He's back: A compressed oral history of Warren Beatty, starring Warren Beatty

If there's a dividing line between old Hollywood and new, Warren Beatty stands astride it.

He started his career in 1961 with Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass and became a symbol of stylish rebellion in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde. He carved his way through the '70s with the likes of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. He won a directing Oscar for Reds in 1982, survived Ishtar in 1987, romanced Madonna in 1991's Dick Tracy and used a hip-hop beat to skewer the political establishment in 1998's Bulworth.

He has been there, and he has done that. Now he's onto this: Rules Don't Apply, his first movie in fifteen years. Beatty, 79, directed, produced, co-wrote and stars as an elderly Howard Hughes, caught up in the romantic shenanigans of a driver (Alden Ehrenreich) and an aspiring starlet (Lily Collins) on his staff. The movie opens November 23.

Beatty recently visited Dallas to promote Rules Don't Apply, and he brought with him an assortment of stories and opinions on his career, the movie industry, politics, artistic collaboration and whatever else he felt like talking about. Such interviews usually last fifteen minutes. Since Beatty calls his own shots, and he's got plenty to talk about, this one went more than twice that long.

Herewith, a compressed oral history of Warren Beatty, starring Warren Beatty.

Warren Beatty on Warren Beatty

1961: Beatty was a rising and rakishly handsome young actor when he scored the lead role in Kazan's romantic tragedy Splendor in the Grass. The film tells the story of two high school seniors (Beatty and Natalie Wood) driven to the edge of mania by unfulfilled passion. It remains a painful indictment of sexual puritanism, a subject that also permeates Rules Don't Apply (and from which the famously frisky Beatty never suffered).

Beatty: That subject [puritanism], we don't escape it, whether it's Massachusetts Bay Colony or Jamestown, Virginia, or wherever. It has succeeded in making us the laughing stock of France and other countries very often.

That was the first movie I made, and I got lucky. That movie was a hit. I had Kazan, who was a great teacher not only of dealing with material and re-writing and directing and so on, but he was an extremely good producer. He was not self-indulgent, let's put it that way. He was a little bit more self-indulgent in the legitimate theater, where you could afford to be.

1967: After scrambling to find financing and a director, Beatty produced and starred in Bonnie and Clyde. The movie's violence and irreverent tone shocked some early reviewers, but it went on the score ten Oscar nominations. More important, it helped usher in a daring new age of American filmmaking, influenced as much by European art films as classic Hollywood gangster movies.

Beatty: When I finally got around to making Bonnie and Clyde here in Dallas, I had been turned down by about ten directors that I had gone to. Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard had played around with the idea of doing it. I was turned down by George Stevens and William Wyler and Freddie Zinnemann, just on and on and on. Arthur Penn had bad experiences on big movies and he said he wasn't going to make any more films, he was just going to do legitimate theater. He turned me down.

I finally went back to Arthur and said, "You know, you really should do this. Don't back off from the movies. Let's have an argument every night. Let's find something to argue about no matter what. Let's have a difference of opinion." He thought that would be fun, so we did it. It worked very nicely. We got along great. The picture was good.

1971: After the success of Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty teamed up with another iconoclastic director: Robert Altman. McCabe and Mrs. Miller, freshly available from the Criterion Collection, is an ethereal dream of a Western, with dialogue that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. Beatty stars as an entrepreneur/hustler who opens a brothel in the Pacific Northwest with an English lady who has a thing for opium (Julie Christie, who also starred with Beatty in Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait). The late Leonard Cohen provided the haunting songs.

Beatty: Bob was a brilliant collaborator who would do whatever he could do to get you to pitch in as much as you could. I don't think that was reserved just for his relationship with me, I think he did that with everybody. He had a great sense of what was funny and he had a good story sense, and he had a gift for flexibility. When actors came and brought something, he could see it. He did not deny it. I felt that very strongly with Altman.

1981: Beatty reached the Hollywood summit with Reds, an epic about the radical American journalist John Reed and his involvement with the Communist revolution in Russia. Beatty won the Oscar for best directing. He also earned an invite to show the movie at the White House, where he had a conversation with the president that sticks with him to this day.

Beatty: Reagan was a friend of mine. Now, you probably know I'm not a right-winger. I am what is known as a lefty. But I did like Ronald Reagan a lot. We would have all kinds of hilarious, jocular arguments back and forth. He was a very likable man.

He invited me to bring Reds to the White House. A three- and-a-half hour movie about a Communist. At intermission, we were standing outside of the screening room at the White House. Let us say the room was not full of Democrats. But he said something to me that was not intended to be funny at all. He said, "You know I have moments now where I wonder how anyone could be the president without being an actor." He was really serious. It made sense to me at that point. It makes even more sense to me now.

2016: After many years swimming around in his head, Rules Don't Apply is ready to hit theaters. In a sense the movie takes Beatty back to the beginning: Set largely in late-'50s/early-'60s Hollywood, it shows us a period of the movie industry that no longer exists.

Beatty: Years ago, Warner Brothers was trying to get me to start shooting a movie about Howard Hughes, and I did not want to make a movie that was just about Howard Hughes, in the sense that Bonnie and Clyde was about Clyde and Bonnie, and Bugsy was about Bugsy Siegel or Reds was about John Reed. In this movie Hughes allows us a raison d'etre for these two kids as they come to California from Southern Baptist and strict Methodist backgrounds. But it's not a story about Howard Hughes.

Sometimes we do our best work when we don't know that we're working. We think we're doing something else, so inspiration runs free and it's more fun. When you ask how long I've been working on this movie, I could say I've been working on this movie my whole life, just as I've been working on every movie my whole life.