ACTION!

ACTION!
Interviews with Directors from Classical
Hollywood to Contemporary Iran

Edited by
Gary Morris
Foreword by
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2009

by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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© 2009 Gary Morris editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors.

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

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ISBN-13: 978 1 84331 329 8 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1 84331 329 4 (Pbk)

ISBN-13: 978 1 84331 331 1 (Ebk)

ISBN-10: 1 84331 331 6 (Ebk)

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
 Contents

Foreword, by Jonathan Rosenbaum vii

Editor’s Preface, by Gary Morris xi
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction: The Art and Craft of Interviewing,
by Bert Cardullo xvii

I. Going Hollywood: Masters of Studio Style 01

1. Angel in Exile: Allan Dwan, by Howard Mandelbaum
and Gary Morris 03
2. “An Unhappy Happy End”: Douglas Sirk,
by Michael Stern 17
3. Somebody Up There Likes Me: Robert Wise,
by C. Jerry Kutner 39
4. “The Greatest Movie the World Has Never Seen”:
Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride on Orson Welles’
The Other Side of the Wind, by Damien Love 65
5. “Plant Your Feet and Tell the Truth”: Clint Eastwood,
by Tony Macklin 89

II. Tickets to the Dark Side: Festival Favorites 103

6. Manderlay: Lars von Trier, by Karin Luisa Badt 105
7. 20 Angosht (20 Fingers): Mania Akbari,
by Dorna Khazeni 113
vi CONTENTS

8. I Am a Sex Addict: Caveh Zahedi, by Peter Rinaldi 123

9. Caché (Hidden): Michael Haneke, by Karin Luisa Badt 131

III. Blows Against the Empire: Indie Godfathers 139

10. Sweet Soul Music: Melvin and Mario Van Peebles,
by Damon Smith 141
11. Nearer My Corman to Thee: Roger Corman, Bruce Dern
and David Carradine, by Damien Love 153

IV. Edgeplay: Avant-Garde Auteurs 173

12. An Actionist Begins to Sing: Otto Muehl, by Andrew
Grossman, Trans. by Robert Mark Grossman 175
13. “They’re Panicking, Look at Them!” The Brothers Quay,
by Damon Smith 207

V. Women in Revolt: Artist-Activists 225

14. Dialogues with Madwomen: Allie Light, by Gary Morris 227
15. Shut Up & Sing: Barbara Kopple, by Damon Smith 235

VI. The Canon: Brilliance without Borders 245

16. “For a Kind of Pleasure”: Federico Fellini,
by Toni Maraini, Trans. by A. K. Bierman 247
17. Transcendental Style, Poetic Precision:
Robert Bresson, by Bert Cardullo 265
18. “The Fruitful Tree Bends”: Abbas Kiarostami,
by Bert Cardullo 299
19. Alter Ego, Autobiography and Auteurism:
François Truffant, by Bert Cardullo 323

Contributor Biographies 347

 Foreword

It’s often overlooked that the revolution in film taste promulgated in

the ’50s and ’60s by Cahiers du Cinéma (and, to a lesser extent, by
Positif) was at least as much a matter of interviews as it was a matter
of reviews and essays. Admittedly, the most consequential broadside
by the most prominent Cahiers critic-turned-filmmaker was François
Truffaut’s, “Une Certaine Tendance du cinéma français” (“A Certain
Tendency in the French Cinema”), which first appeared in the 31st
issue (January 1954). But if that opening salvo established an
important polemical position, it must be conceded that Truffaut’s
clinching victory came a dozen years later with Le Cinéma selon
Hitchcock (1966), his book-length interview with his avowed
master, published in English the following year with the simpler title
Hitchcock.
“Une Certain Tendance” was at most a warning shot–a
contentious article that created waves in the Parisian film world, but
still a local event, appearing in an oddball monthly with a then-
modest circulation. Hitchcock, on the other hand, marked an
international paradigmatic shift from the position that commercial
cinema was basically a form of light entertainment to the more
controversial notion that Alfred Hitchcock, the most recognizable
director of light entertainment in Hollywood, was also one of the
medium’s most serious, accomplished, and even experimental and
thoughtful artists.
Truffaut set out to prove this premise by engaging Hitchcock
himself in the discussion–an undertaking requiring the services of an
expert translator, Helen G. Scott, because neither speaker was fluent
in the other’s language. And the discussion finally had more to do
with persuasion and illustration than with assertion or argument.
viii FOREWORD

Hitchcock knew how to entertain while clarifying various points

about his practice, and was far less prone to put on airs about artistic
designs than any of his scrappy French defenders. In this respect, he
was a better spokesperson for la politique des auteurs (or “the auteur
theory,” as Andrew Sarris Americanized the concept) than Truffaut
himself, at least within Anglo-American film culture–so much so that
his own status as a serious artist went from being an outrageous
postulate to a commonplace assumption within a relatively short
period of time.
One obvious reason why interviews with directors have generally
been regarded as an adjunct to film criticism rather than an integral
part of it is the exclusion of these interviews from most critical
collections, including English-language volumes devoted to Cahiers
du Cinéma. This exclusion has come about partly because of the
problem of translating English-speaking directors from French back
into English, which inevitably mangles their discourse, and partly
because interviews, even though they represent an important part of
the Cahiers revolution, are commonly regarded as second-class
citizens among critical texts.
But as the book you’re now holding shows, the insights to be
gleaned from conscientious interviews with articulate filmmakers are
worth a lot more than this patronizing treatment. Indeed, to cite one
outstanding example, I think a deeper understanding of Robert
Bresson’s films can be gleaned from Bert Cardullo’s 1983 interview
with Bresson than from most critical essays. And going all the way
from Allan Dwan to Truffaut himself in these pages, I think one
winds up with a pretty all-encompassing definition of cinema itself.
So assembling 19 interviews here, as Bright Lights editor Gary
Morris has done, is above all a critical enterprise.
Aptly describing itself as, “a popular-academic hybrid of movie
analysis, history, and commentary, looking at classic and
commercial, independent, exploitation, and international film from
a wide range of vantage points from the aesthetic to the political,”
Bright Lights is a magazine that was launched in print in 1974,
continued that way until 1980, and then was revived from 1993 to
1995 before migrating to the web in 1996–making it the most striking
example of a film journal that has survived and even flourished in
online form. (As I write, its 60th issue has just appeared.) And as one
can readily see from this collection, interviews are as natural a part
of its territory as critical articles.
 FOREWORD ix

The range of material to be found here is unusually broad–so

much so that the six section headings should be regarded quite
loosely. It’s one of the Catch-22s of film criticism that the most
singular films and filmmakers tend to elude whatever categories we
might think up for them. So in “Going Hollywood: Masters of
Studio Style,” for instance, we not only go all the way from an
important, but neglected and early pioneer (Dwan) to the most
prestigious Hollywood auteur currently at work (Clint Eastwood),
encountering along the way such disparate figures as Douglas Sirk
and Robert Wise. We also take in the most celebrated of the
unfinished and unseen features of Orson Welles, thanks to the
testimonies of two of his most resourceful chroniclers, Peter
Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride, both of whom acted in the film.
But I hasten to add that even though Hollywood as an institution,
business and state of mind is central to The Other Side of the Wind,
and a major studio’s backlot even figures (surreptitiously) as one of
the locations, this is the most independent of all of Welles’s films
made in the U.S. So if this chapter had appeared in Section III,
“Blows Against the Empire: Indie Godfathers,” it wouldn’t be out of
place rubbing shoulders with Melvin and Mario Van Peebles, Roger
Corman, Bruce Dern and David Carradine.
By the same token, some of the more provocative interviews
found here, such as Andrew Grossman’s exchanges with Otto Muehl
and Bert Cardullo’s encounter with Abbas Kiarostami, periodically
threaten to escape even the category of film to settle on society and
life itself. And when filmmakers Federico Fellini or Allie Light talk
about their work, they invariably wind up discussing much more.
This is the enduring legacy of the best film criticism–to take on the
world at the same time that it tangles with such important parts of
that world as art and politics.

Jonathan Rosenbaum
 Editor’s Preface

Hollywood pioneer Allan Dwan, who lived to be 96 and whose first

films date back to 1911, famously told Peter Bogdanovich, “If you
get your head up above the mob, they try to knock it off. If you stay
down, you last forever.” Action! Interviews with Directors from
Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran is our attempt to get 19
directors, working in a wide range of eras, genres, production styles,
and budgets, to, “get their heads above the mob”–without, we trust,
getting them “knocked off.”
It’s fitting that this first collection of writings from Bright Lights
is comprised of interviews with directors. I started the magazine in
1974 as an “auteurist, truth-and-light sheet,” in the words of early
contributor Jeff Wise. Bright Lights’ profile evolved over time
according to the peculiar alchemy of my and the writers’ interests. It
continued to feature director studies and interviews while expanding
into many other areas including genre studies, production histories,
political screeds, explorations of marginalized realms like
exploitation and queer cinema, and whatever other topics the writers
found engaging. This diversity is represented in Action!
When compiling this collection, we asked ourselves, how do
serious film fans experience cinema? What do they look for? Do they
focus exclusively on specific directors, genres, high budgets or low
budgets, European or Asian or American films? We believe that
many viewers like to experience all that cinema has to offer–docs
and features, indies and blockbusters, art films and exploitation.
Why restrict ourselves? In an era of DVDs, cable television,
commercial cinemas, cinematheques, second-run brew pubs and art
houses, there’s never been greater accessibility to such a variety of
cinema. Categories shift and overlap, and contemporary viewers can
xii EDITOR’S PREFACE

easily handle a film like Caveh Zahedi’s I Am a Sex Addict, which

feels initially like a docudrama, but quickly expands into less
recognizable, more challenging territory.
We wanted Action! to reflect that breadth and openness and
cinematic curiosity. Featuring interviews we’ve published either
online at brightlightsfilm.com or in the discontinued print edition,
along with a number of new ones, the book is intended to give film
fans, students and teachers a kind of group portrait of filmmaking to
read for insight, inspiration and entertainment. Rather than the more
common approach of single-director interview books, or those based
on a narrow theme (e.g., all indie filmmakers), Action! covers a very
wide range of filmmakers, including canonical figures, populists,
activists, superstars, and virtual unknowns. The interviews, divided
into six sections, comprise a cinematic world tour, with stopovers in
France (Truffaut), Austria (Otto Muehl), Iran (Mania Akbari, Abbas
Kiarostami) and Italy (Fellini). Some are long and in-depth, while
others are shorter and more informal, but still probing. Some have
longer introductions that offer an overview of a director’s career or
an analysis of the particular film being discussed, while others
plunge post-haste into the dialogue.
“Going Hollywood: Masters of Studio Style” gives readers a
detailed picture of American popular filmmaking during its “golden
era” and aftermath. Allan Dwan, Douglas Sirk, Robert Wise and
Clint Eastwood represent filmmakers who bring a personal, often
subversive vision to commercial, sometimes blockbuster, projects.
Director Peter Bogdanovich and critic Joseph McBride present a rare
look at the tumultuous “easy riders/raging bulls” era through an
eyewitness account of working with Orson Welles on his last major
film, still unfinished and unreleased, The Other Side of the Wind.
In “Tickets to the Dark Side: Festival Favorites,” four art-house
auteurs each discuss a particular work showcased at a film festival,
but expand the discussion into wider realms. Lars von Trier, Mania
Akbari, Caveh Zahedi and Michael Haneke prove as idiosyncratic as
their films, and show why film festivals are critical venues for
promoting important contemporary cinema.
“Blows Against the Empire: Indie Godfathers” profiles two
important figures in the post-studio era. Roger Corman, who virtually
created the New Hollywood of the 1970s and beyond, comments
on his discoveries, and two of them–Bruce Dern and David
Carradine–return the favor by commenting on him. Melvin Van Peebles
 EDITOR’S PREFACE xiii

launched the blaxploitation genre in 1971 with Sweet Sweetback’s

Baadasssss Song. He philosophizes on the film from the vantage
point of decades later, and is joined by his son Mario, who talks
about his father and about his acclaimed 2003 tribute film to Melvin
and Sweetback.
“Edgeplay: Avant-Garde Auteurs” visits some of the most rarified
realms of cinema. Otto Muehl’s disturbing radical artistry starting in
the 1960s incorporates films, “actions,” paintings and manifestos.
This interview finds him at his most explosive. The Brothers Quay
represent an extraordinary symbiosis: twin brothers who
meticulously construct live-action and animated otherworlds that
enchant and disturb in equal measure.
In “Women in Revolt: Activist-Artists,” documentarians Allie
Light and Barbara Kopple talk about their films examining issues of
female representation. Light’s documentary Dialogues with
Madwomen looks at the intersection of socially constructed mental
illness with female artistry, while Kopple’s Shut Up & Sing delves
into the dynamics of the Dixie Chicks, who weathered death threats
after their controversial onstage denunciation of President Bush.
Finally, “The Canon: Brilliance without Borders” features wide-
ranging, in-depth conversations with four seminal figures in world
cinema. Fellini waxes whimsical, and philosophical, on everything
from spectacle to “motionless time” to Carlos Castaneda. Robert
Bresson is unusually forthcoming, if sometimes combative, in
discussing four of his major films. Abbas Kiarostami describes the
challenges of making films in contemporary Iran. Truffaut, in his
previously unpublished final interview, revisits one of cinema’s
richest careers, with particular attention to The 400 Blows.
Without trying to be comprehensive (an impossibility on every
level), we’ve attempted to make Action! the literary equivalent of a
film festival, both serious and fun, equally useful for in-depth study
and casual sampling. A director’s work should speak for itself, but
we like hearing what some of cinema’s most gifted, provocative
creators have to say, and we hope you do, too.

