Interview

HM: I didn't even know who was fighting.

JT: Wladimir Klitschko and Sultan Ibragimov. Ibragimov should have been in Klitschko's corner as a cut man, not in the ring to fight, and Klitschko, unless someone is coming at him, is unbelievably boring. Nice guy, but you thought, "This is a heavyweight-championship fight?" I mean, boxing is not coming back. There's not going to be a new Ali or a new Tyson. What's happened to movies is happening to boxing-that is, too much availability of alternative, similar entertainment. Movies started to become diluted with the advent of television; that has been mirrored by the dilution of boxing, with kickboxing and absolute, extreme homicidal fighting. In a way, I think that the movie Fight Club [1999] did a weird, negative thing to boxing, culturally. I mean, it is sort of similar to what has happened to the novel. For however many good novels are written, the novel itself has completely lost its place. In fact, as Norman Mailer said in [Nicholas] Jarecki's documentary about me [The Outsider, 2005], the novel is not now what it was when he was coming up, when the reference points were John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. He said, "Now, you'd become a filmmaker."

HM: Is that why you decided to become a filmmaker instead of a writer?

JT: Absolutely. I was determined to become a novelist on the order of Fyodor Dostoevsky. And around my second year at Harvard, I realized-

HM: That nobody reads Dostoevsky?

JT: No! That would have been okay. But Steve Saltonstall, who was in the writing seminar I was taking, was a much better writer than I was, so I thought that if in a class of 10 people, I'm second best, then the chances of my being the best novelist in the world are zero. And yet I tried. I started to write The Gambler as a novel. And then I realized I was seeing it as a movie, even though I'd never read a film script. And I started it over again. And then from working with [director] Karel Reisz on The Gambler and being there, as [Winston] Churchill put it, from erection to resurrection, I felt, "Oh, this is a great art because I can pull in music and visual imagery, and it has its literary aspects and drama." Film was a sort of Wagnerian synthesis of the arts, as opposed to opera, which Wagner had thought would be. That's another art form that has seen its best days.

HM: I take it then that you will not be directing an opera anytime soon?

JT: Ha! Right!

HM: To some people, it seems like it's the twilight of civilization because we're losing the so-called war of ideas and we're losing the physical war as well. In your mind, is there an irony that these things could be happening at the same time?

JT: I think they're interconnected. I think there's a general sense that the belief structures that existed and carried civilization forward have weakened to the point where they can no longer support it. They are not powerful enough to do it anymore because there is not enough serious belief in them. And, in fact, I think that one of the things that is happening in the so-called "clash of civilizations" is that the confidence-and Tyson uses that word over and over again in the documentary-that was once obvious in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition has been weakened tremendously. There's a feeling that there's a cynical, corporate layer that's really driving it-one that's ready to compromise-and that the real confident energy around the world is coming from Islam, that the believers take their own faith at face value and with great confidence and in far greater numbers.

HM: So I've been meaning to ask you: What do you think about the fact that the offtrack betting outlets might be closing?

JT: My feeling about all gambling venues-OTB foremost among them-is that I'd be happy if they were shut down permanently. I look at all these gambling establishments as conscious traps meant to ensnare middlebrow, nonprofessional, nonaddictive gamblers who are just going to lose a certain amount that they've budgeted. And worse, for people like me who are not casual gamblers but have a serious addictive nature, the attitude is, "We'll take every penny you have. And, if you leave any money at home, feel free to get it and come back, and we'll take that, too."

HM: You had an entire chapter devoted to you in Art Manteris's book SuperBookie.

JT: Yes. That was in the early '80s. I was on a binge.