Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The right of Alex Cox to be identified as the author of this work has been
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1988.
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Notes 301
IndeX 305
3 intro
possibilities. It’s already being born: out in the same uncharted
territory as the computer game, the ‘readjusted’ corporate website,
and the home-made CD of ‘illegal’ MP3s. But the birth won’t be easy,
and the new form is destined for a long and hard-fought war.
Lined up against the development of new art forms are the
financial beneficiaries of the old: the studios and record companies,
and the politicians, academics and media who work for them. Their
world is already dying. Soon it will be gone. In the meantime, there
are still a few jobs to be had there. This is the filmmaker’s choice –
dependency, and the money which comes with it, or independence,
which may involve lean times.
At the same time, as the studios retrench, consolidate, and
fight for dominance in a diminishing market, it becomes even more
important for them to suppress the individual, or regional, voice. In
some countries, the idea of film as a distinctive, national art form has
been abandoned.
The British and the Mexicans face the most acute cultural
challenge. Mexico suffers from its military and economic weakness
and geographical proximity to the US; Britain suffers from a common
language and from a ruling class that is scared to defy the biggest bully
in town. As a result, our governments and cultural classes invariably
bow to American influence. Instead of encouraging regional voices
and developing new creative forms, they gather in secure redoubts
in the capital city and assist in the creation of amnesia, in the effort to
wash away our feelings and our brains.
Rather than encouraging new forms to develop – in film, in art, in
science, in copyright law – our leaders, cultural and political, seek to
enshrine the old. In film and television, the entire panoply of human
emotion is carved up into bite-size segments – serving a massive,
antiquated, violence-fixated Hollywood fast-food chain that Peter
Watkins has called the Monoform.
On Paul Robeson’s tombstone are the words, ‘The artist must elect to
fight for freedom or slavery. I made my choice. I had no alternative.’
What this great actor said applies to directors, to writers, to journalists,
and indeed to almost everybody. But not everyone is in the fortunate
position of the artist, able to weigh the political implications of each
possible job, and to accept or reject the work accordingly. The choices
that we make, as artists, hackers, or filmmakers, are visible in our
work. No one is forced to make a film.
for those who promote obedience; it’s in short supply for those who
disobey. And yet, all over the world, people refuse to be slaves, and
give up careers, and even lives, because their sense of self-worth, or
their community’s survival, obliges them to.
Another world is possible.
The key film in this book is Walker, shot in Nicaragua in 1987 with the
cooperation of the Sandinista government. Back then the Sandinista
movement was radical and broadly based: inspiring progressive
people all around the globe. Walker is the film in which I became
a director. Before that I was a writer who also directed: I hadn’t
established a style for myself, or thought hard about what a film
should be. With Walker, the script was in the hands of someone else – a
great screenwriter – and for the first time I had to concentrate entirely
on directing. This task included navigating deep political waters and
thwarting the efforts of those who tried to shut the picture down.
With Walker I grew up, and managed to complete a political film of
which I felt proud. But I also became acquainted with the unnecessary
tragedy that making films on a massive scale sometimes involves.
Up to this point, I’d been unduly optimistic about the importance of
making films, and egocentric in my approach to the process. Later, I
became more pessimistic. My most unified film, El Patrullero, was the
result of these experiences.
5 intro
for him, because he chose it. It’s possible for the rest of us, too.
Charles has been an example to me, and to many others, as one
of the best film artists that the Univeristy of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA) produced. Honoured by the Library of Congress and the
MacArthur Foundation, ignored by Hollywood, he’s only pursued
projects that he cared enough to make. He’s had what many people
would consider a very difficult time. Money – in terms of personal
income – doesn’t seem to have mattered to him. The work has been
the thing.
Writing this book, I’ve had to consider many things, and come to
understand some of them a bit better. I don’t know if it will be useful,
much less inspirational. But here it is. In preparing this manuscript,
I’ve been greatly helped by two fine editors, Philippa Brewster and
Jessica Cuthbert-Smith, and I’m forever grateful to them both. I’ll
borrow the end of this beginning from a much better writer, Ernesto
Cardenal. Ernesto will explain what I’ve been trying to say, and
haven’t managed:
Ernesto Cardenal
writing as one of Walker’s Immortals
Alex Cox
Tabernas
9 Edge City
naturally, I wanted to as well. UCLA was the epitome of cooperation
and competition. We all worked on each other’s films – shot them,
edited them, acted in them – but there was always a certain tension,
because we were all auteurs, and, yes, we all wanted to direct.
Edge City was shot between 1978 and 1980. The cinematographer was
Michael Miner, and the title was his idea. Later, in a trim bin, we found
the 16mm titles of another student film called The Suburbs of Edge City,
which must have been made several years before either of us were
students there.
Back in the late 1970s, ‘Edge City’ was a state of mind: a mental
territory inhabited by people with an interest in hallucinogenics
and catastrophe: apply here, graduate students. Michael had been
recommended by just about everyone as our most interesting
cinematographer. He had just directed and shot a longish short, entitled
Labyrinths, with one standout special effects shot, which looked like it
was left over from 2001: A Space Odyssey – a giant spacecraft with a
nuclear reactor at the business end. Michael’s special effects designer
was a fiery lad named Rocco Gioffre, whose triple passions were
radical politics, classic American cars, and special effects. Michael
introduced me to Rocco, and to another cinematographer who had
just graduated from UCLA: Tom Richmond.
Michael later became a feature director, and the screenwriter
(with Ed Neumeier) of RoboCop: I was lucky to catch him in his camera
phase. Widely read and observant, he introduced me to the works of
Borges, and to Julian Jaynes’ book, The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which he would expound on in the
most intriguing manner.
We both knew a high-school kid, and aspirant actor, called Dick
Rude, who had already appeared in a couple of UCLA films. One day,
Dick told us about some problems he was having with one his teachers.
The guy sounded a bit nuts, but I couldn’t offer any real advice other
than just get through it. Michael said, ‘It sounds to me, Dick, as if your
teacher is trying to indoctrinate your class with Scientology!’ No doubt
this seems entirely bizarre, but Dick took in what Michael was saying,
went back to school, and busted the teacher: it turned out the guy
really was trying to impose what Mike Davis calls ‘L. Ron Hubbard’s
amalgam of black magic, psychotherapy, and science fiction’ on his
teenage class. The school authorities spirited him away to wherever
off-kilter teachers were re-programmed in those days.
PRODUCTION
Edge City begins with an aerial shot of LA, the camera circling the city’s
most impressive freeway intersection – where the 405 meets the 10.
A year previously Michael had had a commercial gig that involved a
helicopter. He’d persuaded the pilot to take a little detour inland and up
and down the coast, and had shot a couple of 16mm reels of wide-angle,
Mineresque aerial footage. So Mike had a valuable collection of stock
footage, from which he sold me three shots – the freeway, warplanes on
an airstrip, and the oceanfront. All for a modest sum: $50, I think.
We began filming ‘Illustrator’ in the summer of 1978, with a small
crew all from UCLA – Michael; Tom as his assistant; Dan Halperin,
While I waited for the cast, I kept fooling around with the script. Like
James Fox’s brain in Performance, it morphed and expanded. One role
still lacked an actor. The film was obviously going to take three weeks,
buy film and audio stock, and – as Michael emphasised – I had to feed
people. I didn’t have enough money to bankroll a three-week shoot.
And the actor who was flying in to play the lead, Bill Wood, was only
coming to LA for a week.
In the circumstances I did what any megalomaniac director would
have done: decided to play the lead role myself. Bill was a gentleman
about playing a repo man/skip-tracer called Ozzie Mamber instead
of Roy. The other British actor, Richard Benjamin (no relation), had
a couple of days’ work as a weird harassing bureaucrat. Having the
director play a role in a low-budget film does make a kind of sense,
because the director is always on set, and it means one less person to
feed. Directors often learn to act simply by watching actors. But isn’t
there an actor out there who can do the job better? Unless your name
is Orson Welles, the answer may be yes.
Michael and I had decided to go with a mixture of film stocks and
to shoot certain scenes in colour and others in black and white. All of
the opening scenes in Roy’s apartment were shot on 100 ASA black-
and-white reversal stock. These, along with the ending, also mono-
chrome, are my favourite sequences. I’ve always wanted to make an
entire film in black and white: all of my films but the Westerns would
have been better in monochrome, I think. But since the early 1980s
there’s been a de facto prohibition on monochrome that only a hand-
ful of filmmakers have managed to get around. It’s a pity, since black-
and-white images are so strong, so lacking in visual distractions.
The rest of that first week of production was spent in Royce Hall
at UCLA, a huge, boxy auditorium that we used as the location for
Smack Hasty’s office. Michael and I had recently been awed by The
Conformist: a film both visually spectacular, and of real substance. Its
hero, like Roy Rawlings, is one of those ‘go along, get along’ characters.
We both felt Roy was living in a proto-fascist environment, and, thus
inspired, set out to emulate Storaro’s tracking shots.
This approach to making the film was akin to a magpie’s in nest
construction. Here were bits of Bertolucci/Storaro. There was the
editing strategy of Performance, followed by a scene shot in a single
master. There was a flash-cut in the style of Bird With Crystal Plumage.
A snippet of Godzilla. A sniper, as in Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty.
Sooner or later, Edge City would make it to Monument Valley, and
discover Punk.
I’d written the part of Smack for a woman, and had in mind
Florence March, Frederic’s widow, whom I’d met through a friend.
Replacing Ruth with Bob made the film a bit more guy-heavy
than I had planned, but he was very good in it – always menacing,
always bemused. Casting a film is usually this sort of balancing act,
and you must work hard, probably harder than you anticipate, to get
it right. Unless your film is set in a prison or a Foreign Legion fort, you
will want a suitable mix of women and men: characters like ‘Doctor’
and ‘Cop’ are often cast as men, but there is no reason this should be
so. Likewise, unless your film is about the Air Force or the Ku Klux
Klan, you will want to have a racial balance to it.
Michael would set up the shots and I’d wander through them, in my
best bemused/paranoid/Limey style.
Downtown LA was far less manicured at this time, and there
was a lot more to see, and film, without restrictions. One weekend
we filmed a march by Central Americans to a park in downtown LA.
The marchers were carrying banners and a flag stained with red paint.
I didn’t know it, but it was the Nicaraguan flag. The Nicaraguan
revolution was being won on the streets of León and Managua that
very weekend in 1979, but in the mainstream press we heard nothing
of it. Yet beyond the precincts of Westwood and Beverly Hills it was
obvious that Los Angeles was a Latino city, and that the Latinos were
kept in check by the heavy presence of white, armed police. Mad
though Edge City was, it was increasingly a documentary.
worked with excelled when given the chance to shoot long, continuous
scenes involving serious acting. And in each case the actors’ work
was noticeably better when they were able to play the whole scene,
uninterrupted, in real time. (In Spanish two words describe the long,
moving master, though I didn’t know it yet: plano secuencia.)
All this time we were shooting without an actor to play the most
important character of all: the mysterious writer whom Roy Rawlings
wishes to meet, Beauregard Masterson. How embarrassing it is for me
to see that name now. It is a monicker straight out of a badly dubbed
Spaghetti Western. Unsurprisingly, I had trouble trying to find a
decent American actor to play the role.
In those days I was a passionate enthusiast of the character
actor Harry Dean Stanton. He had a particularly world-weary,
exhausted, saddened face, and made a strong impression in a number
of interesting films, including Two-Lane Blacktop, and The Missouri
Breaks.
Tom Musca, from UCLA, had a cousin who owned a pizza
restaurant at the top of Beverly Glen. Tom worked there as a waiter.
This wasn’t the bottom end of Beverly Glen where I’d resided, in the
smog. This was top end of Beverly Glen, up near where it crossed
Mullholland, the best road in LA. Up there was where the movie stars –
Brando and Jack Nicholson – had their pads.
Musca told me Harry Dean was a frequent visitor to the pizza
restaurant. He and I worked out a system whereby he would call
whenever Harry came into the restaurant. I’d immediately get my
helmet and leather jacket on and race up the hill. In those days, on a
motorcycle, it took a mere 20 minutes to get anywhere in LA. Inland
via the 10 and up the 405, I’d scoot to Musca’s pizza joint. The first time
I walked in, I acted like it was a complete surprise that Harry Dean
Stanton was sitting finishing his dinner. I introduced myself, praised
his great work, and asked if he’d consider reading a short script that
I just happened to have in my pocket, titled ‘Illustrator’. Poor Harry
Dean had no choice but to accept the script, and mutter something
about getting around to reading it. Some days went by, then Musca
tipped me off again, and I blazed up there. I gave a double take when
I saw Harry, said hi, and chattingly brought the conversation round as
to whether he’d read my script or not. Of course, he hadn’t.
I didn’t give up. I wanted a very good actor for that role. Not
only a very good actor, but someone with a bit of iconography
behind them. Harry had worked for Monte Hellman, and Peckinpah,
‘If you’re looking for a really out-there actor,’ Michael Miner said one
day, ‘there’s always Timothy Carey.’ Timothy Carey was a powerful
actor with an outstanding history: he’d worked for Kubrick in The
Killing and Paths of Glory, Brando in One-Eyed Jacks, and Cassavetes in
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
Michael had a number for him, and I called it. It was an
agricultural feed store, out in the desert somewhere. They had another
number, where a woman answered, and I had a long conversation with
a madman, to whom I promptly mailed a copy of the script. Timothy
Carey read it, liked the character of Beauregard, and so we met. Unlike
some actors, Carey was more imposing in person than on film. He
looked about six foot six, and had a powerful voice, black-and-white
hair, and staring eyes. He talked constantly, a little bit about the script,
but mostly about farting, about the importance of not suppressing the
suppression of the fart. On and on like this he went, in the same way as
Harry Dean was apt to get into a longish diatribe about the Jews, not
that Harry was anti-Semitic – he thought the Christian culture every bit
as bad and stupid as the Jewish one – but he did tend, given a trapped
interlocutor, to go on about the Jews. Timothy’s obsession, expressed
in public, in a much louder voice, was the beauty and importance of
the fart.
For all that Timothy Carey seemed nuts, he was a very fine actor,
putting on a performance for me and everyone else in Dairy Queen.
He was the most egomaniacal thespian I’d yet met, and thus, I suspect,
one of the most insecure and damaged. He was also a director, having
authored and starred in a feature of his own, The World’s Greatest
Sinner.
Clearly, Timothy was right for the part of the mysterious,
mythological madman, the wisdom-dispensing grail-o-matic at the
end of Roy’s desert quest. I offered him the part, making it clear that
there wasn’t any money, this being a student film. He told me this
was fine. What was important, he said, was somewhere he could be
quiet and prepare, on set, before we filmed. This was a reasonable (if
inconvenient) request; in my head I saw myself pitching a tent, in the
foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains.
Timothy also thought that some of his observations, particularly
regarding farts, might fit the character of Beauregard. I couldn’t have
agreed more. How much film would it use up? Not that much. I could
always cut the fart stuff out – though, if Timothy said it with the
passion he evidently felt, it would probably be better than the lines I’d
scripted.
I spoke to him a couple of times at his home in El Monte. The LA
County Fair was held in nearby Pomona, and Timothy urged me to
attend it, in particular so I could marvel at its enormous pigs. I said I’d
try, and returned to issues of the shoot: costume, location, date, etc.
My plan was to shoot our showdown on one of the trails above
Will Rogers Park. This was then an unspoiled and wild part of LA,
whose canyons and roadless areas had so far defeated the developers.
If you got deep enough into it, and looked the right way, all you could
see was desert hills and the ocean. I was giving Timothy the directions
to Will Rogers when he hit me up for cash. And he didn’t mean gas
money, he meant a fee.
I’d already explained I had no money, that the film was being
made via a ‘UCLA waiver’ by which Screen Actors Guild members
I persuaded Nancy that the wrap-around to the nerve gas attack scene
should be shot in Monument Valley, and that we should take her MG
there. (Varnum’s Malibu wouldn’t have made it to Arizona.) The MG
had two seats, so she was promoted from assistant director to second
unit producer and camerawoman, and we headed east in her little car,
as winter descended.
The route being via Las Vegas, the director dropped acid and
shot a large number of ‘driveby’ shots, most of which didn’t make it
into the film. Nancy, steadfast in her love of independent cinema, got
increasingly worried as the roads and the weather got worse. When
we reached the outskirts of Monument Valley, I came up with the idea
that Roy’s MG should get stuck in the sand.
We compromised by carefully heading out on a narrow, rutted
track towards a skeletal wooden arch which – mirabile dictu – turned
A year after the shoot began, Bill Wood returned for an additional
scene: one that was meant to explain the other activities and
involvements of the sniper and his employer. Michael was in Ecuador,
so Tom Richmond shot it. Nicaraguan events were now reported in
the LA Times, and so Bob Rosen’s character, Hasty, claimed to have
business interests in Nicaragua. The location was an oil refinery in San
Pedro.
Again, we had no permissions to shoot in this splendid refinery,
with its bobbing, insectoid wells. When the guards showed up I
week – which indeed I had, and he’d refused permission. But it was
Saturday and there was no way for them to contact Mr So-and-so, so,
since I’d given them an actual name, they let us shoot. You couldn’t
get away with that now: the guards have mobile phones, and middle
management are accountable 24/7.
In spite of all its negative aspects, LA was – in the late 1970s and
early 1980s – a great place to shoot dystopian, independent films.
There was so much readily accessible dystopia: oil wells and refineries
and burn-off towers, abandoned warehouses and railroad tracks,
districts of impoverished tract homes, alleys that had been completely
reclaimed by native vegetation, wide streets buckled, cracked,
and pitted with potholes, and so many vast concrete structures of
surpassing ugliness, soaring above ground or cutting aggressively
into it.
Edge City was edited over the couple of years it took to shoot. Due to
the length of time involved, I changed things constantly. Scenes were
re-ordered, rearranged, and intercut. I had no idea when we shot the
scenes of Krishna’s drowning and Ozzie’s suicide dash into the Pacific
that I would cut the two together. These things suggested themselves,
over time.
RELEASE
Edge City/Sleep is for Sissies’ public premiere was on 6 June 1980 at the
Fox Cinema in Venice. It was shown with six film and 15 video works
by UCLA students. The Fox was a great old cinema – the only one left
in Venice – which specialised in art and foreign films. (Later it was
owned and managed by Rafiq Pooya, who struggled valiantly, but in
vain, to keep it in business.)
A modest brochure was printed up for the occasion, with an
essay entitled ‘The Role of UCLA in the Creation of the Artist’ –
supposedly distilled from interviews with project advisors, including
Jorge Preloran, Shirley Clarke, John Boehm, and Teshome Gabriel. The
academics described their own function thus:
At the Fox Venice, on that fateful day, as the lights went down,
and Edge City/Sleep is for Sissies unrolled for the first time before a
paying audience – on that big genuine movie screen – someone was
talking loudly outside. Being young and full of myself, I stuck my head
into the lobby and said, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ This was a mistake, for the
long-haired fellow who was talking turned out to be the manager of
the cinema. Many minutes of placating this dude had to ensue, and I
missed most of the film.
The obvious lesson is that the opening of a film is a stressful
occasion for the filmmaker; and that when it takes place, the power
shifts. The film’s fate now lies in the hands of the distributor/exhibitor;
a perverse individual both inordinately sensitive and cruel, who
controls the prints, the screening rooms, the loudness of the sound,
the brightness of the bulb. The filmmaker should ask nicely (usually,
to have the sound turned up), get their names right, and not abuse
them, if possible.
To my surprise, the LA Times commended Edge City for a
‘voluptuous sense of dread’ and ‘labyrinthine imagery’. The Herald
Examiner called it ‘a nightmare vision of LA’. My newly-acquired agent
showed it to the head of development at Orion Pictures, who had left
before the end of the screening, telling her, ‘I don’t know anybody like
this! I don’t know why this film was made!’
I took a print back to England. Still knowing no one in the
business, I called the National Film Theatre in London and asked for
a free screening. They said, ‘Who’s coming?’ I said, just some people,
ex-students. They replied, ‘If you want a free screening you have to
invite celebrities, famous directors, people like that.’ Who? ‘Well,
Lindsay Anderson or Nicholas Roeg.’ I called up Anderson and Roeg
– they were in the phone book – and invited them to see Edge City.
Both said they’d try to come, and when I reported this to the NFT, they
gave us the screening. Anderson didn’t show up, but Roeg did, with
decent of him, and he was very enthusiastic about the film, though
I’m sure he’s forgotten it now.
he snags the vehicle, he’ll pay you 20 bucks to drive his car home.’
I rode around with Mark for the next three months or so. He’d
call me and pick me up, and we’d drive out to wherever the defaulter’s
car was rumoured to be parked, or to his home, or to his girlfriend’s
residence, or to a place where the defaulter had been seen. Often we
cruised downtown in the Watts and Vernon areas, where Repo Man
was ultimately made. Other times we’d head north into the far reaches
of the Valley. We’d stop at liquor stores and refresh ourselves with
canned, pre-mixed cocktails called Clubs. If we snagged a car, Mark
would pay me $20 to drive his vehicle back to Venice, or to the tow
yard. The money was appreciated, as were his stories of the repo trade.
Mark insisted that every car he repossessed had one of those little
Xmas tree chemical ‘air fresheners’ in it: some repo men decorated
their offices with them, though personally he hated the smell and
threw them away. I filed this away as an urban myth of the repo trade,
but when I ripped my first car, sure enough, it had one of those little
Xmas trees hanging from the rearview mirror, smelling up a storm.
Mark observed that repo men should drive anonymous cars,
and dress like detectives. His was the only profession, he said, apart
from the police, where you got paid for creating ‘tense situations’.
Over time he and his colleagues convinced themselves that tension
was what they liked. There wasn’t a repo man he knew who didn’t
take speed. As for the defaulters, the people who hadn’t kept up their
car payments, they were all ‘assholes’. Mark fantasised being able to
shake anybody down at random, ‘finding out how much money they
owe, and making ’em pay!’ But he also knew when to walk away:
as soon as anybody pulled a gun, whether it was real or not. ‘Some
people get very intense about losing their vehicles,’ he told me. ‘You
have to remember, only an asshole gets killed over a car.’
Mark worked for a big company, General Motors Acceptance
Corporation. GMAC, at this time, offered health care and a pension.
I set my script in the ranks of the ‘cowboy’ repo men. The cowboys
went after the older, more conflictive cars. They went into the badder
neighbourhoods. I named the four cowboys Bud, Lite, Oly, and Miller
– after the brand-names of the undrinkable beer-type swill most
commonly available in LA. Their characters were loosely based on the
four members of Fear, the city’s most obnoxious, obstreperous, and
tongue-in-cheek Punk band. Most of Bud and Lite’s dialogue came
from Mark or one of his colleagues. Tom Richmond called them ‘the
outlaws of democracy’.
Repo Man went through 14 drafts over a period of just more than a
year. The first five or so were a road movie involving the journey of a
Chevy Malibu from LA to Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico. Later
drafts were set entirely in LA. Though done for budgetary reasons,
this helped the film: one location made the plot tighter and the action
more unified. In later drafts I firmed up the ‘chase’ aspect by thinking
of the Malibu as the black box in Kiss Me Deadly: to keep its menace
present, it needed to reappear. Peter reckons we printed and sent out
roughly 200 scripts. Each one was accompanied by a frontispiece of
four comic book pages, depicting the adventures of Otto and Bud. I’d
planned to draw the whole script as a comic book of some 36 pages.
But I realised after only four pages that drawing a comic book is a lot
of work. I gave it up. Film-making is a lot of work too, but there’s a
greater variety, and you have company. You must be very disciplined
and tough to be a comic book artist.
Our plan at this stage was to make Repo Man low, low budget.
Edge City – the company, not the film – was founded on $4,000,
provided by Bob Rosen, Wacks, McCarthy, and me. The money bought
letterhead, paid some lawyers’ fees, plus phone bills, photocopying,
and postage. Those 200 scripts went out to studios, to production
companies, and to private individuals who were rumoured to have
dough. The individuals received, along with their script, the following
proposal, on Edge City Productions red-letter stationery.
(The above is an example of the bullshit that always goes into these
things. Why on earth go on about technology that your reader doesn’t
understand? Today’s analogous blather would be something like
‘Shot in full-screen 16x9 1080p HDV Pro, which tests in New York
have shown is just the same as DigiBeta or a blow on the head with a
heavy object. . .’) The dreadful sales pitch continues:
(Translation: the crew are amateurs, will work for free, and will break
things when we shoot in your home.)
Of the films cited, the only one remotely similar to ours was Penitentiary,
which Jamaa Fanaka also made as a student project at UCLA. (I don’t
imagine Penitentiary really grossed four million dollars, despite its
virtues, and I’ve no idea where we came up with any of those figures:
presumably from some Variety article on ‘indie’ film.)
One thing is to learn how to get along with rich people. I really
hate it when you meet young filmmakers and they say, ’I hate
rich people.’ I say, ’Well, who do you think is going to give you
money for movies? You should learn that right away. If you have
any relative that has any money, be nice to them.’ Learn to like
them, if you’re raising the money yourself. Rich people want
three things of their filmmakers: they want to hang around, they
want the hip level of their lives to go up, and they want to be
invited to better parties.1
I wish it was as easy as he suggests. But rich people care only for
money and status, things the artistic soul eschews. Luis Buñuel and
Salvador Dalí followed this strategy when they shamelessly befriended
the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles to get the money for L’Age
D’Or. Buñuel didn’t direct for years after the picture flopped. And
Dalí became a bad artist and a fascist.
Artists can easily turn into notorious sycophants in the company
of the rich. It’s best to avoid them, if possible.
The Repo Man prospectus refers to ‘casting in July and August’ – almost
a year before Repo Man was made. By this point Edge City had met the
design team of J. Rae Fox and Linda Burbank, who made it clear they
couldn’t go the lowest road: they needed money for their crew, and –
not unreasonably – to be paid. In search of cast, Peter and I drove my
pickup truck to New Mexico, where we hoped to track down Dennis
Hopper and show him the script. On our arrival in Taos, which we
believed to be Dennis’ home town, we enquired at the liquor store,
and were told Dennis lived in LA. We returned with a pair of Taos
baby boots for Jonathan and Margaret Wacks’ first-born.
Responses to the script kept coming in, all of them negative. The
general reaction was that the characters were ‘unsympathetic’. (This
has been the response of money people to almost all my scripts.)
Fortunately, we were introduced to someone with money who
actually liked the script. Abbe Wool, another UCLA-ite working on
her thesis film, had given the script to a producer called Harry Gittes.
Harry gave it to Michael Nesmith, the ex-Monkee. Nesmith considered
financing it himself, then took it to Universal. The super-low-budget
Repo Man was about to become a different kettle of worms.
went quiet. I called his agent to pursue the thing, and was told that
money had come between us: they wanted ‘six figures’ but – even
with the bigger-budget Repo Man – only five figures were allocated. So
Dennis went off to do a Mullholland Drive road-racing movie called
King of the Mountain, and, as we’d threatened in our prospectus, we
invited Harry Dean Stanton to read for the lead role.
My friend Tod Davies had run into Harry at a party. She told
me he was born to play the role: ‘He has that Old-West-skeleton-
Varnum aura,’ she wrote, ‘which is just like Bud.’ I thought I should
do something to firm up our relationship. Rather than try the ol’ Pizza
Joint Scam again, I arranged via his agent to visit him. We discussed
the part. Spending time with Harry could be hard going: he liked to
talk a lot about Eastern mysticism and Buddhism, but his knowledge
seemed dogmatic and superficial. And then he would go on about the
Jews. He seemed to have Buddhism, Calvinism, and Predestination
confused, but it was impossible to say anything, because if you
contradicted him, he became annoyed.
I put his anger down to his career: he had the perpetually sad
face of someone who had been yelled at by successions of tough-guy
directors and actors who were bigger and more brawling than him.
Yet, when he smiled, his face could light up, and his eyes glitter with
delight. Harry Dean was, in his own words, ‘a complicated character’.
And he liked the character of Bud.
All seemed to be going properly and professionally, so I paid
a courtesy call on his agent, at the most famous Hollywood agency.
This was an eye-opener. I spent 20 minutes chatting to Harry’s agent
about what a great actor Harry was, the wonderful work he’d done.
The agent listened, and then said, ‘Harry Dean’s okay, but he’s past
it. You need someone younger, more up-and-coming. I also represent
Mick Jagger. Why don’t you offer Mick the part?’
This gobsmacked me. First, Jagger was completely wrong for the
role of a grizzled, burned-out LA repo man. And second, the guy was
out of line. We’d offered Harry the part, and here his agent was trying
to do him out of the job. It was immoral, surely a breach of contract,
and stupid. I replied that Harry’s age, experience, and nationality
made him the best choice, made my excuses and left.
could direct actors; this shows his good taste and political dexterity.
I wanted to give him a part in Repo Man, but couldn’t figure out what
part to offer – other than the lead role, Bud.
On the last day of the shoot, I saw a repo-type come stumbling out
of a payphone in downtown LA, and he reminded me intensely of
Richard Masur. I wondered then what would have happened if we’d
gone for a younger, more befuddled Bud – Masur was a very good
actor, so it might have been interesting.
Some of the cast I already knew. I’d met Sy Richardson on a stage
at UCLA, working on Monona Wali’s film The Grey Area; I thought he
was a very powerful actor. Vonetta McGee had impeccable credentials,
having played the heroine of Sergio Corbucci’s greatest Western,
The Big Silence. Jennifer Balgobin and Dick Rude had both appeared
in Abbe Wool’s film Rita Steele – Private Heart; Zander Schloss was a
young guitar strummer, brother of La Wool; Pansullo and Varnum
were my neighbours from Venice.
and locking up after the acting classes. Most of the actors were
horrible: they wouldn’t speak to us and they ate our food, and when
we put a padlock on the refrigerator they broke the lock. The only
actor who was friendly was Fox Harris: he put on no airs, treated us as
if we were human, and didn’t steal our food.
Fox was a generous, exciting actor. When in his cups, he would
declare, loudly, ‘We must all dare to be STARS! Let us be STARS!’ I
tried to convince him it was better to be a great actor. But Fox knew he
was already a great actor. He wanted to be a star.
Harry Dean had a hankering to play Bud and J. Frank Parnell.
At his audition he gave a wonderful cold reading as J. Frank, peering
over the tops of his spectacles and playing it with a very creditable
English accent. (For some reason it’s very hard for most American
actors to play English roles believably: most don’t get the nuances, or
the regional differences.) Harry mentioned someone else who might
do justice to the role. ‘If I don’t play it,’ he mused, ‘there’s another
actor: name of Fox . . .’
Fox was a self-made character: as a young man he’d escorted a
party of elderly lady tourists to Italy and absconded with their money,
living the high life till he was caught and deported back to the US. He
couldn’t drive, but wouldn’t tell us even after he was cast: we only
found out when I suggested he take me and Robby Muller for a spin
in J. Frank’s Chevy Malibu, to ‘get the feel’ of the car. Fox cruised
through several stop signs in Ocean Park. He didn’t know where the
the first time he had ever been behind the wheel of a car.
Though he was one of our most experienced and accomplished
actors, Fox was also so nervous that, even when not pretending to
drive, he tended to break out in hives.
The script was submitted for what is called ‘E&O’ (Errors and
Omissions) insurance. This is an insurance policy that covers you
in case the script accidentally defames some individual, or breaches
somebody’s copyright. If Otto sang Black Flag’s ‘TV Party’ for instance,
the E&O report would say ‘Must secure rights to song, “TV Party”’.
