points in
their lives where they kind of want to do that. And I also think, you know,
in my mind, overlooking the entire course of this series, there's a little bit
of fate involved in the two of them being together.

GROSS: Now I find that I usually resist new series until after a couple of
episodes or more the characters finally get under my skin and I get really
interested in them. I think I have a very crowded brain that feels already
overpopulated with characters and plot lines.

Mr. BALL: Absolutely. Yeah.

GROSS: Do you think of yourself as having to fight against that when you're
writing a pilot?--because in the pilot, you have to do a lot of work. You
have to not only make it interesting, but you have to introduce a whole cast
of characters, introduce the basic plot of the series and keep resistant
people like me interested.

Mr. BALL: Mm-hmm. Well, one of the great things about working at HBO as
opposed to working at the broadcast networks, just based on my own limited
experience with the broadcast networks, is that HBO is constantly encouraging
me to really get into the characters' psyches and get into, you know, the
stuff that's not so pretty--the warts, the neuroses. And as a writer, I've
always been drawn to those characters because, well, number one, I can relate
to them more than I can relate to, like, the perfect heroes or heroines.

And number two, I just--my heart goes out to them. I love characters who are
trying to make sense of their lives and trying to live an authentic life in an
increasingly inauthentic world, but they're not totally equipped and they're
just kind of acting on blind faith and, you know, really, you know, making
mistakes, and their lives are messy. I find that much more poignant and much
more captivating than, you know, your totally perfect hero or your completely
nurturing, you know, wife, mother, heroine--that kind of thing. I just
don't--those archetypes don't interest me.

And plot actually doesn't interest me as much as character. And so in the
pilot of "Six Feet Under," I felt like--you know, there's nothing like a
death--a cataclysmic event to really bring--it just sort of peels away a layer
of skin. And you get to see how people really are underneath the armor that
they wear through daily life, and the masks that they wear through daily life.
And those are the moments to me that are always interesting.

And I just--you know, "Six Feet Under" is the first television project that
I've worked on that is something that I myself would actually watch. And so
when I wrote it, it was from a very instinctive place as opposed to, `Well, I
need to convey this information about this person,' and blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah. And usually pilots I've worked on before, there's so much
studio involvement, there's so much network involvement and you're constantly
being told to spoon-feed information about the characters to the audience,
whereas at HBO it was just like just let the behavior speak for itself.

GROSS: Now you've written for several shows for commercial TV, and in
commercial TV a program is divided into acts with commercials separating one
act from another.

Mr. BALL: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Are you basically taught when you start working in network TV how to
plot around the commercials?

Mr. BALL: Yeah. You start--when we were breaking stories for half-hour
sitcoms, we would start with the act break. Well, actually, we would start
with the moment where, you know--the moment at the end where people get all
weepy and somebody learns a lesson. You know, I worked on those kinds of
shows. And then you'd figure out the act break.

GROSS: So what are the tricks that you're supposed to keep in mind when
you're writing into or getting out of a commercial?

Mr. BALL: Well, you want to end the act with something that is a bit of a
cliff-hanger, so that people will wait--you know, will sit through the
commercials and they won't change the channel. And other tricks--you know,
just--I don't know. The shows I worked on had--and a lot of American sitcoms
do have this, I feel--they have kind of a leering adolescent viewpoint about
sexuality. And the characters may be teen-agers or they may be middle-aged,
but it's this sort of like bedroom-farce, wink-wink, nudge-nudge kind of
viewpoint that is--you know, after you reach a certain point in life, it's
like, well, grow up; it's not that big a deal.

GROSS: My guest is Alan Ball, creator of the HBO series "Six Feet Under."
More after our break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Alan Ball, creator of the series "Six Feet Under." HBO
began rerunning it this week.

Now I'll tell you something that surprised me. At the end of episode four,
several people at the end of the show actually seemed to learn a lesson and
grow. You know, a gang leader learns to have empathy with his dead homey's
parents; the daughter seems to learn she probably doesn't want to flirt with
gangs and guns; and David, the brother who's been in the business for a while,
kind of learns a lesson from the corpse. I should say here that the corpse
usually talks to...