Gary Morris
 Acknowledgements

This book literally would not have been possible without the
contributions of the writers whose names appear herein: Karin Luisa
Badt, Bert Cardullo, Andrew Grossman (and translator Robert
Mark Grossman), Dorna Khazeni, C. Jerry Kutner, Damien Love,
Tony Macklin, Howard Mandelbaum, Toni Maraini (and translator
A. K. Bierman), Peter Rinaldi, Damon Smith, and Michael Stern.
I thank them, along with Robert Keser, Alan Vanneman, Dave J. M.
Saunders, Robert Hiett, Lesley Chow, Scott Thill, Gordon Thomas
and Megan Ratner, for also helping to improve the book with
suggestions on everything from selections and section titles to
structuring. Bright Lights itself wouldn’t exist without the Herculean
efforts of my friend and webmaster George Brown. Thank you,
George. My pal Howard Mandelbaum kindly opened his New York
archive Photofest (one of the world’s best) for the wonderful photos
throughout. My buddies Robert Hiett and Jesse Tepper offered
various kinds of support, and Robert kept the computers humming.
Heartfelt thanks to Bert Cardullo for expert advice throughout and
his thoughtful introduction on the art and craft of interviewing, and
to Jonathan Rosenbaum for his enlightening foreword. A tip of the
hat to Paolo Cabrelli and Tej P. S. Sood of Anthem Press–Paolo for
suggesting the book and Tej for seeing it through. Finally, I’m
grateful to my partner Gregory Battle for tolerating the many
disappearing acts I managed to perform while working on this book.
 Introduction

The Art and Craft of Interviewing:

A View from Within

I don’t consider myself a professional interviewer, so I’m not writing

this introduction in order to give “how-to” advice to anyone. All of
my interviews with film directors have been done because I wanted to
do them; I didn’t do them for money, certainly, and a number of them
lay unpublished–indeed, untranscribed–for a couple of decades.
I think the filmmakers in question appreciated my amateur status and
may have trusted me all the more because of it. This is especially true of
the late François Truffaut, who–as a former journalist himself–seemed
charmed by the fact that I had traveled all the way to Paris, at my own
expense, just to have a three- or four-hour conversation with him that
might, or might not, appear in print.
When I call myself an amateur, of course I don’t mean
“unprofessional.” I thoroughly prepare myself for every interview by
seeing all of a director’s films at least once (DVDs have made this a
lot less difficult than it used to be!) and reading everything about him
and his work I can lay my hands on. I also prepare lists of “good
questions,” even though I don’t always stick to the list. The trick in
an interview is to “read” your subject and figure out how to get the
most (by which I mean the best) out of him–and that sometimes
means asking a provocative and even inflammatory question that’s
not on your list. As when, during the first interview I ever conducted,
I asked Vittorio De Sica the following loaded question, and for the
second time at that. I include his verbal response, but I wish I could
xviii INTRODUCTION

also show you his exasperated, nearly comic physical response,

which, 35 years later, is still vividly etched in my memory:

BC: Now what about the suggestion made by Italian newspapers at the time
that Miracle in Milan tended to excite political animosities?

VDS: Oh, here we go again! Look, mister, I have no interest in politics. I am

a member of no party; I am not a propagandist of any ideology. Miracle in
Milan was inspired by nothing but a Christian feeling of human solidarity.
That’s all!

My ears are still ringing with Signor De Sica’s words, and my mind’s
eye continues to envision his wrath at the audacity of a 25-year-old
novice to ask such a question. Nonetheless, I was happy to endure
that wrath just for the chance to meet and talk to the man. And that,
perhaps, is the real “art of the interview”: how to make contact with
your subject, establish your credibility, and set a meeting time and
place. The rest, by comparison, is simple. The easiest way to make
contact, in my experience, is to use a go-between who knows the
director at the same time as he will vouch for you. (After my brother-
in-law, the Finnish actor Vesa Vierikko, arranged an interview for me
with Aki Kaurismäki, Kaurismäki then gave me a letter of
introduction to Ingmar Bergman.) But a surprising number of
European directors, for one group–unlike their uppity American
counterparts–are in the telephone book; and if they’re not, their
national film institutes will readily give you at least a mailing
address–the director’s home address, that is, not the location of his
agent’s office. I’m not shy, and I’m not afraid to be told “no,” as
Agnès Varda has said to me on three occasions! So I just humbly ask
for my interviews myself if someone better placed cannot or will not
ask for me.
Once you get the interview, naturally, you have to get to the place,
and that’s usually the filmmaker’s place: his house, his hotel, his
office, his set, his country. The price of airfare can sometimes be an
obstacle, but so can the authorities. When Abbas Kiarostami, for
example, agreed to meet, he told me to come to Tehran. Since
I was living in Istanbul at the time, I thought that going there,
from Turkey, wouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t, until the Iranian
customs agents waved my American passport in my face, even as
I was waving to Abbas behind a large, thick, forbidding wall of
glass at Imam Khomeini International Airport. Officialdom sent me
 INTRODUCTION xix

back to Istanbul without my interview–which I had begged in

vain to be permitted to conduct inside the terminal, in a hotel
room. But Abbas later diplomatically resolved the crisis by flying
to the Istanbul Film Festival, where I conducted my interview with
him in peace.
That interview, like all my others, I tried to make as aesthetically
inclusive as I could, as opposed to as academically exhaustive as
possible–and I believe my subjects responded to my knowledge of
their craft as well as my analysis of their art. That is, my questions
focus on practical matters related to filmmaking (which, lest we
forget, is variously known as a technology, an industry, a business,
an entertainment, and an art) as much as they do on historical,
aesthetic, and critical-theoretical issues raised by the films
themselves. Among those practical matters, furthermore, I give as
much attention to acting, design, and cinematography as to
directing, writing, and editing (with some attention paid to finance
and audience reception as well). Needless to say, this is because film
is the most “total” of the arts, containing or embracing all the
others: literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, photography,
music, theater and dance. Hence any interview of a film artist should
itself aspire to be as aesthetically comprehensive as possible.
The easiest directors to interview–easiest in the sense that they
have the most information and insight to offer–are those who
themselves are the most “aesthetically comprehensive.” I speak of
auteurs, moviemakers who write, or collaborate in the writing of,
every script they direct, in addition to initiating all their projects on
their own as opposed to accepting films “on assignment.” Moreover,
these directors are sometimes complete auteurs in that they perform
almost every function that goes into the making of a film, including
editing and musical scoring. Why is such authorship important?
For the obvious reason that it puts a film on the same level as any
other work of art (not so negligible a reason when you consider
the relative youth of the cinema as an art form): as primarily the
product of one person’s vision, supervision and execution. And
that’s precisely the kind of person who can give you an in-depth
interview about the total art of filmmaking, from script to
screen–not a blinkered show-biz chat about what it’s like to be rich,
famous and powerful.
Auteurism, properly understood, privileges the well-wrought script,
the carefully chosen word, as the place where every narrative film of
xx INTRODUCTION

quality must begin. That so many narrative films do not so begin–that

they limit auteurism to signature visual style or stylistic flourish–is the
reason why so many of them finally fall short of cinematic wholeness,
let alone distinction. And the fact that so many interviews with
directors don’t end, as well as begin, with the word, is the reason why
so many of them fall short of completeness, not to speak of excellence.
I refer to the editing of interviews, which is a long, painstaking process
that entails not only the transcription of a director’s words, but also
the revising of them (with his approval) for coherence, accuracy, and
continuity. Like a good movie, a good interview has got to move; and
to do that, it has to have not just pointed dialogue, but smooth
transitions and strong juxtapositions, too.
Alas, only the interviewer can provide these “connectives” if they
are not already there in the conversation. At most, this sometimes
means rearranging parts of an interview; at least, it means providing
transitional or oppositional elements in the very framing of your
questions. I realize that some people value spontaneity and
immediacy over this kind of ex post facto tampering, but with
spontaneity and immediacy often come randomness, repetition and
irrelevancy. For this reason, the art of the interview, like the art of
film, is finally in the editing. This is all the more true when you have
interviewed a subject (like Kiarostami or Zhang Yimou) who speaks
no English and has spoken to you through an interpreter. It’s also
the case when you have conversed with directors (like Robert
Bresson and Jean Renoir) who speak half in English and half in
their native language, which you yourself then have to translate at
a later date.
Let me conclude by declaring that the older I get, the less I want
to write about film on my own than hear its creators talk about
moviemaking from every angle–including but not limited to
meaning. I’ve learned a lot from doing such interviews; it’s more fun
than individual, essayistic criticism; and (to judge from book sales!)
readers seem more attuned to this type of “communal” analysis. The
best part of the interviewing process, however, may be what, for
want of a better term, I’m going to call the personal side: the
connections I’ve made over the years with a group of human beings
who also happen to be great artists. As an instance of such humanity,
I’ll leave you with the words of Satyajit Ray in response to my
 INTRODUCTION xxi

thanking him, at the conclusion of our interview, for his generosity

and geniality:

I am in the phone book, and you can knock on my door. Everybody has
access to me, anyone who wants to see me. In fact, the people who come
to visit… are often very ordinary folks. Not big stars or anything like that…
In the end, I think it’s rather stupid to raise a wall around oneself. This way
of doing things–as we have done today–is much more interesting, rewarding,
exciting.

I hope that you, dear reader, will feel the same way after your own
encounter with the film directors in this book. My deep thanks to
Gary Morris, Bright Lights Film Journal, and Anthem Press for
sponsoring such a collection, as well as to all the filmmakers
themselves: for their words, for their wisdom, for their work.

Bert Cardullo
I. Going Hollywood:
Masters of Studio Style

“You’re a machine, and you’re going to make a picture–that’s all.”

–Allan Dwan

1. Allan Dwan
2. Douglas Sirk
3. Robert Wise
4. Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride
on The Other Side of the Wind
5. Clint Eastwood
Barbara Stanwyck and Allan Dwan on the set of Cattle Queen of Montana (1954).
Credit: RKO Radio Pictures/Photofest

Angel in Exile: Allan Dwan

by Howard Mandelbaum and Gary Morris

In conversation as in filmmaking, Allan Dwan (1886–1981) is a

master storyteller. He savors details, builds suspense, sketches
characters broadly yet deftly, and never allows the pace to flag.
A genuine affection for people–tempered by a mischievous sense of
humor–illuminates every yarn. In a career spanning five decades
starting in 1911, Dwan’s attitude toward morally ambiguous
characters remained sympathetic. Gamblers, loose women, outlaws
and outcasts are presented with understanding. We’re encouraged to
enjoy the extravagant nastiness of the villains and to view simple
folk without condescension. Although Dwan retained the
pictorialism and the melodramatic plot devices of the silent screen,
his generous stance defies time. He continued to grow during the
sound era, enjoying a large measure of creative freedom making
4 ACTION!

color westerns, adventures, and melodramas for producer Benedict

Bogeaus. Even the slightest of the series (Pearl of the South Pacific
and Escape to Burma [both 1955]) are graced by ravishing
images and smoothly flowing narratives. Cattle Queen of Montana
(1954) has almost nonstop action against magnificent locations.
Even better is Passion (1954), a moving story of romance and
revenge. Silver Lode (1954), Tennessee’s Partner (1955) and Slightly
Scarlet (1956) are masterpieces; human stories handled with total
formal control.
Prior to signing with Bogeaus, Dwan spent nine fruitful years at
Republic Studios. His visual inventiveness and sense of tempo
enlivened a variety of projects including small-town pieces
(Rendezvous with Annie [1946]; Driftwood [1947]; The Inside Story
[1948]); delirious Vera Ralston-John Carroll romances (Surrender
[1950]; and Belle Le Grand [1950]); lightweight musicals (Calendar
Girl [1947]; and I Dream of Jeanie [1952]); semi-satiric westerns
(Montana Belle [1952]; and The Woman They Almost Lynched
[1953]); and tender war films (Sands of Iwo Jima [1949]; Flight
Nurse [1953]; and The Wild Blue Yonder [1951]). At the time we
interviewed him (October and November, 1978), Dwan had just put
the finishing touches on a script entitled A Bullet with Love. Not
knowing what to expect, we wondered if at 94 Dwan was strong
enough to discuss his career. We should not have worried. The
vitality he injected into tepid screen material was bracingly present,
and we left each encounter feeling entertained and enriched.
We were disappointed that, with the exception of Sands of Iwo
Jima, Dwan expressed little pride in his Republic or Bogeaus
productions. The 1910s and 1920s brought him wealth and fame
and dominated his reminiscences. He seemed bemused by our
preoccupation with his later output. As we led the interview
toward John Payne and Rhonda Fleming, Dwan would slyly steer us
toward Douglas Fairbanks and Gloria Swanson. But late, middle or
early, Dwan’s vast cinematic output remains a source of infinite
delight.

Interview

The period we wanted to discuss with you is the late forties and
fifties–at Republic and with Benedict Bogeaus at RKO.
 DWAN 5

Why do you want to dwell on that? Is that supposed to be something

interesting?

We’d like to cover some territory Peter Bogdanovich [in his book,
Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer, 1971] didn’t discuss in great detail.
He’s probably fonder of your silents and Fox periods. But there’s a
lot of vitality in your postwar work, especially the color movies of
the fifties.

You know, that’s suicidal. That’s the way I feel about those old
pictures. I hated every goddamn inch of every one of them.

Well, people don’t agree with you.

Well, [Herbert] Yates wished that dame of his on me. And what can
you do with Vera Hruba Ralston?

She seems to try hard. She’s sincere.

We’ll give her a “T” for trying. I wish we had a “T” for all the
money we lost on her. Whenever I worked, or cared a damn about
what I was doing, I was absolutely autonomous. There was nobody
around. And if Yates came on my set, I’d tell him to get the hell off.
I would. I’d say, “What do you want? See me in the office, then, not
here. You’re disturbing me.” And he’d go away. And I did that with
most of them. And most of them knew that. Most good producers
would let you alone. Turn you loose and say, “Give me what you
can.” But some of them would just grab you by the ass and hold on
all through the picture, and send you notes every three minutes.
Well, I had notes stacked up, and I used to take a whole bunch of
them and dump them in the toilet, especially their private ones, so
they couldn’t use them. Jack Warner was the worst note-writer I ever
knew. He wrote them every minute. Anything that came to his mind,
he wrote a note. Well, all the fellows hated that sort of thing, but
when you’ve got a job where they said, “Make a picture out of this,”
you made the picture. And of course, there’s always the budget. And
the budget’s guarded by eight sycophants that are ass-length above
the manager, just a little lower, about the kissing height. And they’d
come around and get in the habit of giving orders, and then they’d
get a very bad time. But now, Ralston–she was a swell girl personally,
6 ACTION!

tried to be. But under the circumstances, everybody was catering to

her. In fact, they nearly broke her neck. Every time she’d fix a chair
for herself, somebody’d come and readjust it and she’d hit the floor
and get hurt. You’d think a girl like Vera moved smoothly, from your
seats. It took 14 kicks in the ass to get her across the stage. She was
terrified. I used to put skates on her and say, “Try it that way.” And
she’d take that seriously and thump through the scene with her
skates on. And she’d say, “It doesn’t feel good.” And I’d say, “Take
’em off.” On her feet, for some reason, she was nervous. She hadn’t
learned the basic things. Once they took one of the empty stages and
built a skating rink, so the old man could learn to skate. And they’d
go la-de-da-da-da [waltzing effect] up and down the damn rink and
everybody in the studio would go look and applaud. And our picture
would stand still until the skating lesson was over. We got rid of him
once. We got him into St. Joseph’s Hospital, to get his toe operated
on or something, so we had peace over there for two weeks. He got
out and everybody’d step on his toe and say, “Sorry,” and lay him up
for another day.

