Thirty years ago this summer, James F. Robinson was a first-time director at the age of 40. A native of the Rio Grande Valley, he had fallen in love with San Antonio while attending Trinity University in the 1970s, and had written a script about a magical romance between two souls searching for one another that would also show off the city. "Still Breathing" starred Brendan Fraser and Joanna Going, and the filming locations in San Antonio included homes in Olmos Park and Alamo Heights, the San Antonio River, the Alamo, and Mission San Jose.
Robinson attended our TPR Cinema screening of “Still Breathing” on July 28, 2026, and was kind enough to share some stories about the film’s production at a post-show Q&A. Below is an edited transcript of the program—you can listen to an audio version using the player at the top of this page.
We opened our talk with a discussion about the music of the film, in part because of the beautiful Chopin piano piece that struck Robinson’s heart and provided inspiration while writing the script.
This story has been lightly edited for clarity.
Nathan Cone: I enjoyed seeing this movie even more now than I did when it first came out. I mean, it just grows and grows and gets better. So, first of all, that's just so beautiful, and I guess it has to do with age too, as well. When you were conceptualizing this movie, and I think we talked a little bit about this before, I think that music and art itself really took helped inspire some of what we see on screen here. So talk about how the way the picture evolved in your mind, the story from music and art.
James F. Robinson: I was in L.A. and I wasn't getting any projects going, and I thought, I want to make a movie I would watch about five times. And I remember I was in a music store, and I found this bargain CD, you know, like "Classical music, Part Three," and it had just all these random tracks on it. And there was one, this Chopin "Berceuse..." and I started listening to that, and I listened to it, and I listened to it, and I put it on repeat, and I would write to this music. So we used that actual track in the movie, and Paul Mills, who was the composer wrote this orchestral stuff to surround it.
And then there are various variations within it. We were really lucky with the music. Paul Mills, the composer, was a longtime friend of mine, and there was a lot of resistance into hiring him as the budget got higher and higher. It's like, who is this guy? Because he's mainly done Christian gospel music. ... I had a lot of faith in him, and we worked well. And he moved to L.A. and then moved into an apartment at Park La Brea and would just work on it. And then we would say also the Verdi, the "La Traviata" (opera) theme is in there, and another piece of Chopin. There's a waltz. I can't remember what number it is, but you kind of hear that when she's talking about the little girl in there at San Jose. That's that Chopin waltz. So, he wrote a lot of original music too. Roz's theme was original, and we worked and worked, and it's like, boy, it'd be really good if we had an orchestra. And Paul was really good. ... We would have all these union musicians, these studio union musicians, and we were so excited to be what was called at the time Studio M in Paramount. Have you ever heard of that?
Nathan Cone: Sure.
James F. Robinson: Well, it's gone! It's probably a data center or something now. But this was where Bernard Herrmann recorded, and I mean, this is a legendary room, and we started with a fairly large amount of musicians, and these guys just come in with their instruments. They've never seen a thing. They've never seen the music. They sit down. They run through it once, and then they record it. It was the best day of my life because I had almost no responsibility! My one contribution during the day was I was like, I don't know. The intonation on the string seems a little off on that one. But that was a dream day.
Nathan Cone: Maybe I can get to how the script and how everything gestated and how the story came about as well?
James F. Robinson: I found the Chopin "Berceuse" to be almost narcotic, and so I would literally just sit there with my headphones. And to be honest, it's kind of egocentric and embarrassing … but it wasn't really about a man and a woman. It was about two parts of me, because Fletcher was the person I always wanted to be, and Roz was the person I was becoming. And then once you start to know the characters, then they start talking.
Nathan Cone: You talked about the two characters, Roz and Fletcher, being kind of a part of you. ...Was the magic of the dreaming something that you had always thought about in terms of a connection between them two — or you know when you try to find a way to get these two people together — had that been an element, a plot element, something within you that you thought you know what this would be good.