Mr. BALL: Well, David's the guy who spends the...

GROSS: ...the people in the funeral home. Yeah.

Mr. BALL: Yeah. He spends a lot of his time with dead people, you know?
And that, of course, is not meant--I'm not implying that these people are
actually ghosts. These are manifestations of interior dialogues that he's
having with himself.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. BALL: But yeah, I mean, you know, I think as you watch the series, people
do learn lessons and then they back-track. You know, it's one step forward,
two steps back. But you know, while I feel like a lot of the lesson-learned
moments in network TV seem to me very saccharine and very superficial, I don't
think that one should necessarily just try to avoid those moments altogether,
because we do learn lessons in life. But I--what we attempt to do is for it
to be tempered, for it to be realistic. But people have profound moments in
their lives, and in a show that is about how the constant presence of death
throws your own life into stark relief, I think people will have profound
moments. Are you familiar with the writer Thomas Lunch?

GROSS: Yeah, the poet who's also an undertaker.

Mr. BALL: Yeah. Well, you know, I did a lot of research when I started
working on this show and his books had the most profound effect on me just in
terms of the tone of how they were written. And there's a certain reverence
for life, but at the same time just a completely unsentimental acceptance of
the fact that it is fleeting. And so I think that's what I'm attempting to do
in the moments where, you know, people do learn things, people do become aware
of things--people's consciousnesses expand. But at the same time, it's a
constant struggle because you always, you know, want to fall back.

GROSS: Alan Ball is my guest. He's the creator of a new HBO series "Six Feet
Under," and it's about a family that runs a funeral parlor.

You know, you described the series about living in the constant presence of
death. And I know that death really entered your life--I'm not sure if it was
for the first time or not--when you were 13...

Mr. BALL: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: ...and your sister was killed in a car accident, and you were both in
the car at the time she was driving. Could I ask you to tell what happened?

Mr. BALL: Well, I--my life was very clearly separated into before and after,
at that moment. She was driving me to a music lesson, and it was her 22nd
birthday. And she pulled out in front of a car and it hit the driver's side
and she was killed instantly, and I was not hurt at all. It was a, you know,
profoundly shocking and traumatic moment in my life and, you know, I will
carry deep scars from that moment until the day I die.

And then there was a lot of blood. And in the ambulance I said, `Is she going
to be OK?' And instead of just telling me, `No, she's dead,' they said, `Yes,
yes, she's going to be OK.' They took me to the hospital, and, you know, I
was thinking, `Well, she's going to be OK. She's going to be OK'--I was
holding onto that. And then our family doctor came and picked me up and was
driving me back to meet my parents, and he said, `You're going to have to be
strong for your parents.' And I said, `Well, why?' you know, `She's going to
be OK, isn't she?' And he said, `No.' And there was a moment where I--a very
distinct physical sensation of just the bottom dropping out from under me at
that moment.

And my family--I wouldn't call them dysfunctional because there was no abuse
or no addictions or anything like that, but certainly we were not particularly
skilled in intimacy. And what happened is that everybody sort of splintered
and went into their own little world. And I think that's certainly--there is
a dynamic of that in the Fishers, in that people really kind of--even though
they're a family and they share the same house, they exist as separate
entities. And that, to me, is what gives the show fertile ground because as
these people move towards each other and start to reach out to each other,
that's, I think, where you can really mine that for some great drama and some
great comedy.

GROSS: You said that in your family when your sister died that everyone in
the family withdrew into their own world. What world did you withdraw into,
and did you remember that when you were writing the characters for "Six Feet
Under"?

Mr. BALL: What I did is I became incredibly active at school. I became like
the guy who did everything--any club I could join, any organization, anything
I could do to get out of the house, I would do it, so I became somewhat of an
overachiever. And, no, there's not really that dynamic in "Six Feet Under."

GROSS: The daughter doesn't seem to be on the verge of becoming an
overachiever...

Mr. BALL: No, she doesn't.

GROSS: ...I'll say that.