You tended to work with the same craftsmen over and over at
Republic, like the cinematographer Reggie Lanning.

Well, I liked Reggie. He was a good cameraman. Excellent. And I

always did that. If I found a fellow I liked at the studio, I kept asking
for him. Because they’re awfully important. I finally got a hold of
John Alton at one of the studios. He was very pompous and
aristocratic, but he turned out to be a great photographer. And that’s
what you want. You need that. It’s half the game.

Was it difficult to get Alton?

No. Difficult to get rid of him. [Laughs]. Oh no. He came with the
rent. That was at RKO. Well, I’m plugging myself. All the stuff I did
at RKO, though Bogeaus’ name was on it, he just did what you
asked him to. Alton came to me with Bogeaus. I went there because
J. R. Grainger, who was president at that time, for [Howard]
Hughes, was also the sales manager. And they were scared to death
of Bogeaus, because they thought he’d come in there and spend a lot
of money and wouldn’t get results. So I was hired by Grainger to
come in and hold his budgets down, and keep him from blowing his
 DWAN 7

wig, because he’d shoot half a script that you weren’t going to use.
In fact, I had to battle with him for script-cutting. He thought I was
trying to ruin him. That was on Silver Lode. So we cut it down to
what it ought to be, at the price we were supposed to spend.

The Bogeaus movies are very handsome, especially Slightly Scarlet

and Escape to Burma.

Oh yes. Escape to Burma looked good. One of the things that

occurred on Escape to Burma–again it’s a matter of thievery–Dick
Powell had come in there to RKO to make a picture with John
Wayne, The Conqueror [1956]. All those magnificent sets were built
for him and they were still trembling with heat when I walked in and
changed them to Burma. I finished Burma before Powell finished
his picture. He started weeks ahead of me. I was chasing him out of
his own sets. He was going out of his mind. Those were magnificent
sets. So we got them for nothing and got our picture that way.

We just saw Slightly Scarlet in New York. It was interesting

especially because it was a color movie and you used such heavy
shadow work. It was reminiscent of film noir, those very downbeat
forties movies that use very few sources of light.

Well, again I was using Alton on that. And Alton would say to me,
“What painter are we working with today?” And I’d say, “Definitely
Rembrandt.” And that was Rembrandt, you see, because he goes in
for the heavy shadows and the highlight coming through them. If you
were doing a light, happy one, you’d go for a light, happy painter.

You used the talents of the Lydecker brothers at Republic several times.

They were great. I think Sands of Iwo Jima had a lot of great stuff.
Of course, we had the marines in there and they knew what to do
and that made a difference. We used to say, “Give me 250 men
walking, and they’re coming back from battle–give ’em the attitude.”
And the officers would say, “All right, piss in your pants and get up
on the hill and drag it, boys, drag it.” And they’d drag it. And one
guy had a musket on his shoulder, and the officer said, “Get that
goddamn gun off your shoulder. You haven’t got the strength to carry
it. Drag it!” And they’d drag it. And the officer would have these
8 ACTION!

orders going out,

and he’d sit there
and say, “Oh, isn’t
that a wonderful
scene I’m making?”
What a director he
was! And all you’d
have to do is say,
“When do I holler
‘cut’?” That was
my first lesson in
directing, and I
never forgot it.
They taught me
three words. First, James Brown and John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima
(1949). Credit: Republic Pictures/Photofest
they told me to say,
“Camera.” And the next thing I’d say was, “Action.” And the next
thing, “Cut.” That’s the secret. You get those three words and
remember them and you’re a director.

How did you generally work with actors? Did you like to rehearse
extensively or did you prefer improvisation?

It depends on the actor. You give actors scripts and they read them
and you see two actors together–girl and boy–and you say to them,
“Get together. Run over your lines.” And they do. And so you say to
them, “Have you got them? Do you remember them?” And the girl
will say, “I hope I do,” and say to the dresser, [falsetto] “Prompt me
if I make a mistake.” But in our racket it didn’t work very well to
have somebody yell lines at them. I’d tell them where to move and
when to get up, when to get out. If they had difficulty with their lines
or their expressions or their character, you impart that to them, and
they give it back to you, like mirrors.

You often get much more sexual performances out of women than,
say, Griffith. I’m thinking of people like Rhonda Fleming, Debra
Paget, Arlene Dahl.
Oh, he wouldn’t know what to do with those women. He’d stop them
the first time they made a “gesture.” Arlene Dahl was a very sexy
woman, and anything you’d ask her to do, she’d do–within reason.
 DWAN 9

You seem to have sympathy for “bad women.” Griffith tended to

prefer madonnas.

All women are bad women until you tame them down.

Barbara Stanwyck’s very athletic in the movies you made with her:
Cattle Queen of Montana, Escape to Burma.

Yes, well, she’s a fighter. She was a very determined girl. She had to
know “why” about everything. You couldn’t say to her, “As you
approach that corner, there may be somebody lurking there. Go with
ease.” She’d look around and think awhile. And you didn’t tell her
to pick up a club, but I used to watch her and I’d see her pick up a
brick and slip it in her pocketbook. She’d get ready to round that
corner and she had a grip on the thing. If anybody had come around
the corner, he’d have been brained. There was nobody there, of
course. Just her attitude. But that was her. Another girl would say,
“Oh yes, this looks just right. Going around the corner.” And she’d
get bopped in the nose–“How dare you!”

How about working with children? That must be more difficult.

They’re easy. That’s a cinch. You don’t work with them. They do it
all. When I worked with Shirley Temple [Heidi [1937]; Rebecca of
Sunnybrook Farm [1938]; Young People [1940]], I’d tell her mother
what I wanted her to do, and her mother would coach her and she’d
do it just that way. If I wanted it done a little differently, I’d tell the
mother. She was always in the background. She never stuck her nose
in. But the little kid was precocious, and I had to use that energy,
’cause it was bouncing all over the place. And when you had 50 or
60 more kids around, they were all trying to imitate her.

How were you able to work so fast? Did you do a lot of pre-planning?

Well, secretly, yes, I guess so. I had a packet of notes around.

Basically, it’s all inside you. You’re a machine, and you’re going to
make a motion picture–that’s all. That’s the whole answer. And when
you pick up that bunch of marbles, you’ve got a lot on you because
you’ve got all the departments to think about, all the things you want
to do. You’ve got your lighting to think about, your place to go to,
10 ACTION!

what kind of background you’re going to have, how much money

you’re going to have. And there’s the big stopper. ’Cause if somebody
says, “There’s no limit to your money,” then you can say, “Ah, let’s
really go on this one. We can get a few scenes up in the Alps, a couple
more down in the tropics, travel around a little, maybe buy a yacht.”
And I’ve said this to companies, “We’ll buy a yacht and do that yacht
stuff aboard the yacht.” They’d say, “Buy a yacht?” They’d think
you’d gone out of your mind. “Yes, you need a yacht. The company
hasn’t got one. Everybody’s got a yacht but you.” And they’d think,
“That’s right, we haven’t got a yacht.” And the old man’s thinking,
“Yeah, I could take the kids out there on the weekends.”

We’ve seen lots of your movies with audiences who respond to the
action–the fights, the stunts. The narrative pace really seems to reach
people. How did you manage to tell the stories–sometimes really
complicated stories–so smoothly and so swiftly?

Well, that’s hard to say, except that that’s all you’ve got in your
mind. There isn’t any interruption. When you’re telling a story,
generally you don’t cut and say, “Oh, that reminds me of…” and tell
them something extraneous. You’re there to tell the story and tell it
right through. And you realize you can tire an audience out with a
certain pace. You make them tense, but if they stay that way too
long, they’re going to get tired and fall apart and not like it. You plan
your story so that it is relaxed, then you pick them up again. Because
you’re playing with human emotions. Your audience is supposedly
emoting with these people–that’s the intent. And if you keep that
emotion too tight and too tense, they’re going to let go and say,
“Now I don’t believe it anymore.” You wear yourself out, like you
do with any tension. You get to the point where you let go. Better to
let go with them and go do something else. Then the other thing you
do, of course, is cut it properly. And that’s very important.

How much control over editing did you have?

Well, all of it. I’d sit with the cutter and say, “Put it together. Just
take the numbers off.” Because I didn’t want him to presume to jump
in there and make up the scene. I wanted to do that, ’cause that’s part
of it. That’s part of your work. A cutter, or editor, so to speak, can
 DWAN 11

ruin you, or he can sometimes help you. It depends. You always see,
“Edited by…” and I get nervous when I see that because I say,
“What ego is he suffering from?” He’s going to show us what he can
do. He’s apt to cut to some roses, or put on Julius Caesar making a
speech for no reason if he happens to have it.

On some contemporaries

Could we ask you to comment on some of your contemporaries, like

Raoul Walsh and Gregory La Cava?

Raoul Walsh [1887–1980] I still know well. We’re very close. Talk
to each other on the phone. ’Course, he’s stone blind and tied to
the wall. He’s writing, though, writing stories. He talked to me
this week. If you shut your eyes and keep ’em shut all day long,
and wander around the house, you get a faint idea of what he has
to do–always. He sees nothing. He talks just the way he did.
I saw Bogdanovich’s new picture, Saint Jack, at Bogdanovich’s
house the other night and Raoul wanted to know all about it.
And I said, “Well, you should’ve been there and seen it.” “I’d like
to have been there,” he said. I said, “You’d have enjoyed it.” He
couldn’t see it.

Do you remember Gregory La Cava [1892–1952]?

Oh, yes. He was a subtle guy, very quiet, but full of fun. Most of his
remarks were humorous. Basically he was a comedian, inside
himself. It didn’t always come out that way, but he thought funny.
Sometimes it became cynical. If I remember right, he drank a lot.
When he got the alcohol in him, he got mean, and sometimes got
himself into jams. He got into jams with studio heads. Of course, all
of us did that. Yes, he was the kingpin when he was at work and he
used to overdo it, I guess. He was insulting, let’s put it that way. He
had a great capacity for saying something sharp that would hurt
people, but that he’d think was funny. He’d say to a leading man, or
to somebody at a party who’d just come in, “Gee, you look
great–that is, in the mirror. Where in the hell did you get that outfit?
You look like a pile of shit.”
12 ACTION!

His movies are really caustic.

Well, his words were, at times. ’Course in movies you’re censored,

you’re restricted. Certain things you can say and certain things you
can’t. He was a big drinking buddy of W. C. Fields. They had that in
common. But that would always wind up with one or the other
walking out sore because their humor’d get a little on the cruel side.
The sarcasm would start to flow. La Cava would pop up right out of
the dark and give it to somebody. He’d see strangers sitting at a table
discussing something and he’d say, “Listen you so-and-sos, you don’t
know a goddamn thing about what you’re saying.”

You produced some of Frank Borzage’s [1894–1962] early films and

both of you were at Republic in the late forties. Do you remember
much about him?

Yes. He was a very pleasant, quiet man, very artistic, and I guess he
had a very good soul. I can only liken him to a painter who’s at his
easel and extremely careful with what he’s doing. He knows what
he’s doing, he does it to perfection. He’s a perfectionist. And he was
like so many, the word “budget” had no meaning to him. He’d want
better things and give orders to get them, and they wouldn’t come
because they wouldn’t spend the money, you know. He’d try to get
unit managers to steal stuff from the studios to improve the movies.
And that made him suffer. He suffered, like all directors, from denial.
And that had its good and bad effects. When you’re denied
something, you’ve got to find a substitute. And your ability to find a
substitute is the measure of your strength–of whether you’ve got any
or not.

Outtakes

I spoke to Dwan a few months after Howard’s and my interview.

Below are some excerpts from that talk.

Dwan is 95 years old. He had broken his back a few months prior
to my visit, but was sufficiently recovered to come to the door (after
numerous knocks) and usher me in, with the aid of a cane.
 DWAN 13

He complains about his back problems, but says a chiropractor

(whom he also recommended to Peter Bogdanovich) was working
wonders. He hates hospitals and doesn’t like the “drug treatments” and
overnight stays they were trying to force on him. He shows me what he
calls “tiny cancers” near his eyes that would have to be attended to.
On Ronald Reagan, whom he directed in Cattle Queen of
Montana and Tennessee’s Partner, becoming president: “Why not?
He’s played everything else.”
Dwan says he never shot a lot of coverage. “If the take’s
satisfactory, print it.” He startles me by saying, “I often shoot with
scissors in my eyes.” He prefers studio settings to the great outdoors:
“more private…you can control the noises and people.” He says
directors must be prepared to abandon a script because, “some
things have to be played off the paper.”
Dwan got a real female convict to advise him on one of the
earliest women-in-prison dramas, Wicked (1931). When I mention
the “brutal, realistic” scenes of Elissa Landi’s little boy crying, Dwan
demonstrates sticking pins in the kid.
I bring up Technicolor, which Dwan used often in his career.
“Natalie Kalmus was a bitch,” he says, then recalls that people
complained about color at first. “It hurts my eyes” was the common
objection.
I show him a 1911 photo of the American Film Company in Santa
Barbara, California, his first employer in the film business. He
remembers the scene and identifies the people in it, a camera and
actors sitting around a brook on the outskirts of town. He calls
actress Pauline Bush “a good horseface,” and mentions that
J. Warren Kerrigan, a stage actor transplanted to Hollywood, was
“quite a lady himself.” He says there were many such “pansies and
poseurs” because “Hollywood sucked them all in.”
Dwan says D. W. Griffith was “number one.” I bring up
Manhattan Madness (1916), which I had just seen. Dwan says he
made it in Yonkers, New York, while Griffith, who took producer
credit, was in California. Dwan says he and Griffith disagreed on
“story sense.” Also, Griffith featured women while Dwan featured
men. Griffith apparently didn’t like Dwan’s star Douglas Fairbanks.
Fairbanks suffered an accident, Dwan recalls, while “charging
upstairs” during Manhattan Madness. His eyes were injured by
powder burns. He was athletic, Dwan says, but not always smart.
14 ACTION!

