‘Tesla’ gives inventor bio-pic treatment
As a teenager, Michael Almereyda wanted to be a cartoonist. He even reached out to Alex Toth, who began in the 1940s as a comic book artist but is perhaps best known for his animation designs for Hanna-Barbera’s TV productions throughout the 1960s and 1970s, everything from “Space Ghost” and “The Herculoids” to “Scooby-Doo” and “Super Friends.”
And Toth actually wrote him back. More than once. They developed a relationship.
“It was a strange relationship, now that I think of it, ” Almereyda says from his Brooklyn home. “If I got a letter from a 16-year-old, I don’t know if I would open the door like that. Alex had a family. He had children. He had a wonderful wife, but for some reason, he had this history of mentoring people.”
But once Almereyda went to college, he and Toth lost track of each other.
So, instead of promoting his latest comic, Almereyda (“The Experimenter, ” “Marjorie Prime”) is talking about “Tesla,” his bio-pic of Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Toth, who died in 2006 at the age of 77, introduced the future filmmaker to the story of the Serbian-born inventor whose alternating current made today’s electrified society possible.
“I became obsessed with movies, and it seemed like possibilities were more appealing to me,” Almereyda says. “Even when I was talking with Alex Toth, one of the conversations we had that had a little tension to it was that I loved Alex’s drawing and his storytelling. But I became disenchanted with the stories he was telling and that lots of comic book artists were telling. This was the late ’70s. Things have changed dramatically since then, and now we know that graphic novels, as they’re called, have more depth and intimacy and more humanity. At the time [comic] stories seemed so flat and superficial.”
THE KEY TO THE CURRENT
Other filmmakers have been drawn to Tesla’s life as well. The inventor is a supporting character in Christopher Nolan’s fictional “The Prestige,” played by moonlighting singer David Bowie as a man tormented by the technological marvels he has created. In “The Current War,” Tesla (Nicholas Hoult) is a supporting character as George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) and Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) take center stage.
Tesla is the main character in Kristo Papic’s 1980 effort “The Secret of Nikola Tesla,” which features Petar Bozovic as Tesla and Orson Welles as his one-time patron J.P. Morgan. Almereyda likes that particular film but notes that David Lynch (who executive produced and appeared in Almereyda’s “Nadja”), Jim Jarmusch, Julie Taymor and Serbian director Dušan Makavejev have all had projects on the electrical wizard fall apart.
“It’s hard to do movies set in the past. It’s expensive,” Almereyda says. “One trick with Tesla is that he had no known romantic relationships. We tend to focus on romantic relationships in bio-pics. That’s the handle that people have, and with Tesla, you can’t really pretend [that he had one.] That’s my guess, at least.”
While the “The Prestige” presents Tesla’s achievements as simply a subject of awe (that’s not the point of that movie), Almereyda briefly shows how alternating current made today’s technology possible. During those brief moments, it’s almost as if viewers are inside Tesla’s head.
“I’m glad you feel that we got some of that information across. I’m not sure it did work, but if you say so, I’m glad,” he says. “The trick is you don’t want to weigh it down with science because the ambition is not to make a documentary or a science lecture. I thought it was important to convey the essence of his ideas and how great he was to be able to accomplish so much and to make breakthroughs that no one else had been able to achieve before.”
Almereyda says presenting the movie from the point of view of Morgan’s daughter Anne (Eve Hewson, daughter of U2 singer Bono) helped make Tesla’s story more accessible. Another factor was star Ethan Hawke who studied Tesla’s life thoroughly.
“It’s fair to say that Ethan re-energized the project,” Almereyda says. “When he committed to it, it became real in a way it had never been. Ethan has enough energy and imagination to present his take. His great contribution wasn’t just that information but about perspective. He came up with a few lines of dialogue, and they’re some of my favorite lines in the movie. When a friend says Anne Morgan can make all his dreams come true, he says, ‘All my dreams are true.’ I thought that was a beautiful line.”
MISSING CURRENT
If the movie honors what Tesla achieved, it also reveals why (until the rock band and electric car came around), he was fairly obscure. When I was growing up Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan), who opposed the use of alternating current, and George Westinghouse (Jim Gaffigan) were household names and featured in children’s books. (I should mention, I work for a company that was formed by the merger of corporations the two founded, and I didn’t know about Tesla until I got to graduate school.)
Because Tesla hasn’t had as much time on the big screen, he has made a tempting subject for a movie, and it seems like he’s an unsung hero. Nonetheless, Almereyda and Hawke spend the film explicating why Tesla’s inventions are better known than he has been.
“The truth is that while he was at his height, he was very famous, and very celebrated and was, in fact, wealthy,” Alemereyda says. “Two thousand people showed up at his funeral.
“He was also very good at confounding or complicating business arrangements. He was a flat-out lousy businessperson. He was bad with money. At the same time, it wasn’t like he didn’t like money. He just went through it very quickly, and I’d have to say recklessly.
“So the more I’ve read about him, and I don’t want to dishonor him, but he got in his own way a great deal. He alienated a lot of people. I don’t feel as sympathetic toward him as I used to. As a teenager, I thought he was a victimized rebel. Unlike Westinghouse and Edison, he wasn’t a mogul. He didn’t form companies.”
Despite having support from J.P. Morgan, who once backed Edison. Tesla lost Morgan’s financing when his projects didn’t match expectations.
“This isn’t in the scope of the film,” Almereyda says, “but the truth is Tesla wasn’t so much betrayed by Morgan as Tesla betrayed Morgan. He didn’t do what he said he was going to do.”
DEFYING CONVENTIONS
Almereyda’s career has benefited from defying expectations. In his modern-dress adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (2000), which featured Hawke in the title role and MacLachlan as Claudius, Bill Murray plays the scheming Polonius. Stand-up comic Gaffigan had a major role in “The Experimenter” as well as “Tesla” and has received solid reviews.
The director says Murray’s and Gaffigan’s skillful turns should be not surprising.
“I think that they’re terrific actors, and they can be hilarious when they want to be,” he says. “Most comics, if they’re any good are able to tap into humanity, so I really don’t draw the line between comic acting and dramatic acting. They’re running the same circuit.”
Both “Tesla” and “The Experimenter” use atypical narrative techniques that might make their subjects proud. In the new film, Tesla even bursts into a Tears for Fears song at one point. While the director has used Fisher-Price children’s cameras for some of his movies, he’s surprisingly self-effacing about getting away from cinematic norms.
“The conventions have shifted,” Almereyda says, “When you think of movies and plays that present history, they’ve become a lot more flexible and fun. When you think about ‘Hamilton’ or ‘The Big Short’ or the TV series about Emily Dickinson, there’s a new normal where facts are served up in a way that’s more self-referential. I didn’t’ feel like I was breaking any new ground. I was just trying to honor how those figures lived their lives.”