Mr. BALL: No, actually, I think--you know, it wasn't until I went away to
coll--I was very much a--in high school I was named, like, Young American,
which was this group of kids--they were supposedly...

GROSS: How little they know.

Mr. BALL: Exactly. They were supposedly very upstanding and, you know,
everything that was great about America--whatever. And then I was actively
trying to do that. I was trying to be, you know, the ideal of what you're
supposed to be and it really had very little to do with who I actually was.

GROSS: Alan Ball is the creator of the series "Six Feet Under." HBO began
rerunning the series this week. Ball will be back in the second half of the
show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Credits)

GROSS: Coming up, we continue our interview with Alan Ball, creator of the
series "Six Feet Under," which HBO began rerunning this week. Also, John
Powers reviews "The Royal Tenenbaums," the new comedy about three child
geniuses who mature into dysfunctional adults.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with more of our interview with Alan Ball. He won an Oscar for writing
the film "American Beauty" and he created the HBO series "Six Feet Under."
HBO began rerunning the series this week. Our interview was recorded last
June during the first run. "Six Feet Under" is about a family that owns and
runs a funeral home and lives in the constant presence of death. Alan Ball's
sister died in a car crash when he was 13.

What was your sister's funeral like?

Mr. BALL: It was surreal. It was very surreal. It was, you know, the
traditional open casket thing, and I remember the first time I saw her in the
open casket I thought, `OK, who's that?' because they had done her completely
different. They had given her, like, big boofy hair, which she never wore in
life. It was, like, a lipstick color that she would never wear. And I'm
sorry, you know, when they lay those bodies out in caskets they look phony,
they look like wax figures. And it's--certainly for me, and that's all I'm
saying; I'm not saying that this is true for everybody--it was not at all
comforting to see that. And there was a point where my mom just broke down
and started to cry, and somebody from the funeral home just appeared out of
nowhere and silently swooped her off into this room and shut the drape.

And that moment is very--I put that moment in the pilot because I'll never
forget that, because the subtext of that moment is, `Oh, these emotions
are--no, you shouldn't see this. This is bad. You shouldn't have this kind
of emotion. The way that we should deal with this is very quiet, very
muffled, keep everything down.' Well, no, that's a lie, because what you need
to do is you need to scream, you need to bang on the wall, you need to, like,
tear at your hair. Because grief is a primal, primal thing, and the only way
out of it is through it. And, you know, it took me 25 years to learn that,
because I never really grieved for my sister because, number one, I was told
to stay strong for my parents; number two, I just didn't have the skills. You
know, I didn't know what you were supposed to feel, how you were supposed to
express it. It was too overwhelming, it was too terrifying, and so I carried
that grief, that unexpressed grief around for 20 years.

And then when I was living in New York, I had been pursuing this career as a
writer, you know, doggedly my entire life. And I wrote this play that got
optioned by Columbia Pictures, and they gave me, what was for me at that time,
a large amount of money and I quit my day job. And that was the thing I had
been working for, you know, my entire life, the moment when I could quit my
day job and I could be a writer full time. And what happened is I went into
this pretty severe depression, because now that I no longer had this goal to
distract me, all of those years of repressed grief welled up and I had, you
know, pretty standard post-traumatic stress syndrome. I had panic attacks.
My heart was racing all day long. I couldn't sleep. I would burst into tears
at the drop of a hat. You know, luckily I was living in New York City so
nobody really cares. You can just sit there on the subway and start weeping
copiously and nobody pays any attention.

GROSS: That's really true, yeah.

Mr. BALL: And I thought that I was losing my mind. I thought, `I'm going
insane.' And it was a period that lasted for about six or seven months, and
it was one of the darkest, most painful periods of my life. And having come
out on the other side, I'm so glad I went through it because it really
deepened me, it really made me kind of a stronger and a richer human being,
having experienced--really allowing myself to feel the primal existential pain
of a loss of that magnitude.

GROSS: Who was it who made you think that this depression and panic you were
going through had to do with your sister's death 20 years ago? Did you come
to that conclusion yourself or was it through therapy?

Mr. BALL: Well, I was in therapy. I was in therapy. And I had some dreams
that sort of, like, keyed me into it.