In the elaborate Robin Hood (1922), he used a trampoline to cross

a 30-foot moat. The director had to cut when he landed on the wall
instead of over it. “Fairbanks was too dazed to do anything but hang
onto the wall’s vines,” he laughs.
Fairbanks was a favorite actor of Dwan’s, “but you had to keep
working with him, he’d lose the character.” He liked to do ballet
leaps, and whenever he affected a ballet pose, with one arm up and
one arm trailing, Dwan would ask him, “What the hell was that?
What’s in your other hand?”
The actor liked to play practical jokes. He’d wire a chair in his
dressing room and when visitors came and sat down, they’d get an
electric shock. Dwan taught him a lesson one day by wiring
Fairbanks’s chair.
Once the actor insisted on leaping off a balcony onto a horse.
“That’s insanity,” Dwan told him. Fairbanks ended up in the hospital.
Usually the actor would cooperate with Dwan, but sometimes “he’d
go in and try to improve on the gag…and regret it.”
It was Dwan’s idea to have him ruthlessly mug for the camera in
Manhattan Madness, surely one of the first such happenings in a
narrative film.
Dwan repeats his famous “piss and shit” story–teaching
Fairbanks how to smile for the camera by gritting his teeth and
saying “piss” for a half-smile and “shit” for a broad one.
Dwan mentions Joan Crawford, saying she and Fairbanks Jr., her
husband, couldn’t work together on a set because he was such a
ladies’ man. Fairbanks Sr. was just the opposite, “devoted to Mary
[Pickford].” I tell him I’d just seen Chances (1931) and he says
Fairbanks Jr., who starred in the film, was “too fond of imitating
Ronald Colman.”
Dwan didn’t think much of Helen Mack, the female star of his
mood-drenched While Paris Sleeps (1932). He says the atmospheric
Paris of this film was created entirely on the Fox lot.
He read actor Jack Oakie’s autobiography and called it “dull.” We
look at the book and come across a picture of Cary Grant, Oakie and
other “types.” Dwan calls it a “stockyard. Those are real hams.”
I bring up his use of camera movement, especially tracking shots,
throughout his career. “There’s always a certain amount of camera
improvisation,” he says. “If a man is being pursued and the pursuers
are more interesting than the pursued, I’ll track to include them.
 DWAN 15

Things would occur on the set and sometimes ahead of time. They
turn you loose on the set.”
He put new facings on the Heidi set, originally a New York street,
to transform it into Frankfurt, Germany. “You can disguise any set
with lights and shadows.”
I ask him about Daryl Zanuck. Dwan says, “it was mutual hatred.
Zanuck had written a terrible book that the studio bought, so he
came into the movies that way…another poseur.” Dwan usually paid
no attention to him. Zanuck was pleased with Suez (1938). I ask
about Annabella’s prominent erect nipples in her “wet shirt” scene,
and Dwan says, “I wanted them to show.” The Hays people called
him on this and he argued with them. “Have you ever seen a nude
woman? Ever seen your wife nude? There was nothing there that
wasn’t positively true to life…you knew she was going to be
sexy…that’s why you picked her. The audience knows. This is my
idea of giving it to them. All women are alike–they can go to the
mirror and see that anytime.” Another point in his favor was that
reshooting would have necessitated rebuilding the entire expensive set.
Dwan talks of constant censorship battles. “They picked on stupid
things,” he says, citing Arlene Dahl’s naked leg, raised from behind a
couch, in Slightly Scarlet. The censors objected to what the audience
knew Ted De Corsia was looking at in that scene: “her pussy.”
I ask him about television, if he likes any of the new shows. He
mentions two old favorites in syndication: The Big Valley and
Bonanza. [He worked with Stanwyck in Cattle Queen of Montana
and Escape to Burma.] He likes their “bravery and consistency.”
Dwan’s throat is getting dry, and he asks if I want something. He
calls to his housekeeper: “Bonita, a coke!…and some poison for me.”
I reluctantly tell him I have to go. He gets up and slowly escorts
me to the door with the plea, “Don’t be a stranger.”
Sirk directing Lana Turner on the set of Imitation of Life (1959). Credit: Universal
Pictures/Photofest

“An Unhappy Happy End”:

Douglas Sirk
Introduction

by Gary Morris
Douglas Sirk’s (1900–1987) career breaks down neatly into three
parts. First is his German period (1934–42), which, starting with
Zwei Genies (1934), comprises two dozen sophisticated melodramas
18 ACTION!

and comedies of manners. His second phase began in 1943, after he

emigrated to America, with the topical anti-Nazi drama Hitler’s
Madman (1943). During this time Sirk brought a high-art sensibility
to programmers and European-style films like A Scandal in Paris
(1946), for various companies. In 1950, with Mystery Submarine, he
moved for good to Universal Studios where he made the films that
secured his reputation as the premier 1950s melodramatist: All I
Desire (1953), There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), All That Heaven
Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels
(1958), and Imitation of Life (1959).
In Michael Stern’s interview, which explores the latter two periods
but also considerably more, two seemingly contradictory statements
appear within a few sentences of each other: “We were deeply
steeped in Art” and “For God’s sake, no more Art.” These words
represent, in some ways, the unique appeal of Sirk’s work and the
fascinating paradoxes it contains. On the one hand, he’s the
consummate studio craftsman, embracing the most conventional
elements in cinema. His major films were all made for one of
the biggest Hollywood studios, using best-selling source novels by
the likes of Fannie Hurst and Lloyd C. Douglas, and featuring movie
stars like Rock Hudson, Lana Turner, and Jane Wyman and “trashy”
collaborators like producers Ross Hunter and Albert Zugsmith.
Furthermore, the films mostly occupy the still critically maligned
ghetto of the women’s picture/melodrama.
On the other hand, Sirk has been repeatedly portrayed as a clever
subversive, a European intellectual émigré fiendishly mining his
American “comedie humaine,” as he called it, with Brechtian
distanciation devices, a cutting critique of middlebrow culture,
and, to some observers, a sardonic, superior attitude toward his
characters and their dilemmas.
As the above quote, and this interview in general, shows, Sirk has
happily endorsed both views of himself–as a sympathetic chronicler
of the American character and a maverick standing outside of, and
in fact deconstructing, his narratives. The fact that Sirk’s films were
usually highly successful–Imitation of Life was Universal’s most
popular film to that time–may have helped contemporary critics
dismiss them as superficial and overblown, but it also kept his
name in the public and critical imagination. Starting in the 1960s,
with the approval of some of his European fans like Godard
and his placement in the coveted “Far Side of Paradise” category in
 SIRK 19

Andrew Sarris’ seminal The American Cinema, Sirk has been

increasingly lauded for his extraordinary aesthetic balancing act
between high and low art. Filmmakers as disparate as Fassbinder
and Todd Haynes have acknowledged his influence, with the former
remaking All That Heaven Allows as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
and the latter reproducing Sirk’s style verbatim in Far from
Heaven (2002). So distinctive are his films, with their radical lighting
schemes, rich mise-en-scène, irresistible emotional power, and
despairing world view, that the word “Sirkian” has, in some circles,
achieved the resonance of “Felliniesque.”
This interview finds Sirk, who never gave a bad interview, at his
most voluble. It took place in spring 1979, when Michael and Jane
Stern spent two weeks with Sirk and his wife Hilde in Lugano,
Switzerland. Screenwriter George Zuckerman and producer
Zugsmith add some thoughts about Sirk at the end.

Interview

by Michael Stern
When we first came to America, I bought a tiny piece of land far out
in the country. But there was no place to live on it, only a shed. For
a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very
old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took
off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty. I was raising chickens
then. The neighbors were wonderful, and I remember a cafe on the
corner. I’d go in there and the owner was a typical American cafe
owner. This was the only place in town then. It was only a farming
community. I’d say to him, “Why don’t you get some newspapers in
here?” “What for?” he’d say. “Nothing ever happens.” Well, being
from Europe, I was still interested. This was 1939, and some things
were happening, you know. So I kept after him. Then–I don’t know
how he did it, because this was miles from L.A. over the
mountains–he began to get the L.A. Times in every morning. That
was fine. And even some of the truckdrivers and farmers who
stopped in for their coffee or sandwich started to read it. Then
I suggested he attach the paper to a stick of wood. “Now why would
I want to do that?” “Look,” I said, “these truckers come in here and
20 ACTION!

use the paper for rags. It’s lost, dirty.” So sure enough, he got the two
pieces of wood and I showed him how to clamp them together along
the side of the paper. And here was this goddamned cafe in the
middle of nowhere with the L.A. Times hung up like it was in Paris.
“Say, that’s kind of chic,” the owner said. “Real smart.” And I’d go
in there every day when I wasn’t working on the farm and read that
paper.

How did you get along with the American film community? In
particular, with your producers, the studio…

I enjoyed working there very much. Only on Thunder on the Hill

[1951] did I have a producer who was interfering with my work. He
was the only one at Universal. After that film I believe they fired him.
Ross Hunter was my assistant on Take Me to Town [1953]. He was
a young man, an actor before that, and learned a lot on the picture.
During shooting, [producer Leonard] Goldstein left, and Ross was
most pleasant. He never interfered. In fact, I explained to him my
theories of melodrama, and he understood. But I still remember him
begging me, “Douglas, please, please make them cry.”
[Ed] Muhl was a very nice guy, but not a producer. He had no
showmanship. And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce
films is to gamble. Muhl, I believe, began as a bookkeeper, and he
never had that sense of show. Zugsmith understood audiences. He
was like other producers–a man who makes money. But he was more
honest about it than L. B. Mayer and the others. There was no
bullshit, no arty pretensions. “Doug,” he’d say when we were doing
Written on the Wind, “give me some bosom.” You know we still had
the Hayes office then, so I said, “Zug, I can’t. They’ll cut it out.”
“Let’s try it anyway,” he said. “As much as you can get away with.”
Then in The Tarnished Angels, of course, we had Malone
parachuting from the sky with her skirt blowing up. Zugsmith loved
that. He didn’t want her to wear anything underneath… What a
character! I never knew him without the baseball cap on his head.
He has newspapers, TV stations, radio and movies. The man dabbles
in everything–except art and culture. “That’s why I hire you and
Orson,” he told me. I really liked him very much. He had something
that I did not, and I had something that he didn’t. And both of us
were smart enough to understand that and tolerate each other. I even
came to him with that Faulkner book, which nobody would touch.
 SIRK 21

“Doug,” he said, “you’ve made so much money for me, I’ll do it.
I trust you.” And I must say, he backed me all the way. People ask,
“How is it possible that you can get along with that vulgar, crude
specimen of Americana?” Well, it was a pleasure. As a producer, he
never interfered, except to ask me to show more bosom.

I am curious about whether you felt you had any intellectual

colleagues in ’50s Hollywood. Certainly it wasn’t like Germany in
the ’20s.

Well, let us go back to after the war. I was a university guy–1/2

literary, 1/2 a painter. And it really began with Einstein. We attended
his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained–and still
remains–only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a
completely different picture of the physical world. Now in theory, if
there is no straight line in the universe, this has its effect on art. Art
must consist of something bent, something curved.
We had come back from the war, and we were really too old for
the university. We had seen too much. The war was the end of an era,
in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy. At the
same time, of course, Marxism arose–Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism,
anarchism–and art became political. In the nineteenth century, you
had bourgeois art without politics–an almost frozen idea of what
beauty is. We were trying to negate beauty, and negate that art which
was a synonym for beauty. We were soaked with it. We were deeply
steeped in Art. We were looking for something completely different.

In Magnificent Obsession [1954], Rock Hudson has a line: “As far

as I’m concerned, Art is just a guy’s name.”

Exactly! In Hollywood, the producers said, “Never say Art. Nobody

wants to know about it.” Arty is OK, but Art is for crazy painters,
or sculptors. Now after the war, we were looking for something
completely different. Artaud’s essay in The Theater and Its Double
describes a completely new era for the theater. It explains simply,
“No more masterpieces,” for God’s sake, no more Art. We are really
not interested. Together with Marxism, this was to be something
populistic–this is different from the American term populism. It
would be something the average man could understand, but with
something additional–style. There arose a belief in style–and in
22 ACTION!

banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a

common belief that politics were not worthy of art.
As a theater man, I had to deal with high art. I would play farces and
comedy to make money, and classics for the elite. But we were trying to
escape the elitaire. So slowly in my mind formed the idea of
melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They
were naive, they were that something completely different. They were
completely Art-less. This tied in with my studies of the Elizabethan
period, where you had both l’art pour I’art and you had Shakespeare.
He was a melodramatist, infusing all those silly melodramas with style,
with signs and meanings. There is a tremendous similarity between this
and the Hollywood system–which then I knew from only far away.
Shakespeare had to be a commercial producer. Probably his company
or his producer came to him and said, “Now, look, Bill, there’s this
crazy story–ghosts, murder, tearing the hair, what-do-I-know.
Completely crazy. It’s called Magnificent Ob…no, Hamlet it was called.
The audiences love this story, Bill, and you have to rewrite it. You’ve
got two weeks, and you’ve got to hold the costs down. They’ll love it
again.” So, my God! A director in Hollywood in my time couldn’t do
what he wanted to do. But certainly, Shakespeare was even less free
than we were.
But let’s go deeper into drama. How was it with the ancient
Greeks? I have studied pieces of the Periclean period, and all of them
are crazy situations. But there is a difference there. The role that style
plays today was then taken by religion. Take Oedipus, for instance.
The Freudians don’t like this, but in reality Oedipus is a detective
story, a mystery, nothing other than that. The mother thing, the
complex, is bullshit, because he didn’t know. He’s not guilty, really.
It’s sheer melodrama, for the masses.
Now I talked with Brecht about this, and I told him that it was
religion that made such crazy melodrama possible for the ancient
Greeks. That, of course, is not possible any more. He agreed. But he
was at a complete dead end. L’art pour I’art offered nothing, so
finally he escaped into Marxism. There is no doubt that this is what
made it possible for him to continue. It was politics that made his art
possible, as religion did for the Greeks.
Now my idea of the melodrama he carried into the “drink and
smoke theater,” where there was nothing sacred. The idea was,
Let’s forget, for God’s sake, the word Art. In this theater, there is
really something going on. Beer is served; you meet a few whores.
 SIRK 23

Of course, we were conjuring the Elizabethan theater. Slowly into

my program in the theater I was sneaking in the melodrama–popular
plays–and I discovered they were making lots of money.
At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to
power. The intellectuals were all saying, “Give him a year. Give him
two years. It will all blow over. He’ll go away.” I wanted to escape.
But what did I know? I knew law, and I knew theater. I didn’t, of
course, know American law, and in America the theater did not
exist, except for Broadway. But America to us–especially to
Brecht–was raw and rough. That was our idea of it–boxing,
triviality, banality, killing, and the American melodrama, which was
the American cinema. This goes for Stroheim, for Sternberg. All of it
was melodrama; but in their hands, given a style.
When Brecht was there he tried to sell his ideas as a literary man,
which didn’t work. Not in America. And for movies he had no
feeling. He was not a visual character. He didn’t see. In his movie
scripts he didn’t catch movie style or technique. It was only theater.
Furthermore, he insisted on his Marxist way of thinking. Of course,
McCarthyism finished any possibility of that.