James F. Robinson: When I was like eight years old, my father was stationed at the Pentagon, and we lived in Arlington, Virginia. And I remember sitting in my bed, and somehow I'd seen a movie or something that there's one person in the world for you, and I'm like, dang. ... What if she's in China or Brazil? I was really worried! How am I going to find this woman? That was a big concern. [laughs] So eventually, when I started to write the script, part of my thinking was, okay, this is a ridiculous thing I believed when I was eight years old. Of course, it's not true. There's not impossible that there's one person in the world for you because relationships are much more complex and involve much more work and flexibility and understanding and empathy and everything else. But what if I took that thought and treated it as something real within the movie? So they're really this family, this guy in this family really believes that there's one person, and that you have this vision of this person and this dream. And I just liked, I like dreams.
Nathan Cone: And I like the way there's a history of it in the family too ... a lineage. ...
James F. Robinson: Right, and I think I mean because it's a ridiculous concept. So as a storyteller, can I sell a ridiculous concept as real in this fantasy? I mean, there was an article in the [San Antonio] Current, I believe, that said this movie was magical realism for white people, which I thought was pretty accurate!
Nathan Cone: Well, when you do the magic thing once for one guy, then it's magic. But when you do it for the father and the grandfather, then it becomes history.
James F. Robinson: And so ... I love San Antonio. I didn't want to shoot on the River Walk. We did shoot on the river. That part where they're on the boat, and she's playing the tuba, is on River Road, kind of a more pristine, or what I imagine the original river was more like.
Nathan Cone: Were there certain locations you made sure you wanted to get in the picture?
James F. Robinson: Well, I wanted him performing in front of the Alamo. Oh, even though you can't do that, I don't think. I went down there yesterday. It was quite a shock. I don't know if anyone's been there.
Nathan Cone: The plaza is a lot different now. ... You wanted the Alamo in there, and you had Mission San Jose, and a beautiful house too. So talk about these locations.
James F. Robinson: The house was really important. Really important. My ex-wife was ... I kind of got her into this business. She was an interior designer, and she started working on commercials. And then a movie came to town called "Johnny Be Good," I don't know if anyone remembers.
Nathan Cone: Yeah, with Anthony Michael Hall.
James F. Robinson: So she worked on that, and a kid that worked with her, his name was Jeff Hammond, and he said to her, "You got to come see my parents' house. And I remember going to see the parents' house one evening, and it was like someone hit me like here with a sledgehammer, because it was like this creative Shangri-La. This house was built in I think 1915. It was full of all this stuff. A lot of the stuff you see in the movie was really in the house. Pat and Hall Hammond, it was their house. They were just amazing people. Pat was just a completely unique individual. She loved kites. She loved fireworks, and she had this ... if you remember the beginning of the movie, he's working on the mural, right, the collage, and then you see an open door, and you see what this crazy room with all this stuff in it. That is exactly how it was. The kitchen is almost exactly how it was, and although we added that big espresso machine, but I remember when I first went in her kitchen, it's like there was a basket with empty eggs that she had cracked open, for cascarones for Fiesta, and I thought, how San Antonio is that? And I made a collection of Alamo post cards, which you see in the movie on the wall. The dining room is exactly the same. That's her was her table that he works on, and we kind of junked up the sitting room where he has his big chair. And [when] Roz and Celeste Holm have their talk, that was their couch. My [then] wife was the production designer, and she's a genius. And she decided to get all this fabric and hang that down as this kind of like, which is not very realistic, but it was very expensive fabric. In fact, her name is Denise Pizzini, and she has two Emmy nominations right now. She is the production designer for "Pluribus" on Apple, and she's the production designer on this "Muppet Show" that they had recently. So I hope she wins. We had a lot of really talented people.