GROSS: Right. Right.

Mr. BALL: I have a very active subconscious.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. BALL: Sometimes it's very unsettled. It's just like, `OK, this is what
this is about. You need to pay attention to it.'

GROSS: Yeah. Well, you know, I thought maybe I could play a scene here. You
know, you're talking about the importance of grief and how, like, at your
sister's funeral, the funeral director tried to cover that up by escorting
your grieving mother behind a curtain. There's a scene I want to play from
the end of an episode, because it's the first episode, in which the father's
being buried, and one of the sons, the prodigal son who's come back, wants to
throw fistfuls of dirt onto the coffin as opposed to, as you describe it, the
more sanitized symbolic version of throwing dirt onto the coffin, which is
what this funeral home usually practices. And his brother, who has been in
the funeral business for a while, gets really angry with him for acting out
like that and for showing his anger and grief in public. And this is the
conversation they have between them about what the appropriate way to behave
is.

(Soundbite of "Six Feet Under")

DAVID: You want to be the alpha dog, Nate? Is that it? You're coasting
toward midlife with nothing to show for it. Now you want to come back and be
the rock for this family to lean on? (censored) you.

NATE: That is not what I'm...

DAVID: Do you want to get your hands dirty? You sanctimonious prick, talk to
me when you've had to stuff formaldehyde-soaked cotton up your father's ass so
he doesn't leak.

NATE: Jesus.

DAVID: Yeah. Well, I'm sure you just would have tossed him out with the
garbage. It may seem weird to you, but there is a reason behind everything
that we do here. We provide people with a very important and sacred service
at the darkest time in their lives because maybe they don't want to make a
spectacle of themselves, because maybe they'd prefer to grieve in private.

NATE: Why? Why does it have to be such a secret? It's nothing to be ashamed
of. Dave, please.

DAVID: You know nothing! Nothing! You had a responsibility to this family
and you ran away from it, and you left it all for me...

NATE: Whoa, don't blame me if you're not living the life you want. That is
nobody's fault but your own.

DAVID: OK, fine. Just do me a favor, OK? You got out. Stay out.

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: Is there anything you want to say about writing that scene, Alan Ball?

Mr. BALL: Well, yeah, I mean, because I think they both have valid
viewpoints. I don't think Nate is the hero and David is the villain at all,
because Nate is so self-righteous when he says--when he's telling David, `you
can't go through this without getting your hands dirty.' He's telling this to
a man, you know, who constantly prepares dead bodies. And that's what Nate
was afraid of and Nate ran away from. And in David's mind, of course, he
abdicated his responsibility and left David with no choice but to go into this
business. I think it's--I also think, you know, the thing about the
relationship between Nate and David is that the bedrock of that relationship
is just this fierce love for each other, but because of the various ways that
their lives have taken them, they can't communicate that, and so that passion
gets rechanneled into anger and resentment.

GROSS: My guest is Alan Ball, creator of the HBO series "Six Feet Under."
More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Alan Ball, creator of the series "Six Feet Under." HBO
began rerunning it this week.

You had to learn something about what restorers do when they're working with a
corpse, especially if the corpse--you know, if the person died in a terrible
accident that mutilated the body in any way.

Mr. BALL: Yes. Yes.

GROSS: Where did you go to learn about that, and what are some of the things
that you learned that you're drawing on now?

Mr. BALL: Well, I actually--you know, I did some reading. I checked out some
textbooks from--you know, restorative art textbooks from, you know, funeral
training institutions. Embalming textbooks I looked at. But we have
consultants on the show, people who are licensed embalmers, who are licensed
funeral directors, that we sort of turn to when we need to be really specific
about what's going on. But I did learn all kinds of stuff, you know. I never
knew really what happened in an autopsy. I didn't realize that they removed
most of your organs, you know, because when you embalm somebody after an
autopsy, the circulatory system is not intact, so you have to do it limb by
limb. It's an entire world of stuff that most people don't want to know about
and, thankfully, never need to know. But I can tell you this: I've decided
that when I die, I'm going--it's straight cremation for me...