This was mostly straightforward stuff, though at times there were
intractable problems. For instance, in the original script, when the
repo men went to beat up Mr Humphries (the supermarket manager
I agreed that, in this bad area, many people did indeed have guns,
but that I, being English, didn’t carry one.
‘You ain’t English, man. You’re from the neighbourhood.’
And I agreed again, that, yes, it was confusing, but, though I
resided locally, I was from Old Blighty originally, many thousands of
miles away . . .
Our conversation was grinding towards its inevitable end. My
robber demanded my gun again. I said I didn’t have one. He asked
for my billfold. A breakthrough! What a robber was supposed to do,
at last! I didn’t have a billfold, but I did have a wad of banknotes
and credit cards and picture ID. I offered these to my knife-wielding,
bad-drug-stewing interlocutor. He took them vaguely, seeming not
to know what to do next. The knife was still at my throat. I closed
my eyes, and, fortunately for us both, my robber took off running.
I locked the bike up, went back inside the Edge City building, and
started thinking about renting a flat.
Michael was keen on hiring an ‘experienced’ DP. I met one, who had
just finished a feature for Paul Morrissey: Steve Fierberg. I showed
Nesmith a tape of the film, 40 Deuce. Nesmith didn’t like it – perhaps
because there was a lot of hand-held photography, something I
thought was great. But Peter saw this rejection as an opportunity.
We’d been treating Repo Man as a low-budget, independent film – but
a million and a half dollars could buy us more, he said. ‘Think about
any cinematographer in the world, Al. Anyone. We’ll offer ’em the
job.’
Robby Muller immediately came to mind – I thought of the car
scenes in The American Friend, which he’d shot for Wim Wenders. Robby
was one of the top DPs in Europe: his ability was unquestionable.
Could we afford him? Peter discovered he had an agent in LA: he’d
already made one American film, a Dolly Parton vehicle, which he
hadn’t much enjoyed. His agent said they could negotiate if Robby
liked the script. So the 200th script was dispatched to Robby Muller,
in Germany. Robby read it, liked it, and agreed to shoot the film. He
flew to LA and we all met for a sushi dinner in Venice.
Fox and Burbank were hired as production designers – though, in
their modesty, they chose to be called art directors. They introduced
us to Theda DeRamus, who became our costume designer. I asked
them to ‘seed’ the film with would-be visual coincidences: generic
goods and Xmas tree air fresheners; ‘happy face’ badges, unseen since
Each day was hotter, and smoggier. Then the day of the shoot
arrived.
PRODUCTION
Abbe drove us to the set the first day. The call was at 4 a.m.
As we headed downtown, there was a new moon, and Talking
Heads’ ‘Burning Down The House’ came on the radio. It played
throughout the weeks to come, and became the FM radio anthem of
Repo Man. Though the song isn’t heard in the finished film, it played
on Otto’s headphones in a deleted scene. ‘Burning Down The House’
inspired discussion of a sequence where Otto returned home to douse
his family nest in gasoline and put a match to it. However, this was
never included in the shooting script.
When we arrived on location – downtown LA, by the railroad
tracks and the LA River, naturally – I was astonished. I hadn’t
anticipated how many vehicles were considered necessary to shoot a
feature film.
We drove past truck after truck after truck – big, white, articulated
lorries carrying costumes, props, camera and lighting equipment,
dollies, portable toilets, accommodation for the actors, ADs, and
production and executive producers. There seemed to be hundreds of
these trucks, though I suppose there were really only 25 or so. Plus all
the vehicles that the crew and cast had driven to the set.
All this to make a film about two men, in modern dress, driving
a car?
Repo Man’s motorcycle cops were Officer Al and Officer Bill. Though
full-time employees of the production, they were simultaneously
members of the LAPD, with uniforms and guns.
The presence of paid cops is a disturbing aspect of American film-
making. They are usually unnecessary. The Teamsters, stunt guys and
some of the actors are packing high-calibre weapons in their trucks
and trailers: if guns give you a feeling of security, you are already very
safe. All the cops do is hang around the set giving passers-by the evil
eye, drinking coffee and eating (and, yes, they do eat mostly donuts).
This tough-guy stance encourages the crew members to adopt an
adversarial attitude towards the public.
Most people in LA don’t like the police, who are militaristic and
treat the city as a war zone: their battalion’s main assignment being to
defend Bel Air and Beverly Hills. When folks see cops acting as hired
guns for films, it makes them hate movie crews too. Hence the small
acts of sabotage which occur on any shoot: loud radios or stereos
turned on just after the ADs shout ‘Rolling’, tyres getting slashed, bits
of kit going missing, people demanding money to move their cars or
turn the radio off.
Michael Miner and I had shot Edge City on our own in these same
parts of town: it was entirely possible to make films downtown, or in
East LA, with a much lower profile – and without cops. Officers Al
and Bill weren’t bad men: they were close to retirement, were kind
to their bikes, and they accompanied us through traffic with reliable
professionalism. A few years later, I heard that Officer Al had been run
over and killed, while eating donuts on another film. The driver did
a runner and hid, so the surviving cops called in the K9 squad and,
when they found him, set their dogs on him. It was all so pointless, so
avoidable, and so typical of the mindless brutishness that underlies
both LA and the movie scene. Officer Al’s death shows that having
cops on set is not a guarantee of anyone’s safety. It also indicates how
vulnerable motorcyclists and cyclists are in a city full of bad drivers.
Welcome to LA.
right away, and I won’t have to move any vehicles.’ Moving so many
vehicles was, indeed, an enormous hassle, so Dave’s advice speeded
things up.
In the script, Otto has a fated acolyte called Kevin: a would-be punker
with a convertible haircut, whom the real punks despise. Zander
Schloss, who had been hired as a production assistant, wanted to
play the Kevin part. I told him he could, but the producers were less
keen: Zander had never acted before. How could I give away a good
part to our cigarette-butt-picker-upper when real actors were circling
other end.
A foolish tug of war ensued, to the great amusement of the crew.
Harry and I were distracted by the deft Betsy, and her valiant assistant
Rip Murray, into surrendering the disputed bat. All the wooden bats
immediately vanished. The scene went wonderfully.
At this point the director wanted to fire the lead actor; the writer
quickly figured out a way. During our meal break in Nesmith’s trailer,
I proposed to the producers that we should retire Harry and give his
remaining scenes to Sy. I could easily re-work the script so that the
final scenes revolved around Lite, rather than Bud. I felt Sy was doing
better work than Harry. His character had started out with almost
no lines: Sy had created Lite from the ground up. Peter and Jonathan
opposed firing Harry on aesthetic grounds. Nesmith just said it
wouldn’t fly with Universal. Though the studio hadn’t wanted Harry,
he was still in the picture. In the event of a terminal disagreement
between the director and the main actor, it was the director who had
to go. Michael was pulling my coat to certain industrial realities that
hadn’t existed at UCLA.
We returned to the set. Afterwards, Del (who was playing a car
thief/revolutionary, Lagarto Rodriguez) told me he’d loved the whole
ruckus. He was convinced a pro like Harry would never lose control
of his bat, wooden or plastic. Leaving, Harry shook my hand and
thanked me for a good night’s work.
Harry Dean was difficult, but he was a great actor, as was Sy.
Another remarkable actor, I thought, was Richard Foronjy, who
played the knitting cop, Plettschner.
Foronjy claimed he was an ex-gangster who had worked in the
meat business, done time, and then become an actor and a writer. He
wrote semi-autobiographical screenplays about gangsters, the New
York underworld, and the docks: in this way, I realise now, he was a
completely Liverpudlian character. Richie claimed to have invented
the first heavy leather gay nightclub in New York, The Spike: not that
this was his scene, but there was a lot of money in it, and the clientele
weren’t troublesome. Ritchie came up with the lines about the ‘chicken
man’ and Plettschner’s claim to have been a prison guard in Attica: a
joke, since Richie had been incarcerated there. He said he’d written
the scene in Dog Day Afternoon where Al Pacino’s character incites the
crowd by chanting ‘Attica! Attica! Attica!’6
Foronjy told an incredible tale of how Sidney Lumet dealt with
producers, studio execs, and other potential troublemakers: ‘On the
beneath the dashboard of his car. But the camera crew didn’t run, they
froze; the cars shot past; everything was okay. Afterwards I spoke
to one of the stunt drivers: ‘If anything had gone wrong, you’d got a
plan, to get clear. Right?’ ‘Sure thing,’ the driver told me. ‘If anything
went wrong, I was gonna veer right, down toward the river bed. All
your camera guys were gonna jump to the left.’
I felt uneasy about car stunts after that. My faith was restored
by a stunt man named Rick Barker. Rick had been hired as a double
for Fox Harris, whom he did resemble; he was also reasonable,
thoughtful, and knew left from right. He choreographed – and starred
in – the stunt in which a car smashes through a phone box. There was
only one special effects phone box, and only one Rick, who leapt out
less than a second before the car hit the booth. Yet he made the whole
process go tidily, and according to plan.
The least inspiring day of the shoot involved the first death of Archie.
Miguel Sandoval, a very inspirational actor, was playing Archie.
Sando, who’d been hired partially for his swimming prowess, told us
that morning that he couldn’t swim.7 The scene was a Beverly Hills-
style mansion, into which the punks had broken. There was supposed
to be a pool surrounded by statues. But ours was a low-budget
Hollywood film: the mansion was in miniature, and the ‘breakable’
props were few.
In the shooting script Archie was killed by an arrow, fired from
the bow of Duke. Dick Rude asked me: ‘What should my expression
be, after I see I’ve accidentally killed Archie?’ I had an answer ready:
it entailed what I knew about Pudovkin’s editing experiments (very
little), and a story about John Wayne being directed by John Ford
on the set of The Searchers. Wayne’s character had just discovered a
white family massacred by savage Redskins. Wayne wanted to know
what look he should have on his face. ‘Duke, don’t think of anything,’
Ford told him. ‘Relax, and think of nothing at all.’ The juxtaposition
of Wayne’s expression with the unseen horror in The Searchers is a
magnificent moment in a great film. I thought that I could now put this
time-honoured theory into practice. ‘Duke, don’t think of anything,’ I
That night/day I overslept, and woke just after crew call. I got to the
set an hour late. Nobody mentioned it. I apologised to everybody.
Everyone was pleased that I’d fucked up so visibly. Nobody likes
Johnny-on-the-Spot. But better not be late twice.
The location was a shut-down hospital in West LA, where we
were to film the night scenes in which Otto seeks absolution from Bud,
and escapes from the Blond Men. It was a busy, agreeable night. We
moved fast, got a lot done. At the end, Jonathan and Martin told me
they’d been discussing Tracey’s character, Miller: how he’d turned out
to be the most interesting and enigmatic of the repo men. They’d come
up with a new ending for the film.
Still guilty over my lateness, I didn’t freak out, but sat down to
listen. Their idea was this: there wasn’t a neutron bomb in the trunk.
J. Frank had it wrong. Instead there was some sort of device – maybe
an alien flying machine, maybe a time machine – which was sentient,
with the car, the car would be glowing like the radioactive isotope
in Kiss Me Deadly. The CIA Blond Men, the repo men, the men in
fallout suits, all would try to reach the car, only to be repelled by its
mysterious power. Then Miller, unafraid and unaffected, would walk
up, get in the driver’s seat, and invite Otto to take a ride.
I thought their idea was brilliant. It resolved the problem of Miller,
who had become the most interesting and important figure in the
repo yard, and who otherwise would simply vanish at the end. And it
meant we didn’t need to destroy LA. This was better, since I’d become
attached to the place, sort of. Animals might flee it, but humans clung
to every part of LA. It would always be a dreadful hell-world, but so
many nice people lived there. It was a shame to kill them all off, even
in fiction, just to make the obvious point that nuclear bombs were bad.
Everyone knew that, already.
Under the terms of the ‘negative pickup’ agreement, we couldn’t
substantially change the screenplay without Universal’s consent:
otherwise, they could say Repo Man wasn’t a ‘fair facsimile’ of the
original screenplay, and refuse to accept/pay for it. We had less than a
week of shooting left, and there was no way Universal would respond
within a couple of days. Our only hope was to convince Nesmith, and
let him deal with it.
Next day, the producers delegated me to sell Nez on the plan.
Robby was convinced it could be done cheaply: ‘Just paint the car with
luminous paint and light down the axis of the camera.’ I headed for the
payphones. These were the days before mobiles (no video assists on
the cameras, either, plus no digital editing, no screenwriting software,
no global positioning devices, no CGI . . . how on earth did we manage
to make films?), and if you were on set and needed to make a call, you
went to the call box on the corner. The call box here was outside Davy
Jones’ Liquor Locker, in Venice, just over the road from the bank we’d
robbed in Edge City. I poured several dollars’ worth of quarters into
the only phone that worked, and called our executive producer in far-
off Monterrey. I told Michael about the new ending: he liked it. But he
didn’t want to bring it to Universal’s notice at this time. Things were
going on over there, he said, that might, or might not, be good for us.
Now was not the time for us to propose changes. The best thing, Nez
reasoned, was to shoot the scripted ending, and then ask the studio for
more money later.
This was a reasonable plan: it would have primed the budgetary
pump, had Universal gone for it. But, if anything was going wrong,
It’s always nice to shoot the first scenes first and the last scenes last,
and I was looking forward to the rescheduled scenes where Emilio
found Harry Dean in the glowing Malibu, the minions of authority
descended en masse, and Tracey flew the car away. But a huge kerfuffle
had grown up around the glowing car. One of the Malibus had been
stripped of its motor and other heavy elements, and painted, inside
and out, with the reflective paint used for highway signs. There was
a crane to lift it up. All well and practical, until a Hollywood special
effects crew arrived to position a mirror. This didn’t seem hard to me
or Robby, but the ‘specialist team’ managed to occupy four hours of
our penultimate evening stroking beards and sporting leather crew
jackets, while the rest of us waited.
Robby and I said our goodbyes. He was off to prepare for Paris, Texas
– and another six weeks on the road with Harry Dean. I took off in my
pickup with my old pal, Tom Musca. We spent three nights camping
and hiking around Cottonwood Lakes in the Sierra Nevada. After so
many days and nights spent downtown LA, the California mountains
were major boosts to our personal happiness and immune systems.
Tom and I walked through New Army Pass, a pile of rocks 12,000 feet
above sea level, overlooking Sequoia National Park.
We camped beside South Fork Lake and watched an endless,
multicoloured sunset. We swam in Dinosaur Lake – man, that water
was cold. We’d lugged in heavy packs and began to think that a
week of bracing dips in ice-cold water might be a couple of dips too
many. Down in the California Central Valley, we both knew of certain
inviting hot springs . . . So we left early, hiking back down the trail in
a hurry, to beat the crowds who would no doubt swarm in on Labor
Day. We loaded our rucksacks into my truck and headed up the hill
from the trailhead. It was a long, winding, uphill dirt road. ‘Wonder
how ordinary cars can make it out of here?’ mused Musca, thinking
about his old Volvo back in LA. I laughed, and put ’er into third.
The truck backfired, and the back axle snapped in two with a loud
bang. The gears and brakes went out. We slowed, then started rolling
backwards, down the hill, brakeless. I steered the truck away from the
cliff edge, into the rock wall.
In spite of Labor Day, no one was on the road. After a long while,
a park ranger passed us, and, taking Tom’s American Automobile
Association particulars, drove on over the hill – en route to fight a
forest fire and summon us a tow truck. We waited for hours on that
empty dirt road surrounded by rocks, beside my doomed pickup in
the hot sun, more than a little mad.
POSTPRODUCTION
Our editor, Dennis Dolan, cut standing up at the Moviola. He didn’t
make splices, insisting they slowed him down. Instead he’d make the
cuts and paper-tape the two bits of film together. There was always at
least one assistant, usually two, standing by to splice the film. Dennis
had longish hair, a beard, and looked like a biker. His assistants looked
like biker chicks. He was a real old-school editor, who’d worked for
Peckinpah.
Dennis wasn’t shy about requesting additional shots – not just
transitions or inserts, but new scenes or new parts of scenes. He
thought we ought to see more of the mystery Malibu, and pointed out
that we were short on material for the finale. He hated the scene in
which Duke slew Archie with his bow. I was in favour of cutting it out
entirely, but Dennis wanted to know what happened to Archie – why
did he disappear? Since we were planning to shoot pickups, Dennis
proposed a second demise for Archie, in which – after Duke burned
his hand on the radioactive trunk handle – Sando’s character would
take over the gang, throw the trunk open, and be fried, as Varnum
had been in scene one.
Michael Nesmith wanted pickups, too: he was concerned that
there was little physical ‘car violence’ in the run-up to the baseball bat
scene. Bud’s Impala chased the Rodriguez brothers’ Falcon through
largely empty streets, and there was little or no physical contact
between the cars. With Bullitt, or The French Connection in mind,
perhaps, Nez advised: ‘When you go back downtown with those cars,
Alex, don’t be afraid to beat ’em up. Run ’em into each other.’
Yet the stunt guys, usually gung-ho, were strangely reticent. On
the first two takes, they barely touched bumpers. ‘Don’t be afraid to
beat ’em up,’ I insisted, ‘Run ’em into each other!’ The drivers shook
their heads. ‘We’ve been told not to damage the cars too much,’ one of
them explained. I asked who’d given him these instructions. ‘Michael
Nesmith. He’s worried about getting a bill from the owners of the
Falcon.’ I convinced them to bump the cars a tad more, but Repo Man
to ’em.’ I handed the arresting officer the walkie. The voice asked them
their names. They told him who they were.
‘Listen, guys,’ the mysterious police voice said, ‘I’m back at base
here, waiting for these guys to get done so we can all go home.’
‘Well, you oughta be with ’em,’ said the cop. ‘Right now they’re
shooting on the street without an officer present.’
‘I reckon they’re done. Isn’t that right?’
I said, yes, indeed, we were done. The cops nodded. ‘Okay, I’m
gonna send ’em back to you,’ said the sergeant. He almost handed
back the walkie-talkie. Then he pressed the talk button again. ‘Who is
this?’
‘Officer Bob, LAPD.’
‘Ten Four, Officer Bob.’ They got back in their LAPD cruisers and
took off.
I walked over to the Falcon. Everyone was in fits of laughter.
Lying on the floor of the car was Bobby, in his J. Frank widow’s-peak
makeup, holding the only other walkie we had. ‘Ten Four, Officer
Bob!’
Looking at the finished film (or rather two finished films, since the TV
version is quite different), I think the writing of Repo Man is better than
the direction. This was only my second picture, and I hadn’t evolved
much. Fox and Burbank understood the script, and Alsobrook went
for the most broken, concrete, and alien locations. An aesthetic of
‘brokenness’ developed to fit the film: old cars whose motors failed,
punk fashions, J. Frank’s sunglasses, Agent Rogersz’ artificial hand,
the gag of the severed boots . . .
The Repo Map of LA is quite precise. No one other than Miller
or Otto even has a home. They spend their time in cars and telephone
boxes, on which their lives depend (Bud spends far more time waiting
in phone booths than he does smashing them). When J. Frank’s
around, these familiar objects become deathtraps. Yet the characters
still cling to them. There were no cellphones back in the summer of
1983, or SUVs, as our fragile humans scuttled across hot concrete
parking lots, from car, to payphone, to car.
Price didn’t attend the screening. Two mid-level studio execs watched
our incomplete version of Repo Man and talked on the telephone all the
way through. (The studio thoughtfully provided phones between the
twin armchairs in each screening room so that busy executives could
make calls rather than watch films.) Afterwards, a panicked lower-level
exec insisted that the film might still be saved, if only we’d remove
all scenes involving Tracey Walter. None of us – me, Dennis, Peter,
Jonathan – wanted to do this, nor could we see how cutting Miller
out would remotely help or improve the film. So we all refused to cut
him out. Even when Nez, who had brought Tracey to us, now agreed
we should get rid of Miller, we wouldn’t budge. As the suits walked
funereally away, Michael told Jonathan, ‘Just finish the motherfucker.’
Repo Man wasn’t even finished, and it was doomed.
Yet it wasn’t: our sticking together over the character of Miller
made a crucial difference to the finished film. If we’d been divided
on the issue – if one of us had sided with Universal, or if Dennis had
offered to cut out all of Tracey’s scenes behind our backs – disaster
would have ensued. An inferior, fucked-up film would have resulted,
followed by recriminations all round. By staying united behind our
vision, the producers, director, and editor won the battle for control of
the picture. Because we stayed united, creatively the film was saved.
Originally we’d been invited to mix Repo Man in the massive Hitchcock
Theater at Universal. The invitation was now withdrawn. Instead we
mixed at Lion’s Gate, in West LA. The mixer was Mike Minkler. Mike
had invited a colleague, Richard Beggs, down from San Francisco to
help him. Beggs wasn’t only a mixer, but a sound designer – a job
he’d just performed for Coppola’s Rumblefish. Minkler didn’t get Repo
Man, and every day he would take Beggs out to lunch and apologise
for dragging him down to work on Repo Man. And Richard would tell
Mike not to apologise, because he was enjoying himself.
In keeping with its rock’n’roll intent, Repo Man was mixed in
mono. I felt stereo was okay, especially for the ‘car-by’ where a car
passes from right to left, or vice versa, and the sound effect follows
the car. But how many ‘car-bys’ can you enjoy before this thrilling
experience gets old? No mixer should pan dialogue to the right or
left: this just gives the audience headaches since, on a reverse cut, the
voices jump to the opposite side of the screen.
There were no studio overages to bring Robby Muller back to LA. Bob
Richardson went to the lab and spoke to the timers. Peter, Jonathan
and I saw the answer print, and liked it. We thought our work was
done.
RELEASE
Universal’s deal with Nesmith involved opening Repo Man in 12
markets. The first market they chose was Dallas, Texas. Jonathan
proposed that Universal open the film in Los Angeles instead. The
studio said no. Instead they decided to open the picture in Chicago.
The film also played at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was well
received. Soon after, Universal’s foreign arm, UIP, began a fire sale,
selling Repo Man off as quickly and cheaply as they could.
I went straight from Berlin back to the US for the Chicago opening,
in February 1984. This was in 53, mainly suburban, cinemas.
Edge City did the best we could: gave interviews arranged by
Universal’s publicist (my first was to a student newspaper); paraded
Emilio about; and infiltrated ringers into the audience, who were
The weird tale wasn’t over yet. Some months later, Peter, Jonathan,
and I were invited to a screening of the film at the home of Jean Stein.
She was the daughter of Jules Stein, founder of MCA, the talent agency
that, in violation of US anti-trust laws, took over Universal and became
a studio. We had no idea why she wanted to see Repo Man, but Jean
was a very agreeable host, and her brother (a colonel or general) was
a lively sort.
Peter and Jonathan, meanwhile, had made a deal with MCA
Records to release a soundtrack album. MCA invented a new sub-label
‘San Andreas Records’, so as to make the album appear less corporate.
The LP and the tape sold in markets where the film hadn’t appeared,
probably because the soundtrack was a good sampler of the LA punk
scene, circa 1983.
When sales of the album topped 50,000 copies, Irving Azoff, head
of MCA Records, apparently asked, ‘Is there a movie to go with this?’
And the film’s distribution juddered back to life, thanks to Kelly Neal.
Kelly ran Universal’s ‘Special Handling Division’, a tiny branch of the
company that specialised in re-releasing Hitchcock films. Kelly only
had a team of three and a few prints of Repo Man and Rumblefish, but
he knew the marketplace and he had a strategy to get both films into
what he thought were the right cinemas.
Kelly opened Repo Man in one theatre in New York, the Eighth
Street Playhouse on Bleeker Street. Iggy lived nearby and went to the
opening night. He reported lines around the block. Repo Man played
at the Eighth Street Playhouse for 18 months. It was a triumph for
Kelly’s team, coming after the TV and video releases.
Peter ran into Kelly in LA; Kelly told him that Repo Man had
grossed four million dollars during its second US release, in the
summer of 1984. ‘I can’t wait for my Christmas bonus!’ he joked.
Kelly’s Christmas bonus was the sack. He was one of the last people
fired by the collapsing Frank Price regime. A few weeks later, Price
himself was ditched.
chums headed south and liberated their buddy from the Communists.
None of us liked the project. It promoted the notion that Americans
had the right to intervene in Latin America. When we demurred, the
studio exec (the same one who had tried to persuade us to cut Miller
out of Repo Man) assured us that the writer was a good chap since ‘he
snorts heroin at parties’.
The script was written by a former Nixon speechwriter. For some
reason, the studio seemed anxious to embed this right-wing fellow
within the movie business. Was there a deliberate desire on the part
of corporations and the Republican Party to do this, so that more
reactionary stories would be told by Hollywood? I can’t say, from
my limited experience. (The big ‘official’ youth picture was now John
Milius’ Red Dawn.)
Was the heroin story true? Were we supposed to think this doofus
cool? Everyone knew the fate of Vicious and Belushi and other famous
junkies, and they seemed like idiots. In subsequent years I saw a
number of esteemed collaborators fall into the same trash compactor,
and wondered whether Hollywood wasn’t designed to pick up on
addictive types, and drug dealers: they were guilty, predictable, and
easy to control.
anyone who had been vaguely into the Punk movement, this was a
troubling idea indeed. The danger was two-fold: 1) the film might
get made; and 2) the film would present Vicious and Spungen as
exemplars of Punk, rather than sold-out traitors to it.
I left the bar, my mind in turmoil. As yet, Madonna’s people
didn’t have a script, he’d said. I had ‘Too Kool to Die’ – half a script
about Sid Vicious – which was highly political and apocalyptic. If I
was going to get this picture going, it would be necessary to drop the
Liberal Party scandals and the London flooding stuff. Better to start
afresh; in my head I was already planning the production, aware we
had to move fast. Artificial Eye, a British distributor, had licensed Repo
Man – they flew me to London to support it. I started tracking down
and interviewing people who had known Sid and Nancy.
Some of them had worked in the shop Sex (later Seditionaries).
Some had been part of the Bromley Contingent, associated with the
Sex Pistols. One was a dominatrix, in whose house the gang had
lived. She had regularly whipped a famous TV personality. Another
was Malcolm McLaren, the Pistols’ manager/entrepreneur. There was
some doubt back then as to whether Sid had really killed Nancy or
whether a drug dealer had done it. Over dinner in a fish restaurant
called Wheelers, I remarked ‘Nobody really knows if he killed her,
after all.’ McLaren lolled, smiled, and replied, ‘I do’, at which point
his friends jumped up hastily and hustled him away.
After they had got used to me, I talked to the surviving Sex
Pistols. I liked Glen Matlock, the original bass player, who had been
thrown out of the band because he didn’t look as cool as Sid.
When Repo Man played at Edinburgh I met an agent, Nicky Hart,
who offered to represent me in London. I told her about the project,
which needed a good London-based producer. She said she’d look
out for one. By January 1985 I’d moved into the Chelsea Hotel in New
York, where I met Lech Kowalski, director of D.O.A. (1980), in which
Vicious and Spungen memorably appear. Lech had a new film in the
cinemas about the local junky underworld, called Gringo. I met its star
James Spacey, and other ex-associates of Vicious: Rockets Redglare
and Dee Dee Ramone.
I asked Abbe Wool to write the script with me. She came out to New
York and we took up adjoining premises at the Chelsea. Shirley Clarke,
who had been on the teaching staff at UCLA, was our neighbour
On April Fool’s Day 1985 I met Margaret Matheson, the head of Zenith
Productions. Zenith was an independent film production company
with money, c/o Central TV, and Margaret thought she could come
up with half the budget. Another company was also interested: Virgin
Films. Virgin Films was the short-lived production entity of Richard
Branson, later known for his Coca-Cola imitation, his airline, and a
massive taxpayer rip-off called Virgin Trains.1
Branson had farmed out his film business to a person with no
experience, but a noble name stretching back to Elizabethan times.
Branson’s ilk are impressed by things like this, but his Elizabethan was
no match for Margaret, who came in at the last minute with a better
offer for the film. Instead of improving his offer, Branson’s Elizabethan
wrote a complaining letter to Eric, detailing why he should have
triumphed in the negotiation. This is something – in business as in
love – that you should never do. Virgin Films shut down a year later.
Zenith’s deal was satisfyingly straightforward: I would direct; Eric
would budget and produce the picture; Margaret would provide 50
per cent of the finance and pursue the rest.
Convinced the film was going to happen, I rented an ‘artist’s
loft’ off Abbey Street in Bermondsey. This was a big space, all white
and almost all one room, with a translucent shower and two walls of
windows; unfortunately looking out in one direction onto a car park,
in the other onto Abbey Street, with tower blocks and the dread Lupin
Point beyond.
Unfamiliar with London, I soon discovered I was in the wrong
part of town. The Sex Pistols’ story all took place in the west and
north-west of London. There are numerous Tube lines and stations
north of the river, but very few south of it. I think this is because the
poorer people live south of the river. Hence the lack of amenities
(and why the Elizabethan theatres were built there – outside the city
limits).
Apparently, Bermondsey has undergone a transformation
over the last two decades; a Tube station has finally appeared, and
the abandoned warehouses along Abbey Street and the river have
I pursued my search for interview subjects. Even though the script was
finished, the more sources of information, the better: we were making
a potentially contentious biopic about people who, in some cases,
were still alive. I had a phone conversation with Johnny Thunders,
late of the New York Dolls, who requested a fee for his reminiscences.
Full of punk rock self-righteousness, I declined to pay.
In June Lucy Boulting began work as our British casting director,
and I bought a 1983 BMW R100RT motorbike in Cowley, outside
Oxford. The bike, unlike Nesmith’s, wasn’t the green colour of folding
money: it was the colour of silver money instead.
Wheels acquired, I left immediately for LA. Eric had worked out
a way of getting business-class tickets cheaply from an airline that was
going out of business, British Caledonian. Vicky Thomas had come on
board to look for Nancy and the American cast, so now I was talking
to casting directors in both countries.
From London to LA, back to New York, or London, or perhaps
LA again . . . it wasn’t so painful if you were youngish, and they kept
filling your glass with cheap champagne. Thus I fell into a demented
routine of frequent flying back and forth across the Atlantic. Over and
over again, week after week, month after month, eventually year after
year. I must have overflown Greenland at least 200 times. This makes
me personally responsible for at least two kilos of carbon dioxide
every trip: 400 kilos in all. The worst of it all was that on many of these
redundant, global-warming, immune-system-depleting trips, I didn’t
get the upgrade.
All these logistics, all this travel, to make a film about two pig-
ignorant junkies! Now it seems mad. Couldn’t we have prepared
and filmed Love Kills all in one place? We could. We could have shot
almost all our interiors in London, with a week of establishing shots in
the US. But the film might not have had the same tension – the same
trajectory of hope in its first half, doom in its second – as its extended
schedule achieved.
That we were able to shoot in both countries (with an additional
day trip to Paris!) is due to Eric and his extraordinary budgeting ability.
He managed to extract an 11-week schedule from the budget Zenith
okayed – enough for two independent feature films! There would be
Next day, in LA, I started reading potential Nancys. Vicky had already
met a number and had been through an immense quantity of pictures
and resumés. Nancy, thanks to her wretched tale, was a dynamite
role for any woman actor. I was impressed by Patti Tippo, and by a
kid calling herself Courtney Love, whom Abbe had met in New York.
Patti was a gifted actor and comedian and would have been a killer
Nancy. Courtney seemed too young – particularly opposite Gary, who
was about 10 years older than the ‘historic’ Sid – but she had immense
drive and real potential.