You use the term “we” in describing the early formulation of your
aesthetic. In your talking about America I sense that you did feel,
intellectually at least, alone.

Intellectualism came very late to America. That’s why Americans are

so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But
there are so many pseudo-intellectuals. They carry their Freud or
their Marx around in front of them on a platter, and say, “Hello, I’m
so-and-so, have you heard of Karl Marx?” Yes, thank you. This kind
of pseudo-intellect is worse than the man who lives by instinct. You
can’t talk to the American intellectual.
But I was one of the few who stayed. Brecht, Mann, they all left.
There is no tradition in the United States. In anything. It was different
in New York, which was highly Europeanized. But California was a
mixture of Mexicans, early settlers, people who had been in the Pacific
during World War II or Korea. It was open. Your wife could go to the
supermarket in her bathing suit. When we came, there was no industry
at all. Just blue skies, no smog. Of course, after the war, the picture
changed completely. But before, everything was movies. And you have
no idea how this shaped your life. The movie stars were a strange
24 ACTION!

aristocracy. If Lana Turner walked down the street to buy dark

underwear, Hedda Hopper would tell all about it. It was so primitive,
and at the same time it was so pleasant. We liked America in spite of
everything. Europe was so old, so burdened with guilt complexes.
California was a center for mass art. Europe to an artist after the war
was not at all interesting. I had become a complete foreigner in
Germany. And there, in Hollywood, was an industry for a new art.
America, after Magnificent Obsession, was for me an opportunity.

That is very interesting. You mean you welcomed the opportunity of

Magnificent Obsession?

Yes, for the first time, I began to realize here my ideal of melodrama.
It was my first real opportunity. That film, and the melodramas that
follow, are all attempts to formulate something.

You were in America over ten years before you took that step.

Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director.

They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in
those comedies to begin my project of American films.

But your reputation in Germany was based on your success with

melodrama. None of your pictures during the forties seem to follow
up on that.

I wasn’t so sure then. I didn’t think I could continue to do the

melodrama as I had done in Germany. I couldn’t know how it would
go over with audiences here. When I was able later to get free of
Columbia, I took up that offer from Universal. Although I was hired
to do comedy, strangely enough the first one I did was that
submarine picture, Mystery Submarine. I got it, I suppose, because
I had been in the Navy. It was alluring to shoot in a submarine, with
hand cameras and so forth. But it was a miserable little story. Here
the auteurship of the studio comes in. But I did want to do pictures
about America. Not just appeal to American tastes. The French call
it contes moraux–a series of episodes. Not so much moral tales, as
tales about peoples’ morality. The Lady Pays Off [1951], for
instance. I wanted there to be a contrast to all those silly women you
see in pictures. Now this predated women’s lib. I wanted to draw
 SIRK 25

a picture of a woman who is free to the extent that she wasn’t even
likeable. I wanted to contrast a masquerade world of gambling and
unreality to a new woman’s world. I wanted here to take a woman
who is beautiful–a very luscious girl–who wanted to have her way,
but not because she is beautiful. I used Linda Darnell because she
was beautiful, not one of those ugly things that people look at and
say, “Who’d want her?” She was wonderful to work with, putty in
a director’s hands. Unfortunately, all this was tamed down by the
studio–even before I started on the script.

How do you see No Room for the Groom [1952] in your plan for a
series of “contes moraux”?

I have just seen this film, and I am surprised that it still holds up. It
still seems sharp to me. It never becomes doctrinaire. It never
preaches values. It is always dissolving itself into funny situations.
Now this picture was supposed to make something of Tony Curtis,
but he complained to me that he was only a clown in it, just the butt
of the jokes. “Oh no,” I said, “Tony, you are the whole antithesis of
the picture. You have to be dynamic. You have to fight against
everything, the whole establishment. You are all the ‘anti’ values of
the film.” And he was really very good.
My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create
a comedie humaine with little people, average people–samples from
every period in American life. Now I had something in mind, a definite
design; but of course I had to grab the opportunities as they came.
That is why sometimes I took on a lousy project–just to have the
chance to work my plan. In this series, the furthest back in time was
in Take Me to Town. I haven’t seen this film, but in my memory it
lingers as a pleasant picture.

It’s delightful. Bob Smith said it’s your most optimistic picture. It
certainly is the most “open” of your films. The characters don’t seem
so completely trapped; the situation isn’t hopeless…

Of course. This is early America, and therefore it is almost a fairy

tale. The women of the establishment are the evil queens, and the
hero, he is completely stalwart. A preacher!
Now the Sheridan picture is a society that is still to an extent
open. So there are just the slightest signs. It is all mellowed down,
26 ACTION!

which of course, has to do with the period. Then later on there is an

establishment. Written on the Wind is the ultimate degeneracy of the
system. The kaput superstructure. There the old man, the capitalist,
is drawn a bit too nicely only to show the degeneracy of the son and
the daughter. It is also a picture of nostalgia, with the characters
always wishing they could go back to the river, to their youth, maybe
to the world of Take Me. But they can’t go back, they can’t return.
For instance, take this picture There’s Always Tomorrow. I think
this is a very sad picture because here is the American man
dominated not by his wife so much as by the rules of society. She is
as miserable as he, only she doesn’t even know it! He can’t escape.
He can’t make up his mind. He is the American man remaining a
child. He is a producer of toys; still playing with toys. Then, his
youth comes back. Knocks right on his door. And at the end, of
course, he walks to the window and there is the plane flying away. It
is his youth, his happiness. You will see exactly the same thing at the
end of The Tarnished Angels. Throughout my pictures there are
these recurring signs–the plane, those goddamned cars, and the pond
to which they all want to return, all these victims.

There is certainly a wealth of prison imagery in your films. Perhaps

you could discuss in more detail these recurring images; the
iconography of your films.

I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their
lives. They are always behind those window crossings, behind bars
or staircases. Their homes are their prisons. They are imprisoned
even by the tastes of the society in which they live. In All That
Heaven Allows, this woman is imprisoned by her home, her family,
her society. They are imprisoned in two ways–by their personal
habits, and by the class to which they belong, which is slightly above
the middle class. The middle class is more anonymous. For instance,
in All I Desire, it is the academic society which is another prison. The
drama teacher is in love with the guy, but he can’t make a move. He
wants his goddamned promotion. He’s in his prison, too. This goes
all the way up to Written on the Wind. There they are imprisoned by
wealth. They are the kaput haute bourgeoisie. They have gone from
the simple society to complete decadence. But in between, in
the upper middle class, there is upper-middle-class elegance only.
That living room in All That Heaven Allows has a certain elegance.
 SIRK 27

I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know. I believe my pictures

reflect this, even in a sort of continuity. In Written on the Wind, the
mirrors that run throughout are marbelized. They are not clear
mirrors anymore. Even the reflections have become clouded.
In All That Heaven Allows, the town is shown as being arranged
around the church steeple. You don’t see them going to church, because
that would be too much on the nose. But even that church is a prison,
just like the homes, which are their cages. People ask me why there are
so many flowers in my films. Because these homes are tombs,
mausoleums filled with the corpses of plants. The flowers have been
sheared and are dead, and they fill the homes with a funereal air.

Your films often do end with either a wake or a wake-like situation.

If the characters aren’t dead, their fate is certainly sealed.

All my endings, even the happy ones, are pessimistic. Of course, in

All I Desire I wanted her to go back to the stage–to the seal act. It
was only a stopover. That would have been very sad. Perhaps too
pessimistic. But now it is only an unhappy happy end. As Brecht has
said, you must think further, after the curtain goes down. What will
happen to her? The end of every story is death; but here, what can
happen? Maybe, maybe a flicker of the old love. But it is impossible.
Pretty soon she’ll be one of those housewives, inviting in the
academic crowd for tea and cake. She’ll be lost. She’ll disappear.

I wonder if we might talk about your craft as a director.

Of course. If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain

craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is
nothing there without an optical reason. I never regarded my
pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the
style.
Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as
the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye. So it is
not enough to look beautiful. But if I move my camera in to do a
close-up, closer, looking into the eyes, you must think, think, “I’m
going to kill him.” Look at this picture from the silly Columbia movie
[Shockproof [1949]]. Frozenness. The average director might say,
“Now, look, I’m just doing a long shot so just stand there.” That’s
not enough, not for the camera. The actor must think, “My god,
28 ACTION!

what have I done? Will the police get me? Where will I go? My whole
life…” Then the face regains life, and you create the line. The
moment your actors understand this, you’re on safe ground as a
director. They’ll follow you like a dog.
On the stage, I’m a great imitator of people, a mimic. I do voices,
gestures. It’s not enough there to tell them what you want. You have
to play it for them–in a slightly overdone way, like a cartoon. So they
understand, they see the highlights. You absolutely cannot do that in
movies, because they imitate you. Then you get always Mr. Sirk on
the screen and not George Sanders. The main thing on the screen is
to preserve the personality. Sometimes, I’ll tell you, this is easier to
do with a horse than with an actor. You can’t destroy the personality
of that horse, because it will be there on the screen and it will say,
“Fuck yourself, I’m a horse.”

How much did you discuss the meanings of your films with the
actors?

Of course, that would depend on who it was and on the picture.

Rock Hudson found Pylon difficult; so did Stack. Rock hung around
my house looking for guidance on that. I knew he needed some
introduction, some explanation to the film beyond the novel, which
made no sense to him. So I gave him My Antonia as a sort of
explanation. An explanation of what was not in the film, of what
Malone is supposed to be leaving for in the end. This he understood.
With Malone I had a different problem. She was very prudish.

You’re kidding.

Not at all. I even had to watch my language. If I said, “This scene

needs more balls,” or “that light’s fucked up,” she’d walk out. So
with her I had to be devious. But I did arrive at it. For instance, her
dance in Written on the Wind. We almost came to an éclat about
that. I had to call in Zugsmith, and he took her aside and said, “Now
look, I wanted you to dance completely nude in this scene. But that
prig Douglas–he insisted you wear the clothes.” So finally she did it.
Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful
body of his was putty in my hands. And there was a certain dialectic
at work in his casting, especially after Magnificent Obsession. This
film he did not understand at all. But after it, I used him as a straight,
 SIRK 29

good-looking American guy. A little confused, but well-meaning. In

the novel–in Pylon–that reporter is a complex character, interwoven
perhaps too much into the other world, the world of the flyers.
I wanted to use him as a drab guy, with no experience but his shitty
job in his drab, shitty office. Then he falls in love with these gypsies
of the air. He wants to find out about their life. He’s fascinated. He
begins to imagine. He is the outsider looking up into the prison of
the air. Because up there, in those planes, is a prison too. These flyers
are trying to leave the prison of society–which was terrible after the
war. They think they are escaping into the air. But we are all
prisoners, into the final prison, which is the grave, and death. This is
something that I don’t think Rock understood, but for his part, as
the outsider, his confusion as an actor helped. There is always in the
films a dialectic–between the imprisoned group, and the one who
wants to come inside. Stanwyck in All I Desire moves from the stage
into that small town. In There’s Always Tomorrow, it is from outside
the house to that goddamned plane at the end.

There are two important diversions I’ve noticed between the film
and the script in Written on the Wind. One surprising one is that the
script has nothing about Malone’s dance, as the old man is dying.

That is a scene I added later–the one she objected to. The picture
I felt was sagging. It needed a climax to bring it together. I improvised
that scene on the stage. Zugsmith liked it, but we kept it from
the front office. They didn’t like such changes in the script. When
Mrs. Sirk and I saw the film just last year, that scene was missing.

But that’s the central scene in the film!

Sure. It was probably cut out for TV.

The last scene in the script is Malone in her office. Only there she is
pushing the buttons on her phone, rather than hugging the oil well.
And there is no shot of Hudson leaving.

Sure. We know they’ll go away together. Why show it? My idea was
to end on Malone. And of course I added that well–another sign
from the whole film–and the portrait, and the whole desk. That’s the
way it ended. But then later, long after shooting, Hudson’s agent,
30 ACTION!

I believe, complained about that. So we shot them driving away from

the house. It doesn’t hurt the film too much.

But Hudson was convinced that The Tarnished Angels would be

different?

It is different. I told Rock, “You are a goddamned crazy shitty

newspaperman who wants to go into another life. My Antonia wants
to escape like you.” He took the book and read it and loved it. And
he understood. He knew Malone at the end there was going back
to the cornfields, to the earth, to her youth. Of course, I didn’t tell
him she was only trying to go back. It’s a very unhappy ending,
because she is going away for good. His idealizing speech at the end
is crap of course. This man will never be another Faulkner. Just a
shitty, drab reporter, who is really very pitiful. And his heart is broken
because he thinks love has entered it. There is a strong ambiguity there.

As you say, it sounds very much like the structure of There’s Always
Tomorrow. There too is a man who is heartbroken because something
exciting has entered his life, and left for good. There too is the
ambiguity. Is it love or just a childish escape, as Stanwyck tells him?