GROSS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mr. BALL: ...'cause I don't really understand the need to preserve the body.

GROSS: You know what I find disturbing? The sense that after someone you
love dies, they still have an address, and the address is the cemetery.

Mr. BALL: Yes.

GROSS: And that's where you're supposed to go visit them, that there's a
place where you're supposed to be thinking about them, that it's not enough to
carry them in your heart and in your memory. There's an address that they
have, and you're supposed to go there on certain holidays, and it can be an
incredibly alienating experience, because you're not necessarily going to feel
their presence any more in that cemetery than you are sitting in your bedroom
or your living room.

Mr. BALL: No. You know, last time I went home, I went to the cemetery
because my sister and my father are both buried there, and I hadn't been in
years and I thought, `Well, you know, I'll just drive by and stop,' and just
being there is such a--it is, for me, an alienating experience. It's so
weird. And I didn't feel--you know, I cried, but it wasn't because I felt
particularly close to them or I felt their presence. I feel their presence
much more throughout daily life.

GROSS: Why do you think you cried then?

Mr. BALL: Maybe it's because--you know, Brenda says in one of the episodes
of "Six Feet Under," you know, things happen that leave a mark in space, in
time, in us. And maybe just being in that particular spot, there's some sort
of psychic mark for me that reminds me of, you know, those moments when it
happened. But I didn't feel the presence of either one of them, my sister or
my dad. I just felt sad, but it was sort of a weird, kind of generic sadness.

GROSS: So you're going to go the cremation route. Have you told people that?
I mean, have you made it official that that's what you want?

Mr. BALL: Yeah.

GROSS: And do you want to be scattered or kept in an urn?

Mr. BALL: You know what? I don't really care what happens to me after I'm
dead. I'm dead. I try to--I mean, one of the things that's weird karma for
me is, you know, I have my own fear and loathing of death, just like Nate,
that I carried with me for years. And, you know, everybody has that, and we
all will have it until we go. But now that I'm writing about death and kind
of confronting death, at least hypothetically, on a regular basis, there's a
certain relaxation and a certain kind of liberation. And Thomas Lynch says,
`The dead don't care,' and I don't think they do.

GROSS: Well, but if you don't care what happens, why are you so certain about
cremation? Is it to spare other people having to be tied to this address of
the cemetery or...

Mr. BALL: Well, I think it's...

GROSS: ...to take responsibility to visit it?

Mr. BALL: I mean, to just take a body and pump it full of all these chemicals
and preserve it and then--there's something incredibly wasteful to me about
that and I think, you know, just recycle me, you know. There's a great David
Sedaris short story where he has his cat cremated. Because she never
particularly expressed any interest in the outdoors, he sprinkles her ashes on
his carpet, and then he vacuums them up, which I love.

GROSS: And David's a wizard with the vacuum cleaner. Well, you know, I'm
wondering, though, if there have been any of the, like, rituals surrounding
death that gave you a surprising amount of comfort or that did nothing for
you, you know.

Mr. BALL: When my dad died and when my sister died, the rituals did nothing
for me, nothing. And we were not a particularly religious family. We were
Methodists. I was raised Methodist, and we went to church on Easter and on
Christmas. And then when my sister died, suddenly it became all about
religion. And my mom and my dad, both, bless their hearts--they were just
trying to find someplace to turn to offer them any solace in their
grief--became very focused on that whole sort of, you know, end of the world
Gothic Christianity about the rapture and all that stuff. And I would come
home from school--I was 13 years old. My entire life was ahead of me. And
I'd come home from school and find my mom, like, crying. And I'd say, you
know, `What's wrong?' and she would say, `Well, you know, another prophecy has
come true. We're that much closer to the end times.' And she sort of looked
at that as a good thing, because her life was so painful at that point that I
think she just wanted an excuse to, you know--I don't think she ever
contemplated suicide seriously, but I think she would have welcomed, you know,
some big cataclysmic, apocalyptic event that would just take her out of her
misery.

Now I was 13. I had my whole life ahead of me, and it was like I was being
told, you know, we're closer to the end of the world, and that's a good thing.
And so I sort of went, `Hmm. OK. Thanks, Mom. Yeah.'