Late in our third day of Nancy meetings, Miguel Sandoval
introduced us to an actor named Chloe Webb. We met at Peter
McCarthy’s office in Venice – the old Edge City building.
Before becoming a full-time LA actor specialising in moustached
characters, Miguel and his wife Linda Callahan had run a theatre
company in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This did only cutting-edge
bohemian stuff: they wore pierrot costumes and did theatre workshops
with inmates in maximum-security prisons. They were no-nonsense
thespians. Chloe, a very serious and intense actor, had naturally fallen
Back and forth across the continents dementedly went I. Lucy and I
read Lindas, Phoebes, Rottens, Joneses and Cooks in London on one
PRODUCTION
Love Kills had the longest shoot of any of my films: 11 weeks. The first
half, shot in London, was the fun part, though often technically more
difficult. The second half, in America, was easier from a production
standpoint but far more challenging for the actors. The British half
was full of characters, actors, crowds – a succession of lively, funny
scenes. The American section had fewer characters: the Sex Pistols on
Something along these lines had happened to me, in 1977. The gig was
in a room at the top of a very grand staircase in the Elks Lodge, off
Pershing Square in LA. The Punk scene wasn’t popular with everyone,
and for some reason the police were summoned. Two hundred cops in
riot gear appeared, declared the show over, and proceeded to beat the
bejesus out of the departing punkers.
I’d dropped two tabs of acid just before the show began, so the
whole thing was doubly mysterious to me. Hoping the gig would yet
go ahead, I hung back until the hall was almost cleared. Finally, the
Sid and Nancy weren’t acid-heads, but I still had this vision of them
wandering through a raging storm that they’d provoked, in a cocoon
of drugs (or love, maybe) which protects them from violence. I talked
to Roger about it; I’d imagined a series of different shots: individual
set-pieces, involving Chloe, Gary, extras, and stunt guys. Instead,
Roger proposed keeping the camera on them the whole time, and
letting the mayhem play out in the background. Roger was a genius!
And the burden of lighting and filming a bunch of boring night-time
action scenes was lifted.
This was my first plano secuencia, a long, moving master shot that
incorporates an entire scene. It’s the way Arturo Ripstein shot many of
his films, and the way most of the scenes in I Am Cuba are constructed.
Later I made features that way, for a while.
At the same London hotel location, on the roof, Sid and Nancy
shot cap guns at Edward Tudor-Pole, who played the concierge. They
were dressed as cowboys and it was meant to be light-hearted stuff.
Half an hour into it a helicopter appeared, and we saw men in black
with sniper rifles on the adjoining roofs. Our hotel was opposite New
Scotland Yard – the presence of Chloe and Gary, with toy guns, had
triggered a red alert. No one was shot, the cap guns were examined by
the appropriate authorities, and filming progressed.
A couple of concert scenes – one in a basement club, the other
in a large venue that doubled both for Uxbridge College and the
Winterland in San Francisco – caused the actors difficulty. Being a
veteran of the west coast Punk scene, I was used to being soaked in
sweat and showered with spit at gigs: it was the punky thing. Most
of the spit was aimed at the bands, out of respect, but if you stood
anywhere near the stage, you’d also end up being spat upon. If it
sounds disgusting, that was the idea.
The climax of the English shoot was the re-creation of the famous
‘My Way’ promo, directed by Julien Temple. If you look at the
original version today, the stage, set, audience, and Sid’s gun are all
comparatively small. However, in our memories, if we are enthusiasts
for this kind of thing, the stage is huge, ablaze with light, the theatre
giant and grand, the audience vast and agog, filled with august
dignitaries, and Sid’s gun enormous . . . Memory plays tricks, makes
good things great. It was these memory tricks that I was emulating
in a re-creation of London Punk, a scene I’d never seen. Real London
Punk in 1976 or 1977 was a couple of skinny, spotty boys bouncing
up and down. Ours was a mob of tattooed skinheads and mohicans,
slamdancing in a mosh pit. It looked like California Punk, circa 1984,
because that was what I knew, and it was visually more exciting. I
wanted to show the movement’s heroic, epic side, so the viewer would
understand the tragedy of its destruction.
Andrew McAlpine’s mission with the ‘My Way’ set was to
re-create the imaginary apogee of Sid’s pretty pathetic repertoire.
Andrew made the stairs enormous: under each step he placed a bank
of fluorescent lights. We filmed a dozen takes of the song, before Gary
reached for his revolver. He was lip-synching, but, like Drew, he’d
sung the tracks himself. He acted with great energy and finesse.
So much good work was done over two short days that something
was bound to fail. When it did, it was quite sudden and dramatic.
In the theatre stalls, the grips had built a crane for Roger’s
camera. A movie crane is a big fulcrum: one or two camerapeople and
For the wrap-around to the ‘My Way’ scenes, we needed some footage
of the actors in Paris. Eric arranged for a small crew and three actors
to fly to a small airport outside Paris in a private plane. We got our
various locations, including some stolen shots on the Metro, where
Sid and Nancy abused a hippy busker. At a restaurant across the
street from the Moulin Rouge, we were joined by Peter McCarthy,
who was playing one of Sid’s insidious suitors, a manager named
Hugh Kares.
That day in Paris was the easiest of the Love Kills shoot. With two
vehicles and a total company of 10, we moved fast, yet were still able to
light and shoot a night-time restaurant exterior. The small crew made
it easier, of course, but there was another factor: the city itself. Paris
seemed to be the most film-friendly city on Earth. If you went into a
shop, or sat down on the terrasse of a café, and asked to shoot there,
the reaction always seemed to be a broad smile and a ‘certainment’.
After LA and London, it was amazing.
The night before we left to start the American phase of the shoot,
there was a wrap party for the London crew. In the gents’ toilets, I
met an interesting gatecrasher. His name was Joe Strummer. (I
assume the gentle reader is familiar with Strummer, the White Man
at Hammersmith Palais, and his seminal punk band The Clash, whom
I’d seen, soaked with spit, sweat and white light, at the Santa Monica
Civic Auditorium. If not, there are albums and ‘rockumentaries’ to
enlighten you.) We chatted briefly about Sid and the film, and agreed
to get together when the shoot was done, so I could show him some
footage and perhaps acquire a song.
The next night we shot the exterior of Max’s Kansas City. This was
where The Velvet Underground once played; it was abandoned, but
Fox and Burbank had recreated the famous sign from the Velvets’
album cover, and for extras we had a crowd of keepers of the Punk
flame, some of whom modelled themselves on the late Vicious – this
meant they hated Gary Oldman, because he wasn’t really Sid.
After the rehersal, Gary told me that some of these Sid-clones
had tried to punch him when he got out of his limo. We agreed not to
hang about, but to shoot immediately, and that I’d go in with him. So
that was me, clinging to Sid’s belt as he raced from the limo into Max’s
Kansas City, if you noticed. Sure enough, several would-be-Sids threw
punches at us, as, heads down, we barrelled through the crowd. But
we made it in a couple of takes, and I must have done a better job than
Luis Colosio’s bodyguard did in Tijuana, as Gary survived.
good actor, and one of those American girls with a continuous vocal
stream of consciousness. One evening during the New York shoot
Rudy and I made plans to go out for dinner. We were going to discuss
a screenplay I’d asked him to write about William Walker. Courtney
got wind of this and wanted to come along – so that, she said, she
could learn how films got made. I told her she couldn’t come; Rudy
and I were going to be working, and we didn’t want to be entertained,
or to have to entertain her. Courtney told me that if she could come
along, she wouldn’t speak. ‘I promise to be a complete moll and just
sit there, saying nothing,’ she vowed. This didn’t seem possible, but I
took her at her word, and we three went out for dinner at the grisly,
overpriced Spanish restaurant adjacent to the Chelsea Hotel. Rudy
and I had a productive discussion about the script and, as you’ve
guessed, Courtney remained totally mute. I thanked her very much
for being so disciplined.
only one short scene, the one point at which the political context of
heroin is mentioned.
More memorable, for most of the audience, is the scene that Abbe
improvised and directed: where Sid and Nancy kiss in an alley, with
dustbins falling all around. This was invented at the eleventh hour,
after we’d lost a location. The scene had depicted Sid throwing a chair
at someone and kissing Nancy, so Abbe said ‘Let’s have something
which starts with a kiss and ends with a crash.’ The alley into which
the trash fell wasn’t in New York, due to an inexplicable shortage
of creepy alleys in Manhattan. In contrast, LA’s downtown brick
buildings offered plenty – replete with fire escapes, overflowing
dumpsters, and very large rats.
In charge of our LA extras was an old UCLA pal, Lorenzo O’Brien,
who did his job by walking up and down the Venice Boardwalk,
stopping people he liked the look of, and asking them if they wanted
to be in a movie.
The eleventh week of the shoot, scheduled as our last, was on stage
at Cine Pro studios in Hollywood, where Fox and Burbank had re-
created the Chelsea rooms. It was a great environment after constantly
changing locations. We could rehearse in one place, in peace.
The largest set was the Chelsea suite that Sid and Nancy set on fire.
We shot the transition from England to the US here: Sid lying in bed,
imagining himself in Maida Vale, fantasising about how much better
things would be when they got to America. After the room was burned,
we moved to the Room 100 set, completing the scene where Fox Harris,
as the world’s oldest bellboy, carries Sid’s guitar to the new room.
Once we were in Room 100, Sid and Nancy were almost entirely
alone, at the vortex of their horror/love story. And we were into the
most dramatic and difficult scenes of the film. Not difficult for the
director, who just stood behind the camera watching marvellous
actors, but very demanding for the cast. Chloe and Gary weren’t
entirely alone in Room 100: Xander Berkeley played Sid and Nancy’s
dealer, a composite character we’d named ‘Bowery Snacks’.
Xander is one of those actors who love to discuss the details
and the possibilities of their characters. He brought many interesting
angles to the scene, down to the details of the drugs his character had
ingested prior to the scene, and whether Bowery was an authentic
‘drug bucket’ or, more likely, drawn to the opiates, like Nancy and
Sid. He alternated Bowery’s fawning side with his anger at being the
errand boy of celebrity fuck-ups.
Some have assumed that because Love Kills was about two junkies, we
were all awash with drugs. A noted film director even asked me ‘How
much smack did Gary and Chloe do, during the shoot?’ I could only
POSTPRODUCTION
Postproduction took place almost entirely in London, apart from
some additional dialogue recorded in LA, and John Cale’s and Pray
for Rain’s music, done in New York and San Francisco. The first cut of
the film was three hours long, so there was no need to shoot additional
sequences. The task was to cut the picture down.
original Country and Western song, sung by Pearl Harbor. All play
as source or background music in the film. In the end roller, they’re
credited to non-existent composers and bands. Joe didn’t seem to
mind; he was getting experience as a part-time film composer, he was
having a good time.
Strummer was a haunted man, concerned to be upfront. He
slicked his hair back with soap, wore his sideburns long, and always
showed up wearing the same black-and-red checked lumberjack shirt.
I remember him lecturing a young American actor about the danger
of heroin, the importance of not falling stupidly into doing it. The
message didn’t sink in, but I was impressed by Strummer, who seemed
entirely sincere. Joe thought drugs were something you should be
upfront about. If you had a spliff to smoke, you should walk down the
street smoking it – ‘The Rebel Way’! If you had to hide what you were
doing, you had a problem.
Strummer was an encyclopedic musicologist. He would produce
home-made cassettes and lay them on people – tapes of music he
had put together to augment areas where he thought their musical
knowledge was lacking. He gave me tapes of reggae and of old English
music. This was a huge asset to Love Kills. The only point over which we
disagreed was the title song, which in the end he wrote and sang. Two
guys had sent me a tape of their song about Sid. They were quite young
and the song was very critical – about how Sid had sold out, done
nothing of value, died an idiot. ‘King of the punks, king of the geeks,’
went the chorus. It was minimal, had a good riff, and I was taken by it. I
met its authors, and we agreed they’d do a version for the film.
Strummer didn’t like their song, and volunteered to write an
alternative. Then, in his typical hyper-prolific fashion, he came back
with two demos: ‘Love Kills’ and ‘The Dum-Dum Club’. Either one
could have been our main theme song par excellence, but ‘Love
Kills’ stood out: a plaintive ballad with a mournful, wailing vocal;
minimalist, troubling, moving. Unfortunately, in going from demo to
finished product, the song and the singer/songwriter went through
the studio of a producer in New York. This guy had a state-of-the-art
1985 computer setup, with thwonky fake drumbeats, auto-bass, and
those early digital thingys that made ‘blip-blip’ sounds. Joe’s lovely
song, once just his voice and a couple of instruments – so sparse, so
lonesome – grew thicker and boingier with multiple mechanical
drumbeats, and hyper-bass. I heard various versions and the effects
and thuds got louder every time.
One night, near the end of the editing process, I took the Tube back
to Tower Hill. When I came out of the station I encountered a mass of
banners and marchers heading east. Immediately I spotted the banner
of the ACTT – the Association of Cinema and Television Technicians
union, of which I’d only recently become a member! I joined my
comrades beneath our proud banner. Where were we going, I asked?
‘Wapping!’ the marchers replied.
It was a march against Rupert Murdoch, and his creation of a
fortified non-union printing Stalag for The Times, the Sun, and his other
rubbish papers, in Wapping. (For those who are fortunate enough
not to know London, Wapping was another poor district, partially
industrialised, on the opposite bank of the river from Bermondsey.)
The ‘Dirty Digger’s’ plan was enthusiastically supported by Thatcher,
who sent forth armies of cops to break the picket lines. This was a
march in support of the pickets and the printing unions – in support
of the right to protest, and to block the factory gates! I loved marches,
and this one was particularly atmospheric, through blackened old
brick streets, to Murdoch’s grey-walled bunker, with razor wire and
CCTV. Flanks of public and private police eyed us, though not as
many as I’d anticipated. After a bit of chanting, I retraced my steps
and walked home across Tower Bridge.
and then he’d roll and mix it on the fly, adjusting levels and fading
tracks, until he made a mistake, or the scene ended. I watched him
mix long scenes this way – several minutes’ worth of dialogue, music
and effects – without pausing. It was exciting – a real performance, an
artist at work. There was no automation or computer assistance: every
knob had to be tweaked, each button pushed, and every slider slid, by
Hugh’s or his assistants’ hands, in real time.
Today, we programme all our fades, levels, effects, tweaks,
and adjustments in advance, and every take is predictable. The
digital world has made things precise and accurate, but perhaps less
exciting.
RELEASE
The film first played as part of the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at Cannes
in 1986. It opened in a huge cinema, in the presence of Jack Lang, the
former minister of culture, who sat in the balcony; he received more
applause than the film did. The Sid & Nancy/Love Kills team were all
seated together as the lights went down: me, Eric, Margaret, Chloe,
Dick Rude, Sara Sugarman, Joe, Gary, and his manager. Apparently,
members of Duran Duran were in the audience. As the first image of
Gary as Sid appeared on screen, one of them shouted out: ‘Johnny
Thunders!’
Strummer, may the saints preserve his memory, stood up and
yelled at the wanker, ‘Shut the fuck up!’
of whom had seen the film. One of them looked me in the eye and
declared, ‘Ce film – c’est nul!’ Half a dozen people crashed on the floor
of my hotel room after the event. Next morning I went off for a meeting
of some kind, and, on my return, found Strummer, Rude, and Tom
Richmond, still dressed in their black evening wear and white dress
shirts, clustered around a white plastic table in the hot sun, trying to
get coffee. The image stuck with me, and inspired the opening scenes
of a new film, Straight to Hell.
Love Kills had a preview in LA – one of those events where the invited
audience fills out forms and answers a studio’s questions. These were
some of the responses from the preview audience:
Despite the previews, the film got an American release from the Sam
Goldwyn Company, an independent distributor of art pictures, based
in west LA. The Americans went with the ‘raining dustbins’ image for
their poster; the British distributor went with a brightly coloured, Jamie
Reid-type graphic of Gary and Chloe. The posters reflect the way the
film was viewed: quite differently in each country. In England, Sid &
Nancy was a Sex Pistols artefact, while in the States – where punk had
never had much of a foothold – the film was seen as a free-standing
drama.
Following Sid & Nancy, I received invitations to direct other
heroin-related projects, among them Needle, and The Basketball Diaries.
These were good projects, but why would I want to do another one?
Now, if I could just shoot Malfi, starring Chloe Webb or Kathy Burke,
with Drew or Gary as her werewolf brother Ferdinand, and Sy or
Xander as the Cardinal . . . But how to swing it?
A crew was quickly rounded up. Before the script was even written,
Eric had asked Andrew McAlpine to design the film. We hunted
down Karl Braun, who had been production manager on the Love Kills
promo. Karl knew the extras casting guys, the owners of the Western
towns, and construction people. We all knew the locations.
When Eric said a screenplay was now essential, I went to LA to
write it with Dick Rude. At the Kensington Hotel, we began work on a
script provisionally titled ‘The Legend of Paddy Garcia’. We knew we
were writing it for a group, and that it wasn’t to be too ‘serious’. But,
on a practical level, within our Spaghetti Western world, who would
the hero be? Joe was the obvious candidate, but he was an untried
actor whose enormous stage charisma might not translate onto film.
The Pogues were innate rivals: the group would kill any of its cohorts
rather than let him play the lead. Elvis had a great look, but it wasn’t
the square-chinned, pale-eyed killer face of Eastwood, Franco Nero, or
Henry Fonda. Should an actor play the lead? Sy Richardson was the
most obvious protagonist: commanding, credible, experienced. But
he wasn’t one of the rock’n’rollers. Unknown to me, he was currently
working as a bank manager.
The hero of a good Spaghetti Western moves through it like a
steamroller: like Toshirô Mifune in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. By contrast,
Straight to Hell introduces four characters, then 24 more; all inhabit the
film constantly. Three days pass, and very few are killed (Ed Tudor-
Pole and Jem Finer, one of The Pogues, bite the dust prematurely).
On the final day, in the last 20 minutes of the film, a speedy killing-off
ensues.
During the writing process Dick and I consumed coffee – bad coffee,
brewed on the electric ring – and suffered from sexual tension,
provoked by one of our neighbours in the hotel. We never knew who,
or even where, she was, but if we angled the slat-opening windows
of our writers’ roost just so, they’d catch the reflection of this woman
who spent every day tanning on her balcony. She was dark-skinned
and voluptuous, with a very small bikini, and every day she would
lather herself with sun-tan oil and lie there on the plastic sun-lounger
provided by the hotel.
Sexual tension quickly became the screenplay’s main concern.
Despite all their talk of money, most of the characters are ruled not
by avarice, but by love or lust. Unlike my previous scripts, this one
contained no swearing at all.
We wrote the screenplay in three days. If you associate long
periods of effort with quality work, you may think quickly done things
like this to be cheap rubbish. Never mind. The ideas in Straight to Hell
had been brewing for some time, and we were creating characters for
actors we knew: screenplay as casting director. Only one role proved
difficult to cast: Mr Dade. In the script, Dade is a villainous regional
power-broker, who has hired the three killers – Norwood, Willy, and
Simms – to murder a rival. When his hirelings fail, rob a bank, and
run away, Dade sends an emissary, Whitey, to look for them. Whitey
is hanged and Dade heads for the killers’ hideout, to settle their
account.
Given this, the part of Mr Dade called for a very strong actor. In
the best of all possible worlds, Dade wouldn’t have been human at all,
but a brain in a bell-jar on hydraulic robot legs, or a lizard-creature in
a lounge suit: something out of Mars Attacks! or a Cronenberg movie.
But either possibility would have involved some serious special
effects, something, in 35mm days, beyond our million-dollar budget.
I tried Iggy Pop: he, if anyone, could play a special effect! Iggy was
receptive at first, but as the date approached he was less keen. Eric
asked Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb if they would play a cameo –
PRODUCTION
The shoot began on 4 August 1986, with the opening: interiors and
exteriors at the Gran Hotel, Almería, and the apparent kidnapping of
Velma.
The Gran is a none-too-pretty tower block opposite the docks.
It’s one of the new buildings that went up in the 1950s and 1960s to
replace the neighbourhoods destroyed when the German navy shelled
Almería and Malaga: the last cities to surrender to the fascists in the
Spanish Civil War. In the 1960s, the Gran was the only ‘modern’ hotel
in Almería: it had telephones, so it was where all the movie crews,
actors, and directors stayed. David Lean and Lee Katz stayed there,
Tom Richmond, Shaun Madigan, Del Zamora, James Fernley, Dick Rude,
Biff Yeager, Courtney Love, Martin Turner, Joe Strummer,
and others on the set of For a Few Dollars More.
I took this when the Hell set was new – around 1971.
Zander played Karl, the Weiner Kid. Inevitably, he was the town
scapegoat.1 If anyone was to be lassoed, kicked, and otherwise ill-
treated, it would be Karl. Zander took great interest in Andrew
McAlpine’s creation of his cart, and had even brought a prop with
him: a wooden nickel that he thought Karl’s natural father might
have given him before abandoning him at the fair. Zander had
exactly the correct take on Karl and played it to the max. Our actors
and musicians were a soft-hearted and loving bunch, but their hearts
turned to stone when they saw Karl’s cart approaching, pushed by
Zander, in his red-and-white chequered coat and service hat. By the
second week of shooting, we probably had more footage of Karl being
mistreated than of any other character’s travails.
Even when we cut 10 minutes out of the film, it didn’t diminish him.
Only Kim Blousson (Fox Harris) does more to entertain the Llano del
Duque, and he is a professional: apart from his portrayal of J. Frank,
I think this was Fox’s finest filmic hour. Not many Westerns featured
a Tom Jones imitator, and Fox had no singing voice at all. Once again
I’d given him a role he wasn’t right for, but how glorious the result.
Fox’s version of ‘Delilah’, sung to a crowd of bizarrely dressed
armed drunks, is quite fine. Of course, he is superbly supported by
Elvis Costello: always in character, struggling to keep pace as Fox
randomly changed pitch, tempo, and key.
Another actor who enjoyed himself was Ed Pansullo. Cast as one of the
spooks in Repo Man, Ed had blurred into the blond herd. Determined
not to let this happen again, Ed made friends with the wardrobe
designer, the ineffable Pam Tait, and went through her entire costume
collection on arrival. Ed prepared a dandy mariachi outfit for himself,
tricked out with epaulettes, sashes, kerchiefs, silver buckles, silver
spurs, silver conchos, and a whip.
Xander Berkeley had a harder landing: he flew from LA to Madrid
to Malaga, whence he was immediately driven to the wardrobe
department, a tent in the desert. Sleepless, and in the midst of a
costume fitting, he was summoned to the set. Xander had been looking
forward to discussing his character – ‘Who is Preacher McMahon?
Where is he coming from?’ – those kind of questions. On the set of Sid
& Nancy there had been one director and three actors. Now there was
one director, baked to insensitivity, and 20-odd actors. This director’s
attitude was, ‘Get yer costume on and start actin’!’, which worked for
most, if not all.
In such circumstances actors must rely on wardrobe and props.
Xander hadn’t even thought about his character, but the Preacher had
been issued with a bible, so he hit Karl with it. Simms had a switchblade,
so Karl was menaced with it. Mac had a whip, so he whipped Karl.
The night after Karl was dunked in the town well, Zander confronted
me. Dick Rude was on his side. There’d been too much picking on
Karl, they felt, and Karl needed some kind of restitution. I agreed, and
offered Zander three choices. He could 1) continue with the script as
it was, but instead of being killed his character would, after further
suffering, be allowed to leave town with all the women; 2) show up
and offer his services to Norwood and co., who would reject him –
then, off-screen, a bus would run him over; or 3) offer his services to
when hats were shot off her head. But what she really wanted to do
was direct.
There was no better, faster, whiter cameraman than Tom, whose skin
was so prone to burning that he was nicknamed ‘Whitey’ by his crew.
He was entirely on top of things, as was Andrew’s art department, as
were costumes and makeup. And yet, we weren’t quite making our
days. By the middle of the second week I realised my own department
was to blame: shooting in fragments, we were failing to finish scenes –
leaving things out that we’d need to get later.
I was working with an ‘old school’ assistant director, who had
done Romancing the Stone. Hollywood films shot for many, many weeks
and moved at a different pace, it seemed. He was a charming guy, but
if I needed something – a gun that fired blanks, for example – I’d say,
‘I need a gun with blanks,’ and my man would shout, ‘We need a gun
with blanks!’ and stand there, looking around. If his second assistant
was in the vicinity, that guy might shout ‘Gun with blanks!’ as well.
And that would be that.
ensued, involving the journalists being staked out in the sun and
tormented, often with no camera present.
The last of the big night sequences involved the McMahons lined
up as a Last Supper painting, or the cast of Viridiana, drinking a last
coffee in granpa’s honour, and singing ‘Danny Boy’. Shaun Madigan,
the grip, suggested a plano secuencia, thinking this would speed things
up – he wanted to get to bed before dawn. The scene features almost
all the actors in the film, including Blacksmith, and Martin Turner in
drag. Only Jem Finer was absent, his character being dead.
Miguel continued to improvise and to expand his role as the
hardware store owner. He created a scene where Jennifer, who played
his faithless wife, was supposed to slap him. Miguel did one of those
actor numbers: ‘Go for it, Jennifer. Really hit me. Otherwise it’ll look
fake.’ When the take came, Jennifer hauled off and whacked him. It
looked great. Sando, like Brando, is an actor whose mind you can
read, and one can clearly see him thinking, as his glasses fly painfully
from his face, ‘Why did I tell her to do that?’
That evening, Biff Yeager told me Straight to Hell was the first of
my scripts that he’d been able to understand. The previous screenplays,
as far as he was concerned, were gibberish. But Straight to Hell made
sense. The next day, Eric returned from LA with a suitcase full of
money. I told Sy the good news, and – as the rest of us celebrated –
he called the bank in California. He asked his boss if he could have
another week of leave. His boss said no, four weeks’ leave was enough;
they needed him back on Monday.
So Sy, who was earning next to nothing on Straight to Hell, quit
his job there and then. He didn’t mention it to me, or anyone. It was
almost 20 years before he told me. I didn’t know Sy even had a job,
apart from acting. I’d simply relied on him entirely. To pull Straight
to Hell off, I’d needed a corps of fearless, ready-for-action actors
on whom I could rely. Sy was the most vital member of the group;
I was luckier than I knew. Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones came,
generating a great buzz among the actors, but it was Sy that I am
most indebted to.
Sunday, 31 August. The shoot was over. This was our day of rest,
before everyone shipped out. To celebrate the conclusion of the shoot,
POSTPRODUCTION
David Martin edited the film in Soho. The sound designer was his
assistant, Justin Krish. The original four-day version was complete in
December 1986. I missed most of the editing, since Walker was in pre-
production in Nicaragua and Mexico. But the process seemed to go
smoothly.
Eric, however, was beginning to have his doubts – not about the
editing, but about the picture itself. He’d shown the cut to friends of
his, and they didn’t find it funny. He turned to the Sex and Cruelty
Consultant for advice on how to make it funnier. Martin asked Eric
if he wanted to shoot new scenes or to re-edit it; Eric didn’t know.
Strummer, worried about the response, sent me the following letter
at the beginning of January. I quote it in full: there are no secrets in
it, but it reveals his concern for the film, and what else was going on
with him.
Dear Al
Please find enclosed an idea for the film. Spoke to one or two
people here who could not follow story when they saw the film.
As a result comments included ‘Disappointing rip off’ ‘The story
is feeble’ also ‘Just a load of rockstars posing about.’
I did not defend or voice any opinions but I pumped them and
discovered that none of the story is getting over. So without
speaking to anyone I sat down to write you a letter. However a
small idea came to me which I began to like very much. Benefits
include: 1.) puts story over; 2.) adds depth; 3.) is cheap to do; 4.)
requires no cutting of film as is; 5.) contains new presentation
idea.
say ‘I’m not going to add narration just to save a film’ I realise
we are probably doomed to a disastrous reception from the
critics and public in February. Yet are these attitudes wise in the
circumstances?
Anyway please sit down comfortably and alone and really try
and visualise this as you read it as a punter might see it. I have
discussed this with no one. If you think it is a goer or is a good
springboard for additional ideas please discuss it with Miguel.
My mother died the night before Christmas Eve. I have just
returned to London after the funeral. Will send that song.
Mick [Jones] also sending something probably in demo form.
Remember I’m batting for you.
Love from the deserted city
Joseph
I hadn’t known Joe’s mother was ill. And I’ve forgotten what
debate we’d had about narration. I opposed a voiceover, on the
grounds that this was a Spaghetti Western, and, while they often
had incomprehensible plots, they never had voiceover narrations.
Strummer’s proposed fix was fascinating, but it wasn’t cheap: it
involved re-editing the film, and shooting new scenes with Miguel
Sandoval. Joe’s idea was that the film’s events should be presented as
flashbacks, from the point of view of Sando’s character George, living
in his bunker beneath the burned-out hardware store, long after the
apocalypse. It was quite a brilliant proposal, typed on a sheet of paper
six feet long. I took it seriously, and called Karl in Tabernas to ask
about the state of our locations. He sent the following poetic reply:
RELEASE
Straight to Hell opened in London and Dublin on 12 June 1987, the day
after Thatcher’s general election victory. It’s hard to imagine a worse
downer of a time. Just as Joe had predicted, the critical response
was negative and the initial audiences small. Strummer had bravely
promoted and defended the film, but its British theatrical release
didn’t last long. The UK distributor was a company called Miracle
Films, who had distributed the excellent Spaghetti Western Today It’s
Me . . . Tomorrow It’s You! Their motto was, ‘If it’s a good film, it’s a
Miracle!’
The US opening was at the Pickwick Drive-In, Studio City, LA
on 1 July. I attended this gala event. Island had come up with a fine
distribution plan: good cinemas in 17 cities. They spent money on
advertising, but the US critics were hostile, too – there was only one
good review in the entire country, from a Seattle paper.
I was surprised: Straight to Hell might not be great, but it was all
right. Its strongest point was Sy’s performance. There was very good
music and photography, some demented and sadistic humour, and a
sustained Spaghetti Western homage. But this was 1987: there was no
vogue for jokey films about black-suited professional hitmen, or films
without one central character. Among those who absolutely failed to
‘get it’ were the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the
BACKGROUND
Walker is my best, my most expensive, and my least-seen film. It’s the
biopic of William Walker, an American mercenary who had himself
made president of Nicaragua in the mid-nineteenth century. In the US,
Walker was an anti-slavery liberal; in Nicaragua he instituted slavery.
He’s almost unknown in the US today, but in the 1850s Walker was
fantastically popular. The newspapers wrote more about him than
they did about Presidents Pierce or Buchanan.
All the characters in the film existed, though they aren’t all
accurate portraits, and there’s no evidence, say, that Walker and his
financier, Vanderbilt, ever met. Most of what happens in the film is
part of some historical record, but it’s a drama, and the bricks of truth
are mortared with fiction.
I first went to Nicaragua in 1984, with Peter McCarthy – on one
of those leftist tours where you meet nuns and trade unionists and
representatives of cooperatives. It was the week of the presidential
election, which the FSLN – the Sandinistas – won. We were impressed
by the revolution, by the beauty of the countryside, by the changes
and the optimism in the air. In León, on election day, two young
Sandinistas egged us on to bring to Nicaragua a big Hollywood
movie that would communicate something about Nicaragua to the
Americans, and spend dollars there.
Fair enough – Nicaragua was a poor country, under continuous
terrorist attack.1 The Sandinistas were their elected representatives,
131 walker
this meant much in Hollywood. To get serious money for a Sandinista
feature, it would need an American protagonist: step forward, William
Walker.