It’s an impossible situation. Very sad. The children there are looking
at strange animals. The parents have become monuments, sculpted
by society and their children. Of course, these children don’t realize
they’ll become the same kind of fools. They are already more
orthodox than the parents. These children are very different from the
American ideal of children as little angels.

One of the remarkable–and consistent–elements in your films is their

distinctive camera style. There is a unique visual quality to every one
of your films, not merely in your use of mirrors, screens, veils, and
decor, but in the cinematography itself. How much do you concern
yourself with the purely technical aspects of the craft?

Completely so. All this, of course, I learned at UFA. And I learned it

well there. In fact, I rarely look through the camera, because I can
judge exactly. I tell the cameraman to put on a 2 inch or a 25 mm
lens. I give him the distance. Then I can tell exactly where the side
angle is for movement.
 SIRK 31

What about the

lighting in your
films? It seems that
especially in the color
melodramas, say All
That Heaven Allows
or Magnificent Obse-
ssion, that you
employ a radically
different lighting
scheme than that
which is usually
prescribed for color
film. Your total lack
of front lighting,
for instance, in
dramatic scenes. Or,
even in the black- Lana Turner and Juanita Moore in Imitation of Life
and-white films, an (1958). Credit: Universal Pictures/Photofest
extraordinarily com-
plex pattern of shadows. This is not only “antinatural,” it breaks
any rules of balanced lighting.

Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.

Often the window will be here, and the light from there. With color,
too, I did this, to attain a lighting that is almost surrealistic. As
Brecht has said, you must never forget that this is not reality. This is
a motion picture. It is a tale you are telling. The distanciation must
be there. It creates an unreal quality, a certain heightening. You can’t
just show it. You have to shoot it through with a dialectic.

What about Russell Metty? Was he cooperative?

More than that. He was original. He understood. After a while, he

came to me with ideas which I had used. The director must listen,
too, and in his own way Metty had a feeling for what I was after. His
lighting was the best.

Back in the fifties the Cahiers people spoke of your moving

camera–a series of lateral tracks, in almost every shot.
32 ACTION!

I always loosened up the camera. It was very rarely static. Many of

these movements you wouldn’t even see unless you studied the film
on the moviola. But every movement followed one rule, which was
a rule of iron with me. (It has been discarded today.) That is, that a
camera movement ought to be justified by your actors’ movements,
and that your actors’ movements must be justified by the camera.
I lay out my camera moves before plotting the actors’. There must be
a constant flow of inspiration between camera and people. The
goddamned camera must react. And the actors must respond to the
camera. Always. With Sanders I’d tell him, “Now we’ll pan with you
as you move.” And he’d say, “Why in the hell do that?” (He knew
what I was up to.) And I’d say, “Because the camera is interested in
you”–which is true. “The good camera is curious.” And he’d say,
“Douglas, you goddamned intellectual.”

What about the use of rear projection in your films? I am always

running into people who say, “That’s the best he could do. It’s just
lousy rear projection, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.” Could
you say something about this–say about the rear projection in
Written on the Wind when Kyle is driving in his sportscar.

I will tell you. Many pictures I have shot against the wishes of the
studio totally on location. But the moment you go inside the studio,
it is dangerous to go out again. The moment you hop from that
studio to the wilds of Utah, you must artificialize nature. You must
somehow integrate nature into your story. So you use back
projection. For instance, there in Written on the Wind, the whole
story is artificial. The back projection has to be this way. “Artificial”
used to be a negative word. But every artist today must proceed with
a certain artificiality.

In the Cahiers interview you say that the 1940s were a golden age of
American movies, like primitive painting, full of courage and
audacity. How do you see the 1950s?

It was the twilight of the Gods. Drama is impossible today. I don’t

know of any. Drama used to be the belief in guilt, and in a higher
order. This absolutely cruel didactic is impossible, unacceptable
for us moderns. But melodrama has kept it. You are caged.
 SIRK 33

In melodrama you have human, earthly prisons rather than godly

creations. Every Greek tragedy ends with the chorus–“those are
strange happenings. Those are the ways of the gods.”
And so it always is in melodrama… In Magnificent Obsession,
I was feeling my way. It is perhaps too much when Rock Hudson
finally succeeds. This God-like creature is sitting up there. It is a
good old image of God. He is benevolently smiling down on that
stupid story. Of course, this is something that few critics penetrate.
But I actually built the operating room for that scene. Throughout
the picture this man is never being taken seriously. He’s just a
funny little man with crazy ideas. He’s needed because down there
on the operating table, a miracle really is happening. And it really
has to be a Rock Hudson type there. At first he’s just a stupid guy.
All he can do is race his car. His change is quite impossible, and
therefore just right.

In Magnificent Obsession you have what I consider to be a

quintessential scene–really a manifesto for the melodramas which
followed. When Wyman is groping blindly in her room…

Yes, there is this huge bulging pole, like a phallus. It’s sitting there,
in front of her and she can’t find it. She can’t see it, yet she is
reaching out, reaching…These are aspects you can’t hit too much. It
must be subconscious. Like the oil well in the Zugsmith picture. It’s
riches, it’s a phallus. The real end there is this poor bad girl behind
that huge desk, behind all that money, with only the oil well instead
of what she wants. She’s stuck there in that house.

Like Clifford Groves, in There’s Always Tomorrow?

Yes. I like that ending. It’s ironic. But the way it was before I reshot
it was even more direct. There, Groves goes back to his office and
watches the plane fly away. The shot’s still there now, as the robot
walks towards the camera. But now it cuts. I had it keep walking,
walking, then fall off the table. The camera pans down, whoom!
And there’s the robot, on the floor, spinning, rmmm, rhmm,
rhhmm…rhhmmm, slowly spinning to a halt. The End. That is
complete hopelessness. This toy is all the poor man has invented in
his life. It is a symbol of himself, an automaton, broken.
34 ACTION!

But here is another difference. In tragedy, the life always ends. By

being dead, the hero is at the same time rescued from life’s troubles.
In melodrama, he lives on–in an unhappy happy end.

George Zuckerman on Sirk

On Written on the Wind

Robert Wilder’s novel had been shelved and written off (because of
Breen office objections and a threatened lawsuit by the Reynolds
tobacco family) when I first came to Universal in 1949. I met Wilder in
’46 at Paramount, and then and there decided that his book would make
a great picture. Albert Zugsmith had come to Hollywood about 1950,
made some small films, and “arranged” to land a post as a U-I producer.
He bought an original of mine, The Square Jungle, and then I “sold”
him on trying to get Wind off the shelf and shit list. Finally, with
Zugsmith leading the blocking, Muhl allowed himself to listen to “the Z
and Z maniacs.” I was allowed to write a treatment or two, and then a
first-draft screenplay. The rest is history. The movie was a blockbuster.
I became, at the time, the highest-priced screenwriter in U-I’s history.
I honestly don’t recall consciously constructing this film along
classical lines. Basically I saw it as a Sunday Supplement American
melodrama…which, incidentally, isn’t a dirty word to me…not so
long as character is action. As to the flashback: In the fifties, the
exhibitors watched the opening minutes of the film and they had to
be hooked. Hooking the audience was secondary. Also, no social
criticism was intended–not at Universal (Western Union sends
messages)…just things as they were and are. In the Stack character
you’ve found–and rightly so–a little Gatsby. If you’re looking for
awareness, you won’t find it in most American drama. The critics
take it for self-pity, and only Shakespeare and Hamlet can get away
with it…and not necessarily at the box office…or the bookstore.

On The Tarnished Angels

I fell in love with the novel in 1936. When I came to Hollywood in

’46, I learned that the town’s top talent had tried and failed to ride
the property past the Breen office. I suspect the novel was neglected
by critics because, in truth, it wasn’t in Faulkner’s genre of Southern
 SIRK 35

novels. Though it’s set in New Orleans, it could have happened in

Hackensack, Oakland, or Pessary, Ohio…But after the success of
Wind, in conversation with Sirk, I suggested Pylon. His face turned
white. He said it was exactly the property he had in mind.

On the auteur theory

You may have seen Wallace Markfield’s New York Times article on
his favorite old B movies. He identified The Incredible Shrinking
Man as a Jack Arnold film. True, Jack directed it. But it would be
closer to the truth to call it a RICHARD MATHESON FILM (he
wrote the novel and, with my tutoring, the screenplay). Or a
ZUGSMITH FILM. He had the guts to buy it and bull it through.
Jack Arnold put in his 21 days of shooting, plus his time working out
the shots with the art director. But hardly a JACK ARNOLD FILM.
So much for Markfield and other outsiders who don’t understand
what the hell went on here…Sirk, much as I admire the man, wasn’t
and couldn’t have been an “auteur” the way the studio was run in
those days…Your “hero” should be Ed Muhl, who ran the studio.
I don’t mean to demean Sirk’s work. But he had no chance. The
budgets were tight, the schedules tighter. A director who went over
budget or shooting schedule never worked at U-I again. Sirk knew
this. He was rushed, he was harried by the stars. He did what he
could–which was better than the other directing talent on the lot.

The preceding comments were edited from several letters by

George Zuckerman to Michael Stern between August 28, 1975 and
mid-1976.

Albert Zugsmith on Sirk

On Written on the Wind

Sirk had a marvelous relationship with Rock, with all the actors.
I remember once Bob Stack was in the office. Doug had a little
problem with Dorothy [Malone]. She didn’t want to do the dance
scene–something that really wasn’t in the script. I talked to her and
got her to do the prior dance scene–she’s dancing in the house, at
a party, and she leaves Rock for another man. But the other dance…
36 ACTION!

she objected to making love to the picture of the man she loved.
She’s very Texas and he’s [Sirk] continental. Outside of that,
I can’t recall any problems. Stack loved him. Bacall–I don’t think
anybody gets close to her.

On the creative process

As far as Douglas Sirk and myself, the relationship couldn’t be finer.

He’s one of the two finest directors in the world, the other being
Orson Welles. There’s nothing bad I could say about Douglas. He
was the quintessence of elegance, an artiste, a gentleman, a master of
camera placement. Douglas and I never had an argument. He was a
very sensitive man, a private man. We became good friends socially
as well as practicing our art. He never tore down our initial planning
in our attack on [film] properties. He did nothing but add to things.
I precut my pictures. Sirk was an absolute willing doll in conforming
to anything that made dramatic sense. There was no improvisation,
none whatsoever on the part of the actor in these films. There
were conferences, meetings, quasi-rehearsals. Improvisation was
unnecessary.
Sirk worked very closely with the cameraman, placing the shots
himself. In this respect he was similar to Orson Welles. Metty was an
excellent cameraman. He detached himself into the background
somewhat. We had a sensational operator on those films.
George Zuckerman was a third partner with Sirk and myself. It
was a creative team–something exceedingly rare in the film world.
Usually you have no creative producer. I would almost say that the
front office, in the form of Ed Muhl, was a fourth partner. They
allowed us to make an actor out of Rock Hudson. Ed Muhl was
a constructive, sensitive man.

On the producer

Ed Muhl doesn’t go to sets. George [Zuckerman] wasn’t there a lot,

particularly on location. Sirk and I were there. The producer’s place
is on the set. Ross Hunter would be introduced to the director, but
at that time, Hunter would not go on the set. He would meet the
director before the film was shot and say, “See you at the preview.”
His contribution at that time was, he was a marvelous handler of
female stars. He has a marvelous ability to handle women–with all
 SIRK 37

the social graces. Aaron Rosenberg and I were the only producers
actually on the set. Sirk intimated–being too much a gentleman to
come right out and say it–that always on his Hunter films, up to the
time I worked with him, he had to do everything himself. George
[Zuckerman] worked under my direction, and I was his editor.
Some of the dialogue in the films was mine. Sirk’s main talent was
the execution of the script. I can remember no major suggestions he
made to affect the screenplay. Universal considered him their top
director. At least Ed Muhl did.

Albert Zugsmith’s comments were excerpted and edited from

a phone conversation with Gary Morris, September 17, 1977.
Robert Wise and Emmanuelle Arsan in The Sand Pebbles (1966).
Credit: Twentieth Century Fox/Photofest

Somebody Up There Likes Me:

Robert Wise
by C. Jerry Kutner

I have been thinking a lot about Robert Wise (1914–2005) lately,

partly because he is one of Hollywood’s most underrated
directors–hardly acknowledged as a true “auteur”–and partly
because so much of his work falls into the genre that interests me
most at this time: film noir.
40 ACTION!