Nathan Cone: Well, speaking of talented people... you mentioned the collage a moment ago, and I want to pay tribute to Bill Bristow, who is somebody that we have in common through Trinity University. The late Bill Bristow passed away just a few years ago. Art professor, inspirational guy, one of my mentors. He designed the tree man's cart, basically, on your suggestion and the artwork in the film. You know, the collage.
James F. Robinson: Bill was an art teacher at Trinity. He started out as an abstract painter. I don't know if you know that, and then had a like a conversion Saul on the Road to Damascus, kind of conversion where he became a a painter mainly of landscapes, but also trees. If everyone remembers La Mansion del Norte, the hotel up by North Star Mall. Does anyone remember that? Used to be, if you walked in there, you saw this beautiful tapestry behind the desk with all these trees. That was his. But he was a big influence. I was in the art department [at Trinity]. He was a big influence on me. I wasn't particularly good at making art, and I took mainly Art History as you did, but I remember, and we just talked about this a minute ago. He would have a drawing class, and you could sit and watch him draw. And I still remember the way he would pick up a pencil, like it was-I don't know the most valuable thing in the world. Delicately pick it up and just then just go on the paper. And it was just I know there's a picture of you somewhere in the world. So anyway, I said to Bill, "Hey, I need art. Would you do this?" And I mean everything. Every drawing you see of Roz that Roz makes is Bill. That drawing of Fletcher at the end is Bill. But I said we want to do this collage, and I was thinking, you know, we'll do something. And he did something truly amazing. That collage is, I think, amazing. He worked so hard on it and took different pieces of you know different pieces of eyes from different things and stuck it on and did this. He worked so hard on that, and we built it onto the wall there in the house. You know I can't say enough about him. So I got some really great pictures, Bill and Denise and the these set decorators were fantastic. We had Lisa Lopez, who was the set decorator here in Los Angeles, and we had a different one in Los Angeles. I would say 65% of the film was shot in San Antonio. Inside of Roz's house was Olmos Park. The bedroom where they kiss was in Monte Vista, and that was the only part of the house we used. We used an upper bedroom. In fact, I just drove by it today. That was cool. And there's... I can't remember the name, a famous restaurant on South Alamo, that's where Roz and the British guy go to cut up the money and to have their talk. What else did we shoot here? [Mission] San Jose... That was great. It was hot as hell that day. We shot it in the middle of summer — like idiots! I think because Brendan was going to do "George of the Jungle." That's why his hair was long, and so I think we had to shoot it.
Nathan Cone: It works on him, because he's hot.
James F. Robinson: That's what my girlfriend just said! He worked out every day.
Nathan Cone: You can tell!
James F. Robinson: At San Jose, that was glorious. That was one of those days where just everything works, and that was so brilliant the way he dusts the edge off [the Rose Window]. And I went back 10 years later, and I saw there all these pieces of the Rose Window ledge just chipped away, and that really made me sad. And I hope it wasn't because of the movie, but now they have a fence around it, and you know guard dogs and everything. But I went up to one of the park rangers once, vainly, and said, "I heard they made a movie here." Do you know what he said? "I don't think so. I never heard of that." That's what they told me. "I don't know what you're talking about."
Nathan Cone: Well we got a lot more people who know about it now. Well, since you mentioned Brendan, and so before we open it up for audience questions, let's let me let's talk about casting. Let's talk about getting Brendan and Joanna as part of the this.