What I read about Walker convinced me that this was a person who
wanted to get himself killed. He managed in the end, being shot by a
firing squad in Honduras. But many, many others had to die first. In
that way the story of Walker reminded me of a film I’d seen about a
pair of death-fixated hero-types, who provoked untold destruction: Pat
Garrett & Billy The Kid. I wrote a long letter to Rudy Wurlitzer, asking
him if he would consider writing the script for a feature about Walker.
Fortunately, that letter is lost now: it was filled with grandiosity and
impossibly revolutionary cinematic hopes. In spite of it, Rudy agreed.
He flew to London, where he stayed at my place in Bermondsey
and began writing. However, he hated it there, just as I did, and soon
went back to New York. Before he left, we discussed our approach to
the story we called ‘Ride to Glory’. Hollywood, we thought, would
have made a ‘Walker’ movie from the viewpoint of a sympathetic,
humane journalist; we felt there were no ‘good’ journalists, especially
in Walker’s entourage. Rudy saw Walker’s men as pirates, gangsters,
would-be slave-owners; his Nicaraguan supporters were equally
villainous. Nothing had changed in the 130 years between Walker’s
genocidal campaign and that of Oliver North and the current crop
of war criminals in the White House. The anachronisms that Rudy
placed in the script became an essential part of the project – to show
things as they were now.
Over Christmas and New Year 1985/6 I went to Nicaragua on a
location scout with Lorenzo O’Brien and Cecilia Montiel. At this point,
Lorenzo was already the producer. We’d made a policy decision that
everyone involved in the production would fly economy, including
the principal actors. This saved us a substantial amount of cash. It’s
thanks to Lorenzo that so many dollars got spent in Nicaragua, and
that a film was made. As producer, he had to manage the logistics of
four different crews – Nicaraguan, Mexican, British, and American –
in various languages; deal with industrial unrest, weather damage,
three-camera shoots involving the Nicaraguan Army, the attempted
cancellation of the completion bond, whining journalists, drowning
actors, and car crashes, while feeding and paying all those involved.
On that first location scout, we visited Corinto, León, Rivas, and
San Juan del Sur. We met representatives of Instituto Nicaraguense de
spent a few days in Granada, the most colonial of cities: many streets
looked as they must have when Walker was there. Walker boasted of
burning the city to the ground, but it’s hard to see how a fire could
destroy Granada. Almost all the buildings were of thick-walled
stone, with tiled roofs and interior courtyards – like the old houses in
Granada, Spain. We took a boat to the islands of Lake Nicaragua, the
largest lake in the Americas, and the only one with freshwater sharks.
In Granada we went to the cinema. Television was everywhere,
but VCRs were still a luxury, so the country had the second-highest
cinema attendances in Latin America: only Mexicans went to the
pictures more. It was a huge, barn-like auditorium with broken
speakers and a dim bulb. The film was Peckinpah’s Ride the High
Country. Even the battered, pink-and-blue print couldn’t disguise a
great tale. How many other Peckinpah films were circulating round
Nicaragua’s 125 cinemas? Recent American films were unavailable, as
a result of the US government’s embargo, so instead Nicaraguans paid
a few cordobas to watch classic American cinema on a huge screen.
This, and other experiences in these local cinemas, convinced me
that Walker should have a mono soundtrack. If you played a recent,
stereo print (Sid & Nancy, say) on one of these old mono systems, it
sounded terrible. The projector missed the edges of both optical tracks,
and the result was muddy and indistinct, whereas a mono print, one
optical track, always sounded great.
133 walker
script, from this very first draft, pulled in two directions: 1) Walker’s
own story; and 2) that of his troops, and Nicaraguan camp followers.
Rudy titled his second draft ‘Immortals’. While the central action
remained the same, there were more troops, and there was more for
them to do. We kept meeting interesting actors who wanted to go to
Nicaragua, many of them for solidarity reasons. It made sense to have
them populate Walker’s army.
Lorenzo and I went looking for an executive producer. This
would be a more expensive film than either of us had made before.
We needed someone to visit the studios and the banks for us. An
American producer, Ed Pressman, expressed an interest.
Pressman’s credits included Badlands and Masters of the Universe.
Among his many projects were some politically risky ones. He did an
amazing thing on Walker: managing to raise American money for a
very radical, anti-imperialist feature film – a film shot in Nicaragua,
a country with which the United States was de facto at war. And he
raised the budget from a US studio!
At the same time, Ed’s first idea for finding finance was a bit
alarming: he wanted to take the project to Universal. This sounded
like the Return to Hell, but Ed insisted – there had been another
regime change at the studio, and the new boss didn’t want to be
thought of in the same light as his thuggish forbears. Bad former execs
had suppressed films like Repo Man. The good current execs wanted
to extend the hand of friendship and support to talent whom the
previous bad execs had wronged. Maybe. Our game plan was to raise
half of the budget via an advance on foreign sales, selling the other
half in the US. This is the way independent films were made at that
time – the international sales market hadn’t yet collapsed. So we were
only looking for half the budget from the US. Ed knew we planned
to shoot in Nicaragua, but he didn’t think that would necessarily
be a problem. The three of us also discussed the fallback position of
shooting in Mexico. Lorenzo and I planned to shoot in Nicaragua, of
course, but we couldn’t insist on this to potential insurers, to whom
we had to present an image of flexibility rather than fanaticism.
135 walker
which he said he’d had no problem: Film Finances.
take the reactionary rag. The guy immediately got on her case. This
was an old newspaper boy in the middle of a busy intersection, and
he shouted at us: ‘What the hell do you know about reactionaries?
You are foreigners! You have no right to criticise, or have an opinion
about anything yet! Buy La Prensa, and learn what Nicaraguans
think!’
The traffic moved, the car rolled on. We didn’t buy a paper.
There were three national newspapers: La Prensa (which was indeed a
reactionary rag); Barricada, the Sandinista paper; and El Nuevo Diario,
written by journalists who had left La Prensa. Each of these newspapers
was published and edited by a Chamorro: the Chamorro family, right
wing and left wing, had a monopoly on journalism in Nicaragua.
Of all the cast, Walker was key: it was his story, and it had potential
to attract a ‘movie star’. In London, Strummer told me he’d seen a
picture of the actor Sean Penn, ‘And he looked just like Walker. Same
age, same shape of face, same expression in his eyes. When you’re out
in LA, you have to see him. The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny.’ Pressman
agreed with Joe. His preferences were for Sean or for Warren Beatty.
I didn’t think Beatty was right for Walker – he was older, physically
very different, but he could make a powerful Vanderbilt. Thus began
137 walker
penthouse Beatty resided.
Beatty liked to talk. He knew a bit of history, and he knew Walker
was the better role. I kept trying to impress him on the sheer power
and charisma that Vanderbilt would project: qualities that very few
actors were able to project as effectively as Mr Beatty. He remarked
that I seemed very enthusiastic. I said I was. ‘Why? What are you –
a coker?’ I asked him what he meant. ‘You know, coke, are you all
wound up on coke right now?’ Nope, I said, I was wound up with the
thrilling energy of the Walker project, of which I hoped he’d soon be a
major part, etc.
Our conversations petered out when Beatty’s father died.
Discussions with Penn persisted. Sean and I met, and in terms of
physical appearance, Strummer was spot on. Penn looked like Walker
aged around 30, before the Nicaraguan mission took its toll on him.
He seemed very young. Could this handsome, even delicate, young
man convince an audience and an army of actors that he was its
leader? I hoped he’d audition for the part. At our meeting, he said he
would, but his agents told Pressman he wouldn’t. This hadn’t been
an issue in the past: whenever I’d asked an actor to read they’d done
it, LA or London. Walker was bumping up against the ‘star’ system,
with its strange rules and demands. ‘Stars’ are different from actors.
‘Stars’ marry other stars. ‘Stars’ do not read. Sean’s agents felt that for
him to audition would be to lower his status within a larger structure.
Perhaps they were right. However, it meant I had no way of knowing
what Sean might be like in the Walker role. I had no instinctive
feeling, based on our one meeting, as to whether this little, somewhat
shrimpy, guy could play the role. When he refused to read, we moved
on.
Into the equation stepped another actor, whom I had known
vaguely back in UCLA days: the star of Ed Harker’s The Dream
Players, Ed Harris. Harris is a striking character: his grey eyes and
the pronounced bone structure of his face draw your attention. His
qualities were the antithesis of Penn’s: he looked older and a little less
like Walker, but he projected a force of personality that could clearly
dominate a throng of filibusters circa 1853, or a throng of actors circa
1987. And he was willing to read. Ed had been a football player at
college and presented himself as devoid of bullshit. In due course,
Vicky and I flew up to Portland, Oregon, where Ed was shooting a
film, and he auditioned. In his production condo, Ed buttoned up
his shirt collar, pulled his sleeves down and fastened them, sat bolt
At the beginning of 1987, we received the new version from Rudy, now
titled ‘Walker’. It was the best draft yet, ending with Walker refusing
to board the helicopter, as in the finished film. Still nothing had yet
fallen into place financially: Universal wouldn’t provide any written
commitments, and there was still no foreign sales partner.
The production design issue remained unresolved. Fox and
Burbank were brilliant, but neither was a Spanish speaker. Cecilia
was talented enough to do the job, but she would be a hard sell to
the bond company. Then, out of the blue, a new candidate walked
through our door: Bruno Rubeo. Bruno was a former model maker
for the special effects designer Carlo Rambaldi. He spoke Spanish
fluently and seemed a creative chap. To his credit, Bruno recognised
Cecilia’s talent and knowledge of the project: he hired her as his art
director.
139 walker
Lorenzo and I continued scouting the same falling-down Mexican
movie locations we’d already seen. We showed Bruno John Wayne’s
movie ranch, La Joya. Nearby was the ranch that Peckinpah used as
Old Fort Sumner in Pat Garrett, which we also visited repeatedly. We
talked about using it for the San Jacinto battle, but we had no real plan
to shoot there – how could we recycle the main location of another of
Rudy’s films?
Lorenzo stayed in Mexico for meetings with potential crew.
While still trying to be a lean and mean film-making machine, we
were hiring a union crew from Churubusco Studios, which entailed a
lot of people and much paperwork. Bruno and I headed south, from
the snowy Sierra Madre to the tropic heat of Nicaragua. We stayed
briefly in Managua at the Intercontinental – a hotel built to resemble a
pyramid or ziggurat – which had survived the 1972 earthquake. The
Intercontinental was the sort of place where you put journalists and
actors; the rooms had phones, so they could call their agents, and the
food was suitably bland.
The hotel had something of a history: supposedly it had been built
for Howard Hughes, who blacked out all the penthouse windows.
The fugitive Hughes had been invited to Nicaragua by the American
ambassador, Turner Shelton, formerly a croupier in one of Hughes’
casinos. After the revolution, it had briefly been headquarters for
Daniel Ortega and Tomás Borge.
Our Managuan meetings done, Bruno and I drove south, via
Rivas, to San Juan del Sur. We stayed at the Hotel Estrella, close to the
beach. San Juan looked very like the illustrations from Walker’s day:
two-storey wooden structures with one big room per floor. It was the
kind of place you’d see on a tourist guide to undiscovered paradises.
The bedrooms at the Estrella were demarcated by flimsy
partitions, with doors protected by a tiny padlock, or no lock at all.
Yet no one was ever robbed there. Many of the foreign crew and cast
liked the Estrella, but its lack of amenities and proper locks made our
new designer ill at ease. We left our bags at the hotel and went out to
reconnoitre. When we returned, Bruno insisted someone had been in
our room going through our luggage; he was certain his bags had been
searched. I asked him who he thought had searched them; he told me
Sandinista intelligence or the local police. At the time, I thought this
was paranoia on Bruno’s part: I’d stayed here before and had never
had this problem. But perhaps Bruno was onto something, as far as his
bags were concerned.
Angel told Lorenzo some long and complicated story about how the
convoy had been held up by bandits in Guatemala. The reality was less
exotic. The crew had been delayed by the Guatemalan authorities who
were, as ever, under orders from, and eager to please, the Americans.
Our trucks were searched repeatedly; bits of gear were impounded;
days went by. When the vehicles finally got rolling, there was a
road accident and somebody was killed. It was stupid stuff, possibly
preventable, and it didn’t become less stupid by glossing it over with
tales of highway banditry.
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filming in what the insurers considered a war zone, we hadn’t been
able to get coverage for ‘Acts of God’. Predictably, the insurance
company considered this border hold-up to be one of God’s actions.
There was no spare money to pay for the week’s delay, so Ed Pressman
and I kicked our salaries back into the budget. This almost funded the
extra week of idleness; to make up the balance, Ed Harris gave half his
wages back as well. Now this was extraordinary: it doesn’t normally
happen on a film, even a good one. Of course, it had to do with the
Nicaraguan revolution: each of us felt some moral obligation to make
the film.
Harris, in character, led all of the actors on a forced march, to get
them in the spirit of the film. Ed’s forced march was a bonding exercise:
it got the entire cast on a walk that was pretty excessive for most of
them – eight miles or so, which if you’re from LA or London can seem
like the Bataan Death March. It took us on winding dirt roads through
lush countryside. We stopped in the poorest of villages, where houses
didn’t have glass in their windows (though the little store usually
had a television!), drank cola out of plastic bags (bottles were always
too valuable to be taken away), and generally behaved like starry-
eyed gringos and Mexicans on a political nature tour. My assistant,
Abbie Fields, had worried we’d run into problems because there were
military installations (Nicaragua’s only radar battery) nearby. But we
went without minders – only our INCINE producer, Carlos Alvarez –
and encountered no obstacles. That day spent marching in disorderly
ranks behind Ed, through the real Nicaragua, more than compensated
for the absence of work.
At last, the trucks arrived. The shoot started the next day, 14
March 1987, at a tiny village not far from the radar base. It was a half-
day shoot, after a long convoy out of Managua into the mountains, to
catch the gorgeous afternoon light for the scenes in which Walker’s
troops reached town. I don’t know if the handful of houses had a
name: in the script, we called it Realejo. The art department had
whitewashed all the buildings, fixed up the roofs, added a couple of
walls and built a chapel. It was only a temporary movie chapel, with
three sides, but this suited the locals, who had plans for the wood.
Our first shot was a low angle on the steep road to Realejo, looking
up towards the town. Dave Bridges and I puzzled over the composition
for several minutes. We wanted it to be visually impressive, so we’d be
excited by our first look at the rushes. But we couldn’t stop thinking
in terms of horizontals and verticals. Finally Steve Fierberg, whom
we move the camera a few metres to the left. Now the narrow road
created a diagonal. The right image popped out immediately.
We didn’t need to rehearse 50 men going up a hill, I thought.
We rolled camera, I called action, and off they went – Walker in the
lead, of course, flanked by Byron Cole, the romantic journalist, and
Dr Jones, the black-clad opium eater. After them came the soldiers,
Hornsby, Henningson, and co., and 30-odd extras. After the extras
came the mule-skinner Wiley Marshall and then the chuck wagon,
which, having no mule, was pushed by the two cooks, Washburn (Joe
Strummer) and Faucet (Dick Rude). However, the chuck wagon barely
moved an inch. Dick, dressed in a ‘fat suit’, strained in the traces; Joe,
clad in rags, face hidden by long, curly locks, ran at the wagon and
tried to budge it. The gap between chuck wagon and army widened.
The wagon slid sideways, into a ditch.
After we cut, Joe and Dick descended on me. Their cart, it
seemed, was realistically laden with provisions, ironware, and heavy
goods. It was near impossible to push uphill. Joe thought I was
playing some kind of joke on him, and threatened to quit. Aghast, I
asked Ron, the prop master, if he could possibly remove some of the
fantastically authentic but very heavy items from the cook wagon.
He nodded; his assistants were already in the process of stripping it.
This was the only time in three films that I saw Joe get pissed off or
offer to resign.
Walker was supposed to be a political film, and pretty much
everyone involved offered to resign from it at some point, or threatened
to go on strike. The previous weekend I’d been to the Realejo set with
Lorenzo because the Nicaraguan construction crew had downed
tools.3 This was another of those occasions where a director learns to
appreciate a great producer. We needed that location ready, with the
paint dry, by a certain hour on 14 March. The only person who could
guarantee that this would happen was Lorenzo, thanks to his attention
to detail, his negotiating skills, and his staying on the case. Without
Larry’s precision, persistence, and extreme charm, there would never
have been a film.
It started to get dark. The village was on a particularly scenic
hilltop, with a magnificent view of the Pacific to the west. As the
buses appeared to ferry the actors back to their hotels and homes, Joe
proposed that rather than ride the bus back, we all camp out on set as
we had done on Straight to Hell. Several actors, veterans of that film,
agreed. One of the Nicaraguan crew tried to dissuade us: he indicated
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‘Peligro?’ ‘No, no,’ the guy said, ‘Frio.’
Joe smiled, and indicated the bedroll that he and all the actors
carried. Walker’s Immortals had their sleeping gear with them,
courtesy of the wardrobe department: they wouldn’t be cold. I grabbed
a bedroll from the costume truck before the trucks drove away.
polished off the food and drink, and stood or crouched in huddles on
the mountaintop, shivering, singing, and staring at the eastern sky,
hoping for dawn.
His experience with the overloaded chuck wagon, followed
by our Night on a Bare Mountain, put paid to Joe’s interest in the
Method, I think. Never again did he or any of us sleep out on the
Walker locations. Strummer came to the set, waited, acted, went back
to the room he’d rented, and thought about music.
Like the march, even this event had a unifying purpose, as did the
absence of creature comfort. We’d brought camera trucks from Mexico,
but none of the usual array of private trailers or ‘honey wagons’ for
the actors. All the cast were expected to get dressed in the back of the
wardrobe truck, and hang out on the street. When an American actor
objected, Pam Tait pointed out that all the Mexicans, including Blanca,
got changed in the truck without complaining. Thereafter, there were
no objections.
The following morning we filmed Walker’s speech to his men and the
ensuing riot. This is the only scene in Walker in which Ed Harris wore
a wig. We’d had it specially made, and it did make him look slightly
more like the historical Walker, but it was a bear to deal with: it kept
flying up, or coming off, and in the rushes one hardly noticed it. Ed
was cool about giving it up: he had a lot of scenes, and less time spent
in hair and makeup meant more time on set.
Working with Dave and Steve, I was able to set up two scenes
simultaneously: Sy clearing the cantina of ‘Immortals’, Jack Slater
encountering the sheep pens. I was much enthused by being able to
work like this; Dave was less excited. He said it wouldn’t work once
we got into interiors, which was no doubt right.
The day ended with the execution of three Immortals who had
been singled out for exemplary punishment. One of these men was an
actor, Will Utay, who played Admiral Fry. (Since Walker has burned
his ship he doesn’t need an admiral.) The other executees were extras
who had been complaining about something: either their wages or
the food. In the political climate that surrounded Nicaragua and the
making of our film, Lorenzo and I tended to be a little paranoid, and
anyone who made problems for the production (such as asking for
better food) was regarded as a potential fifth columnist, or spy. Given
Walker’s habit of executing his own men, it was easy to earmark
complainers/potential spooks for the next firing squad. This doesn’t
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spies. The majority were dedicated, young American FSLN supporters
– Sandilistas, like Lorenzo and me. We killed them, too.4
Dave and I set up the execution shots with a particular editorial
effect in mind: we started close on the executees and the firing squad,
moved to a wider shot, then cut to a wide landscape, just before the
shots were fired: the execution became a small thing, an element on
the horizon, with Walker’s troops in the foreground. Yet the troops all
jumped when the shots were fired.
spoke to Ed. The camera could see he was a bit hung-over, I explained,
and makeup couldn’t hide it up so close, so the only solution . . . ‘So
I can’t drink the night before we shoot?’ asked Ed. ‘That’s fine. We’re
not shooting on Saturdays, right?’ Most Saturdays were ‘turnaround’
days, where we got back on a day schedule after shooting on Friday
night. ‘And we’re not shooting on Sundays?’ That was definitely right.
‘Well, then, it’s not a problem. I can get loaded on Saturday. And on
my days off.’ We laughed at that, because Ed didn’t have any days
off: Walker was in almost every scene. Ed was true to his word, and a
pristine Walker resulted.
(Only when editing did I realise that the film Walker had to
be about Walker, and only Walker. Many actors who’d come to
Nicaragua, and acted fiercely for many weeks, almost vanished from
the film – just as they have from this recounting of it. Apologies to all
those actors for the double omission, but it was all about Walker.)
From my point of view, things were going well, and the footage
(apart from our attempts at aerial photography) was excellent. But
Dave Bridges wasn’t entirely happy: there were some aspects of Steve
Fierberg’s work that he didn’t like, and he had doubts whether his and
Steve’s shots would intercut properly. I felt they would; I wanted to
continue with Steve. However, there was another cameraman, whom
Dave preferred, and he was available.
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both liked Fierberg’s work, but Bridges was the DP. If someone isn’t
working out, the department head should always have the right to
replace them, right? Otherwise they’re not really in charge of their
department and can’t be responsible for it. I broke it to Steve that
he was getting lashed. He grinned and shook his head – he’d seen it
coming: ‘I realise I shouldn’t have suggested your very first shot to
you guys.’ I protested that we’d been undecided, that his suggestion
had been good. ‘It was. But I shouldn’t have done it. It screwed up my
relationship with Dave.’
It was decent of Fierberg to let me off the hook.
‘But why would my character flee?’ Right in the middle of this, the
representative of the bond company stepped forward. A single word
he spoke: ‘Enhancement’.
None of us had any idea what he meant. In later years, I discov-
ered that bureaucrats, who very often don’t understand what they’re
doing, make up new terms not used in the business in question,
which only they can understand. This gives them a sense of power in
an environment otherwise mysterious to them. It qualifies and ena-
bles them to destroy industries, such as British Railways, or British
film.
‘Enhancement’ was one of those words. It meant something to
him, and to his bosses back in LA, perhaps. By uttering it, he was
finding serious fault with the production. The set, he told Lorenzo,
was too big. There were too many extras. We were shooting with too
many cameras – three cameras. Too many cameras to shoot a battle
scene? This wasn’t a remotely real issue. Even for students at UCLA,
film stock costs were never significant; you shot as much film as you
needed to. In the overall budget, especially of a film costing $5.67
million, film stock was a tiny part.
The guy had been told to find some contractual breach, and this
was what he came up with. Now they could threaten to cancel the
bond again. Whatever the reason, it made production more difficult
and our circumstances less certain.
To put the situation in perspective, compare this small US
‘intervention’ with the ones the Nicaraguans suffered on a daily basis.
This guy was trying to stop the production of a film; in Matagalpa,
and on the Costa Rican border, Nicaraguans were being killed daily
by US-funded terrorists. The entire country lived in expectation of
an American invasion. The draft ate families; a tough life got more
difficult still.
That same day INCINE wrangled us a small plane, and lashed it
to the ground adjacent to the farmhouse, so that its propellers could
create a dust storm. As soon as they heard there was a problem, Maritza
Castillo and another FSLN compañera asked us what the situation was.
Lorenzo told them that if the bond was cancelled, Universal might
stop funding the film. The women jumped on various possibilities. If
Universal pulled out, to whom would the rights belong? Where could
we find more cash to complete the picture? If Walker was too political
for the US, maybe Eastern Europe . . . ?
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asking, ‘Hey, Al, any news about when we’re going to be getting
paid?’ or saying, ‘I was talking to the missus last night, and she said
the cheque still hasn’t arrived . . .’ Strictly speaking, actors shouldn’t
bother the director with things financial. We’re supposed to be above
all that. But these guys weren’t out of order; they were asking, three
weeks into the shoot, where their paycheques were.
As far as I knew, everything was fine. The contract with Universal
was signed, and cashflow had begun: otherwise the Mexican crew
and their trucks wouldn’t be here, and there wouldn’t be any money
to buy gas, food, or pay the local costume crew and art department.
Neither Lorenzo nor I, busy with the set, could say what the hold-up
was. At this point, a second wave of thespians landed, including the
actors playing Walker’s brothers: Gerrit Graham and Billy O’Leary.
When Gerrit heard from the other actors that no one had got
paid, he gravely reported his own experience of a film called Phantom
of the Paradise. In this film, also produced by Ed Pressman, Gerrit said
Pressman had failed to pay the actors. It was one of those familiar
stories involving the words ‘picture made millions’ and ‘never saw a
penny’.
Gerrit’s tale had the effect of making many actors anxious. What
if they weren’t ever paid? What if the film shut down, and they were
abandoned in Nicaragua? Ed Harris wasn’t worried, but he was the
official spokesman of the actors, and some of his colleagues were talking
about going on strike. Ed told me and Lorenzo that if the actors went
on strike he’d have to join them. I offered to go on strike too. Lorenzo
was doubtful whether our contracts permitted this; he also said it
didn’t matter. Now that Ed had conveyed the situation so clearly and
unequivocally, Larry felt sure he could communicate it to Pressman,
and that the delay in payments would end. And indeed it did.
Lorenzo was very valiant, driving 50 miles back to the
Intercontinental Hotel in Managua, calling LA via the long-distance
phone, and making sure the actors all got paid before they went on
strike. At the end of each day’s shoot, I had the luxury of going back
to the old house I’d rented in Granada, and sitting in the courtyard –
watching it rain, or the moon creep across the sky. Or I might watch a
video with my neighbour, Strummer – Ran, for its battle scenes, or Pat
Garrett & Billy the Kid, for its script and music – and strategise creative
things. Lorenzo, meanwhile, would still be stuck under the fluorescent
lights at the Inter, on the telephone to LA.
the bond again. It seemed a crude effort to shut down the film.
My response was to go on the offensive: it seemed to me that, by
threatening to cancel the bond without good cause, Film Finances
were in breach of contract. This was the line Pressman’s lawyers took
with them, and, since it was true, it eventually brought them around.
With the example of the Nicaraguans, what could we do but try to be
resolute and defiant? The Sandinistas’ motto that year was ‘Aqui No Se
Rinde Nadie’ – Here, nobody gives up. It was on billboards everywhere:
frayed, weather-beaten billboards with panels missing, one of which
showed Hasenfus arrested by a young Sandinista soldier. Despite a
constant, murderous war of attrition, Nicaragua hadn’t given up – so
how could we?
Despite a lot more threatening and posturing, Film Finances
never actually cancelled the bond. Lorenzo and I went on working, the
crew and cast continued to show up. Only a handful of people even
knew that this was happening. If any experience demonstrates how
absolutely useless and unnecessary a completion bond was, this was
surely it. Whereas CBC had been a benign and distant presence on Sid
& Nancy, and physically absent on Straight to Hell, Film Finances were
an impediment to Walker – yet despite the difficulties they caused
us, we continued shooting, on schedule and on budget, while they
collected their percentage.
Little by little, anxiety receded. Cashflow continued, and
gradually we realised we had won.
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with many angles, high and low, in all directions. My plan was to have
Walker’s men turn into this wide side-street, get half-way down it,
then be boxed in, both front and rear, by wheeled vehicles, as riflemen
appeared behind the wagons, and on the roofs.
When we began shooting the Battle of Rivas, many, many people
turned up to watch. We’d anticipated this, and had managed to get the
teenage Sandinista police to do crowd control on our first day there.
But what if people kept coming in these numbers? What if we ended
up with hundreds of unexpected extras, or spectators?
Fortunately, film-making is quite slow-moving (especially if, like
the bond guy, you know nothing about it). Adults quickly got bored
and walked away. The kids, however, stayed. The crew continued
to have a certain fascination for children, who love to stare at adults
working with machines. Jaime O’Brien, Lorenzo’s brother, had shown
up and joined the ADs’ department. He was a natural assistant director,
rapid and empathetic, but his work was frustrated by a fad that was
sweeping Latin America: the traca-traca toy. This was a sort of rattle,
which, if you kept swinging it, made a sound like a rattlesnake trapped
in a rusty can. One traca-traca gave off a nerve-jangling sound, and
there were hundreds of them in Granada. Every child had at least one.
Waiting for them to stop was like waiting for crickets to fall silent. The
traca-tracas would subside, mysteriously; we would begin shooting;
then one traca-traca would start up, in the middle of the watching kids,
A more serious issue for the Granadans was the dust. Though
colonial and often beautifully preserved, Granada was a modern city
with asphalt roads, pavements and overhead electric cables. Like all
oppressive film productions, our mission was to get rid of them. The
electric wires were re-routed, the phone lines the same. But hiding
tarmac and concrete meant bringing tons of dirt into the centre of the
city, and dumping it in the streets.
I paid little attention to this process, which seemed so natural and
sensible. I was more concerned with Cecilia’s project: hiding various
modernities, including the Sandinista soldier on a giant plinth in the
main plaza. To do this, she had decided to build a theatre in the dusty
main plaza, where Walker might mount the works of Shakespeare, in
English, for the improvement of the populace. Granada was already
a beautiful city, and, as far as I could see, we were improving things.
I wasn’t thinking about the actual results of dumping a load of earth
and sand in the middle of a community, of the dust that would rise and
swirl through town, of the discomfort, inconvenience, and respiratory
consequences. It all looked great to me.
But I was wrong. Overestimating the importance of our project, I
underestimated people’s willingness to put up with it. In 2004, almost
20 years later, I saw Ernesto Cardenal in Caracas. Cardenal had been
Nicaraguan minister of culture, and a supporter of the film. The first
thing he said to me was, ‘That film of yours – do you remember the
dust, the problems you created in Granada?’ I had been playing the
artist, but at what a cost to the locals? Wasn’t I acting arrogantly, like
one of those Hollywood movie crews with their paid cops on Venice
Beach? If Walker contained anachronisms, why couldn’t one of the
anachronisms have been paved streets with parking signs? I was
stupid, lacking in solidarity, not to think of this.
Late in the course of his disastrous battle, the actual William Walker
took shelter in a house on the outskirts of Rivas. There was a lot of
action and dialogue to cover in this interior scene, and Dave Bridges
suggested that we should do it all in one take. It was an exciting idea –
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come out of a very staccato sequence – the street battle – so it would
be in complete contrast to what had gone before. The shot took less
than a day to get: we rehearsed it a couple of times with the camera
at the end of one day, had it in the can by lunch time on the next. It’s
more complicated than any of the hand-held moves of Sid & Nancy,
and includes a dozen or more elements – the stabbing of Major Angus
in the eye; a bullet hitting the wall adjacent to the landscape painter;
Doubleday, Henningson and Hornsby arguing over military tactics;
Walker playing ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’ on the piano.
I could only follow this action, given that the camera did a
360-degree move through the building, by being behind it or in front
of it. If I stayed behind Dave and his focus-puller I would see nothing.
Being as moustachioed and hairy as any of the Immortals, I got an
extra’s costume and watched the action from the piano room. That’s
me, crouching on the floor next to Eddie Tudor-Pole, clutching a
musket.
Most of Walker was filmed in or around the city of Granada. The shoot
veered from intimate moments between Walker and his lovers, Ellen
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film-making was easier: no one knew things were impossible.
By the sixth week of production, we were two days behind, and
the bond company was perturbed again. It occurred to me that while
first unit was waiting for the principals to be ready with costume and
makeup, Dave and I should shoot some short scenes involving the
subsidiary characters, a third wave of American and British actors
having recently arrived. But it was a mistake. Invariably, by the time
Dave and I had lined up the first shot, Ed and Blanca would arrive on
set, ready to shoot the important sequence. And the new, improvised
scene would be scrapped.