The virtues of Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

became apparent when it was issued in a widescreen video version.
Unfortunately, when the film was originally released, the virtues of
the director’s vision were completely eclipsed by viewers’ feelings
about the Star Trek television series.
Viewed now–independent of one’s previous attitudes toward
Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock–Star Trek is an impressive achievement.
It is a classic example of what Raymond Durgnat calls “a compass
and protractor film,” in which the sheer interplay of abstract colors,
forms, and motion is consistently pleasing to the eye; and Wise,
apparently, was given plenty of room to indulge his penchant for
abstract exercises of this sort. For example, a sequence whose only
narrative significance can be summarized in the words, “Kirk returns
to his ship,” is elaborated by Wise into a six-minute tour de force of
music, composition, and montage.
But, as in most of Wise’s best work, the tendency toward abstract
formalism is balanced by reserves of feeling. Here, most of the
feelings cluster around the film’s “monster,” an enormous thinking
machine attempting to evolve into human form (specifically, the form
of beautiful Indian actress Persis Khambatta), and the reciprocal
feelings of one of the crew members (Stephen Collins) toward this
pseudo-human. The climax of the film, both literal and metaphoric,
occurs when the human and the machine-made-flesh “join.”
Odd relationships of this sort are not uncommon in Wise’s films.
In fact, they are more the rule than the exception. One thinks of the
frustrated spinster (Julie Harris) in The Haunting (1963), who
finally achieves fulfillment by becoming one with a haunted house.
Similarly, there is the relationship between the woman (Patricia
Neal) and the alien (Michael Rennie) in The Day the Earth Stood
Still (1951). Even in Wise’s first film, The Curse of the Cat People
(1944), the relationship most emphasized is that between a child and
a ghost (Simone Simon).
Metaphorically speaking, what the strange relationships in Wise’s
fantasy and science fiction films represent is an acceptance of “the
other.” Translated into the real world, this means an acceptance of
persons who are different or unusual, rather than a fear and rejection
of them (as expressed metaphorically in such paranoid science fiction
films of the 1950s as Invaders from Mars, Earth vs. the Flying
Saucers, and The Thing). Thus, it is not surprising to find interracial
romances at the heart of many of Wise’s “realistic” films, including
 WISE 41

his masterpiece, West Side Story (1961), Odds Against Tomorrow

(1959), and Rooftops (1989), his last film to date.1 One would also
expect Wise to be more tolerant than most of his contemporaries
toward male and female homosexuality, and West Side Story and
The Haunting show that he is.
Children and blacks play a more significant role in Wise’s films
than in those of most of his peers. It is no coincidence that The Curse
of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher (1945), Wise’s two
contributions to the Val Lewton horror cycle, are the only Lewton
horror films that involve children to any significant degree. Children
and/or young people are also central to the stories of The Day the
Earth Stood Still, The Sound of Music (1965), West Side Story,
Audrey Rose (1977), and Rooftops. Wise assiduously avoids the
patriarchal white male viewpoint, gravitating whenever he can to a
woman or a child.
How then does Wise relate to the film noir? Wise began his career
as an editor for Orson Welles and a director for Val Lewton, two of the
most influential architects of noir style. If we include the noir western
Blood on the Moon (1948) and the noir musical West Side Story, Wise
has directed at least nine films which can be called noir. Among the
others: The Set-Up (1949), Born to Kill (1947), The Captive City
(1952), The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), Somebody Up There
Likes Me (1956), I Want to Live (1958), and Odds Against Tomorrow.
Noir, it must be stressed, is less a genre than a vision, a way of seeing
the world shared by certain artists–among them, Robert Wise.
Wise’s vision is essentially theological in nature, the view of a
“fallen world” shared by such spiritually oriented authors as
Graham Greene and Philip K. Dick. When a filmmaker applies that
way of seeing the world to the contemporary urban landscape, the
result is a film noir.
Wise differs from many other noir directors in that while his view
of the world is thoroughly cynical (noir ⫽ dark), his view of
humankind is not. Over and over again in his films, certain
individuals transcend (escape from) the fallen world either through
their own efforts or the intervention of some “Other.” (The theme is
stated explicitly in the title Somebody Up There Likes Me.)
The Set-Up, Wise’s first fully achieved major work, is also
the prototype for most of his films to come. Already demonstrating
the taste for formal experimentation that would define the rest of his
career, Wise scrupulously adheres to the unities of time and space,
42 ACTION!

having the entire story take place between 9:05 and 10:17 p.m. in
one dark city block. An over-the-hill boxer (the great Robert Ryan)
prepares for a bout, unaware that his manager has promised the
Mob his boy will take a dive. The boxer’s wife prays for him to leave
the sport while he still has a mind. The fight begins. The boxer
refuses to lie down. His manager tells him about the fix, but the
boxer fights on and wins. After the fight, the Mob corners the boxer
in an alley and beats him to a pulp. The wife discovers him. He is
still alive, but his hands have been broken–he “can’t fight no more.”
The wife cries for happiness. Fate has forced the boxer to leave the
profession (the purgatory whose borders are defined by the spatio-
temporal unities of the film) with his body and spirit intact. Her
prayers have been answered.
The Sound of Music is unusual in Wise’s output insofar as its
pastoral vision of pre-World War II Austria is a picture of the world
before the Fall. The Fall occurs within the film, signified by the
arrival of the Nazis. (Wise was making anti-Nazi films as far back as
1944’s Mademoiselle Fifi.) Again, Wise uses escape as a metaphor
for transcendence, as the Trapp family leaves Nazi-occupied Austria
by climbing over the same mountain range that was shown so
lovingly in the film’s opening shots.
It should be clear by now that the themes of the fallen world and
transcendence recur throughout Wise’s career from The Curse of the
Cat People through Star Trek (never more movingly expressed than
in the “There’s a Place for Us” musical number from West Side Story).
Similarly, formal experimentation is a constant, from the spatio-
temporal unities of The Set-Up, to the absence of music on the
soundtrack of Executive Suite (1954), to the intercutting of newsreel
footage with the studio-staged action in The Hindenburg (1975). The
purpose of this piece is not to preach to the converted, or to those
such as novelist Barry Gifford who already know and admire these
movies, but rather to certain hard-core auteurists–or others
unfamiliar with Wise’s films–who have perhaps not given him his due.

Interview: Part 1

I was born September 10, 1914 in Winchester, Indiana, a town of

about 5,000. When I was eight, my family moved to Connorsville,
Ohio, which had about 12,500 people.
 WISE 43

I had an opportunity for a year at a small college near Indianapolis,

Franklin College, through a scholarship. But this was the mid-
Depression, 1933, and there was no money to go back a second year.
I couldn’t get a job in the little town–every kid around had a job–and
my Dad’s business was on the rocks. And I had an older brother who
had the wanderlust. He had gone out to Los Angeles from Connorsville
in the late twenties. And he came home the summer of 1933, his first
trip home, and at a family conclave that I was not present at, they
decided that under the circumstances the best thing for me to do would
be to go back with my brother to California. I loved films, I used to go
to them all the time as a kid. But I had no idea of being in films. I was
going to be a journalist. But my brother was working at RKO Studios
at the accounting department, and he got me some interviews, the
second one with the head of the film editing department. He happened
to be able to use a young, eager, strong, ambitious kid to work in the
film shipping room, so that was my break.

How old were you?

Eighteen. And I started carrying prints of films up to the projection

room for the executives to look at, and patching leader, and checking
prints and all those things.

And somewhere along the line you became a film editor

Well, I worked my way up. I was spotted by T. K. Young, who was the
head sound effects editor at RKO, and he saw that I was young and
eager and maybe bright enough, so he asked for me to be put with him
after I’d been in the shipping room for a few months. He taught me
sound effects editing and music editing. After I’d done that for a
couple of years, I looked around and saw men who’d been doing that
for 15 or 20 years. I saw it was a dead end. So I kept after my boss to
move me over on the picture side so I could become an assistant film
editor and learn film editing, and he was kind enough to do that.

What was the first film that you cut?

I got co-credit first on The Hunchback of Notre Dame [1939]. I was

made an assistant to Billy Hamilton, who was a marvelous master
editor in those days. The very first film I worked with Billy on,
44 ACTION!

Winterset [1936], we had a small sequence. I used to break the film

down, put it on the bench for him to cut. He would stand at the
Moviola and I would stand at the synch machine and he’d mark
while I cut. So he came in one day, we had a small sequence, maybe
four or five minutes and I had the rolls all lined up, all the coverage,
and he looked at it and said, “Why don’t you throw that together?
Let’s see what you can do with it.” First film I’d worked with him.
I was a little nervous-like, but I stumbled through it somehow and he
came down and showed me how it could be improved and all and in
about two more pictures I was doing all the first cutting in the room,
and he would be up on the set with the director. He’d come down and
look at the sequence and improve it, and the last three films I did with
him, I was doing so much of the work, he insisted I share credit.

With regard to the fiddle sequence in Dieterle’s All That Money Can
Buy [1941], did you have the music track first, or did you cut it, and
then [Bernard] Herrmann scored it?

No, no, you always have the music track first. We had to have that
playback for a guide.

Your first film as a director was Curse of the Cat People. You shared
credit with Gunther Fritsch. How much of the film is yours and how
much is Fritsch’s?

Gunther was a fine documentary filmmaker. It was his first feature,

and they were not dissatisfied with his work, but his schedule was
terrible. These were short-schedule, low-budget, 18- to 20-day films,
and they couldn’t seem to speed him up. So I got called over to
Lucy’s Restaurant across the street from RKO, on a Saturday noon,
and was told I was to take over on Monday morning. And this was
my break. I did most of the stuff at the end, the old house and the
snow, and all the scary stuff. As a matter of fact, I think all the stuff,
even the earlier sequence, where the little girl first visits the old
house, and meets the daughter and the old woman, I shot all of that.
Gunther shot a number of things around the family, so I think it was
about 50–50.

The Body Snatcher is one of your many odd couple stories. You have
this sadomasochistic relationship between Henry Daniell as the
 WISE 45

respected physician and teacher; and Karloff as the cab driver who
supplies him with fresh cadavers. And Karloff, the outsider, comes
across as the more sympathetic of the two. My favorite sequence in
that picture is the scene where Karloff strangles Bela Lugosi. It’s so
well choreographed.

Well, I had to mask a lot of it, you see. Number one, that part for
Bela was not in the original script. And the studio came to Lewton
and said, “Gee, wouldn’t it be great if we had something Lugosi
could do, so we could say we have Karloff and Lugosi in the same
film?” So that whole role of the porter was created by Val Lewton to
give a small role to Lugosi, so we could put it in the film. And Lugosi
was not very well, and I had to kind of nurse him through it. So I
decided the only thing to do with the fight was to kind of mask it,
fuzz it up, cut away to the cat and show things in shadows and all
that, to get over the fact that he couldn’t give me a very robust fight.
I had to conceive of another kind of fight.

Born to Kill was your first full-blown film noir.

There was a book that they’d had around there called Deadlier Than
the Male. And somebody brought it to my attention, and I liked it
very much. They had a script that wasn’t very good, so the studio let
us put on a writer to do a rewrite. And they went for it. And then
because it ended up with Larry Tierney who had done Dillinger in it,
they didn’t want to have the title Deadlier Than the Male, that was
too soft, so then the studio came up with the title Born to Kill.

Did you have input on the development of the script?

Yes, I was one of the early ones who got involved with the script on
that. I don’t write, myself, on the scripts. I do work closely with the
writers.

The characters played by Tierney and Claire Trevor are archetypal

film noir protagonists, driven by forces they don’t really understand.

I think that makes them fascinating characters. You question what

makes them tick, and they don’t know themselves, and you don’t
quite know where you are.
46 ACTION!

Tell me how you came to do The Set-Up.

It was written by a fellow named Art Cohn, whose first feature film
it was. Art had been a sportswriter down in Long Beach, then up in
San Francisco, so he knew the fight game. And it was based on a full-
length prose narrative poem written in the late twenties, and it told
the story of a black fighter who didn’t have his hand mashed in the
end, but was pushed in front of a subway train by the gangsters. But
at that time there weren’t really any black stars who could carry a
picture, and they had Ryan, who had been a fighter under contract
at RKO, and he loved the piece.

The Set-Up is basically an art film, and it looks like the studio gave
you a very free hand with it.

Yes, they did. The only interest Hughes had in that film was who was
to play the leading lady. Naturally.

The Set-Up looks forward to West Side Story, too, insofar as you have
all this highly choreographed movement within a very realistic setting.

Yes. Well, I call it choreography. At the old YMCA in Hollywood,

they had a ring up there, and I would go in on a Saturday before we
started shooting–and see what they were doing, make some
suggestions, fewer punches, more, whatever. Gradually build it that
way. Then when we shot it, we would just do it in sections, with
three cameras on each fight: one camera to cover the whole ring,
another one to be in tighter, you know the two guys, and another
one, just a wild camera, for those little pieces, the spray flying and
all that. I told the man to get in there and get whatever he could. He
was up close with a little handheld camera. So all the fights were
done with those three cameras.

By the time you made The Set-Up, the noir style was highly defined.
Were you aware there was such a thing as film noir?

No. I was just making my films as I saw them, that’s all.

And yet there were so many people in the same place at the same
time who were really creating the style.
 WISE 47

Of course, one of the things was they were still working in black and
white. Is there any film noir made in color?

I think so. Reservoir Dogs, to name a famous example.

I didn’t see that. I suppose it would be, but I think that maybe my love
of black and white makes me think that it’s more fitting in a film noir.

This brings us to The Day the Earth Stood Still. The emphasis on the
woman and the child is very unusual for science fiction films in
general, yet it’s typical of your career.

[Laughs] Serendipity, I guess. That was in the script.

Also the presentation of the alien as benign. That goes against the
whole right-wing tendency to see anything foreign or different as a
threat.

Right. That’s one of the things that appealed to me!

It’s a hell of a statement to make in the middle of the McCarthy era.

Yes, it sure is, isn’t it? I’ve always been a believer in the possibility of
things from the unknown out there, not from this earth,
parapsychology, also UFOs. I’ve never seen one, but I have to believe
that for me to think we’re the only possible intelligence in the
universe is just crazy, you know? So I loved that part of it. I liked
several things about it: the fact that it was science fiction, had a
benevolent alien, and it was sort of earthbound. Science fiction that
took place on earth. The fact that we made it in Washington, D.C.,
a very mundane real area, that’s one of the things that gave it its
effect and its strength somehow.

The film takes an antimilitary stance.

I’ve been an antimilitarist in many of my films. Even The Sound of

Music was, you know, “To hell with the Nazis!” And The Sand
Pebbles [1966]–hey, we’ve been showing that flag around for a long
time. That phrase “Yankee Go Home” didn’t start in World War II,
it started in World War I. So this is what I liked about it.
48 ACTION!

I think that’s a good point, that The Sound of Music isn’t just anti-
Nazi, it’s antimilitary.

Absolutely. Day the Earth the Stood Still is antimilitary, anti-atomic

war. I wish the message could have gotten out more clearly around
the world, to the powers that be, but I’m afraid that’s too much to
hope for.

Executive Suite and some other films made around the same
time–Jack Arnold’s Incredible Shrinking Man comes to mind–have a
kind of abstract, modern style which I find very appealing and which
looks forward to some of the films by Antonioni and others in the
1960s. This modern style, along with the film noir style, is one of
those looks that you were instrumental in helping to develop.

Well, you know it was–what style would you call it?

Well, it’s very abstract. It stresses architecture and environment as

much as people.

Yes, because of the look of the buildings and offices and boardrooms
they were in. And Bill Holden’s home and his office. I’ll tell you who
dressed that office–Charles Eames. I didn’t know Charlie, and
[producer] John Houseman did. And he said, “I think we’ll see if
Charlie Eames will do this special set for us.”

Is your basic method to try to create a unique style for each project?

Yes. I’ve been accused by the critics of not having a cinematic style
of my own. And my answer to that is–I’ve done so many different
genres–that I try to approach each one in the cinematic style that’s
right for that story, you know? I wouldn’t do The Sound of Music
like I did The Set-Up. I try to give each film the style I think is right
for that film. Makes it difficult to have a consistent style all the way
through. Say, a Robert Wise trademark on it.