GROSS: Right. I want to briefly change the subject from death, the funeral
business and your series "Six Feet Under" to pornography, and the reason why,
I read, I think, it was in The New Yorker that--you know how a lot of
pornography is a pun on a well-known mainstream film.

Mr. BALL: Yes.

GROSS: Well, your film "American Beauty" has had its porn parallel, which is
"American Booty."

Mr. BALL: "American Booty."

GROSS: So have you rented the film?

Mr. BALL: Actually, I didn't even know it existed, and a very good friend of
mine sent me a copy, and it's great because the video cover is--it's, like, a
total rip-off of the poster. It's a background of rose petals, the typeface
is exactly the same, and it's a woman's buttocks and she's holding a rose
between them. And when I saw that, I was like, `Oh, my God, this is the most
exciting thing, you know. I have created something that has now been
bastardized by a porno knock-off. Wow, I have arrived.' Actually, I did
watch it.

GROSS: Are any of the scenes homages to your film?

Mr. BALL: Not really. It starts off with this kind of vague montage of
suburban houses. They all look like houses in the San Fernando Valley. And
then this woman just sort of looks at the camera, and you can tell she's kind
of coked up. It's really sort of seedy and sordid. And she has this
monologue. She goes, `This is my neighborhood. It's so boring. If something
exciting doesn't happen soon, I'm just going to jump out of my skin.' And
then they dump rose petals behind her, but it's not in slow motion, so it
looks just like garbage is falling, and then the next thing you know, you're
in a jail, and some completely different woman is having sex with two men.

GROSS: Well, congratulations. You have arrived.

Mr. BALL: Yes.

GROSS: Well, I want to leave you with the words printed on the stationery.
It's the motto of a tombstone and memorial company in this area, and it's `We
won't take you for granite.'

Mr. BALL: Wow. Wow.

GROSS: Well, Alan Ball, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. BALL: Thank you so much, Terry. It was such a pleasure.

GROSS: Alan Ball created the series "Six Feet Under." HBO began rerunning it
on Wednesday. Our interview was recorded during the first run last June.
New episodes begin in March.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Review of the movie "The Royal Tenenbaums"
TERRY GROSS, host:

"The Royal Tenenbaums" is a new comedy directed by Wes Anderson, who co-wrote
the screenplay with Owen Wilson. It's the same duo who made the 1998 prep
school comedy "Rushmore." Wilson is one of the stars of "The Royal
Tenenbaums." Gene Hackman plays Royal Tenenbaum. Anjelica Huston plays his
estranged wife. Their children are played by Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow and
Luke Wilson, Owen's brother. John Powers has a review.

JOHN POWERS reporting:

The trouble with making a beloved movie like "Rushmore" is that your next
picture is a real setup. Your detractors hope you turn it a flop so they can
say, `I told you so."' And your fans tend to want something even worse. They
want you to make it again. I suspect both groups will be surprised by "The
Royal Tenenbaums," a wonderful new ensemble comedy that takes writer/director
Wes Anderson into riskier emotional territory than he's previously dared.
As Jonathan Franzen did in "The Corrections," Anderson pushes beyond the
stylistic flourishes of his earlier work to tackle a deeply felt story of
family life.

The movie is set in an idealized New York City and stars Gene Hackman as Royal
Tenenbaum, a selfish louse with a toupee that resembles roadkill. Royal was
once married to Etheline, played by Anjelica Huston. And when they separated,
he left behind three children, all of them prodigies. Chas was a financial
whiz; Richie, a junior tennis champ; and Margot, a prize-winning playwright in
the ninth grade. But those glory days were decades ago. Now Chas, that's Ben
Stiller, is a widower perpetually dressed in a red track suit and obsessed
with the safety of his two sons. Margot, who's played by a frumped-up Gwyneth
Paltrow, is unhappily married to a shrink played by Bill Murray. And Richie,
that's soulful Luke Wilson, spends his life wracked with unrequited love
for Margot, who was actually adopted. They're all living together in the old
family house when Royal, who feels death breathing down his neck, returns in
hopes of winning back the love of his family. Naturally, his kids aren't
wholly delighted, but here he tells them his thinking.