In the Julius Caesar scene, Rudy and Cecilia captured the pretentiousness
of the enterprise, and Walker’s coming fall. As Walker watches the
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Gerrit, surprised but stoic, bit the dust.
Immediately after the rehearsal, Ed asked me, ‘Can we? Or
have we shot something with him later on?’ We checked with Mario
Cisneros, the ‘Script Boy’. Mario told us we hadn’t yet shot any of
Norvell’s later sequences; he didn’t have many, in any case. Ed, the
actor, freely voiced his opinion that Walker, the character, would have
159 walker
day off, to pay our respects, was totally affordable.
Instead Dave and I filmed some undistinguished stuff: the
Immortals, wounded and battered after Rivas, shooting at a sloop
anchored off shore. Most of it wasn’t used. It isn’t easy, doing good
work with a guilty conscience, on a balmy shore.
Lorenzo and Carlos, from INCINE, attended the funeral.
During our location scouts, Lorenzo and I had found a secluded beach
north of San Juan, where some striking rocks emerged from the surf.
There was no road to it, so we’d agreed to ferry the actors by boat, as
we’d scouted the location. The day before the shoot, Carlos showed me
and Lorenzo a surprise, courtesy of the local military: a five-kilometre
road, dug through the rain forest, from the Chocolate to the beach. The
army had done a thorough job, cutting a wide swath through ancient
trees, devastating the pristine forest. Lorenzo and I felt like fucking
ghosts: we hadn’t asked for this, it wasn’t necessary for an afternoon’s
shoot involving 30 actors, who had agreed to travel by boat anyway.
Why such insane desecration of the forest? There had to be a
reason. It couldn’t really be ‘for the movie’, could it? A Sandinista
friend wondered if there was a military need for it: we were close to
the Costa Rican border, and sometimes the Contras attacked by sea.
Perhaps it was an access road for the army, passed off as a favour
to filmmakers, paid for by us as well. Almost 20 years later, some
Nicaraguans in London told me the road had been built on the orders
of the local comandante, so that his relatives could develop the beach.
Now there are cabañas and a restaurant there, owned by the former
comandante and his partners.
Is this what the revolution was fought for? Is this what Walker
was about? It seemed as if, on the Chocolate, all my attempts at proper
actions were being revealed as destructive, bogus. A forest had been
destroyed; a boy killed. Was there anything worse than a pompous
English filmmaker, trying to be useful to the Revolution?
In the 1850s, Managua barely existed, and its religious buildings, such
as they were, were modest affairs. By the late 1980s, there was a huge
cathedral in Managua – but it was a roofless, windowless, concrete
shell. In Nicaragua, where the parishioners were seriously poor, the
largest religious building had been written off by the church, following
the earthquake. Stark and symbolic, it was a magnet for filmmakers
looking for a location.5
You all might think that there will come a day when America
will leave Nicaragua alone. Well, I am here to tell you that day
will never happen. Because it is our duty to be here. It is our duty
to control you people. So no matter what you do – no matter how
hard you fight – we’ll be back – time after time – forever.
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president of Nicaragua, refused to leave. The marines shut the doors.
We went over the plan one last time: pilot, ADs, cameramen.
With the chopper on the ground, we’d film the sequence up until the
actors got aboard and the doors were closed. At that point I’d call
cut. We’d shoot the same scene again, a couple of times maybe. The
actors would get out, the set would be cleared of extras, and then the
helicopter would take off.
The steps of the cathedral were covered with Nicas, playing
corpses. The plan was to get them off the steps, and the actors out of
the helicopter, before it was airborne. We’d film the takeoff with the
National Palace as a backdrop, and the empty steps out of shot. The
FSLN guys said fine: the helicopter pilot didn’t want to take off with
all the actors on board anyway. So we completely understood each
other, just as we had completely understood the stunt coordinator, in
the LA River, on Repo Man.
The craft was parked on the ground, doors open. It started its
rotors. Three cameras rolled, and I called action. The actors performed
a thrilling version of the scene. Walker was left behind, staring at the
helicopter, as the doors closed.
I called cut. Nobody heard me. It didn’t matter: this was the
planned cutting point, as we’d all agreed. The noise was deafening.
The doors remained closed; the rotors turned, faster. The helicopter
rose.
Why did the helicopter take off? There had been a breakdown in
communication. Somehow, in spite of all our plans and agreements,
the pilot didn’t know he was supposed to stay on the ground. Or he
forgot. Actors aboard, doors closed, up he went.
Now, as the helicopter rose, a wind came off the Lake and hit
it, blowing it off its vertical course, and towards the cathedral. I was
standing on the cathedral steps, clad in an extra’s costume, a few feet
behind Ed. The chopper drifted towards us. Ed didn’t break character
for a moment. He knew the cameras were still rolling, and he
remained stock still: Walker on the steps, observing the huge machine.
The chopper struggled to rise: the racket of its engines grew louder.
It drifted closer to the stone columns of the cathedral. Soon the rotors
would hit one of the columns, shatter, the helicopter would spin out of
control, and everyone aboard it, and on the ground beneath it, would
be killed.
The actors and the extras on the ground figured this out at the
same time. They gave up acting, and ran for it. Ed Harris remained.
gazed fearlessly up. We were the only people left on the steps. He
looked back, saw me, and winked. Then he stepped behind one of the
pillars.
I didn’t move. What was the point? The helicopter was about
to hit the cathedral. This way, I would be killed quickly. Let poor
Lorenzo, my best friend, deal with it. Rather him than me. I closed my
eyes.
Gradually the vast, roaring sound lessened. I opened my eyes
and saw the chopper, higher now, having cleared the cathedral façade,
circling the square and coming back in to land.
After this near-disaster, a visit from the bond company was no big
deal. I visited the bondsman in his room at the Inter. He didn’t
mention ‘enhancement’. Instead he said he was concerned that we
would be late delivering the picture. I said I didn’t think he needed
to worry: delivery of the film was several months away, and we were
due to wrap the shoot in just a few days’ time. We hadn’t over-spent:
there was still money for effects, music, and titles.
I swore to him, on the hotel Bible and the black flag of Anarchy,
that Lorenzo and I would deliver the film on time. The bondsman still
looked preoccupied: maybe he knew that true Anarchists really swear
on the black book of Anarchy, and that the black flag thing was just a
feint.
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weeks, he lost 20 pounds and returned to the set quite skeletal and
menacing. He had a proposition for me. Brooding in his fever bed,
he’d decided that Junior Walker wasn’t an innocent, but a key player
in the mayhem: Billy wanted to play Junior as a bad guy – a clean-cut
sadist, worse than his brother. It was a great choice.
Having filmed Junior’s death and various other violent scenes,
we wrapped at 5 or 6 a.m. This should be Toña or Victoria time, but
just as first unit ended, second unit was stirring. And second unit
looked suspiciously like first. Dave and I checked on Sando, setting
up a scene on a Granada side-street where several extra Immortals
poured through a hole in the wall, into a hail of bullets. All seemed to
be going well, so I walked back across town to my house and went to
bed.
I slept till 1 p.m., then woke and rode in my pickup to Managua,
where I boarded the Actors’ Bus (lately renamed the Actors’, Extras’
& Crew Members’ Bus) northbound to León. On the bank of Lake
Managua, in the shadow of volcano Momotombo, we were to shoot
pickups for the scene where Walker decides to betray Vanderbilt,
seize his boss’ ships, and go it alone. It was a gorgeous location on the
lakeside, in sight of the geothermal power station that the Americans
had built in Somoza’s time, and which the Sandinistas now ran, with
the aid of some Italians.7
We’d filmed the bulk of this scene two weeks previously, but still
needed a couple of extra shots to make it work. The actors on the bus
were all working their second shift. The bus took us out to the location:
a dilapidated, two-storey wooden hacienda inhabited by several
families. When we got there, we couldn’t shoot. On the previous
occasion, Cecilia’s art department had covered the corrugated metal
roof with red ceramic roof tiles. The tiles were still there, on location,
but they were no longer on the roof: instead, they were piled up neatly,
in hundreds of rows, under the eaves of the building.
Our goal was a wide shot featuring this splendid, if crumbling,
edifice. It wasn’t something we could do as a special effect, special effects
shots being expensive in those days. We couldn’t shoot this building as
it was. The solution was a group effort, converting our Screen Actors
Guild cast into a roofing crew. For an hour, Miguel, Ed, I, and the rest
of the actors and staff climbed ladders and spread red tiles across the
roof. Here these great actors were, crawling across a hot metal roof in
Nicaragua, passing me armloads of red tiles, in clear violation of their
contract and job description, just so that we could get the shot.
who lived in the house came up to me and said, ‘Vos eres un gran amigo
de Nicaragua.’ I don’t know if he said this because we’d just put new
tiles on his roof, or because he approved of our attempts to tell this
particular story, but he made me happy. I shook his hand, that strong,
fluid, soul-handshake that the Nicas made, and hurried off so that he
wouldn’t see tears in my eyes.
We didn’t know it, but as Walker wrapped, INCINE itself was shutting
down. El Espectro de la Guerra – a musical about the war – had taken a
huge effort. But some footage had been accidentally destroyed at the
Havana lab. There was no insurance, or money for reshoots. As the
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up on film production. Shortly thereafter, the ministry of culture was
also closed.
POSTPRODUCTION
Among the actors, there was one who had no obvious plans to leave.
Strummer, having faded into the murky texture of Walker’s cast, had
hatched some very specific plans. He was there partially because he
was enjoying the film thing, partially because of the political situation,
but also because in the weeks we’d spent there, Joe had got into
Nicaragua itself – it was so magnificent, so musical, so colourful, so
olfactory. He was in no hurry to go home.
In pre-production, Joe, Lorenzo, and I had discussed his writing
some music. At the time, we’d planned to include Nicaraguan
composers and musicians, including Carlos Mejía Godoy, in the
soundtrack. Now the shoot was over, the plan was for the entire
company to return home. But where was home? I had no base
anywhere; Lorenzo and Cecilia lived in LA; Joe had a wife and two
daughters in England, yet . . .
Joe felt strongly, he said, that I should edit there. He remarked
how beautiful Nicaragua was, how great the people were, what
a rich creative world surrounded us. He said that, if we went back
to London, we’d be sitting around, with cups of milky tea, kicking
ourselves for having left this place. It wasn’t hard to convince me: I
loved Nicaragua, and had no connection to London. By encouraging
me to edit in Granada, Joe was also kicking the editors off the film. He
was quite explicit about this. He knew David and Justin had families
in London and wanted to go home. Joe had felt disappointment at the
way Straight to Hell turned out, and he blamed David Martin for the
initial failure of the film.
I think he was wrong about this. Straight to Hell’s flaws are
inherent in the project. David did the best he could with four weeks’
worth of Hell, but he was never going to turn the material into a film
as polished, or as well structured, or as profoundly acted, as Sid &
Nancy. Justin gave the film an excellent sound design. Both did good
work. But Strummer wanted regime change in the cutting room.
It was easy to orchestrate the rift. Lorenzo and I were more
than happy to stay. After we wrapped, David and Justin returned to
London; Lorenzo, Joe, and I remained in Granada.
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orchestral breadth, nor judge the songs he wrote and sang. It was
a work of great self-confidence. You could tell this by the way he
mixed his vocals loud – not like the buried vocals of the albums that
preceded and followed it.
It took eight weeks for us to finish the rough cut. Near the end of the
process, Tomás Borge visited the cutting room. Lorenzo and I took
bets as to how many pickups and four-wheel drives would be in
Borge’s convoy, but the comandante surprised us. His very agreeable
personal guard showed up to tell us Tomás was on his way. Borge
arrived a few minutes later in a second car – no jeeps, no outriders
– with a Cuban advisor. Having a Cuban advisor was something of
a status symbol for the comandantes: I’d seen Russians in Nicaragua,
but they didn’t fraternise much with the Nicas – they wore baseball
caps and raced around in jeeps and acted, well, like Americans. The
Cubans, on the other hand, were thick with the Nicas; very political,
and could be a terrible wind-up.
Carlos and I showed Tomás and his Cuban asesor the burning of
Granada scenes. We were quite proud of these – though they didn’t yet
feature Joe’s final version of ‘The Brooding Side of Madness’. Tomás
watched the sequence, nodded, and said, ‘Very good’ or something
like that. We looked at his Cuban friend. ‘Yes,’ said the Cuban, ‘you
only show a small part of Granada burning, of course. Is there a reason
for that?’
I didn’t like this guy. We were supposed to be filmmakers, artists,
internationalists and intellectuals, united in defence of the Nicaraguan
Revolution – and here he was, dissing our film! Let the Cubans come
here and make a film as funny and as good as Walker, and pay for it
with American dollars!
I made up some bogus explanation, and got on the phone to
Rocco Gioffre to ask if he could squeeze another effects shot into the
budget: a high angle, at night, in which it was obvious (even to the
most narrow-minded Cuban intellectual) that the city of Granada was
entirely ablaze!
Over lunch, Borge told us all a joke. ‘Cox, what is more important,
do you think – sexual technique, or the size of the male member?’
‘Well, technique, surely, Comandante.’
‘O’Brien, what do you think is more important? Size, or
technique?’
size of the organ. Borge turned to his Cuban advisor, nodded, and
said, ‘See? Two more guys with small dicks!’
We got the plate for Rocco’s shot from my balcony, using Frank
Pineda’s camera. I enjoyed my daily walks, through two- or three-
hundred-year-old streets, to the cutting room on the edge of town. It
was hot and humid, the streets smelled of mangos and bananas and
diesel fuel, people shouted, your landlady whistled at you, there were
kids, carts, and animals everywhere.
I went swimming every day in Lake Nicaragua, with its famous
freshwater sharks; I didn’t really believe the sharks were there. I’d
head in a straight line out from shore, leaving the palm trees and the
little taxi rank behind, making way towards the distant volcano. I’d
swim for 20 minutes or so in that direction, then turn back. One day, I
saw a long, straight fin, sticking out of the water, between me and that
volcano. Or maybe it was a tall stick. Headed straight for me. Maybe. I
didn’t wait for a closer look at Carcharhinus nicaraguensis, but crawled
for shore.
That was my last dip in the lake. Carlos and I had a rough cut
now and Strummer’s score was expanding daily, which provoked
more picture changes, and more temp music. We needed to get back
to San Francisco so Joe could start recording, and we could lock the
music and the picture down. Richard Beggs was waiting to begin
work on the sound design.
A few days before we closed the Granada office, I was sitting
in the cutting room. It was about 10 p.m. and I was working on the
helicopter scene, specifically, the moment where the Company Man
points at Henningson, and the marines open fire on him, blowing off
his arm. We’d had a running joke regarding Henningson’s injured
arm, and René had asked if his arm could be shot off at the end of
the film. Don Marcelino was happy to oblige him with much spurting
blood, and a detachable arm.
Just as I spliced two shots – the soldiers firing, and Henningson’s
reaction – there was a god-awful crash outside. Several crashes very
close together, in fact – one of those road-accident-just-round-the-
corner sounds. I ran outside and saw a terrible scene. A car, driving
fast, had ploughed into the back of a truck trailer, parked across the
road from our office. The car was packed with people, and – as its roof
was torn off by the impact – the passengers had spilled out and were
lying, dead or injured, in the road.
169 walker
in what had happened, and immediately yelled to the taxi drivers
who hung out in front of Walker headquarters: ‘You, you! Pick those
people up and take them to the hospital. You others,’ (this to me and
the other taxi drivers) ‘get the rest of them out of the road.’
We raced to follow Lorenzo’s orders. Sometimes a hierarchical
command structure works. We carried an injured woman out of the
road. The taxis roared off to the hospital with the wounded. I went
back to get another man, but he was dead. His arm had been cut off
and it was lying next to him. I stared, mystified, at the severed arm; a
taxista picked it up, and, not knowing what to do with it, laid it on the
dead man’s body.
Lorenzo seemed to have everything under control. We waited
for the ambulance and the Sandinista cops to arrive. The least injured
comforted the more severely hurt. The taxi guys found blankets for
the dead. I went back inside.
I found myself in the editing room, where the shot of Henningson’s
severed arm still glowed in the flatbed window. I thought about the
man who’d just been killed outside: the white meat of his arm, the
lack of gushing blood. I thought of the lattice of coincidence – How
could such things be? How could they be so horrible? What could
they mean?
I turned off the machines.
RELEASE
The regime had changed, but my Universal experience was pretty
much the same as it had been with Repo Man. There was endless
dickering about the poster. The new boss, Tom Pollock, had okayed
Paul Mavrides as poster artist, but it was a struggle to get anyone
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without a face. This freaked everyone out. The poster had to have a
face! Lorenzo and I attended a meeting with 16 people from marketing,
all of whom clearly had better things to do. Walker, like Repo Man, was
doomed.
173 walker
wanted to show it anywhere. Because they’d already asked.
One of the reasons I had gone to see UIP was because my British
agent, Nicky Hart, was the daughter of an exhibitor and distributor,
Romaine. Romaine owned a couple of screens and wanted to screen
the controversial Walker as soon as possible. So did Andi Engel of
Artificial Eye, who had made so much money from Repo Man. I told
the UIP man this – it didn’t make much difference.
In England Walker did eventually get a release in London,
via Jeremy Thomas’ Recorded Picture Company. Hungerford had
nothing to do with it: the British censor passed the film with three
seconds of cuts; shots of two horses falling. But in the rest of the world
– including natural markets like Italy and Latin America – Walker was
never shown.
Lorenzo is a prolific writer, but it was hard to get him to finish the
script. Only when we threatened to lock him in a motel room with a
typewriter did he give in and write the last 20 pages. The script was
called ‘Federal de Caminos’. I loved his screenplay, and its protagonist,
then called Lucho Rojas. The first draft was structurally very similar to
the final film, though quite different in dialogue and in the ending.
We gave Cecilia the script: it was high time she designed a
feature. She felt that the design of Walker had been disorderly: with so
many art directors taking responsibility for different locations, there
was a certain inconsistency. She wanted to apply a certain colour
palette to everything: a scheme from the Mexican painter, Rufino
Tamayo.
Lorenzo took the script to Poncho and Garrido, proposing
a partnership; they declined. We made plans, as with Repo Man, to
sell shares – this time worth $50,000 each, so as to come up with a
budget of $750,000. Lee Katz told us he’d bond the picture up to the
end of production for this amount: he didn’t think it was enough
for postproduction as well. Interestingly, the average budget of one
of these Mexican cop movies was around $250,000; but those were
films shot in the Distrito Federal in three or four weeks. We were
market.
Then Mr Negishi told us he’d found the money. A huge Japanese
trading company, Marubeni, had agreed to fund features produced
by him and his partner, Sammy Masada. ‘Highway Patrolman’ was
approved as the trial project, with a budget of $1.5 million. A two-
page contract followed, between Lorenzo and Mr Negishi. And
$750,000 appeared, by wire transfer, in Lorenzo’s account. We
discussed running off with the money, but decided 1) that it wasn’t
really enough to finance our permanent disappearance; and 2) that we
really wanted to make the film.
PRODUCTION
We filmed in June and July 1991 in Parras, Mapimí, Gómez Palacio,
Durango, Sombrerete, and Mexico City. Including travel between the
various locations, the shoot took six and a half weeks. Mapimí is a
real town, with (at the time) a particularly bright and varied colour
scheme, of which Cecilia approved. But its environs were shot over a
wide area of Northern Mexico – so as to include natural wonders like
the sand dunes of Parras and the Desierto de los Organos. In Mexico
City we shot the scenes of the police academy (a Formula One motor
racing course) and most of our interiors, including the psychiatrist’s
study, the post-funeral bar, and the Marcos’ home.
The day before filming began, Lorenzo pointed at the rooftops of
Parras, and asked me if they looked familiar. For some reason, they
did. ‘I think this is where they filmed The Wild Bunch,’ Lorenzo said.
And so it was.
We were walking up the main street, coming back from a lucha
libre match in the local sports stadium. All of a sudden the place
clicked, and I could see a dozen shots from the opening shootout,
superimposed over this quiet town. When Jorge Russek came to the
set (he drove up from Mexico City with his wife Julie, towing his own
trailer), he confirmed that most of The Wild Bunch had been shot in
and around Parras. The dunes where Pedro buries his stash were the
dunes through which the Bunch had ridden. The abandoned sugar
factory outside town was where the final massacre was filmed.
El Patrullero, for some reason, went the smooth way that one
plans and hopes for things to go. No one was killed, we never ran late,
the bond company sent us blessings, and everyone worked towards
the goal of making the same film.
to Nicaragua. So father and son were putting their skills to the same
purpose.)
Since El Patrullero was shot out of sequence, Roberto always
had to keep in mind: was this scene before, or after, his character got
shot in the leg? And which leg would he get shot in? He told me he
got it wrong only once: crossing the sand dunes at Parras, he hadn’t
worked out his limping schedule and forgot to do it. Yet when I
watched the sequence in the rushes, Beto seemed to be limping
across the dunes.
We shot one scene, at the police station location, twice. It’s where
Teniente Perez (Guillermo Ríos) assigns Pedro his police car, and
Pedro pulls out one of those backrests, made of strung-together
wooden balls, which taxi drivers used to use. We shot the exterior
scene one afternoon, then next morning went into the office to film the
scene between Roberto and Ernesto that preceded it.
The scene went well, though Ernesto had difficulty with one
line: ‘esperamos un desempeño ejemplar de su parte’ (we expect your
development to be exemplary). Specifically, it was two words,
We shot on ‘short ends’ – reels of 35mm film that had been used by
another production (in this case, Total Recall). Usually the previous
user has shot on only a small portion of the roll, the remainder of
which – unexposed to light – can safely be re-sold; most independent
filmmakers have shot with short ends at some point in their thrifty
careers. But when you’re shooting plano secuencia, and some of your
scenes are several minutes long, it’s a mistake. You know you can film
two five-minute takes on a 1,000-foot reel. But can you squeeze two
takes onto a ‘re-can’ that’s somewhat less than 1,000 ft? No one can say,
because no one knows exactly how long short ends are.
On a couple of occasions, when we were filming Roberto’s long,
limping run though the desert, the short ends ran out. Similarly,
back in Mexico City a short end rolled out near the end of Griselda’s
breakfast seduction scene. The take was so good that we used it
anyway, cutting out just before the flash frames: you can still see some
dust and scratches.
Some savings are worth making; others aren’t. We shouldn’t have
shot with short ends.
but beside a little stream nearby. The stream was separated from the
road by an enormous quantity of trash, which the art department had
to remove. This wasn’t to please the censor (who had never shown
up), but to provide a more dignified visual environment for Anibal’s
death.
The scene involved some elaborate choreography, and the
drawing of many maps.
This may sound like the excess of Repo Man, where it took 60
crew, 10 Teamsters, and two motorcycle cops to film two men sitting in
a car. But everyone involved in the death of Anibal scene was needed.
Starting with the driver of the pickup truck, the five guys pushing it
(Miguel was sitting on the bonnet), and the two guys in the back of
the truck, holding the ropes securing Garzón to the hood. They then
let go of the ropes as the truck slowed, so that Miguel could step
down (followed by his first assistant, Miguel Urbina, and the sound
recordist and boom operator) and track Beto around the burning car
On 16 July we shot our last sequence: the scene where Pedro returns
home drunk, and is threatened by the knife-wielding Griselda. Though
set in Mapimi, like most of our interiors, it was shot in Mexico City.
It was a bit complex, going from an exterior, at night (when focus is
more critical), into a series of rooms in the Marcos residence: the sitting
room, where Don Marcos is asleep in front of the TV; the bedroom;
the kitchen, where Griselda keeps her knife collection; back to the
bedroom; and into the bathroom. The scene started on a close-up of
a lock, and ended on a close-up of Griselda, after running a gamut of
tracking shots, wide shots, two-shots, and medium shots.
Playing on the TV in the sitting room, behind Farnesio de Bernal,
was a scene from RoboCop 2. This was kindly provided by Jon Davison,
the film’s producer. I asked him for the clip so as to give a momentary
glimpse of the imaginary police world in which Pedro – like Tauro and
Dragon – had so much invested, and in which they’d once, perhaps,
believed.
At the end of that last night shoot, Cecilia and I were doused with blue
paint. This was our bautismo – our baptism – by the rest of the crew.
We were being welcomed as members of the STIC – the Sindicato de
Trabajadores de la Industria Cinematográfica, or similar (Lorenzo had
already worked with the STIC, and been covered with paint some
months before).
POSTPRODUCTION
Carlos Puente came up with a surprising take on the police psychiatrist
scene. I’d felt we’d better use the coffee table shot, rather than the
RELEASE
El Patrullero was unusual in that it was made without any thought as
to distribution – other than in Japan, where it was to be released by Mr
Negishi’s company, Cable Hogue.
It played in the festival at San Sebastian. That it won a prize was
entirely down to Lorenzo, who wasn’t at all shy about hassling the
festival organisers, and the jury, to show respect for a Mexican film.
His politicking worked: the jury declared Roberto Sosa the best actor.
Beto was back in Mexico, so Seymour Cassel was asked to accept his
award. Mysteriously, Seymour did this on behalf of John Cassavetes,
while mispronouncing Beto’s name. In spite of the award, our sales
agent couldn’t sell the film in Spain. I had assumed Spain was a
natural market for Mexican films, but it was not so. In general, all film
buyers seemed risk averse. They tended to buy generic product that
they knew how to move in a certain market: this explained so many
third-rate action flicks, starring Chuck Norris, playing on Mexican
long-distance buses, and in hotel rooms.
Lorenzo and I tried to convince our sales people to have
screenings for potential distributors. But screenings are expensive,
and sometimes the key distributors don’t show. Here the studios’
advantage is again apparent: they are vertically integrated, producing,
distributing, and selling their own product, and operating as a cartel
with the other studios. They have lots of leverage, and lots of money:
buying screening room time is the least of their problems – they own
screening rooms. The playing field is so un-level that you can see
why national film agencies tend to give up, and facilitate American
production rather than encourage their native industries.
It was also the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from
Spain, and of the burning of the Library at Granada. Not that the
BBC knew or cared: they were prepared to make one Borges film, it
seemed, French TV another, and Spanish TV the rest. According to the
BBC producer, Charlie Pattinson, it was possible to pick any one of
Borges’ stories, unless another director was already working on it. His
fax said, ‘This project is a co-production with the Spanish company
Iberoamericana who have optioned the rights to all of Borge’s
[sic] short stories.’ Carlos Saura had aready begun production on a
version of the story Sur. Other than Bertolucci’s Spider’s Stratagem, I
didn’t know of any films based on Borges’ works,1 so the whole thing
seemed, so to speak, an open book.
However, it wasn’t – in fact only a handful of stories had been
optioned by the Spanish producer, Andrés Vicente Gómez. And instead
of a relaxing, relatively well-paid, six-month gig, I was embarking on
an unanticipated, labyrinthine venture that would stretch beyond
reason into a four-year project – involving me in debts of honour,
disastrous business choices, duelling producers, and a mysteriously
out-of-synch answer print, at the Villa Triste-le-Roy . . .
‘I would be delighted if you would be interested in directing
the BBC’s film which will be made in English,’ the fax continued.
‘At present we have no fixed story in mind to dramatise, although
it would make sense for us to tackle one of the “European” stories
that can be shot in the UK. Aside from that there is free range. Our
production schedule is relatively flexible with a delivery date set for
June 1992 . . .’
I discounted the ‘European stories’ and the ‘shot in the UK’ bits
immediately. I was in postproduction on El Patrullero and the location
for the Borges film was already obvious. Clearly, the BBC wanted it
shot in Mexico City, even if they didn’t know this yet.
I read Ficciones, but chose El Aleph. There were other filmable stories,
of course, such as The Garden of the Forking Paths and The Circular Ruins,
but El Aleph held, and still holds, the most intriguing possibilities. I
passed this on to Charlie, who went away, then got back to me by
fax, reporting that, having read El Aleph he was ‘concerned by its lack
of narrative. Are there any other stories that interest you? . . . I’ve
had another look through my collections . . . the following are some
alternate (but by no means exclusive) suggestions.’ There followed a
list of seven cuentos, including Emma Zunz and Death and the Compass.
Already assuming they’d go for it, I suggested that the BBC might also
want to make a 90-minute version and release it as a feature. I was
told Alan Yentob would look at the 55-minute version, then decide.
In August 1991 I took a week off from editing El Patrullero and
began work on the screenplay. It wasn’t a hard assignment: the set-up
and the structure were already there. Borges’ work is great material
for the cinema, partly because his writing is so visual: his places,
melancholy times of day, deadly doppelgängers, dark coincidences
formed out of chaos, are all described in vivid, visual terms.
The original story was only 13 pages in length, which meant a
lot of stuff had to be invented. Due to rights issues, I couldn’t grab
scenes and characters wholesale from Borges’ other stories, though I
certainly made frequent references to certain other tales – in particular
El Aleph. Some things, great on the page, didn’t make it into the script:
for instance, the scene in Death and the Compass where Lönnrot finds
himself in a mirrored room.
That scene seemed a homage to Lady from Shanghai. Before his
sight failed, Borges had been a film reviewer: he wrote one of the best
reviews of Citizen Kane. The mirrored room scene was beautifully
written, but I found it too daunting to attempt to emulate Welles. If I
tried, I’d just end up making a pale, colour imitation, like the boring
hall of mirrors scene in My Name is Nobody. So I left it out.
Borges’ cuento is constructed like the fragments from an
imaginary dictionary, or the gazetteer of a fictitious country – as the
last adventure of a great, and very famous, detective. Like most of his
work, it is so dense that it could be expanded in almost any direction:
told as conventional thriller (the structure of Se7en is similar), or as an
intellectual comedy, or as an Expressionist nightmare in the manner
of Dr Mabuse and Fritz Lang. The names of the characters – Erik
Lönnrot, Franz Treviranus, and ‘Red’ Scharlach – suggested to me a
series of pulp novels of police and criminal interaction, of a nightmare
city dedicated to the commission of crimes, and the detection and
cruel punishment thereof. Names like Zunz and Novalis drifted in
from other Borges stories, or came, like Inspector Blot, from a Melville
film.
My Lönnrot wasn’t entirely Borges’. I had in mind a New Age
detective, a chat-show celebrity, a devotee of Eastern religions, a
combo Gnostic-Taoist-Buddhist. So there’s an additional element of
punishment in my version, in that vanity, as well as intellectual rigour,
drives Lönnrot to his fate.
jealous of the artist, who must therefore, like Christ, meet his fate;
Treviranus and Scharlach represented reality. She also said the script
needed a sense of outrage – something I never gave it.
Somehow Chris Eccleston managed to miss his flight not once, but
twice: two days running he showed up late at the airport, after the
Mexico flight had closed. Our friends at the BBC seemed incapable
of doing anything logistical – which meant that Charley and I had to
keep calling the travel agent in England, at great expense, to rearrange
Chris’ travel plans. When a third flight became necessary, we leaned
unsubtly on our half-dozen BBC producers to give us a hand in getting
our man to the airport. These combined efforts, on two continents,
finally got Eccleston airborne. On arrival, Chris proved an inspired,
intrepid actor, throwing himself into his triple role.
Our initial shoot lasted four weeks – the month of April 1992. Our
principal locations were the Palacio de Correos, the fantastic baroque
central post office, which was undergoing renovations; the Palacio de
Bellas Artes next door; and the former Convent of San Ildefonso, now
part of the National University.
Within the Palacio de Correos, Cecilia constructed an intricate
maze of partitions and offices, complete with autopsy tables and a
say, ‘Chris, keep going. Keep going! They’re gonna use this take!’