James F. Robinson: So, the casting. I went to the Sundance Film Festival. I saw a film called “Eden,” starring Joanna Going, who played this woman who has cerebral palsy or something, and I was just flabbergasted by her about her just her tone and her darkness and everything. And so I thought she's it, and I got this casting director in L.A., and I said, first of all, I want to get Joanna Going, and so I flew to New York. I remember it was raining, and she lived in New York at the time, and we-I went to this restaurant and met with her and talked to her, and she said, "I remember she said, 'Why do you want me to do it? Like, I'm nobody, but I'm in terms of stardom. She was kind of nobody, but so anyway, I attached her, which I learned later is bad. It's very bad to attach the woman first because the boys don't like it. They want to be first. Can you imagine? So I remember we set up a dinner with her and me and the casting director and Timothy Hutton, and he came, and I think he didn't like her. So we're like, what are we going to do? Meanwhile, Joanna Going's agent, William Morris, also represented this guy called Brendan Fraser. So we got these constant calls. Brendan, Brendan wants to do it. Brendan's interested to do it. What's wrong with Brendan? And I remember my producer, who ended up being Brendan's best friend, saying "he's an eyebrow actor." A term I hadn't heard before, meaning that she didn't think he was a very good actor. And so I said, "Well, let me meet Brendan for coffee, and we'll talk about it." So I remember... near my house there was a coffee shop on the corner, right near La Brea and Beverly, and I had a meeting with him and [when I] came out... You probably know what parking meters are like in L.A., I'd neglected to pay enough or something and had a $75 ticket on my car.
So that was the signal from heaven that he was the right guy, I guess, but it worked out great! He was very nice guy. Of course, everyone was very skeptical of me. I mean, what have I done? You know, I was 40 years old. I'd only done smaller things that no one had seen, but they liked the script, which was way too long.
Nathan Cone: So tell me about the project you're working on now.
James F. Robinson: I've spent a lot of the last several decades trying to do things that I just really wanted to see. I just thought this was a great movie, and most of the people in Hollywood did not agree with me or just weren't interested. And I spent a lot of time, like eight years, trying to make this indigenous film in Guatemala, and I was so passionate about that, and spent every penny I had on that, and it finally just dawned that it just wasn't going to work. And I was at the Cannes Film Festival, which is you know my happy place, and I was talking to this distributor, this art house distributor from the Netherlands, and I said to him, "What audience do you know will come to the theater? That is your most reliable audience?" And do you know what he said? "Cappuccino ladies." I said, "What's a cappuccino lady?" I said. These are women. They're usually over 40, over 35. They get together as a group on the weekend or on a weeknight, and they go to the movie together, and then they go and have cappuccino and talk about it, and that was like the first little light bulb. And I said, I think I can do that. And I learned a lot about how movies get made in in Europe because they have this co-production system where these if you ever seen these European kind of arty movies, you'll see, you know, all these different producers listed at the beginning, and that's because some of the money's coming from Finland, and some's coming from Sweden, and some's coming from Germany, and so forth. So I started really learning about how that worked, and I came up with this idea.
The film is currently called "Four Past Loves," which might be a working title, but it's about an American guy that just kind of crashes out in a serious way, and opens his mailbox and finds a credit card offer for $25,000, and he gets the credit card and he decides to go back and visit four women that were very important in his life and try see if they can help him figure out what the hell is going on with him, and so it's a narrative that kind of goes in this kind of meandering way. He first goes to see this woman in Finland, and then he goes to Ireland, and then he goes to France, and then he goes to Spain, and each place he goes, things get a little. ... The women are a little more intense and a little more unorthodox, and so it's the kind of movie I'm hoping cappuccino ladies will go get. We'll see, and we have a lot of have had a lot of success, amazingly, to my shock, and we have a major movie star that has said he loves the script and wants to meet me and talk about it. Hopefully, that'll happen in the near future. And he's British. But everyone knows this person and has seen him, and he's going to play an American, which he's done numerous times before. And then we're I designed it so that we shoot for two weeks in each country. The idea was, I want the best actress in Finland and the best actress in Ireland and the best actress because it's not too much to ask of them to work for two weeks in their home country when they sometimes go do big projects that take months and months. So we've just reached out to a very big star in France as of Monday, and so we're just seeing what happens.
Nathan Cone: Well, good luck on that. So, who has a question?
Sherry Heffner, audience member: I thought your casting was perfect, but I was especially taken with Joanna Going. How come we don't see more of her?