(Soundbite of "The Royal Tenenbaums")

Mr. GENE HACKMAN: I've missed the hell out of you, my darlings. Well, you
know that, though, don't you?

Ms. GWYNETH PALTROW: I hear you're dying.

Mr. HACKMAN: So they tell me.

Ms. PALTROW: I'm sorry.

Mr. HACKMAN: Well, I've had a good run.

Mr. LUKE WILSON: You don't look so sick, Dad.

Mr. HACKMAN: Thank you.

Mr. WILSON: What have you got?

Mr. HACKMAN: I got a pretty bad case of cancer.

Mr. WILSON: How long are you going to last?

Mr. HACKMAN: Not long.

Mr. BEN STILLER: A month? A year?

Mr. HACKMAN: About six weeks. Let me get to the point. The three of you and
your mother are all I've got, and I love you more than anything.

Mr. STILLER: Ho-ho! Ho-ho!

Mr. HACKMAN: Chas, let me finish here.

(End of soundbite)

POWERS: While "The Royal Tenenbaums" is a very funny movie about kids and
adults and how it's often hard to tell them apart, it's also a story about
loss, failure and obsession. Royal is trying to regain his lost family. The
Tenenbaum kids are dealing with the disappearance of their childhood genius.
And even their childhood friend Eli, played by Owen Wilson, isn't immune to
this. Although a best-selling novelist of psychedelic westerns, he wishes he
could have had a magical childhood just like the Tenenbaums.

This is a movie where everyone longs for something or someone they may not be
able to have. Perhaps the deepest yearning is felt by Royal, who surprises
even himself by how much his family comes to mean to him. He's spent a
lifetime being a cynic, a user and a wretched father, the kind of man who'd
cruelly give his nine-year-old daughter's play a bad review, then wonder why
it hurt her feelings. But Royal's also a chaotic life force. It's his return
home after decades that starts freeing all the characters, including himself,
from their state of suspended animation. He's magnificently played by
Hackman, who gives my favorite performance by any actor this year. Over the
course of the movie, Royal is all sorts of things--petty, selfish, bigoted,
callous and often quite hilarious. But by the end, Hackman also makes him
extremely moving.

Wes Anderson, of course, is a brainy guy and "The Royal Tenenbaums"
self-consciously echoes things like Salinger's stories about the Glass family
and Orson Welles' film "The Magnificent Ambersons." But the surreal
sensibility is all Anderson's own. The movie is filled with oddball
flourishes that hark back to "Rushmore," from the recurring use of a
dalmatian-spotted mouse to the way that everyone seems to be wearing some kind
of a uniform. No movie this year has been thought out with nearly so much
attention to detail, but yet, the immaculately composed shots, the crazy
paintings on Eli's wall or the ravishing slow-motion image of Margot
approaching the love-struck Richie while a Niko song plays in the background.

"The Royal Tenenbaums" is one of the year's very best movies, but I'd be lying
if I said it were a complete triumph. This is not a perfectly polished gem
like "Rushmore." Bill Murray's character is disappointing, a couple of story
lines don't quite pay off and some of Anderson's stylistic touches are too
precious by half. He's outgrown them and doesn't quite know it. But this
isn't because Anderson has lost anything. It's because he's grown more
ambitious. He's moving toward a richer, messier, more embracing vision of
life, a vision that's both exceedingly odd and bracingly generous.

While "The Royal Tenenbaums" begins in failure, isolation and loss, it builds
to a wedding sequence that shows us the whole family achieving a sense of
fullness and connection. In such a moment, however tentative and fleeting, we
see that the Tenenbaums, like all families, really do have a chance to be
royal.

GROSS: John Powers is media columnist and executive editor of the LA Weekly.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Announcements)

GROSS: On the next FRESH AIR, actor and rapper Will Smith. He's starring as
Muhammad Ali in the new film "Ali." I'm Terry Gross. Join us for the next
FRESH AIR.
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