Chris stayed in character, climbed out of the stream, and carried on.
And Peter’s prediction was entirely accurate: we replaced his words
of encouragement with some scripted dialogue. The stumble made
the shot more real.
We only lost one location: a Metro station where we were
absolutely, categorically refused permission to shoot. I would have
chanced it, but Charley and Alejandra were convinced the Metro
authorities would shut us down immediately. Instead we filmed on
railway tracks in the north end of the city: the scene where the former
highway patrolmen attempted to rob a family, and were reformed on
the spot by the mystical power of Lönnrot. There was another railway
scene to shoot, aboard one of the passenger trains that, in those days,
left Mexico City bound for Tula and points north. Charley and I
determined not to make the same mistake again: this time we didn’t
ask permission, we just bought tickets, and, with 35mm cameras and
battery-powered lights, piled aboard the train.
Though it bustled with students by day, at night the Convent
became melancholy and surreal, decorated with bold Orozco murals.
Several crew members took me to see the bullet holes around the
doorway where an unknown number of students were rounded up
and killed on the night of the Tlatelolco massacre.
Those San Ildefonso/Triste-le-Roy scenes were my favourites: most
like passages from Borges’ story, where Lönnrot grows increasingly
depressed as he passes through a series of identical courtyards and
rooms. The architecture, Garzón’s illumination, and the frozen roses,
moons, and artificial spiders’ webs, combined with Pray for Rain’s
music and Boyle and Eccleston’s performances, realised exactly what
I had visualised when I read the story. How often can a director say
this?
The shoot ended on 30 April 1992, at dawn, with the scene in which
Lönnrot and Treviranus walked down Calle Torbitt after the riot, and
it began to rain. This was one of those race-against-time shots that
are supposed to take place at night, but which you end up shooting
as the sun is coming up. A few days later, I watched our black-and-
white rushes at Alpha Cine in Seattle (there being no black-and-white
lab in Mexico). I brought the material back and we cut the picture
in Carlos’ editing room at Estudios Churubusco. A month later,
in London, I screened a 65-minute version for Yentob in an attempt
to convince him that the BBC should make Death and the Compass a
feature. Alan had asked me round to his charming house in Notting
Hill so he could watch the tape after he came home from work. A
generous host, he poured me a glass of wine, sat down to watch the
film, and fell instantly asleep. I sat on his comfortable sofa, gazing out
into the garden. It was an idyllic English summer afternoon, the sun
was shining, birds sang in the trees. I poured myself another glass, or
three. The film ended. Yentob woke up.
Although he’d been asleep throughout, I wasn’t offended. It
doesn’t matter whether executives actually watch your film or not:
all that matters is that they like it. I made my pitch, stressing the
great production values that he’d just witnessed, the possibilities of
expanding the various back stories that had entertained him so, and
stressing why Death and the Compass would be even better value for
the BBC if they gave me some more money and then released it as a
BBC Films feature.
‘I think it works well as it is,’ Alan said, ‘or perhaps a bit shorter.
Fifty-five minutes would be ideal.’
The Universal Clock had ticked: we were to fit a one-hour,
not a two-hour, slot. I went back to Mexico and cut the film down
as instructed. Most of the Mexican actors had done pretty well with
their English – in particular Zaide Silvia – but I was concerned that
Echánove’s accent was impenetrable, and replaced his voice in the
dubbing suite with another actor’s – mine. Pray for Rain delivered a
The TV version, 55 minutes long, played first on the BBC in its drama
series Screenplay, and subsequently as part of the Borges strand. That
was the end of that, I thought: the film was cut, mixed, finished,
delivered.
In Mexico City, the first order of business was to come up with the
additional scenes. The 55-minute version is weakest in the Scharlach–
Lönnrot back story. Why does Red Scharlach detest Lönnrot so? What
is there in Lönnrot’s past that makes him so wearily guilty? I set to
work on a flashback that would provide the answers. Also, the trap
laid by Red Scharlach for Lönnrot was fairly complicated, and some
additional explanation of that wouldn’t hurt.
Garzón and Montiel were both available for the additional shoot. The
locations were the abandoned Tolteca cement factory (which plays
the role of the Used Money Repository), and a baroque house in the
Chapultepec district (Treviranus’ mansion). Sando flew down from
LA, and Gabriel Solano, the makeup designer who had provided a
false nose, wigs, and other disguises for Eccleston, aged him by about
45 years.
Unfortunately, just as Pedro Armendáriz had predicted, Garzón
and I fell out. Garzón had quarrelled with his excellent assistant, his
nephew, Miguel Urbina; he announced that his son, Miguel Jr, was
now his focus puller. But Miguel Jr had no experience doing this, the
most crucial job on the entire set. Charley and I asked Garzón to find
someone more experienced. He did so, but thereafter he refused to
speak to me, to go to the lab, or to time the film.
Why do things like this occur? I suppose they happen in every
business, especially when family matters intrude, but it’s sad when a
great creative relationship goes sour. I was also worried about one of
our actors, the brilliant Echánove, who had started doing a lot of coke.
A lovely guy, he now got quickly edgy and anxious. A few weeks later
POSTPRODUCTION
To buy us out of this mess, I had to get a job. I ended up directing a
‘work for hire’ – The Winner. It was an unhappy assignment, but the
money made it possible to finish Death and the Compass.
Lorenzo negotiated a deal with Andrés Vicente: in return for the
feature rights we gave him domestic distribution rights for Spain. They
drafted the agreement, and I raced to Madrid to have Andrés sign it
before he changed his mind. I offered Lorenzo a producer credit on
negotiation.
I asked the BBC for the 35mm negative: one morning I turned up
at the old Edge City office in Venice, CA, and there it was, six reels
sitting in a cardboard box on the doorstep, where the courier had
dumped it. This was the same ‘bad neighbourhood’ where I’d been
held up at knifepoint, and where the repo car had been stolen. But not
even the local crackheads stole film negative. From Seattle I reclaimed
the black-and-white footage, and took the whole lot back to Mexico,
where Carlos finished his feature cut. In LA, Rocco, who had already
done half a dozen special effects shots for the 55-minute version
(Lönnrot’s apartment in a lightning storm, an imaginary skyscraper, an
explosion of bats, the closing shot of the maze), came up with a dozen
more: fires, hanging skeletons, spinning newspapers. Tom Richmond
and I borrowed his model labyrinth and shot a title sequence in it.
Dan Wool delivered more music. Pray for Rain’s brilliant score for
The Winner had been stripped out of that film, so I encouraged Dan
to write whatever he liked, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t
get cut out this time. Alejandro built a new layer of effects tracks, and
Victor mixed the finished feature at Churubusco in July 1996.
When we saw our first answer print, it was mysteriously out of synch.
Carlos was a painstaking editor, and he couldn’t understand what
had gone wrong. Neither could I. Leaving Carlos to try and figure
out what the mistake was, I walked back to the old stone house near
the studio. The house was adjacent to a little park and a high-walled
golf course. There was a corner of the flat roof where, if you crouched
down, only the tops of the trees that filled the park and lined the
golf course were visible. Hunched there, unable to see any of the
surrounding buildings, you could pretend you were in the middle of
a forest. Lately, I’d been doing this a lot.
After a while, feeling somewhat better thanks to my fantasy that
I was in a wood, I ate a taco at the little stand outside the studio, and
returned to the cutting room. Carlos thought he had figured out what
the mistake was: without our knowledge, one of the opening title cards
had been changed. It appeared that one of the producers, whom I shall
call Charley, had persuaded his crony at the title house to re-make his
producer title: so that it would stand out more than Lorenzo’s title:
the new card called this fellow ‘EL Productor’. Normally, a director
would dismiss this as typical high-spirited producer rivalry: the more
producers there are, the more they fight each other over the wording of
their credits. Mr Negishi and Stonebear had also disagreed over their
titles, and demanded separate cards. But things were complicated
here by the fact that Charley’s coke-addled little helper had made EL
Productor’s new title several frames too long.
We returned to the lab, where, surrounded by anxious technicians
in white coats, and sweating over the original 35mm material, Carlos
counted the frames of negative against the frames of our cutting copy.
‘I think it’s three frames out,’ he said. We held our breath. We shouldn’t
RELEASE
The TV broadcast in the UK received some good reviews; I don’t know
what the reaction was in Spain, France, or Germany, where it was also
sold. Unlike film directors, TV directors seem to move calmly from job
to job, undisturbed by weekend box-office figures or reviews.
Because there was the pre-existing TV version, there wasn’t
much interest in a theatrical release in Europe, so EL Productor and I
concentrated our attention on Japan and the American market. Death
and the Compass premiered at the Tokyo Film Festival on 2 October
1996, and played at the Vancouver Festival 10 days after that. The
Tokyo Festival screening meant that my debt was paid in full. Karl,
Lorenzo, and Miguel Camacho, head of Churubusco Studios, all
went to Japan for the opening. Karl and I forgave each other, and
sang his ‘Benignity’ song. The film first played in the US at the Santa
Barbara Festival, and at the Guadalajara Festival in Mexico, in March
1997. It also screened at the PiFan Science Fiction Festival in Puchon,
Korea, where 200 students showed up, each one of whom had read
the original story, in English, Spanish, or both. Theirs was the best
question and answer session I have ever attended. The intellectual
level and linguistic ease of these young Koreans were fantastic.
Death and the Compass opened theatrically on 11 July at Laemmle’s
Music Hall in Los Angeles, with a newspaper ad designed by Paul
Mavrides. The LA reviews were good – better than the British ones.
This was odd, since the film is nowhere near as good as Walker, which
the LA critics had loathed. Perhaps the missing element in Borges’
work is any kind of identifiable politics: apart from the JFK set dressing
(which no one but Cecilia and I noticed), and the general ambiance of
corrupt policework, there’s not much politics in the film. Death and the
Compass is a colourful entertainment, which makes it less dangerous
to like.
Did I want to be a part of it? But of course, said I. The faxes flowed
back and forth – mine somewhat short, his increasingly loquacious.
Wim encouraged me to come up with a script based on his theme. I
tried to think of something that might fit the bill. This was pretty hard,
since most of the projects I’d worked on dealt with doom, failure, and
obliteration – beauty and consolation were in short supply.
As far as I could tell, I only had one such arrow in my quiver:
a book called Into A Desert Place, written by an Englishman called
Graham Mackintosh. It detailed his love for the desert and coast of
based on the book. By 1997 I’d lost the rights, but Cecilie Brown in
Madrid was still pursuing it. I sent the script to Wim, stressing it could
be reduced in scale and made for a low budget. He didn’t like it.
So I went back to the files of notes I’d kept – almost all of them
about nuclear weapons systems and environmental destruction – and
after much searching found something I’d written in Mexico City, in
the middle of a lightning storm. I sent it to Wim, as a possible outline
for his film:
20/7/96
I was feeling lonely and at a loss. It was Saturday night and I
was in Mexico City waiting for an answer print of Death and the
Compass. I had had lunch with Pedro Armendáriz, a nice lunch at
his house after which I saw him in a play at the Teatro de Asfalto,
Krisis. I was on my own and I missed my girlfriend and felt
alienated. I had got depressed at lunch talking about money, and
though I enjoyed the play, a very well-staged political comedy,
part thriller, part farce, I remained down in the dumps as I
walked through the ancient city centre after my Metro ride.
Then I saw lightning flicker in the crack of sky between the
buildings to the south. And I felt better as I climbed the stairs to
my third-floor corner room (306) at the Hotel Washington. I sat in
the dark with my feet out on the balcony and watched the faint
flickering become a series of lightning bolts flashing across the
top of a huge cloud. A few big raindrops fell and an acrid smell
hung in the air as lightning crashed on all sides of the sky.
I felt much better. Lightning is like a great disaster or a
magnificent view: it gives perspective.
I saw a circular lightning bolt hit Monument Valley, Arizona.
In Spain I watched two lightning storms trade off flashes – one
above the Sierra de las Alpujaras, the other above Los Filabres,
back and forth in perfect one, two, one, two sequence. Standing
in the Tucson desert in the rain trying to photograph lightning, I
heard and saw it simultaneously as it hit a power line above my
head . . . Lightning is in charge.
Recently scientists have photographed streamers, little miniature
electric bolts that dart up from power poles and buildings and
people’s heads attempting to make the connection with the big
bolt from above. And far above lightning storms, in the upper
atmosphere, conical flashes of coloured light have been observed,
and christened sprites.
This interested Wim more than the desert, and for a couple of
months we exchanged intermittent faxes about lightning. The process
The religious aspects of the film are entirely Tod’s. If there is a God I
suspect he/she/it is a mad demon, at war with similar demons, with
keep crew travel costs down. I’d shot a promo in Liverpool, and been
impressed by the local crew, particularly Kim Ryan, the first assistant
director. Even though there were no incentives, financial or otherwise,
to shoot there, we thought it worth it. The crew people were keen, and
the locations suitably monumental.
Rotterdam, naturally, would be another location, as would Tokyo.
We figured we could shoot in Hong Kong with a skeleton crew, and
wrap in Mexico City. At the beginning of March I embarked on a
two-week location scout from Xochimilco, Mexico, to Tokyo, where
Stonebear and Chigumi Obayashi showed me around. On 22 March,
Tod and I returned to Liverpool, where Andrew Patrick – in charge of
a new regional screen agency, FTC NorthWest – generously offered us
free office space. We set up shop in Andrew’s premises, off Dale Street.
No sooner were we installed in Dale Street than two characters
came in. They were a bit younger than me, local guys, infinitely
intimidating. I thought, this pair are either cops or gangsters. They’d
come to see Tod. Little did I know it, but our visitors were Keith Jenkins
and his partner Tony, security experts. Liverpool had a reputation
as the place to go if you wanted to get your equipment ripped off,
and Tod asked them if we really needed security: Liverpool seemed a
pretty safe place to her, she said.
‘Let me put it this way,’ Keith told her, speaking in his fast scouse
accent that she hadn’t quite caught up with yet, ‘if yez got security,
yer stuff is safe. If yez don’t have it, things are likely to disappear.’
Tod decided we’d have security. It was a wise decision, and Keith and
Tony turned out to be two of the more reliable friends we made in
Liverpool during our five years in production there.
The following evening we saw my old sparring partner Drew
Schofield in a play, Dreams of Children, at the Masque Theatre. Drew
was, as always, quite brilliant. We asked him and another actor from the
play, John McMartin, to be in the film. Martin Turner was production
designer in Liverpool and for the final scenes. We decided to film the
latter in Spain rather than in Mexico for two reasons: we were already
shooting in Europe, and it was easier to scout locations and to film in
two continents than in three; and the desert landscape of Almería has
more of a traditional ‘biblical’ quality than Xochimilco’s canals.
Tod had written the part of Benny Reyes, the American
businessman, for Miguel Sandoval. She’d written Benny’s foil, Frank
King, for me: some of Frank’s idiosyncrasies (tearing articles out of the
pages of newspapers, for example) were mine. In a way, Frank was a
PRODUCTION
Tod wrote the opening scenes for the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. The
Adelphi is to hotels what Heathrow is to airports – one of the worst
in the world. It was built in the days of the ocean-going liners that
sailed from Liverpool to New York and elsewhere. It could, and still
can, accommodate 2,000 people; but it cannot feed them, or make
them happy. More bizarre than the hotel in The Shining, the Adelphi
offers a contrast between huge public spaces – with mirrored walls and
chandeliers, deliberately recalling the ballroom of a Cunard liner – and
mean, grotty little rooms. Its corridors snake and twist in all directions,
ending abruptly on mysterious mezzanines. It is a terrifying edifice,
inside and out, where no one in his or her right mind would ever stay.
I was very fond of it. Normally, it would be easy to film in such
a place: lousy hotels are usually happy to have a film crew come
and inconvenience their guests. But the Adelphi had recently been
the subject of a BBC ‘fly on the wall’ documentary series, and it was
now famous. Famous for bad service, broken glass and vomit on the
staircases, and a harpy-like manager called Mrs Downey. But fame is
a funny thing: despite showing the hotel in its true colours, the series
had done wonders for the Adelphi’s business. People were booking to
stay in the hideous pile merely because it had been on TV. Britannia
Hotels, the place’s parent company, had even had postcards printed
up, depicting Mrs Downey and her scurvy team in full regalia. Their
message: ‘Stay With Us – and Get the Full Treatment!’
As a result, the Adelphi was constantly full, and whether or not
we would be allowed to shoot there hung in the balance. Mrs Downey
was now a national celebrity, and it was hard even to get a meeting
with her. Finally we met for tea in the vast, decaying Derby Room.
‘Everybody wants to film here now,’ purred Mrs Downey, like
a Cheshire cat. She had just corrected my pronunciation of the word
‘Derby’. ‘You see those people sitting over there?’ She indicated two
The first scene was the longest I’d ever done, a tracking shot into the
restaurant where Benny and Frank sit down to eat. We were shooting
on Super 16mm. In theory, 1,000 ft of 35mm film, or its equivalent, 400
ft of 16mm, lasts for 10 minutes. In fact, if you don’t waste time getting
going, you can squeeze almost 11 minutes out of either roll, which we
did here.
The idea for the sequence came from something Tod and I had
actually encountered in a hotel in Bradford. The management had
provided, in the dining room, a large table for ‘lone diners’ – the idea
being that solo travelling salesmen and the like could sit together
while they ate their dinner, and converse rather than dine alone.
It’s a nice idea, and maybe some people like it. But Tod and I enjoy
a bit of solitude, and the thought of being forced unnecessarily into
conversations with people we didn’t know – outside business hours –
filled us with horror.
We’d also noticed a sadistic tendency on the part of maîtres d’hôtel
to cram all diners into the same corner of a dining room. This is for
the convenience of the waiters – it’s certainly not for the pleasure of
the customers, forced into uncomfortable proximity with other people
who overhear everything they say. In Tod’s script, Benny and Frank
get the worst of both these worlds, thanks to the sadistic maitre d’
portrayed by Adrian Kai.
Actually, Frank is the one who suffers. Being English, he doesn’t
want to talk to, or look at, anyone. Benny is an American: he’d love to
to anyone; Frank hates people like this, but is too repressed/polite to let
them know. (I think this comes very close to being a perfectly written
scene. It’s long, drawn out, and excruciating, as life is sometimes.)
Including false starts, we probably did 10 or 12 takes; it took
most of the day. We had a massive dolly, called the ‘Western’, which
only cleared the restaurant door by millimetres as it began its slow
track in on the scene. Ray Fowlis and Chris McDonough, our grips,
manoeuvred the great beast with determination and care.
We had our first theft during lunch. Someone stole one of the
Western dolly’s wheels. Like many criminal acts in Liverpool, this was
presumably intended as a joke – Abraham found the wheel stashed in
the men’s toilets, down the hall.
At end of the day, as we emerged from the Adelphi, another
drunk woman collided with Tod and collapsed on the pavement,
threatening suicide. Another ambulance was called.
Next day, Kim’s dad joined us to play the old man leaving St George’s
Hall. A light drizzle was falling – you can see the raindrops on the
lens – as we proceeded to the Central Library to get our dismal opening
shot. Tiny buds were appearing on the trees and I set to work pulling
them off so that the scene would appear still more stark.
Thence to Lime Street Station, where I discovered our
cinematographer and I didn’t have the same approach to shooting an
independent film. Our philosophies, as we’d discussed them, seemed
quite similar: get in there, shoot in a low-key way, and move on to the
next location. In practice, we defined ‘low key’ differently.
Tregenza thought it best not to introduce the small dolly into
the station, since it might attract attention. Instead, he proposed to
have Ray and Chris push him on a shopping cart. I said I thought
this would attract more attention than the small dolly. Not to worry,
Tregenza assured me, he would be wrapped in a blanket and no one
would notice him.
Picture the scene: two scousers with tool belts are pushing a
shopping cart through the concourse of a busy railway station; on
the shopping cart sits a man with long, flowing, grey hair, wrapped
in a blanket, holding a movie camera. They’re followed by a sound
recordist, me, Keith, and Tony. I can’t imagine anything more likely to
invite stares into the camera and shouts of ‘Fuck off!’ from my brother
Liverpudlians. Unless, perhaps, we’d all worn fluorescent t-shirts with
‘Film Crew’ on them.
On our night off, the third heist occurred. Rob or Abraham always
slept with the camera, but the rest of our gear was stowed in a
supposedly secure room on the first floor of the Adelphi. Of course,
the room wasn’t secure at all, and that evening somebody kicked the
door down and stole two of our walkie-talkies.
Mrs Downey refused to accept responsibility, and when we
reported it to the cops, they told us, ‘This was done by tourists.’ Tod
asked how they knew. ‘Because they stole your walkies, but left the
chargers. The batteries’ll be dead by now. No scouser would be so
the master thief had left his jacket in the room: it was full of letters
from his dole office, in Cardiff.
On Sunday evening, we filmed a pub scene in the basement of
Ma Boyle’s. Ma Boyle’s was unusual for an English alehouse in that
it served very decent food – mostly fish, plus scouse on Fridays. My
friend Adrian Henri came along and sat in a booth, surrounded by
a coterie of admiring poetry groupies; always working, he wrote
several poems while he was there that were published in his last
collection. John McMartin played the Liverpool-boosting businessman
(‘Call centres! Liverpool call centres handle 60,000 calls a day!’) and
Christine, our location manager, played the barmaid who knew who
bought the cars.
On our return to the Adelphi, Abraham made one last tour of the
hotel, looking for the missing camera-mounts. He found them, lying
side-by-side, on the stove in the hotel kitchen. Somebody else’s little
joke.
was that it seemed so orderly. The advances and retreats were slow,
lacking in any real momentum or excitement. It was a riot without
spontaneity, a rebellion devoid of noise.
The Dutch shoot wrapped on 2 May, and after a day’s break, in
which we saw our Spanish rushes newly arrived from Soho Images
one person, a local filmmaker called Terry Boyce. This was Edge City
revisited, as we had no permissions to shoot at all. We wanted to film
aboard the Star Ferry, and also on the gangway to the ferry, on the
Kowloon side. No one on the Star Ferry asked us for permission, or
said anything at all, as we sailed back and forth across the neon-lit
bay. Hong Kong was familiar with films, and obviously film friendly
if you were discreet. Only a gambling joint, in the background of one
of our Island shots, seemed interested in us. Terry suggested we find
an alternative location when the mafiosi emerged.
A couple of clubgoers stopped to read one of Jalle’s ‘Daddy Z’
posters. These posters, otherwise identical, contained a different club
name for each city. The clubgoers were clearly Zander fans, since
they wrote down the information about the gig. We shot a sequence
aboard one of the magnificent double-decker trams, through whose
open windows the most fabulous illumination – coloured neons and
fluorescents – flowed.
Miguel, Tod Davies, me, and Ryoko Takizawa are shown delightful
plastic food (or radioactive alien corpses) by Tomorowo Taguchi.
After the scene was over, we took the necessary crew photograph
(somehow, when you take these pictures, the crew always doubles in
size). Then we embarked on a last, top secret, mission: an unauthorised
attempt to grab a shot of one of the most remarkable new buildings
in Tokyo – the Fuji TV headquarters. Also built on reclaimed land,
this consists of two undistinguished skyscrapers joined by a network
of interconnecting catwalks and a huge copper ball, eight storeys in
diameter. The building, lit at night in a succession of changing colours,
is spectacular: a new, giant, secular space, a postmodern St George’s
Hall.
Stonebear had asked, on our behalf, for permission to include
the building in one of our shots. Permission was refused: Fuji only
permitted Fuji TV productions to show the building. Naturally, we
POSTPRODUCTION
On Sunday 10 May 1998, all returned home. Sando and Tod and I
were on the same flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles. The original King
Kong played on the tiny seatback screens.
Three Businessmen was edited on a flatbed in Rotterdam from 21
May to 16 June. Since every scene played in a single take, and there
were no action sequences, editing was quite straightforward. In fact, it
would have been easy to edit digitally – if we’d had video rushes. But,
faithful to the Old Ways (for the last time), I’d opted for film dailies. I
liked being surrounded by the old equipment in a big loft beside the
docks: not just editing flatbeds, of which there were two, but also big
industrial sewing machines. A big, bright space, some big machines,
a flickering screen, a roll-up of ‘white widow’: this was nothing to
grumble about. It was the last time I’d ever cut on a flatbed or an
analogue editing machine.
Analogue editing of celluloid wasn’t better or easier than digital
editing. A certain percentage of analogue editing time was always
spent worrying about synch: had a shot or a scene slipped out of
synch? Had the synch drifted, or had the coding machine marked
RELEASE
Our executive producer was not happy when we told him the film had
been invited to Rotterdam: Wim Kayzer had decided he didn’t want
the film shown anywhere prior to its VPRO screening. It was he who’d
originally suggested that we make a feature, and we’d discussed the
Filmfonds deal with him on several occasions. When he changed
his mind, he put us in a difficult position. We had an obligation to
Filmfonds, and to the Festival: they’d loaned us their offices, and their
invitation to screen Three Businessmen in the city where it was made
was not to be ignored.
At the same time as Wim objected to the Rotterdam invitation,
I was invited to be a member of the festival jury: this meant helping
pick the winner of the prestigious VPRO ‘Tiger’ Awards. Things were
getting a bit surreal, and nothing to do with film-making, or with
creativity – as is usual, at this stage. I didn’t want to be on the jury.
I hate contests, and prize-givings. However, Rotterdam had been
generous to us, as had VPRO. So I accepted the invitation. When
Wim insisted we pull Three Businessmen from the festival, what was
I supposed to do? Withdraw the film, and disappoint Filmfonds and
the festival? Quit the jury, and upset VPRO?
Everyone had conflicting loyalties, and probably everyone
realised this except Wim Kayzer. Looked at differently, it was a
beautiful situation, but there was no consoling him. Perhaps because
his strand of documentaries was coming to an end, Wim wanted to
test the limits of his power with VPRO. When we refused to withdraw
Three Businessmen from Rotterdam, Wim told VPRO he was no longer
interested in screening it.
unattainable, and Frank and Benny derive their only comfort from
discussing and imagining things: from the sprites flickering above
lightning storms, to the diagonal dimensions of their laptop screens.
This brings me to the bigger problem of Three Businessmen – the
way we watch a film. Consider the scenes with Benny and Frank
aboard the Metro. While we’re aboard the train, it’s pretty similar to
the Liverpool Merseyrail: a Metro interior is a Metro interior, after all.
The train that Miguel and I boarded in Liverpool was painted yellow;
the train from which we emerged in Rotterdam was green. You might
think this is a pretty clear visual clue: trains don’t change colour, after
all. Yet almost no one in the audience noticed it. This taught me that
people watch films on a shot-by-shot basis. What they see now, they
accept as ‘reality’ within the frame; what was on screen five minutes
ago is already forgotten.
Some people didn’t believe the film was scripted. If you’re not a
writer, perhaps you might think Miguel and I were merely improvising
stuff, philosophising as we ambled along. It’s a compliment to Tod,
maybe, that her dialogue is so natural sounding. But it also suggests
laziness on the viewer’s part: the same inattentiveness that misses
when a train changes colour, or that prompts someone to ask, ‘And
the donkey cart that you guys jumped on: did that just happen by?’
The idea that dialogue has to be written, edited, and learned – or that
donkey carts have to be rented and transported, with their driver and
their donkey, to the desert on a truck – is too much information for
the tired critic or viewer, who prefers a ‘magical’ view of things (‘Two
kids show up on Sunset Boulevard and the next thing you know
they’re MILLIONAIRES . . .’). Perhaps the underlying message is just
too confusing – that a good film, or any film, depends not on genius,
but on slightly tedious, medium-term teamwork.
The point of Three Businessmen is that we are, most of the time,
entirely and voluntarily alienated. We don’t see clearly; we don’t
pay attention to things; we don’t know what our jobs mean, or who’s
buying those cars. Benny and Frank walk and take public transport all
the way around the world, in total ignorance. They think Rotterdam
is Liverpool. They think Shinjuku in Tokyo is Liverpool’s famed
‘Japanese Garden’. They think the desert is a city. They wake up in
generic hotel rooms, with no idea where they are, or why they’re there.
One of Three Businessmen’s earliest enthusiasts was a United Airlines
flight attendant: he understood exactly what was going on.
Frank knew Liverpool, and England, much better than I did. It was
he who saw the importance of the cult of football: in the first draft,
the Duke and Lord Antonio attended a private football match, played
in their honour by professional teams. Having always hated football,
I would never have thought of that. He transposed the seventeenth
century into the mid-twenty-first with ease: the characters, with
their family bonds, viciousness, and loyalties (or lack thereof)
proved timeless. And he rearranged and edited the text drastically,
losing the second disguise sub-plot, justifying Graziana’s failure
to recognise her son by making her blind. It was an expert piece of
creative adaptation. The script convinced two excellent producers,
Margaret Matheson and Tod Davies, that here was something worth
pursuing.
A script reading followed at the Script Factory in London, cast
by Gary Davy. David Morrissey read the part of Vindici, and Rita
Tushingham played the Duchess. I asked Berkoff to play the Duke,
but he couldn’t make it. Phil Daniels played Lussurioso brilliantly.
Drew Schofield and Christine Tremarco came down from Liverpool
to play Carlo and Castiza; Tony Booth read Lord Antonio. Overall, the
cast was very well chosen: after that reading, I could think of no one
but Gary to cast the film (he had stage-managed that RSC production
back in 1988, and loved the play as much as I did).
Though some financiers had been invited, no money came; the
Script Factory asked us to stage the reading again, before an audience.
This was a chance for me and Gary to try out new actors: Chris
Eccleston as Vindici, and Margi Clarke as Hannah (formerly Graziana,
Vindici’s mum). Diana Quick played the Duchess at the second
reading. She was fantastic, and afterwards I asked if she’d consider the
part if we were able to raise the money. ‘I’d love to, dear,’ she told me,
‘but you know you’ll end up casting Barbara Windsor or Joan Collins!’
Gary and I resisted these temptations.
Again, Drew Schofield played Carlo. In an ideal world, I would
have asked Drew to play Vindici: he’s an acting virtuoso, and such a
skilful mimic that he could have done amazing things with Vindici’s
disguises. However, I couldn’t convince anyone to back me in offering
him the role. Margaret and Tod both agreed Drew was a great actor,
after Sid & Nancy, it might have been a different story. What a pity
(from my point of view) that Drew had never done a Gary Oldman: he
was as versatile an actor as Gary, and funnier, but he never considered
moving to LA.
I had to promise Tod and Margaret two things: that we would
cast commercially acceptable actors, and shoot in a more conventional
manner – i.e. no plano secuencia. They both felt long takes were
alienating, and that we should make an effort to seduce the audience
with a familiar editing style. There was also a practical issue: the
centrepiece of The Revengers Tragedy is a courtroom scene, and I
couldn’t figure out how to film it as a plano secuencia. The characters
– judge, witnesses, jury, accused – were physically too far apart and
there was no one moving around the courtroom whom the camera
could follow from group to group.
When we did the sums, we were about £35,000 in the red. This was a bad
thing for Margaret’s company, Bard, and for our own, Exterminating
Angel. But help was at hand: Cecilia and Diego had shown up with
numerous design ideas; they wanted to see the locations, even if
picture, right?
Right. I toured the locations with Cecilia and Diego; we took
pictures of the idyllic Wirral countryside around Thurstason village,
overlooking the Welsh hills, with the idea that Vindici might arrive
from the country, rather than aboard a Chinese junk. The junk,
in which Vindici was supposed to land in Liverpool, had proved
impossible to find. Frank insisted he’d seen one sail by recently,
when he was walking on Formby Beach, but the production had been
unable to track it down. I’d started thinking of contrasting a country
idyll with an urban Gomorrah, the way that Middleton’s speeches so
often did.