James F. Robinson: I could call her right now, and we could ask her! I sent her a text a few minutes ago with a picture of the screen and she was very happy. The honest question is that it's very hard to succeed at a certain level as an actress or as an actor or as anyone in this world. Let's face it, but she was in a movie called "Wyatt Earp." Does anyone remember that? At the same time, what was the other Wyatt Earp movie that came out? That was a huge hit...
Nathan Cone: It was "Tombstone" and "Wyatt Earp." Oh yeah,
James F. Robinson: Oh yeah, "Tombstone" made bajillions of dollars, and "Wyatt Earp" didn't do that well, and she had a very big part in that. And I think Hollywood got a little spooked about that. But she was in "House of Cards," she was in a lot of things, and but I will tell her you said that that she's your favorite movie star. I think is what you said. I will. She's a good person, although I don't think she trusted me at all during the shoot. We hardly spoke with each other at all, but as long as she was doing great, what I thought was great work, I decided just to leave her alone, and or I would give her just little tiny cues. I remember the scene where she's leaving Fletcher. That was one time she gives us look. She's looking down, and then she looks at him. That's a good part. But let me talk a little more about the casting real quickly. Celeste Holm, I don't know. We just asked her, and she said yes. I remember her coming to my office, and it's like what, and Lou Rawls is the same thing. He had been in "Leaving Las Vegas." Remember that movie? Lou Rawls had played this taxi driver, and I thought he was great. Who else do we get into it? Angus McFadden was the casting director knew him.
Nathan Cone: Michael McKean...
James F. Robinson: Michael again, the casting director. It's like I think Michael can do it. It's only, you know, a couple hours, he has to do it, and I was like, "Wow." Anne Magnuson, I think I wanted her because I think she's real special, and she was perfect. I remember her coming to the office all dressed up, and she's a very, you know, like all actors, nervous and insecure and trying to see who you are. But she is fantastic in this movie. I think she looks great. And in in the theatrical version, which is what you just saw, I cut a bit of her out. We had to cut a bit of her out for time, as I mentioned, we were cutting the film down, and she was really unhappy about that because she remember the scene where they meet in there in the Formosa Cafe, and that's when they meet the polo player guy, and she looks fantastic, and she was so good in that scene where she's eating bonbons or whatever. No, she's great. I was so happy to have her.
Cameron Tufino, audience member: Hi there. Something that also stands out to me with Joanna going is her costumes. I think she's just...
James F. Robinson: Yes. I'd love to talk about that. Yeah, the costume designer is Susanna Puisto. She's from Helsinki. She came in so prepared with so many definite ideas, and I was just sold on her. And she's like a former model from Finland, and I think she's kind of genius as a costume designer, and that didn't sit really well with my wife, who's the production designer, who didn't agree with some of the choices. Because remember, this is 1996, and that whole cowboy shirt with the pearl buttons thing wasn't a trend yet. It was about to happen, and she was. My wife was like, "Why is he wearing that stupid shirt?" And I'd like, but I just really trusted Susanna, and she and I had this very specific palette based on painting. So it was a palette for Fletcher's world and a palette for Rozalyn's world, and so all those colors, those mint greens and those purples, that stuff she wears walking back into the house at the end, that coat with that amazing, really amazing.
Audience member: I just wanted to see if you could talk more about Jim Cullum.
James F. Robinson: Yes, I always knew about Jim Cullum… I had played trumpet when I was a kid, so that was a big deal to me. And I don't know how I even asked him, but I think I wrote it with him and the band in mind. Jim was great. All the band was great. Does anyone know Jim Sheridan? Do you know who Jim Sheridan was? He was the pianist and the arranger for the band. And I said, Mr. Sheridan, I didn't call him that, but I'll say I did. "I need this Chopin as a jazz tune with tuba. Can you do that by Thursday?" I loved watching that band because they would play every day, and you see these guys sit down in front of their instruments, and the music just come out of them like this. And I thought, oh my God, what a life that would be to know that you know it's 6 o'clock. I'm going to go downtown and sit in front of the piano, and it's just going to come out of my fingers this amazing stuff. And it was I was just enraptured. Don Mopsick who was the bass player, and he was also a great guy. I said, “Don, I need a tuba player,” and he said, “Well, the best tuba player in the world is [Sam Pilafian], and he lives in San Francisco,” and so we brought down this guy, the world's best tuba player, and he plays for Celeste Holm, and who played for when Fletcher plays the cornet? I guess that's Jim Cullum playing.
