It’s a good time to be an Alan Rudolph fan. Last fall, Shout! Studios released a gorgeous restoration of Rudolph’s unjustly maligned satire “Breakfast of Champions,” and this month Rudolph enters the Criterion Collection with a new 4K UHD edition of his deliriously romantic and unclassifiable “Choose Me.”
A hypnotic noir-inflected fever dream following the intersecting love stories of a group of strangers (played by Keith Carradine, Genevieve Bujold, Lesley Ann Warren, and Rae Dawn Chong) who frequent the same smoky bar, “Choose Me” is vintage Rudolph: hyper-stylized, hilarious, and concerned with universal ideas expressed in the most idiosyncratic possible manner.
When Rudolph came to write and direct “Choose Me” in 1984, he was at a crossroads in his career, having made two excellent but unpopular movies (“Welcome to L.A.” and “Remember My Name”) outside the system and two studio pictures (“Roadie” and “Endangered Species”) on which Rudolph felt suffocated after his liberating apprenticeship as an assistant director under Robert Altman on “The Long Goodbye” and “Nashville.”
“As Kris Kristofferson used to say, it was enough to kill a normal man,” Rudolph told IndieWire.
After he made his two studio movies with producer Carolyn Pfeiffer, Rudolph was determined never to work that way again. “When ‘Endangered Species’ was finished, I said to Carolyn, ‘If you and I are to work together again, you need to find another source of money, because obviously neither of us can work in the studio system and survive.’” Luckily, Pfeiffer teamed up with Island Records executive Chris Blackwell and music manager Shep Gordon, who were looking to get into film production. When Gordon approached Rudolph to write and direct a music video for Teddy Pendergrass, who had recently been paralyzed in a car crash, Rudolph saw an opportunity.
“Shep said he could get something like half a million dollars to shoot a music video for Teddy’s album,” Rudolph said. “The number was astounding to me, since both ‘Welcome to L.A.’ and ‘Remember My Name’ were made for under a million dollars.” Rudolph told Gordon that for just a little more money he could make an entire feature based on Pendergrass’ song (titled “You’re My Choice Tonight”), and “Choose Me” was born. Ultimately the film would use a number of Pendergrass’ songs as a sort of Greek chorus, something that caused a problem during editing.
“It put Shep in a position where he had to go back to his old partners or nemeses or whoever owned the rights to the music, and they wouldn’t give us a break on the songs,” Rudolph said. Luckily, at that very moment Tri-Star offered Rudolph “Songwriter,” a movie with Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson that was ready to go. “They needed somebody to start Monday with no prep, so we made the deal for me to direct the movie and they paid to shut down editing on ‘Choose Me’ and pay for the songs as some kind of dolled-up penalty fee or something.”
Rudolph took seven weeks off of “Choose Me” to direct “Songwriter” and then came back to finish the first movie with the songs that had now been paid for and, to make the situation sweeter, he experienced total autonomy on “Songwriter,” which he edited concurrently with “Choose Me,” yielding two of the best films of his career in the same year. “Unlike the other two studio films I did, ‘Songwriter’ was all mine,” Rudolph said. “They knew they were in trouble, so they just let me make up the movie.”
Before Rudolph sat down to write the script for “Choose Me,” he met with his old friend Keith Carradine, with whom he had worked on both “Nashville” and “Welcome to L.A.,” and told him about the project. “He said, ‘I can do anything I want as long as I can come up with something based on this song. You wanna be in it?,’” Carradine told IndieWire. “I said ‘Of course,’ and he said, ‘So what do you want to do?’”
Rudolph wrote the character of a mysterious stranger who may or may not be a compulsive liar with Carradine in mind, following Carradine’s own instructions regarding what he’d like to do on screen. “He said he wanted to do all the things they never let him do in movies,” Rudolph said, explaining why he made Carradine a romantic man of mystery who got into fights and wooed multiple women.
“I had never been offered that kind of standard leading man stuff,” Carradine added. “I had played a lead for Ridley Scott in ‘The Duellists’ and Bob Altman gave me a nice role in ‘Thieves Like Us,’ but this had fights that were inventive and comical, which were really fun to do.”
One of the movie’s greatest pleasures — and greatest challenges for the actors — is its heightened dialogue, which sounds unlike that of any other movie, even if Rudolph sees it as perfectly natural. “I’ve been told from the beginning that my movies are weird, which I could never figure out,” Rudolph said. “But apparently my dialogue is just different. I thought it was the way regular people would speak if they were in that situation, but I guess I was wrong because everyone said the language was so stylized. But Keith has a way of saying these things so that they’re just thrown off. Is he just in tune with the way I think or is he that good? Probably a bit of both.”
“There are those who would look at Alan’s dialogue and say, nobody talks that way,” Carradine said. “But my answer to that is that if a person can think to write it, then a person can think to say it. So my task in working with Alan is to always find my own truth behind these frequently odd things that he has me say and say them in a way that is real to the character, and make them sing as best I can.”
After “Choose Me,” Carradine and Rudolph made several more films together, including “Trouble in Mind,” “The Moderns,” and “Ray Meets Helen.” Yet their collaboration has more to do with an intuitive, spiritual connection than anything intellectual.
“When we sat down to record the Criterion interview, we realized we’ve never talked about acting,” Rudolph said, adding that he was shocked to learn that Carradine never thought about whether his character was actually a compulsive liar or telling the truth. “He said, ‘Did you?’ to me, and I said I had been back and forth, but I couldn’t make any conclusions. And then I understood it — he was right.”
“Choose Me” remains a high point in Rudolph and Carradine’s partnership, and a rare collaboration of theirs that was appreciated in its time and has only grown in esteem since its release. “We didn’t know what we had,” Carradine said. “Alan likes to say that he puts a movie out there and ducks, because he’s ready to have tomatoes thrown at him, but this one got some good notices and when we opened at the Laemmle Royal there were lines around the block. None of us were used to that — we were all used to making these little movies that snuck by where we hoped somebody might see it someday.”
Rudolph credits the circumstances of the film’s production with its ability to transcend its somewhat limited resources and schedule (it was shot in 19 days). “We didn’t have much money, and I didn’t want it to look like a low-budget film,” Rudolph said. “The way to solve that was to get people who wanted to move their career up one notch. So we had got an editor who had been an assistant editor, and a director of photography who had been a camera operator, and sound guys who were desperate to mix a movie. What you get from that are people who are striving to prove themselves, and you can’t buy that.”
Carradine agrees. “This was a case where there was not a single person there who wasn’t there because they just desperately wanted to be there,” he said. “This was something that came together for all the right reasons. It was such a labor of love.”
“Choose Me” is now available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