Inevitably, Cecilia and Diego spent hours in the great public
buildings of the city: the Picton Library, St George’s Hall, the town hall,
the cathedral – monuments to the villainous history of a city built on
the slave trade. They stayed in Liverpool for two weeks and distilled
an art department book, featuring their chosen locations, bedecked
with threatening posters of the Duke. We put together a presentation
of design elements, and the three of us took the train down to London
to present the project to the Film Council.
The new head of the New Cinema Fund was 25 minutes late, and
couldn’t stop talking on the phone. He had two phones, a mobile
and a landline, and every time either rang, he jumped up and raced
to answer it. His conversations seemed mainly domestic, or about
scheduling matters that his assistant could have dealt with. His
concentration skills were minimal – he browsed through Cecilia’s
art book, the phone rang, he went away, came back, made some joke
about Frank Cottrell Boyce, the phone rang again, he went away, and
when he came back he told us the story of how he would have worked
on Sid & Nancy, but had to quit due to glandular fever. Then he was
running late again, for his next meeting.
Diego, being Mexican, was astonished by the guy’s inattention,
vanity, and rudeness. But Cecilia and I felt good about the meeting.
We weren’t asking for much: just half of a greatly reduced budget
of £1 million. Revengers was a prestige project that would attract fine
actors. And this was a vain, distracted guy, in his first week on the job.
On the train back to Liverpool, we drank wine, convinced we had a
chance.
organically with Strummer, Los Plugz, The Pogues, and Pray for Rain.
It was difficult to do it artificially – an approach to Radiohead went
nowhere. We liked Space, the Liverpool combo, but didn’t know anyone
connected to them. So instead, I sent an email to Chumbawamba’s
website, asking ‘Would you like to write the music for a Jacobean
revenge tragedy set in Liverpool? PS we think you are great.’
A reply, from Alice Nutter, came almost at once: ‘It depends on
if we like the script or not. We just said no to Mr McGoo.’ Marvellous
– Anarcho-Syndicalists who turned down money! Now I could be
excited about the music, because I liked the band.
PRODUCTION
Film-making, like anything else, gets easier as time goes by. If you do
something enough – dig a trench, rehearse a scene, carve bons mots
onto grains of rice – you develop an efficient working method, and it
takes less effort to achieve the goal.
As with Repo Man or Edge City, I’d managed to find a crew who
were both nice and enthusiastic. Although I no longer abused them
with 12- or 14-hour days, the schedule was still an endurance test:
five weeks, with a large number of location moves, to fit the different
schedules of those massive public buildings. Some scenes that took
place in the day – Junior’s trial, for instance – had to be shot at night.
This was a big lighting, acting, and logistics job, and exhausted
everyone involved, save for Paul Reynolds, who never got tired.
There were difficulties, of course, but they didn’t bother me as
they had before. When Eccleston showed up, after two days’ filming,
with a shaved head, what could I do? Ask him why he had done such
a stupid thing without consulting me or the hair and makeup people?
A bad haircut wasn’t a sacking offence, but it boded ill. I sensed, again,
that Chris had been hurt by his LA experiences, and had come back
with an enlarged chip on his shoulder.
The rest of the cast were delightful. Derek Jacobi proved to be
the nicest actor known to man. The visiting actors were put up at
the Adelphi (apart from Diana Quick, who knew better), where the
Duke’s sons played a variety of manic jokes on each other, at all hours
of the night. Frazer Ayres, whom we’d cast as Spurio, returned home
at 3 a.m. from his big scene with Diana, to find a note nailed to his
The scene where Eccleston fights with a gang of toughs was filmed
among Victorian warehouses, off the Dock Road. Choreographed by a
scouse stuntman, Ray Nichols, it was based on an old Liverpool custom:
small and irritating scousers would lie in wait for ‘foreign’ football fans,
tormenting them with variations on the question, ‘Are you a cockney?’
The funny reply would have been yes, but visitors were ill-advised to
say it, because invariably there were several big lads hiding round the
corner, waiting to duff up the cockneys. I’d witnessed this on match
days in the 1970s, when fans with red-and-white scarves wrapped
around their extremities would roam the city centre, looking for Chelsea
or Arsenal fans to beat up. (This was before the mellowing influences
of the heroin plague, and the opening of pubs in the afternoon.)
My goal was a hand-to-hand fight like the great judo battle
at the mid-point of Kurosawa’s Red Beard. Of course, it’s nowhere
near as good: our fight was filmed on the street in a single morning,
while The Master took two weeks to film his battle, on a studio
set. Chris was very good with the physical action; Frank described
Vindici as ploughing through the thugs ‘like a steamroller’ and this
is what Chris did. We all liked the conceit of a war between the north
of England and the south that, for a brief moment, anyway, the
northerners won. Eccleston, being from Manchester, charged them
head on. Coming from Liverpool, I thought Vindici might also be a
master of disguise, subterfuge, and guile: all scousers want to be this,
but are useless at it.
The giant TV screen that appears after this first battle contains a
picture of the Duke with the old comedian Arthur Askey. Thus did the
entertainers, popular local lads, long dead. It was a sinister thing, like
Apple Computers’ ‘Think Different’ campaign, where dead people of
real worth, like Ghandi, were co-opted to sell electric gear. We had to
get permission from Arthur Askey’s grandchildren to use his image,
and they asked to read the script. Interestingly, they understood
Frank’s point about the co-optation of valuable images: not only did
they get the joke, they found it funny.
Sketch for Vindici’s arrival, Sc 2: the Duke’s banner on the Liver Building.
Final version, Sc 2: Arthur Askey and the Duke (Derek Jacobi) on the big screen.
Final version, Sc 92: Lutyens’ cathedral under construction! Thank you, Duke.
The giant video screen, and all subsequent effects shots, such
as the view of the ruined cathedral, were provided by River Media
– a Liverpool-based graphics company run by Tom Lang and John
Corner. River were experienced at commercial graphics; this was
their first feature. The results surpassed excellent – the head designer
was Paul Rogers: he’d already provided animated flies for the trailer,
buzzing around the corpses on the bus.
secuencia. I knew Chris could handle it because we’d worked this way
on Death and the Compass. And Len and I had shot Pete Wylie’s promo
Heart as Big as Liverpool in one long take, with Len operating, walking
backwards down a staircase.
Technically the shot was very like the one with Boyle and Sando
in Death and the Compass, minus the lightning and rain. As then, it was
all down to the actors, the expertise of the operator, and the diligence
of his focus puller. Walking backwards on cobblestones, Len had to
weave between police cars, keep Chris and Ed in shot, and feature
Junior, the cops, Lord Antonio, bodyguards, Castiza, and the weeping
People’s Princess, at the appropriate moment. I love such scenes,
because they’re challenges, and all the work is in the hands of the
actors and the camera guys – Garzón and Miguel Urbina, Gowing and
Mike Costelloe. Though I’d promised not to shoot Revengers in plano
secuencia, this didn’t mean moving masters were entirely banned. In
that last hour before daybreak, we managed five complete takes, then
the sun appeared. We used take number five.
heads throw wobblers, and the entertainment press hands out insults
gratuitously – these are truths that anyone involved in film, TV, or
theatre knows. For the Film Council to be hurt, and for them to ask
the producers to respond, was silly. It was like a playwright, or a film
director, replying to a bad review. One just didn’t do it.
To soothe the Film Council’s feelings, I wrote a letter to Time Out.
I said it had been bold of the New Cinema Fund to fund Revengers
Tragedy (true) and that our set visitors were not poodles, but tigers
(false). This was the most shameful thing I did during Revengers,
and I apologise to the journalist whose work I criticised. At least the
Film Council weren’t like the eugenics-oriented private investor who
quizzed Margaret, Tod, and me over dinner. This fellow wanted
to know the specific racial makeup of one of the actors: was she a
quadroon or an octoroon? His questions were the kind you would
expect to hear in Mandingo, in one of the slave market scenes, but
feature films need money, and you have to hang out with some weird
types in order to get it.
I remarked that the crew had given him Most Improved Player status,
due to his lack of fuss over the henchmen. I assured him, truthfully,
that he was always respectful and polite. ‘What about the lateness?’
Eddie wanted to know.
‘Ah, the lateness. There, Chris has a point.’ Eddie tended to run
late. This might sound like a problem, but if it’s consistent, it isn’t a
big deal. The ADs would just give him a call time half an hour before
he was needed, then he’d show up half an hour late – i.e. on time.
What was ironic was that certain other actors had a tendency to be
late, too – naming no names.
That afternoon we had a distinguished visitor – John Pitcher,
the Renaissance scholar from St John’s, Oxford. Pitcher endured a
seven-hour, broken-down Virgin train journey to Liverpool, and was
immediately put to work explaining to Chris and Drew the meaning
of the expression ‘clipping nobles’. He couldn’t have come at a
more opportune time, since his was a fresh face, and an enthusiastic
presence.
In the play, mother and sister simply vanish during the final action.
Reading Frank’s script, I’d always assumed that Hannah and Castiza
would stay behind when Vindici and Carlo made their break for
freedom. Such a decorous fade-out never occurred to Margi or Carla.
When the brothers took Antonio hostage, mother and sister went with
them, watching the lads’ backs as they marched the new Duke down
the stairs. I asked Margi why they made that choice. She and Carla
replied it hadn’t been a choice: ‘Where else were we going to go?’ Thus
do actors know their own part better than any director. Thus does
Revengers end properly, with the entire clan gunned down, together
with their hostage, beneath the portrait of the Queen.
POSTPRODUCTION
Revengers Tragedy was the first film I cut on a computer. Ray and I
had cut three documentaries on his digital system, thus helping me
overcome my fear of computers. What if it crashed? What if the hard
drive died? What if the tapes got wiped or lost? None of these horrors
proved as inevitable as I’d expected (though the Avid certainly froze
every few hours, and the Windows OS crashed at least once a day).
It is 2011.
Ten years ago, a great comet hit the earth, destroying the south of
England and most of France.
DUKE TOURNEUR, a London gangster, was on a golfing holiday
with his family in Malaga.
He returned to England and relocated his operations to Liverpool.
Among his many crimes has been the murder of a young woman
betrothed to VINDICI.
Chumbawamba didn’t worry about stuff like that. They knew what
they wanted to do, and they did it. I made several pilgrimages to
their studio in Bradford, followed by convivial visits to the local
real-ale hostelry. I was travelling by train, and the railways were in
complete disarray following privatisation and several fatal accidents.
So I’d usually end up, hungry and drunk, on windswept platforms
such as Bradford Interchange, hoping for a train, any train, heading
west, where I might catch a Liverpool connection. If I’d been a real
film director I would have caught a taxi back to Liverpool. Instead, I’d
become Frank King. All that supported me through those dark vigils
were the remains of a plastic-wrapped newsagent sandwich, and some
immensely memorable new sounds, courtesy of the Chumbas.
We retained the WTC ending for as long as possible, but the New
Cinema Fund had to sign off on the picture, and refused to do so until
RELEASE
Revengers Tragedy was rejected by all the major festivals of Europe.
This seemed strange at first, given that it had some well-known names
in it, including a supermodel. But there was one element, which,
placed right at the beginning, may have been a tad off-putting to
those festivals’ programmers. It was the special effects shot that our
investor had requested: a satellite POV of Earth from space. In this
image – beautifully executed by River Media – a gaping crater left by
the meteor impact can be seen. Most of the cities of Western Europe,
including London, but also Cannes, Berlin, and Venice, have been
obliterated.
How would you feel if you were a festival programmer,
watching dozens of tapes and DVDs a day, and in one of them, the
town where you live and work had been destroyed, merely as the
back story? You might think, great, I hate this place, we’re showing
this picture. Or you might think, we receive X million Euros annual
subsidy from the good burghers of this city to promote a positive
image of (fill in name of obliterated capital) . . . Next! Despite the
aren’t nihilists. All they really want to do is not get fired, go to the
big official dinner with Nicole Kidman, and get some sleep. The rest
is a nuisance.
Revengers was invited to festivals in Edinburgh, Cambridge,
Hereford, and Birmingham – where it won a prize. It was also invited
to the Locarno Festival. I missed this as I was directing a TV show in
Japan, but Margaret and Eddie attended the screenings. Ed proved to
be a valiant supporter of the film, and joined us in Edinburgh for the
film’s British premiere.
Our best review appeared in the Italian paper Il Manifesto: they
called the film ‘un affresco prepotente e inquietante’. It was one of three
films chosen to open the cinemas at the Foundation for Art & Creative
Technology (FACT) in Liverpool. This was the end of a ‘bullish’ period
for my old home town, in which several local independent films were
made. In fact, it seemed as if Liverpool might become an independent
film centre, in the manner of San Francisco, New York, or Rotterdam.
There was no shortage of talent in the city, but there was no support
for the talent, either.
Remarkably, the soundtrack CD came out on the very day the
film opened: something Strummer and I hadn’t managed to achieve
on Walker. Rightly disdainful of their record company, Chumbawamba
simply self-published the CD – selling it off their website, and sending
copies to all the cinemas in time for opening night. It was such an
obvious, successful strategy that I wondered why Joe had never tried
it on any of the films he scored. But he was caught in the big league,
where everything was done for you – which made everything seem
much more expensive, and more difficult. Strummer could have self-
produced a dozen albums: he never knew the power he really had.
Whereas there were 11 Chumbas, who knew what they wanted, and
did it.
The last time I saw Strummer was at the Cannes Film Festival. I hadn’t
run into him in several years. We’d been invited to attend a bean-feast,
and we were housed down the street from the event. Our hosts asked
us not to walk to it, so we waited for a long time outside the hotel.
Eventually black cars came, picked us up, crawled down the Croisette,
and let us out at the end of a red carpet at the bottom of some stairs.
At the top of the staircase was a mob of press photographers
and film crews, all of them fixated on the black cars. I indicated the
photographers: ‘Just like old times!’ Joe shook his head. ‘When we get
the studio or distributor, and you still owned the video and ancilliary
rights, but it was a lot of work and hassle. A microfeature, being shot
on video, didn’t need to play in the cinema, at all – at least, that was
the theory.
The previous year, I’d gone to Monument Valley to see Once Upon
a Time in the West projected on a giant inflatable screen. The organisers
generously put me up at Goulding’s Trading Post – the equivalent of
the Gran Hotel in Almería – where Ford and Wayne had stayed while
filming Stagecoach and many other films. I’d taken an extraordinary
hike across Hunts Mesa with a Navajo guide. Tim League, who ran
this rolling roadshow, told me he was planning to screen The Searchers
in Monument Valley in 2006 – the film’s fiftieth anniversary year. So
when the Liverpool project folded, I called up Rudy Wurlitzer, and
suggested we drive out together and see The Searchers, in the mystical
place where it was filmed. In the past, I’d managed to lure Wurlitzer
out to the Old Tucson movie ranch, and the Forrest Tucker ruin, near
Tubac, Arizona. Unfortunately, Rudy’s back was playing up, and he
demurred.
I went anyway, and before I went, I wrote a script about two out-
of-work actors with a grudge against a screenwriter, who decide to
attend a showing of his film in Monument Valley, so they can beat him
up. Was I mad at Rudy for not accompanying me on another fruitless,
memory-lane excursion? Not at all. The fact that the screenwriter in
the script is named Fritz Frobisher is coincidental.
The Searchers, on Goulding’s airstrip, overlooking Monument
Valley, was magnificent. Ford got a bigger turnout than Leone: 200
people, including all the German, British, French, and Japanese tourists
from the Lodge. It was too dark to see those formidable buttes, but just
to watch a new print on this big screen under the stars, instead of on
a TV, was enough. Wayne, in his character’s worst moments, looked
like a monster: Ford filmed him in shadow, with a worn-out face and
staring eyes. Yet Ethan Edwards was a multi-faceted racist: his was the
only white character to speak Comanche.
Before the show I’d chatted with a Hopi tourist from Gallup, New
Mexico. He and his wife drove up to Monument Valley now and then,
he told me, to play golf. I thought he was joking, but out came half a
dozen golf balls and two irons, and they started knocking the balls
around the old campground on the hill there, with the red Mittens
and Merrick Butte in the background. They were excellent golfers. So
Indian desert golfers showed up in the next draft of Searchers 2.0.
Searchers 2.0 is the fortieth script I’ve written. Pretty much all of
these, from a First World War story to a biopic of Che Guevara, got
the same initial response: ‘the characters are unsympathetic’. Certain
screenplays got made into films anyway: most didn’t. The characters
of Searchers 2.0 are fairly typical of my films: Fred is a reactionary nut
who always sides with the forces of authority, thereby disadvantaging
himself; Mel thinks of himself as a politically aware, righteous guy,
but he’s also a deadbeat dad; and Delilah is a Prozac addict whose
world view comes from reading two contradictory books (hence her
desire for a hybrid Suburban). But this time, strangely, there were
no objections to the script on grounds of sympathy. Instead, several
people wanted to produce the film.
Michael Nesmith was interested. This should have been a one-
stop shop, since Nez could easily have funded the picture. Just as
previously, he didn’t want to. He gave me some excellent notes: that
Delilah should be Mel’s daughter, not his ex-wife, and that her car
should be a Cadillac Excalibur SUV, or similar – ‘the biggest, most
expensive, stupidest car on the road’. Instead of banking the film, Nez
said he wanted to read for the role of Fred. And he felt the film should
be shot in five-minute segments, and made available as a periodic
download to mobile phones.
Various LA producers offered to take the picture on; a dear
actor friend, made wealthy by a weekly telly series, thought he might
producers wanted to ‘cast the picture up’ – that is, raise the budget
to $3.5 million so as to hire, say, Cheech Marin and Bill Murray to
play Mel and Fred. My actor friend thought he and another thespian
whom he regarded highly should play the roles.
For me, this was problematic. At one point in the script, Mel and
Fred are mistaken for homeless people by a Mexican guy who gives
them a dollar. This follows the revelation that neither of them has
health insurance. Now this is not surprising: 40 million Americans
don’t have health insurance; 18,000 Americans die every year because
of this. Fred and Mel are ‘between gigs’ – in other words, out of work.
But imagine Murray or Cheech, or any other upper-middle-class
Hollywood actor, trying to say those lines. It would be unfair to the
thesps: it would seem like hypocritical, insincere film-flam – just the
kind of acting Fred Fletcher hates. I’d based these characters, to some
extent, on Del Zamora and Ed Pansullo – actors I’d known for more
than 20 years. Ed had pretty much retired: like Fred, he was working
as a travel agent in the Bay Area. And Del, like Mel, hung out at Home
Depot looking for work as a day labourer, to support his primary
career, actor.
Jonathan Wacks proposed a partnership with New Mexican
investors. But we’d need to shoot a goodly chunk in their home
state, and to get E&O insurance. (Errors and Omissions, the reader
may recall, entails an insurance company vetting the screenplay for
potential libels, defamations, or breaches of copyright.) Wacks is a
good producer but E&O and microfeatures don’t necessarily gel. Then
a new fly landed in the ointment.
I don’t mean to compare Jon Davison to a fly, although he did
produce the greatest giant bug movie of the 1990s, Starship Troopers.
Among his other works are White Dog, Airplane, and RoboCop. Like
Ed, Jon had retired: in his case to his ranch, where he bred massive,
pedigree attack dogs. Years before, he and I had tried, and failed,
to make a giant bug movie of our own: Mars Attacks! When he read
Searchers 2.0, Jon offered to be my LA-based assistant. In this capacity,
he took the script to Frances Doel, head of development for Roger
Corman. Corman offered to finance the film to the tune of $180,000; he
wanted it shot in 15 days.
Roger was the perfect executive producer for Searchers 2.0. His
famous cheapness meant that he didn’t want E&O insurance: this was
a good thing, because it would have killed, or at least warped, the
project. On E&O orders, I’d had to remove powerful, litigious brand
names from the script of Repo Man. Searchers 2.0 is far more anti-
corporate, and specific. The script denigrates cars generally, and SUVs
in particular. Fred insists that Volvos break down and that Denalis and
other big pickup-truck-based luxury vehicles are dangerous. Delilah’s
Suburban is always out of gas or in the shop. Other trademarks,
including AAA, MPAA, Megantic Pictures, Megalithic Studios, and
Naomi Klein’s No Logo are referenced, often by maniacs.
Worse, from a litigation viewpoint, are the gratuitous insults to
beloved folk heroes. Delilah mocks Bud Boetticher; Frobisher insults
Winner. Back then, I’d thought the old stock company dead: now we
were together again. In terms of crew it was also familiar territory:
Steve Fierberg kindly agreed to shoot the film; Cecilia Montiel and
Diego Sandoval to be our art department; Dan Wool to score it.
name.
After a night in Prescott, we drove on to Monument Valley,
pausing only to get stuck in sand, and be rescued by Navajos. We
spent two nights at Goulding’s; we drove through Monument Valley
and into the Valley of the Gods, and watched a DVD projection
of The Searchers in the John Ford Theater. Jon drove us back to LA
– astonishingly (for me, who travels at a snail’s pace via secondary
roads) we made it in 10 hours.
The roads we’d picked were mostly less-travelled: good for
acting-while-driving. Counting Skull Valley, we had all our locations.
The two outstanding issues now were: 1) which camera to use; and 2)
who should play Delilah. The Canon had a good lens and nice, sharp
images, but I had difficulty importing the material into my editing
system. We’d shot using the camera’s faux-24p format, which turned
out to be a fudge of NTSC – i.e. 29.97 frames per second. The inevitable
debate of the merits of PAL vs. NTSC ensued – PAL won.
Which camera to use, then? Corman wanted us to shoot on high-
definition video, but didn’t mind about formats. Steve liked the latest
Panasonic camera, with its interchangeable lenses, but it recorded
HD onto 8 Gb flash cards, which meant hiring an extra crew member
whose sole responsibility was to race back and forth between camera
and player, copying the cards onto a drive so we could re-use them.
Any mistakes and . . . Jon and I didn’t like that concept very much.
Corman’s son, Roger Martin, offered us his Sony HD camera, which
recorded onto Blu-ray discs. But this meant renting an HD player for
the cutting room, and upgrading my editing system, which was set up
to import tape.
Besides, there was something reassuring about tape. You shot
it, pushed the little lever so it couldn’t be recorded over, and kept it
safe. In that way it felt like film negative – even more so when our
production assistants, Orlando and CJ, copied the tapes each evening,
and messengered the copies back to LA. In the long term, our sense of
security was false: digital video’s lifespan is dangerously unknown.
DVDs decay much faster than anyone expected; hard drives and flash
drives last only a few years; of all the DV storage formats, tape still
seems the most durable. But how long do tapes last? And the machines
to play them?
The tape issue led us back to my camera, a Sony Z-1. I’d used a
VX-1000 for several years, and the Z-1 was just a big, improved version
We were faced with two strong possibilities for Delilah: one was Jaclyn
Jonet, an enthusiastic, spirited actor; the other was a striking actor
from New York who’d just played the lead in an independent feature.
Jon felt we should take these potential cast members for a driving
test, in the rented Suburban. Jac drove fine: she said she’d learned to
drive in just such a car. With the New Yorker, it was an experience
along the lines of my test drive with Fox Harris, only in much heavier
traffic. This was a quite brilliant actor: she almost convinced us she
had driven a car before. Boss Davison was a native New Jersey-ite: he
knew it’d be possible to grow up in New York, unlike LA, and never
drive a car.
We returned to Corman’s offices, in Brentwood. I must still have
been shaking, because Roger asked if everything was all right. I told
him the story of our death-defying driving test. ‘This reminds me
of filming Bloody Mama,’ Roger mused, ‘Shelley Winters was in the
passenger seat, firing a gun at her pursuers. In the driver’s seat I had
put a young actor from New York, named Robert De Niro. I was tied
to one side of the car with a rope, the cinematographer to the other.
The scene called for Robert to drive at top speed down a mountain
road. He did it very well, but at one point almost lost control of the
car. After we cut, I said I’d like to do it again, and I asked him to take
it easy on the corners, so as not to take us over the cliff. Robert replied:
“I don’t know how to drive.” “That’s a print!” I said.’
The shoot began on 5 December 2006; the crew was 10 people. There
were no electricians, no lighting department – we were dependent
on natural daylight, yet we were shooting on the shortest days of
the year. Just before we hit the road, Corman offered to lend us his
35mm cameras: instead of DV, we could make a 35mm feature – if we
could fit it into our $180,000 budget. It was impossible: shooting on
35mm would have required a couple of camera assistants (Steve had
no assistant – only a grip, Dale Alexander, and a gaffer, Steve Mathis),
plus stock and lab costs, video rushes, higher shipping costs, and an
answer print at the end. It was a fine idea to shoot on 35mm, but this
was a microfeature.
On day one, we violated the Second Film Commandment by
shooting in the home of our makeup artist, Kate Donahue. Kate was
a good friend, as was her husband, Shaun Madigan; it was entirely
wrong of me to borrow their apartment as a location, just as it was
wrong of certain crew members to walk on their ceiling wearing
muddy boots, and leave black tape stuck to the white wall. But the
scenes – Pansullo as Fletcher, watching himself on TV, and inviting
Del/Mel in – went well. It was a pleasure working with Steve again,
likewise with Cecilia, who brought mounds of old newspapers and
framed pictures of Pansullo to adorn Fred Fletcher’s home.
That afternoon we filmed our flashbacks on a sound stage at Sony
in Culver City. Our location manager, Simon Tams, had found some
big pieces of extruded polystyrene, which Cecilia turned into the
buttes of Monument Valley: a backdrop for the scene where Frobisher
whips the child actors. This was a film-within-a-film: Roger Corman
the evil producer, Sy Carter the ineffectual director. Next day Del and
I went to Home Depot and hired some job-seekers to play themselves
in the film’s opening scene. They were all good, natural actors. A
Nicaraguan, Juan Leyva, played the worker who shouts at Mel for
fighting with the boss. Thence to Cecilia’s house in Venice, which we’d
chosen as the location for Delilah’s home, violating the Second Film
Commandment again.
And thence to the road: our second day ended with cast and crew
leaving LA, headed for Desert Hot Springs, shooting as we went. This
was the third big scene of the day; the actors were all prepared, and
performed wonderfully. It couldn’t last.
Searchers 2.0 is 96 minutes long. Its script is 94 pages. With most films,
a page equals a minute of screen time. A ‘normal’ independent feature
might take five or six weeks to shoot – averaging three or three and
a half script pages a day. With our 15-day schedule, we had to shoot
more than six pages daily. This was a tall order, particularly for the
three principals, who were together in more than half the scenes.
We shot more or less in sequence: that is to say, we began filming
in LA, where the story started, and shot the ensuing scenes in order as
we headed towards Monument Valley. This was of some help to the
actors, but learning six to eight pages daily and emoting convincingly
while driving to Utah was a tall order. Del and Jacyln excelled: they
were always word-perfect when they got into the car. Ed found it
tougher going.
Now, there are two types of film actor: 1) those who show up,
like stage actors on the opening night of a play, word-perfect; and 2)
those who show up with the script in hand – usually they’re familiar
with it, but they plan to learn their lines during rehearsals, and in
their trailer. Michael Madsen, for instance, is always word-perfect;
Harry Dean Stanton is of the latter school. Both are excellent actors;
both methods work. But obviously 1) is easier on the other actors, and
more pleasing to the director. On Searchers 2.0, Pansullo was of school
2). There would be pauses as he struggled to recall his lines; the more
takes we did, the better he got. Del tended to be more consistent, and
to be annoyed when Ed wasn’t ready.
were cutaways, shots of the other actors, so I knew I could cut around
pauses, or combine takes, at the editing stage. When we shot plano
secuencia, Ed always got it together. At one point – the long scene
where Fred and Mel list their favourite war movies – Pansullo wrote
his lines on cards and stuck them on the dashboard. Del expected me
to give him some abuse for this act of laziness, but I couldn’t: I myself
had done this very same thing. It was a film shot the day after we
finished Revengers Tragedy: I was playing Drew Schofield’s psychiatrist,
and – claiming I had no time to learn my lines – had got the assistant
director to write my dialogue on big cards, to be positioned behind the
camera. The director, Jim Marquand, had forgiven me, so how could I
not forgive Pansullo? And the card incident occurred but once.
This was a scene shot against time in a vast location – the Valley
of the Gods. There was little danger of two cameras getting in each
other’s way (which usually happens with two-camera coverage on
a restricted set), and Steve is a very patient teacher of photography.
Surprisingly, I began to rely on the TV monitor during takes: there
was no other way of judging the scene when we were in the Suburban:
Steve, our highly flexible sound recordist, Alexandra Gallo, and I
had to be jammed out of sight under the seats. I quickly became
addicted to the monitor’s eye-view of what Steve saw – I justified this
by pretending I was checking focus, as the Z-1 lacked a proper focus
ring.
When we were half-way through the Q&A showdown sequence,
a massive storm blew in: next morning, the valley was carpeted with
fresh snow. Again we rescheduled, and shot the funeral scene. Sy
already knew his speech; Jon had the other actors on standby. Thanks
to this, the funeral looks like something from Corbucci’s The Big
Silence, which is not a bad thing.
All the films described in this book were lucky with the weather;
Searchers 2.0 was luckiest of all. The staff at Goulding’s told us that a
cigarette company had sent a huge crew out the previous December
– they’d occupied the whole hotel for seven days, waiting with cranes
and dollies and lamps and horse trailers and cowboy stuntmen for it
to snow. It didn’t.
What had seemed like a potential nightmare – filming daylight
scenes on very short days – turned out to be a blessing. By the end, we
only had nine hours of usable daylight, so it was easy to get up before
dawn, have breakfast, and start the day with a splendid dawn shot.
And what daylight, when it came! In the summer, the sun is overhead
for most of the day. This gives the photographer lots of light, but of a
harsh, unforgiving kind. In December, the sun is dramatically low on
the horizon. During our last week, there was always interesting cloud
cover: sometimes the clouds were magnificent.
The actors preferred shooting on tape rather than film. There
were no slates (necessary to keep film and audio tape in synch), and –
since the DP had no assistant – no tape measures or light meters thrust
into the cast’s faces. I hadn’t realised until then just how intrusive, and
performance-undercutting, conventional film paraphernalia can be.
Shooting on tape is much less intrusive, and you switch tapes every 60
minutes, instead of every 11 minutes with a magazine of 35mm film.
POSTPRODUCTION
Searchers 2.0 was edited in a cabin, two days’ drive from Monument
Valley, using Avid Xpress Pro on a Mac laptop. No technical problems
were encountered. The picture files were kept on separate hard drives
– less than 500 Gb, in all. Jon came up in the middle of a snowstorm,
and we locked the picture. Dan scored the film, and Richard Beggs
designed the sound in San Francisco. Special effects were created
by Eric Leven at Tippet Studios in Berkeley, and by Pete Kuran, at
VCE in LA. Eric created the helicopter fleet that whisks Fred out of
Monument Valley in pursuit of Fritz. Pete designed the title sequence
and incidental effects: the best one depicts the effect of marijuana on a
male human with the mind of a 16-year-old (Fred).
As far as effects, music, and audio went, we were really in another
world, seemingly beyond the reach of a microfeature. Amazing deals
were made – but amazing deals are often made, if someone wants to
work and likes your picture.