I remember going to the recording studio with them and giving them this big pep talk, and also I remember doing the same thing at Stage M at Paramount, and I said, "Guys, there's no click track." Usually, with movie soundtracks, the musicians all wear headphones, and they have a click track that's already been predetermined at so many beats, and that changes that so many beats a minute. I say we're not doing that. We're doing it by feel, and the conductor is doing the job of feeling the stuff because every if you listen to music, the tempo is constantly being twisted and tweaked and changed, and I just wanted feeling, you know, and that it's a joy to work with good musicians. I mean, what a what a joy and privilege. I hope to have that again.
Audience member: Yes, could you comment on the some of the music selection? Augie Meyers, Texas Tornadoes. Especially Junior Brown…
James F. Robinson: Yes, that's part of the casting I didn't mention. Why did I pick Junior Brown? I know I picked Junior Brown, and Junior Brown was like, okay, he's the greatest guy ever. Has anyone seen him play?
Nathan Cone: Oh yeah, he's amazing.
James F. Robinson: What you see is him, that's absolutely him. And so we had "The Other Texan" part, and he was really nervous, and did a great job. I remember I picked him up from the airport in Los Angeles, and I'm taking him to his hotel, and he's like, "Do you know where I can get some weed?" I said, "Actually, I don't." But that's my Junior Brown story. I fail. But he was very nervous. But he did a good job. He didn't have a lot to do, but he did a good job. And if you ever get a chance to see him in concert, absolutely go do it, and the Augie Meyers. Well, love the Texas Tornadoes, and that one album of them where they're on the cover over by the cement plant. I love every song in that album, and "Laredo Rose," I just love that song, and there's this theme of a certain kind of woman, which goes from “La Traviata” overture at the beginning to the lyrics of “Laredo Rose,” and that's kind of a little subcurrent in the movie. But I love that song, and I love them riding in that convertible on Southwest Military. I love that shot.
Nikki Young, audience member: Hello. So I just want to say that this is 30 years of this film, and it's still just amazing, finding new audiences. So I love that. For those of us who saw it way back when, lots of nostalgia, and in that same vein, so I can look at it with different eyes now and have even more respect and I’m just enamored by it. As a longtime producer now, I still don't even know how you just did this amazing slide projector scene with the sound, with the lights, with capturing it. There's so many elements in that, and it is just perfect. How did you do that?
James F. Robinson: Well, we used a real slide projector. As I was telling Nathan, I guess yesterday or today, the slide projector comes from me sitting in art history class at Trinity University, and watching the slides change. I love that sound and the fan and the sound of it changing. And I remember our my professor standing in front of the screen, and I remember especially this beautiful girl that sat in front of me, and the light off her cheekbones, and I was young and impressionable then. But it was stupid the way we did it! We just got the projector and turned it on, and had him click the slides manually, and it was a nightmare for sound, an absolute nightmare, and we kind of tweaked the EQ to get it down. If you listen, the sound is kind of crappy in that scene. But I'm glad you liked it and it worked out. But I don't know. I'm worried it's heading towards slightly cringy, that maybe some people here got the cringe on that. I hope that you didn't. But you know, the “new perspective on the Rococo” was a pretty good line!
Nathan Cone: Well, I don't think it's cringy because I think that this is a good movie for somebody that has a romantic heart, of course, and I think you made a very beautiful picture, Jim. And I wanted to thank you so much for being here.
James F. Robinson: Thank you so much.
