The Justice interviewed Marshall Herskovitz '73, producer of The Last Samurai, about his Hollywood career.
Sarah Bayer: Would you say that Brandeis has influenced your career since [you graduated], or have you left it behind?

Marshall Herskovitz: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I was majoring in English, but I was studying Old English and Middle English. And I somehow decided that I wanted to make movies out of medieval epics. So I guess that influenced my career. I've never made a movie out of a medieval epic, but it drove me to want to go to Hollywood.

SB: How did you make that connection between what you were learning in the classroom and then deciding to apply it to movies?

MH: That's a good question. I'm not sure I have an answer to it. But I think that I was interested in film. In those days, there was an absolute obsession with old movies. There were two different revival theaters in Cambridge and they showed at least one old movie every week on campus. And I would literally see three old movies a week, on big screens, from the '30s and '40s usually, sometimes from the '50s. And we were obsessed with them. It was a form of unofficial film education. I didn't really take that seriously until my senior year, but it was just a poetic thing. When I read these epics I just realized I was making movies of them in my head.

SB: Is Quarterlife at all based on your life as a recent college grad? I know Thirtysomething was based on your life as a thirtysomething.

MH: Quarterlife is certainly informed by a lot of what I went through in my '20s. And I think it had more to do with being struck by the different issues that people face in their '20s and how important that decade is, that you end up making all these decisions that literally end up determining the rest of your life. You choose a career. It's either a mistake or not a mistake. There's so many things you do in your '20s that set you on a path, and the more time that goes by the harder it is to change that path. So it's quite important.

SB: And [are the compromises that are necessary in the '20s] something that [have] always been around?

MH: The weird thing about the arts--and we do have this focus on the arts, in the show and on the website-is that there's an inherent contradiction in the arts, which is to say that you're expressing yourself, but you're also attempting to communicate with people. So if you express yourself in a way that doesn't communicate with people, then you've failed. But if you just try to communicate but you don't express yourself then you've sold out. You've got to reach people, and that means looking at it in a different way, and I think that's something we all have to learn, and it feels like compromise.

SB: And is that related to why you decided to attach Quarterlife to a social network?

MH: Yes and no. The reason I wanted to do a social network was, when I was looking around at what was going on in social networks (and this is now two years ago, which meant that there were only two that I was aware of, and that was MySpace and Facebook. There are a lot more now but they weren't as prevalent or known then) what I saw in both of them was again a lot of stuff on the surface, a lot of stuff that was presentational. There's a lot of private stuff people are dealing with, all kinds of different things, that I felt there was no social network that was trying to reach people at that deep level. Since that's what we try to do on our television shows, finally, is talk about the deep inner lives of people, couldn't you do that in a social network? And that wasn't being done anywhere else. So it's a very ambitious idea, but that's the idea, to try to create this venue that felt very different from these other social networks.

SB: The social response versus the critical response to your work, is there a balance you try to strike in terms of critical applause versus actually bringing about change with your work?

MH: Everything we do tries to affect people at a deep level. It's not necessarily political, per se. In other words, The Last Samurai wasn't exactly political, but it talked about some important ingredient that's been lost in modern society, having to do with honor and commitment and that sort of thing. I look at Blood Diamond the same way; I don't look at it just as a political piece about conflict diamonds. I look at it as encouraging people to think about the interconnectedness of our global economy and the victims of that and how we are all contributors to situations that we may not even know about that are dangerous or injurious to people. To me, that's the most important thing about what I do, much more important than what critics say and much more important than critical success. But what I care about is a particular depth of response. You just hear from people how passionate they were about that, how moved they were, or how they remember, or how it means something to them in their lives. That's what you look for; that's the goal. That's how I measure my success: Did I get that response from people?

Edited and condensed by Shana D. Lebowitz.