Inserts suggested themselves as the edit progressed. I shot them
with the Z-1: a TV monitor in the cutting room, featuring Quasi the
Duck; a gas gauge nearing empty; a sign, made by Diego, reading, ‘El
Rey Apartments – Where Excelence [sic] Is King’.
When the picture was locked, Kim Ryan flew me back to
Liverpool, to act in a film of hers. One of her crew, Ian Bickerstaff, told
me he’d been tasked to shoot some aerial footage the previous year –
DISTRIBUTION
While we were still in postproduction, the BBC bought UK distribution
rights, and JVC, perhaps encouraged by Mr Negishi, acquired the
film for Japanese release. Thus Searchers 2.0 had recouped half its cost
before it was complete. Thanks to its cultured director, Marco Müller,
we were invited to the Venice Film Festival. Marco had run the Torino
Festival, which showed both RoboCop and Repo Man. For 2007, he and
the excellent critic, Marco Giusti, were planning a retrospective of
Italian Westerns.
The script was translated into Italian by Norma Leuzzi and
Catherine Marcangeli in Paris, and married to the picture, on a new
HD SR tape, in LA. This time it only took two Avid experts to stop the
process falling apart.
The world premiere was at the Sala Perla, in Venice, on 31
August. During the screening, the projectionist accidentally pushed
the pause button during a crucial scene. It was an unnerving moment,
as it always is. The picture remained frozen: he had presumably fallen
297 postscript
to his/her orders via a precise, hierarchical, chain of command. It starts
with the architect, or the Pope, who is the architect’s boss, and ends
with the man who locks the gate that keeps the beggars out. It isn’t
a lovely or human model, this ascending pyramid of flesh and iron,
echoing with orders shouted downwards, but it gets the job done: it
built Notre Dame, dug the Channel Tunnel, and made 2001: A Space
Odyssey.
The bazaar is a creative model that develops laterally. No one
necessarily decides it should exist, and no one is in charge of it.
The Zapatistas have leaders, but they’re obliged to follow a code of
mandar obedeciendo: leading by obeying. The group, whether a village,
a cooperative, or a revolutionary movement, decides an issue, and
certain people get tasked to carry it out. They don’t make policy: they
‘lead’ by doing what the group wants done.
But independent films must move fast, and group decision-
making is usually slow. When I worked in Mexico and Japan, the
director was treated as the person with creative authority. In the
US, the crew and cast sometimes anticipated a struggle between the
director and the producers, and waited to see who won it; effective
forward movement could thus be difficult.
Could Raymond’s bazaar model be applied to making feature
films? I don’t see why not. A cooperative group of creative people –
such as exists around the Nova Cinema in Brussels, or the audiovisual
community in Rotterdam, or at Vive Television in Caracas, or in
a good film school – could choose the subject. A group could write
the script, but what of production, which depends on individuals
who take responsibility for shooting the film, for paying for it, for
recording the sound, for choosing or building sets, for playing a role?
Hierarchy thus is part of the process, as is abrupt information-sharing
and a certain amount of direct confrontation, something that is easier
for men than for women. In most societies, women are accustomed to
pretend to admire fragile male egos, and to get their way indirectly.
Yet to direct a chaotic film set with its share of difficult actors and
complex characters, a woman must confront stupid men directly, as
‘equals’. And this – for many good, intelligent women – is hard to do.
compete with each other for the limited number of parts. Women
actors compete more intensely, because there are fewer female roles
than male.
Once the film is financed, and the roles are cast, the process
changes: barring disasters, the process becomes a collaborative one.
All work, in relative unison and harmony, towards a common goal.
This continues into postproduction. Rivalries and competition don’t
reappear until the making of the title cards. Then, everything reverts
to competition mode. The finished film must compete against other
films: 1) for a distributor; 2) for festivals; 3) for a soundtrack album
deal; 4) for the attention of the media; 5) for the services of a good,
illegal flyposter; and 6) for the largest possible audiences on its
opening weekend.
A microfeature – destined straight for DVD and TV – can avoid
5), 6), and possibly 3). But it too must participate in 1), 2) and 4): there’s
no escape from these, if your art is to find its audience.
I was discussing this – the disagreeable nature of the competition,
the pleasure of the process – with Linda Callahan, one of Walker’s
actors. She said the difference was between a contest and a ritual.
The contest, in which we all compete for limited resources, is one of
deliberately stimulated antagonism, as in a ‘reality’ TV show. The
ritual is something in which everyone participates. Not everyone is
equal in the ritual – some have bigger roles than others; some wear
more elaborate costumes – but everyone has her/his part to play in it.
Everyone’s action is crucial to its success. When the ritual goes well,
no one is judged or made to feel worthless; everyone is essential, and
involved.
One time, watching the Deer Dance outside Tucson, it occurred
to me that it isn’t what you achieve that matters. What counts is how
you comport yourself. Loathing the contest, I still love the ritual, so I
remain.
Edge City
1 For more information about copyright issues and Creative Commons
licences, see Lawrence Lessig’s website, http://www.lessig.org/. You can
download a PDF copy of his book Free Culture from http://www.free-
culture.cc/ or purchase/borrow a physical copy in the usual way. Further
info about free software and the battle against corporate abuse can be
found at the sites of the Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/)
and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/).
Repo Man
1 John Waters, interviewed by Ted Elrick, DGA magazine, January 1999.
2 Roger Corman was, of course, the director of some ground-breaking,
hugely successful independent films, including The Pit and the Pendulum,
The Masque of the Red Death, The Trip, and The Man With the X-Ray Eyes. He
was also the producer of a prodigious number of films, and US distributor
of many foreign art pictures. His philosophy was to make as many films
as possible, in the belief that many would be bad, some would be good,
and most would make money. Whatever its flaws, his was a model that
maximised creativity, and provided the largest number of jobs and
opportunities. It was still hierarchical, but it gave many actors, producers,
and directors experience, and created a body of important, independent
American films.
3 Chris Morris, ‘Sounds Like Murder’, The LA Reader, 6 July 1979, and Craig
Lee, ‘This Violent Generation’, LA Weekly, 9 January 1981.
4 This type of boring, generic storytelling is what the director Peter Watkins
calls the Monoform. Combined with what Watkins calls the Universal
Clock, it has obliged all audiovisual art – dramatic films, TV news reports,
documentaries – to use the same frenetic film language, emphatic music,
and rigid time frames. A handful of white, male studio executives and TV
Straight To Hell
1 The Scapegoat, the famous pre-Raphaelite painting by William Holman
Hunt (1854) hangs in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, near my childhood
303 notes
painting is very like Almería’s, and the theme appeals to me for some
reason.
2 Charles Higham, Trading With The Enemy: The Nazi–American Money Plot
1933–1949 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1983), p.62.
Walker
1 In 1984 the US Navy mined Nicaragua’s harbours, causing much damage
and many deaths. This was part of a decade-long terror campaign,
financed by the US, in which tens of thousands died. Nicaragua reported
the US to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Two years later
the Court ruled against the US, declaring (by a 12 to 3 majority) that the
US had acted in breach of customary international law, and ordering it
to pay reparations to Nicaragua. (This is the case which established that
there is no right of ‘pre-emptive self-defence’ – a pretext later used for the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.)
2 Jonathan Buchsbaum, Cinema and the Sandinistas: Filmmaking in
Revolutionary Nicaragua (Texas Film & Media Studies) (Austin: University
of Texas, 2003) is a fascinating history of the Nicaraguan films of INCINE,
which ranged from mini-documentaries to features. He quotes one
INCINE veteran, Martha Clarissa Hernandez, as saying that all Noticieros
were group efforts, which suggests that INCINE was experimenting with
alternatives to solo authorship as early as 1979 or 1980.
3 This was during a State of Emergency, during which all strikes and
popular militancy were supposedly illegal. Our Nicaraguan workers were
clearly unimpressed by the State of Emergency, and my impression was
that this was normal. The Sandinistas disapproved of strikes, but turned a
blind eye to them.
4 It would have been foolish to imagine there weren’t spies within the
production. One of the Americans who played an Immortal, Daniel J.
Glen, wrote an article about his experiences for his college newspaper,
The Tech, on his return to the US. His editor ran it on the same page as a
large advert recruiting MIT students for the CIA, published on 20 October
1987. The CIA ran a branch office in Boston, so as to make interviewing
students from the elite schools easier. You can find the page, ad and all, on
the Internet.
5 The Church’s failure to repair and roof its cathedral in Managua has an
interesting counterpart in Liverpool: in the early twentieth century, the
Catholic Church planned the largest religious building in the world –
designed by Lutyens, it was supposed to be bigger than St Peter’s in Rome.
The foundations were excavated, but the Second World War crippled the
city, whose Catholics could no longer afford to pay for the most ambitious
cathedral in the world.
6 The Contras’ overseer was John Negroponte, US ambassador to Honduras.
More recently, Negroponte was the US Ambassador to Iraq.
7 Bill Daniels, my father-in-law, was one of those Americans.
8 Universal, Paramount, and the other Hollywood studios were given an
official anti-trust exemption when they were still making silent films, via
Three businessmen
1 Steve Fierberg, writing about SEARCHERS 2.0, says it isn’t more lamps
we need, but more reflector boards, and people holding them. ‘The easiest
way to screw it up is to bring in a light . . . When you get fading light,
never use a lamp because over a long take, a perfectly set movie light at
the beginning will become too bright by the end of the take, because the
ambient light will have fallen. Whereas, if you use a reflector, the ratio
between ambient light and fill will be constant.’ Steve Fierberg, ‘A Western
State of Mind’, DV, Vol 16, No 1, April 2008.
Revengers Tragedy
1 Michael Green, The Art of Coarse Acting (London: Arrow Books, 1980) is a
wonderful guide to actors’ crimes.
2 This is the same comet which Frank King was so excited about in Three
Businessmen; having killed off the dinosaurs 60 million years ago, it has
just swung by and clipped the planet once again. The characters in the
play The Revengers Tragedy live in terror of comets, with good reason.
Postscript
1 Not surprisingly, his book is called The Cathedral & The Bazaar: Musings
on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. (Sebastapol, CA:
O’Reilly, 1999). Its print version is published by O’Reilly, but it continues
to evolve on the internet, and can be read or downloaded, in a variety of
languages, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
307 index
de Mohrenschildt, George, Eccleston, Chris, 203–7, 209, Ferrie, David, 204
204 249, 254, 256–7, 261–3, Ficciones, 198
De Niro, Robert, 285 265–6 Field, Simon, 221
de Noailles, Vicomte and Echánove, Alonso, 191, 203, Fields, Abbie, 141
Vicomtesse, 36 207, 209–10 Fierberg, Steve, 46, 141, 144,
De Palma, Brian, 270 Eddie Nash, a.k.a. Adel 146–7, 154, 282-284, 286,
Deakins, Roger, 7, 32, 51, 87, Nazrallah, 88 290, 295, 304
91–2, 95–7, 100, 103, 285, Edge City Productions, Figueroa, Tolita, 181
289, 301 31–3, 35–6, 38, 44–6, 54, Film Council, The (see UK
Dealey Plaza, Dallas, TX, 71, 74, 85, 212 Film Council)
204 Edinburgh Film Festival, Film Finances, 135, 147, 150
Decline of Western 78, 274 Filmfonds Rotterdam,
Civilization, 33 Eighth Street Playhouse, 218–9, 239, 253
den Hamer, Sandra, 221 NY, 75 Filmolaboratorio, Mexico
DeRamus, Theda, 46 Einstein, Dan, 20, 21 City, 211
Desert Hot Springs, CA, 286 Elks Lodge Hall, LA, 39, 91 Finer, Jem, 111, 119, 123
Desierto de los Organos, Ellis, Bobby, 55, 67–8, 74 Finkelstein, Rick, 37
Sombrerete, Mexico, 182 Embassy Home Finnegan, Tom, 40
Desperado, 251 Entertainment, 82, 88–9 First Film Commandment,
Devo (Akron Punk band), 19 Emma Zunz, 198–9, 304 11
DGA (Directors Guild of Emmanuelle, 79 Flashdance, 61
America), 64, 65 Engel, Andi, 173 Fletcher Cook, Graham,
Diaz, Debbie, 82, 133 ‘Enhancement’, 148, 162, 83, 102
Dick, Philip K., 92, 247 184 Flores, Angel, 134, 136
digital video, 1, 2, 219, 254, Eno, Brian, 25 Fonda, Henry, 20, 111
284, 286, 294, 295 Espectro de la Guerra, El, 134, Fons, Jorge, 181, 182
Dinamita, Mexico, 184, 193 164 For a Few Dollars More, 114,
Dirker, Henk, 233 Espinoza, Omero, 185 232
Discreet Charm of the Estevez, Emilio, 34, 40–1, Ford, John, 59–60, 99, 232,
Bourgeoisie, The, 217 49–50, 52–3, 55, 59–61, 278, 283–4
Dix, Otto, 171, 243 63, 74 Foronjy, Richard, 56, 282
Django Kill, a.k.a. If You Live, Estudios America, Mexico Four Weddings and a Funeral,
Shoot!, 113, 121, 294 City, 191 205, 210 263
Dodgers (LA baseball team), Everett, Rupert, 78, 82 Fowlis, Ray, 224, 227, 265–6
45 Everyman Theatre, Fox Venice Cinema, LA,
Doel, Frances, 281 Liverpool, 251 26–7
Dog Day Afternoon, 56 Exterminating Angel Fox, James, 11
Dolan, Dennis, 66, 69, 70, 72, Productions, 251 Free Software, 2, 301
73, 88 Exterminating Angel, The, 247 French Connection, The, 66
Don’t Look Now, 93 Exterminator, 79 Fridge, Brixton, 109
Donahue, Kate, 286 Friedkin, William, 44
Doria, Malena, 189, 190 Faber, George, 201 FTC NorthWest, 220
Dos Vidas Destruidas por la FACT, Liverpool, 274 Fuji TV, Tokyo, 236, 237
Droga, 107 Fahrenheit 9/11, 269
Downey, Mrs, 222–3, 227 ‘Fair Use’, 302 Gabriel, Teshome, 26
Downing, Ron, 136 Fanaka, Jamaa, 33 Gallo, Alexandra, 290
Dr Mabuse, 200 Farben, I.G., 124 Gandolfini, James, 221
Dream Players, The, 137 Farfan, Jorge, 189 Gang of Four (British Punk
Dreams of Children,, 220 fascists, 12, 36, 113, 197 band), 88
Driver, The, 15 Fear (LA Punk band), 30, 34, Garciadiego, Paz Alicia, 178
Drysdale, Lee, 83 70, 88 Garden of the Forking Paths,
Duchess of Malfi, The, 83, 108, Fear and Loathing in Las The, 198
110–11, 128, 247 Vegas, 227 Gardiner, Greg, 51
Duran Duran, 79, 107 Federal Highway Patrol, Garko, Gianni, 294
Durango, Mexico, 182, 185, Mexico, 175, 178–80, 195 Garrido, Juan, 175–6
189, 202 Fellner, Eric, 79–83, 96, 105, Garrison, Jim, 204
Dury, Ian, 83, 90 106–7, 110–12, 117, 121, Garzón Jr, Miguel, 209
123, 125 Garzón, Miguel, 181–2, 184,
E&O (Errors & Omissions), Fernández, Emilio ‘El 187–8, 191, 193–4, 202,
44–5, 280–1 Indio’, 178, 210 206, 209–10, 262
309 index
kibun, 54, 180, 237, 289, 302 Leyva, Juan, 286 128, 202, 211, 216, 231
Kidman, Nicole, 274 Liam, 277 Madsen, Michael, 287
Kiel, Sue, 119 Library of Congress, 5 Magruder, Betsy, 44, 52,
Killer of Sheep, 8, 25 Liceaga, Alejandra, 178–9, 56, 102
Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 180, 189–91, 206 Malaga, Spain, 113, 118, 269
The, 17 Li-Ho, Alejandro, 212 Malibu, Chevrolet, 14, 19,
Killing, The, 17 Like Water for Chocolate, 210 31, 43–4, 50–1, 54–5, 61,
King Kong, 237 Lima, Miguel, 136, 202 63–4, 66–7, 73
King of the Mountain, 40 Littin, Miguel, 134 Managua, Nicaragua, 14,
King, Nancy, 11, 19, 20 Liverpool, 202, 218–22, 132, 135, 139, 141, 149,
Kings of the Road, 57 224–228, 235, 242, 248–50, 159–60, 162–3, 166, 271,
Kinski, Klaus, 87, 232 252–3, 256–7, 259, 261, 303
Kiss Me Deadly, 31, 62 263–4, 266–9, 271, 273–4, Mandingo, 264
Klein, Naomi, 281 277, 292, 303 Mandoki, Luis, 134
Knickerbocker, Mr, 49 Liverpool City Centre Manifesto, Il, 274
Kowalski, Lech, 78 Evacuation Plan, 267–8 Mapimí, Mexico, 182
Kragen, Ken, 38 Lizzani, Carlo, 294 Marathon Man, 102
Krish, Justin, 125, 165 Loaeza, Manuela, 177, 181, Marcangeli, Catherine, 293
Ku Klux Klan, 13 202 March, Florence, 12
Kubrick, Stanley, 17 Locarno Film Festival, 274 Marin, Cheech, 280
Kuran, Pete, 292 London, 7, 27, 77–81, 83, 85, Marlowe, Christopher, 245
Kurosawa, Akira, 99, 111, 87–90, 93–6, 101–3, 105, Marquand, James, 288
254, 257, 272 109–10, 126–7, 131, 136–7, Mars Attacks!, 112, 281
Kyd, Thomas, 245–7 141, 154, 159, 165, 171–3, Martin, David, 88, 102–3,
193, 202, 206, 208, 211, 125–6, 156, 165–6
LA River, 47, 49, 57, 161 222, 230, 234, 240–1, 246, Martin, Ellen, 129, 132, 153,
LA Times, The, 20–1, 27 248–9, 251–2, 255, 268–9, 155
Labyrinths, 9 272–3, 277, 302, 304 Marubeni, 178
Lacor, Jean-Michel, 178, 181 London, Tony, 99 Marx, Carlos, 171
Lady from Shanghai, 200 Long Riders, The, 119 Masada, Sammy, 178
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port López Rojas, Eduardo, 185 Mask of Zorro, The, 251
Sunlight, 260, 302 López, Roberto, 153 Mason, Shaun, 254, 265
Laemmle’s Music Hall, LA, Los Angeles, CA, 10, 12, 14, Masque Theatre, Liverpool,
214 16–20, 22, 24, 27, 29, 30–1, 220
Lake Nicaragua, 155, 168 35–6, 39, 40, 42, 44–9, 52, Masters of the Universe, 133
Lambton, Ann, 83. 93 55, 58, 61–2, 65, 67–70, Masur, Richard, 41–2, 155
Lamour, Dorothy, 285, 288 72–5, 81–2, 84–5, 87–8, Matagalpa, Nicaragua, 148
Lang, Fritz, 200 91, 96, 98, 99, 100–2, 108, Matheson, Margaret, 80,
Lang, Jack, 107 111, 118, 121, 123, 134, 107, 249, 250–1, 255,
Lang, Tom, 259, 270 136–7, 140–1, 147–8, 154, 263–4, 274
LAPD (Los Angeles Police 165, 185, 193–4, 204–5, Mathis, Steve, 286, 290
Dept), 39, 48, 57, 67–8, 92 209, 211–12, 214, 217, 226, Matlin, Marlee, 129–30, 135,
Larriva, Tito, 69, 92, 194 238, 250, 254, 256, 279, 155
Las Vegas, NV, 19 281, 283–8, 292–3, 301 Matlock, Graham, 78, 89,
Last Supper, The, 123, 166 Love Kills novel, 107 106
Lawrence of Arabia, 85, 114 Love, Courtney, 85, 87, 98, Matsushita, 177
League, Tim, 278 109, 113–17, 121, 124 Mavrides, Paul, 170–1, 214
Lean, David, 113 LSD, 19, 91–2 Max’s Kansas City, NY, 82,
Lee, Craig, 39 Lumet, Sidney, 56–7, 282 88, 97
‘Legend of Paddy Garcia, Lydon, John, a.k.a. Johnny Mayer, Kenny, 37
The’, 111 Rotten, 47, 89–90 Mayflower Hotel, N.Y., 89
León, Nicaragua, 14, 130, Lyne, Adrian, 60–1 Mayflower, The, 22
131, 163 MCA, 75
Leone, Sergio, 99, 110, MacArthur Foundation, 5 McAlpine, Andrew, 91, 95,
113–14, 124, 128, 232, 278 Mackintosh, Graham, 215 111, 117, 120
Lessig, Lawrence, 2, 301–2 Mad Cow Disease, 225 McCarthy, Peter, 29, 31–7,
Let Him Have It, 203, 261 Madigan, Shaun, 15, 114, 39, 41, 46, 50, 53, 54, 56,
Leuzzi, Norma, 293 123, 286 63, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74–6,
Leven, Eric, 292 Madonna, 77–8, 82 82, 85, 96, 130, 207, 302,
Lewis, Mark, 29–30 MADRE, 171 304
311 index
189–95, 211, 213–14, 225 Performance, 11–12 74, 78–9, 88, 90–1, 94–5,
Ocean Park, CA, 43–5 Perrin, Bryce, 155 97
Ogikubo, Tokyo, 235 Perry, Simon, 248, 252
Old Tucson, AZ, 169, 278 Phantom of Liberty, 12 Quaaludes, 10, 15
Oldman, Gary, 83–9, 92–5, Phantom of the Paradise, 149 Quasi at the Quackadero, 292
97–103, 106–8, 112, 250, Pickwick Drive-In, Studio Queen Mother, The, 265
302 City, LA, 127 Questi, Giulio, 113, 294
O’Leary, Billy, 149, 162–3 Picton Library, Liverpool, Quick, Diana, 249, 256, 262
Olivier, Laurence, 102 252 Quién Sabe?, a.k.a. A Bullet
Olvidados, Los, 217 Pierce, Franklin, 130 for the General, 111
Once Upon a Time in the PiFan Science Fiction
West, 20, 119, 278 Festival, Puchon, Korea, Radiohead, 256
One-Eyed Jacks, 17 214 Rae Fox, J., 36, 46–7, 68, 88,
opium, 99, 142 PiL (Public Image Ltd), 91, 101, 133, 138
Oregon, 197, 217, 291 47, 90 Rafelson, Bob, 37
Origin of Consciousness in the Pineda, Frank, 134, 154, 168 Ralphs supermarket, 55
Breakdown of the Bicameral Pink Flamingos, 33, 36 Rambaldi, Carlo, 138
Mind, The, 9 Pinochet, Augusto, 197 Ramone, Dee Dee, 78, 103
Orion Pictures, 27 Pitcher, John, 266 Ramones, The, 103
O’Riordan, Cait, 110 Pitts, Randolph, 26 Ran, 149, 170
Orozco, Jorge, 185, 206 plano secuencia, 16, 92, 103, Raphael, Paul, 121–2
Ortega, Daniel, 139 123, 153, 176, 184, 187, Raymond, Eric, 296–7
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 83, 189, 195, 209, 221, 250, Reagan, Ronald, 282
204 262, 288 Real Madrid Football Club,
Oxford, 8, 81, 245, 266 ‘plate of shrimp’, 66, 79 264
Playhouse, Oxford, 245 Realejo, Nicaragua, 131,
Pacheco, Marcelino, 136, 168 Plays and Poems of Cyril 141, 151
Pacino, Al, 56, 282 Tourneur, The, 245 Red Beard, 257
PAL vs. NTSC, 284 Plugz, Los (LA Punk band), Red Dawn, 76
Palacio de Correos, Mexico 19, 34, 39, 69, 256 Redglare, Rockets, 78
City, 204 Plutonium Card, 231, 241 Rehme, Robert, 38, 61, 71
Palmdale, CA, 50 PNDC (Patrulla Nacional de Reid, Jamie, 108
Panama, 173 Carreteras), 180 Return of Ringo, The, 283
PanAmerican World Pogues, The, 103, 109–12, Return of the Seacaucus Seven,
Airways, 74, 237 119, 121–3, 127, 256 33
Panavision, 217 Pollock, Tom, 170–2 Revengers Tragedy
Pandaemonium, 248 Pooya, Rafiq, 23, 26 production, Swan
Pansullo, Ed, 19, 29–30, 42, Pop, Iggy, 68–9, 75, 112 Theatre, 172, 249
74, 99, 118, 280–2, 285–9 Pope, The, 255, 297 Revengers Tragedy, The,
Pansullo, Michael, 289 Portland, OR, 137 245–7, 250, 260, 270
Paramount Pictures, 69, Portman, Richard, 33 Reynolds, Paul, 256–7, 261,
172, 303 POSIWID, 252–3 270
Paris, Texas, 65 Pray for Rain, 102–3, 127–8, RIAA (Recording Industry
Parker, Alan, 253 206–7, 212, 238, 256, 302 Association of America),
Parras, Mexico, 182, 186 Preloran, Jorge, 23, 26 2
Parton, Dolly, 46 Prensa, La (Managua), 135, Richardson, Bob, 67, 87,
Pastora, Eden, 153 136 134–5
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Prescott, AZ, 283–4 Richardson, Nancy, 42
76, 131, 139, 149 Pressman, Ed, 121, 133–7, Richardson, Sy, 40, 42, 44,
Paths of Glory, 17 140–1, 147, 149–50 52, 56, 67, 99, 108, 111,
Patrick, Andrew, 220 Price, Frank, 71–2, 75 113, 116–17, 121, 123,
Pattinson, Charlie, 198, 201 Principio y Fin, 176, 191 127–8, 144, 164, 170, 282,
PCP (Angel Dust), 45 Provaas, Carolien, 228, 233 285, 288–90, 296
Peckinpah, Sam, 16, 66, 99, Prozac, 279 Richardson, Teresa, 288
132, 139, 210, 288 PSC, Tokyo, 208 Richmond, Tom, 9–10, 15,
Pellicer, Ariane, 207 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 59 21, 30, 34, 51, 67, 87, 110,
Penitentiary, 33 Puente, Carlos, 166, 168–9, 114–15, 117, 120, 128,
Penn, Arthur, 17, 50 176, 192–3, 202, 210, 212, 289
Penn, Chris, 44, 53–4 212–14 Ride The High Country, a.k.a.
Penn, Sean, 53, 136–7, 288 Pullman, Philip, 248 Guns in the Afternoon, 132
313 index
Trabajadores Tokyo, Japan, 128, 208, 214, Utay, Will, 144
de la Industria 220, 234–7, 242 Uxbridge College,
Cinematográfica), 192 Tolkien, J.R.R., 248 Uxbridge, 94
Stone, Oliver, 135 Tolteca cement factory,
Strain, Hugh, 105–6 Mexico City, 209 Valley of the Gods, Utah,
Streets of Fire, 38 Toña beer 145, 163 279, 284, 290–2
Strummer, Joe, 69, 96, 103–5, ‘Too Kool to Die’, 77–8, 90, Van Cleef, Lee, 114
107–17, 121, 125–7, 129, 210 van der Hijden, Jalle, 228,
136–7, 142–4, 149, 165–6, Torres, Juan, 119, 120 233–4
168–9, 172, 193, 209, 256, Torres, Martin, 210 van der Pluim, Ruud, 230
274–5, 302 Total Recall, 187 Van Heijningen, Jacques,
Suburban, Chevrolet, 283, Touch of Evil, 20 219
290 Toxteth, Liverpool, 29 van Rhoon, Christine, 223,
Suburbia, 45 traca-traca, 151–2 226, 233, 238
Suburbs of Edge City, The, 9 Tramhuys Bar, Rotterdam, Vancouver Film Festival, 214
Sugarman, Sara, 83, 107, 230, 235 Vandenberg Air Force Base,
119–20 Tranmere Rovers Football CA, 100
Swatty, 41 Club, 264 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 130,
Tregenza, Robert, 221, 136–7, 163, 169–70
Tabernas, Almería, 111, 124, 224–5, 227, 232–3, 235 Vardy, Adam, 239
126, 184, 231 Tremarco, Christine, 249, Variety, 33, 74
Taguchi, Tomorowo, 235, 236 254 Vatican, The, 255
Tait, Pam, 91, 113, 118, 122, Triumph of Death, The, 226 Velasco, José María, 193
133, 144 Truth Or Consequences, Velvet Underground, 97
Takemitsu, Tôru, 170 NM, 31 Venice Film Festival, 273,
Takizawa, Ryoko, 236 Tubac, AZ, 278 293-4
Talgo, Spain, 111 Tube, London, 80, 105 Venice, CA, 14, 26, 29–30,
Taliban, 99 Tucker, Forrest, 278 34, 41–2, 45–6, 54, 58,
Talking Heads, 47 Tucson, AZ, 170, 216, 298 62–3, 82, 85, 100, 152,
Talking to Strangers, 221 Tudor-Pole, Ed, a.k.a. Ten- 212, 279, 286
Tamayo, Rufino, 176, 185 Pole Tudor, 94, 111, 113, Vernon, CA, 30
Tams, Simon, 286 117, 119, 153 Vicente Gómez, Andrés,
Tangerine Dream, 25, 208 Tula, Mexico, 206 198–9, 202, 211
Taos, NM, 36 Turner, Martin, 54, 61, 114, Vicious, Sid, 25, 71, 76–9, 83,
Taylor, Dexter, 153 121–3, 125, 171, 216, 220, 88–90, 92, 97, 104, 106
Teamsters, 44, 48, 54–5, 225, 231–2, 302 Victoria beer, 145, 163
57–8, 67, 188 Tushingham, Rita, 249 Vida Conyugal, La, 191
Temple, Julien, 95 Twickenham Studios, 127 Villareal, René, 154, 184–5,
Thatcher, Margaret, 105, Two-Lane Blacktop, 16, 49, 76 191, 202
127, 145, 226 Viridiana, 123
Third Film Commandment, UCLA, 5, 7–13, 15–20, 23–6, Volontè, Gian Maria, 87,
11 28-29, 33–6, 39, 41–2, 44, 114, 232
Thomas, Jeremy, 79, 173 48, 51, 56–8, 60, 65, 78, VPRO, 217, 218, 219, 221,
Thomas, Vicky, 39–40, 44, 100, 110, 137, 148, 221, 239
58–9, 64, 81–2, 85, 87–8, 238
133, 137–8, 190 UIP, 73, 173 Wacks, Jonathan, 29, 31–3,
Thorpe, Jeremy, 77 UK Film Council, The, 248, 35–7, 39, 41, 50–1, 53–4,
Thunders, Johnny, 81, 107 252–3, 255, 263–4, 268–70 56, 61, 63, 69, 70, 72–6,
Thurstason, Wirral, 252 Union Station, LA, 100 280, 302–3
Tijuana, Mexico, 97 United Airlines, 242 Wacks, Margaret, 36
Time, 171 United Nations General Waiting for the Barbarians, 29
Time Out, 263, 264 Assembly, 173 Wali, Monona, 42
Timerider, 41, 50 Universal Clock, 301 Walker, William, 98, 130,
Tippet Studios, CA, 292 Universal Studios, 19, 36–9, 131, 138, 144–6, 150,
Tippo, Patti, 85, 87 45, 56–7, 62–3, 71–6, 133, 152–3, 164
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 260 135, 138, 140, 148–9, 170, Wall Street, 135
Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico 172, 302, 303 Wallach, Eli, 288
City, 181, 206 Urbina, Miguel, 188, 209, WalMart, 2, 117
Today It’s Me . . . Tomorrow 262 Walter, Tracey, 40–1, 56, 61,
It’s You!, 127 US Marine Corps, 134, 172 63, 66, 72, 221