If you’ll forgive me for indulging a critical theory, Somebody Up

There Likes Me is an example of what I’ve called “transcendent
noir,” where the hero is very much a part of the fallen noir world,
but manages in the end, almost miraculously, to rise above it, as
 WISE 49

opposed to the darker type like Born to Kill, where the characters are
destroyed or defeated in the end.

Yes, I like that! It’s true, it was a noir world he was in. Charlie
Schnee was the producer and he sent me the book, and I liked it very
much, and he said Ernie [Lehman] was going to do the screenplay,
which I really loved. And at that early time, James Dean was possibly
going to star in it. He had read the book evidently, liked it and
wanted to do it. And of course he was killed in the accident before
I’d ever met him. I never talked to him. And then we got Paul
Newman. Paul was much better. I always had in my mind that
maybe Dean was not physically a middleweight, somehow. And Paul
did one of his best characterizations in it, he really caught that man.

The projects you’ve chosen over the years indicate that you view film
as a medium which can change people for the better.

I would hope so, yes. Show how man deals with the world around
him, the problems he’s presented with, and how he handles them,
overcomes them most of the time. I think it should be a positive
force.

And you frequently address specific social problems.

Well, that’s always important to me. I’ve been asked many times,
how do I choose a project? The first thing for me when I read this
play or script or book or whatever is if it catches me up as a reader,
therefore as an audience, if I get involved with it–that’s number one.
Number two is, What does it have to say? What comment is it
making? That’s very important to me. Then the third stage is, Is it
cinematic? Is there a picture in there? How could I treat it? And the
fourth thing, Is there an audience for it? Because that’s the first thing
I’m going to be asked in the front office when I go in there to ask for
the money. They’re going to say, What makes you think there’s going
to be an audience for it? So I have to have my reasons why I think
this has a chance to be a box-office success. But the first two things
are the story, and the theme–the message, if you will. But the
message, with rare exceptions–The Day the Earth Stood Still would
be one obvious, rare exception–the comment I want to make must
come through the telling of the story, not getting on a soapbox.
50 ACTION!

I Want to Live is for me one of your most interesting films, and one
of your grimmest. Again you’re taking the viewpoint of an outsider,
a woman who is also a petty criminal living on the fringes of society.

Who got bad treatment, you know. I think my main interest in this
was expressed in the general run of the editorials in the newspapers
out here, particularly the day after her execution, where the papers
all seemed to say in essence, “No matter what a person’s innocence
or guilt, nobody should have to go through the kind of torture that
Mrs. Graham was put through yesterday.”

The gas chamber sequence is all the more chilling because you
present it so matter-of-factly.

It’s interesting how one comes by these things. I’d always known
from the beginning that the last act really had to be her arrival in San
Quentin, her night in the death cell, and the next morning, with the
stays and all that. That was our last act. But I didn’t quite know how
to develop it. We were still doing the script then. Nelson Gidding
was on it by this time, and I was up there doing the research.
I interviewed the nurse who spent the night with her, and all the
other people. And I had been over to the prison, to the chamber
and the death cell and that whole area, talked to the guards and
everybody over there, and my art director was there, measuring and
photographing, because we were going to have to reproduce it all
back on the stage, and I wanted it to be just exactly like that. And
Ed Montgomery, the reporter, had arranged for me to have an
interview with the priest who had been there at the time. And during
the course of our dialogue, I asked him, “Well, Father, how does it
happen that you’ve left the prison?” He said, “Mr. Wise, I don’t
suppose you have any idea of the terrible pall, the awful atmosphere,
that descends on a prison the day before, and the night of, morning
of, an execution, when everybody in the prison knows preparations
are being made to take a human life.” So I went back over and I said
to the guards, I want you to show me every step, every bit of
procedure that you use to prepare. And that’s what’s in the film.
That was my hook, you see.

Are you familiar with the book The Devil Thumbs a Ride, by Barry
Gifford?
 WISE 51

No, I don’t know it at all.

Let me read you what he wrote about your film Odds Against
Tomorrow: “Odds is a seedy unpleasant take on life in America in
the late 1950s. Almost as if It’s a Wonderful Life were going on
somewhere in the background of the same town, with Gloria
Grahame as the link between them. The bad girl in the nice little
town, and we get a peek at her life on the underside. The French like
this one, what with racial hatred, hair-trigger violence, tramp wives,
the cool spade in shades, bleak highways, lonesome landscapes, wet
dark streets, the U.S.A. at its best! There’s a great deal of truth in this
one, though, and as usual that’s hard to take.”

That’s good. Interesting. Odds was brought to me by Harry

Belafonte. It was made for his company, and he gave it to my agent,
and I read it and I liked it, although I didn’t like the end of it, because
in the book the black and the white get together. Well, that was too
much like The Defiant Ones, you know? And I thought, we can’t do
the same thing. We have to show the other side of the coin, destroy
them at the end, so we can say, “Hate destroys. Look what happened
to these guys–the hatred they had killed them.” So that’s what we did.
On the script that Harry gave me, there was a name, John Harris.
It turned out to be a black novelist who had done the script,
supposedly. When I got back to New York, Harry introduced me to
a man–Abe Polonsky! Abe had done the script and Harry had just
used this black friend of his up front to put on the title, because Abe
was unusable then under his own name, but he was doing a lot of
undercover writing and that’s when I first met Abe. So we worked
on the script together with Nelson Gidding, but actually the major
part of the script was done by Abe Polonsky.

Interview: Part 2

West Side Story and the ten Academy Awards it earned, including
Best Picture and Best Direction, was a major turning point in Wise’s
career. Up to that moment, he had been a respected genre craftsman;
now he was a Hollywood superstar. The record-breaking success of
The Sound of Music in 1963 only confirmed his status.
52 ACTION!

Unfortunately, Wise’s acceptance by the Hollywood establishment

had a backlash effect, causing him to be rejected by an emerging
critical elite. Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, at odds on almost
every issue, were in agreement in their distaste for Wise. As one of
the foremost purveyors of Hollywood “product,” Wise was neither
a Hustonian maverick (of the type beloved by Kael) nor an Ulmerian
unknown (as sanctified by Sarris) creating stylistic silk purses out of
narrative sows’ ears.
Ironically, Wise himself had not changed to any significant degree.
The same vision (romantic noir) and taste for formal
experimentation that had distinguished his B films continued to be
expressed in the context of the megaproduction. However, because
these were megaproductions, everything was amplified. The
successes (West Side Story, The Sound of Music) were spectacular,
but so were the failures (Star! [1968], The Hindenburg).
The true advantage of Wise’s superstar status was that it enabled
him to realize certain personal projects on a grand scale without
significant compromises. The Haunting’s A-budget production
values were unprecedented compared to any terror film since the
early 1930s. Similarly, The Sand Pebbles succeeds as a detailed,
immaculately mounted and performed period war film that manages
to interweave Wise’s most personal themes into an epic tapestry.
Specifically, The Sand Pebbles masterfully showcases Wise’s anti-
militarism (this time directed at America’s intervention in Vietnam),
his fascination with odd couples (Steve McQueen as Jake and Mako
as the “coolie”), interracial romance (Frenchy and his girl),
existential courage and isolation (Jake at the film’s conclusion), and
the metaphysical darkness that lurks at the edges of Wise’s
widescreen frame, ready to engulf even the noblest of his characters.
What the musicals, West Side Story and The Sound of Music, have
in common is that they are both love stories that take place in the
shadow of doom, a doom that destroys Tony in West Side Story and
barely allows the Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music to escape
with their lives. Star!, on the other hand, has no overriding threat to
give meaning to the career of its self-absorbed protagonist (Julie
Andrews as Gertrude Lawrence), and the result is neither tragic
enough nor uplifting enough to satisfy the musical genre’s mass
audience.
What Star! does have (aside from some impressive production
numbers) is a great odd couple relationship between Gertrude
 WISE 53

Lawrence and a gay Noel Coward. The remainder of Wise’s career

alternates between more stories of lovers in a fallen world (Two for
the Seesaw [1962], Two People [1973], Rooftops), and stories in
which a handful of characters confront and try to comprehend some
unknown, ultimately benign Other (The Andromeda Strain [1971],
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Audrey Rose).

West Side Story was another change of genre for you. You’d never
done a musical before, and yet the studio entrusted you with this
massive project.

I was in New York finishing up the post-production on Odds Against

Tomorrow when I got a call from Harold Mirisch from the Mirisch
Company. He said, Look Bob, we’ve just inherited West Side Story
from United Artists, would you feel like producing or directing? It
was still playing in New York, so I went to see a matinee. And I said,
Well, that sounds fine. I reported to the company over at the old
Goldwyn lot to work on it. And one day Harold Mirisch came up to
me and said, What would you think about having a co-director on the
film? I said, Why? He said, Jerome Robbins has the right of first
refusal to do the choreography, but he’s done the directing and the
choreography for the New York company and the National company
and the London company, and he feels unless he can have more to do
than just the choreography on the film, he doesn’t want to do it. And
I said, Well, let him direct it then. He said, Oh no, no, he’s never
directed a film, he couldn’t do that. I said, Well, I don’t think so. So
we left it at that. When I got home that night, I almost literally looked
in the mirror and took my director’s hat off and put my producer’s
hat on and asked myself what was the best thing for the film? And the
answer came back, any way we could get a working relationship with
Robbins would be best. I knew I could always get his assistant
choreographers to come out to the coast and reproduce what he’d
done on the stage, but I knew Jerry, being as brilliant as he is, would
change and adapt and invent to make it better for the screen. I knew
his assistants couldn’t do that, only him. So I went back and said,
Look, I’ve thought it over and I’m willing to consider it and have
some discussions, if Jerry is. So we met in New York, and he had the
same reservations and concerns I had. It was a bit of a soul-searching
thing for both of us, but we finally came to the resolution that he
would be in full charge of the dances and musical numbers (including
54 ACTION!

camera placement and cutting), and I would be there to help and

assist and give my thoughts on it, and he would be there to give me
his thoughts when I was doing the book scenes. And so we started
and we shot in New York, but we went on and on and we started
getting way behind schedule, and the front office felt that the co-
director was causing this, to go as slowly as we did. So finally, about
50–60 percent of the way through, he was taken off it, and it was a
very tense time. He was very unhappy. I was upset about it.

The film appears to have been very carefully storyboarded.

It was, pretty much, except for the dance numbers. You don’t do
those–like the fights. You don’t storyboard fights. I’ve used a storyboard
on almost every film since The Set-Up. Except for action sequences–you
don’t. You have a special man, not the art director, but a sketch artist,
who’s accustomed to doing this. You used to call it continuity sketches
when they first started doing them back in the forties.

I find Natalie Wood’s performance extremely moving.

Wasn’t she lovely in it? We were having trouble finding our

Maria. We had interviewed and tested several people. We were
also trying to cast Tony. Somebody said, Listen, you ought to
go to Warner Bros. and see if you can see the test that Warren
Beatty made for Splendor in the Grass, so we made arrangements
to go to Warners to see it, and who walks in doing the test with
him but Natalie. And the minute we saw that, we said, Hey guys!
There’s our Maria! Why didn’t we think of her? Just one of those
dumb things. So we forgot all about Warren and settled on her.
[Laughs]

A scene that really shocks an audience is the gang rape of Anita. It’s
shocking because we’ve gotten to know and like these kids over the
course of the movie, and suddenly they’re doing all these really
horrible things.

What is that song out of South Pacific? “You’ve Got to Be Carefully

Taught.” We were looking for locations for the playground in New
York, and we were on the west side someplace, and we went into this
playground, and we saw the little kids, 2-, 3-, 4-year-old kids, all
 WISE 55

races, black and

white and yellow
and having the most
marvelous time.
And we walked on
50 yards over to the
other end, where
the teenagers were
playing basketball.
And the Latinos are
at one end, and the
whites are on the
other, and you feel
the sparks going
between them. Boy,
the anger between
them! That always
struck me–what Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer in West Side Story
happens between (1961). Credit: United Artists/Photofest
that 3-year-old and
that 13-year-old? They pick it up from their parents and their
neighbors and kids on the street and other adults. It’s a shame.

One of the things that picture demonstrates is that noir is more a

matter of vision than of genre–a way of seeing things–which is why
you can have a noir musical, or a noir western like Unforgiven, or
noir science fiction like Blade Runner.

Exactly.

West Side Story also demonstrates that you can make a film noir in
color and widescreen. Can you talk a little bit about your approach
to color in that film?

Well, it was a musical, but a musical set in a real background–it was

not a Never-Never Land. It was New York City, and a tough side of
New York City, so we wanted to have a good, strong, effective color
scheme that would accommodate the darker areas of the film. We
tried to do it as realistically as we could, but not let it get too
flamboyant, too wild, except when we wanted to do certain things
56 ACTION!

like the gym, for instance, with the red walls. But by and large, we
tended to use low-key colors.

The impression I get is almost like a black-and-white film that has

these moments of very bright color which act as a kind of emotional
punctuation.

One of the best of those is when we dissolve from the dress shop to
the dance at the gym. That dissolve is a laboratory effect with the
red, blue and cyan colors separated out. That was done after weeks
and weeks of trial and error. I went to Linwood Dunn, an old
associate of mine from RKO. He did all the optical work for Kane
and Ambersons. And I told him, I don’t want just a straight dissolve,
I want to move into some kind of effect that will swing us in a
striking way into the high pitch of that gym. So he tried different
things, and we must have gotten eight or ten versions of it, I guess,
but we finally got this very effective long dissolve going out with the
color-separated figures twirling and then coming into focus.

It adds a little fantasy element which then sets us up for the moment
when Tony sees Maria for the first time and they go into their whole
little private world.

That was of course one of the biggest challenges we had in translating

it to the screen. In the stage medium, you have the proscenium arch and
you’re once removed from reality so that people can go out of dialogue
and into song, or out of dialogue and into dance, without your feeling
a sense of embarrassment. But the screen is a very real medium, and it
doesn’t take kindly to unrealistic approaches and stylized things and
fantasy, unless it’s an utter fantasy, like The Wizard of Oz.
I was the one who insisted the picture had to open in New York
City; we had to put it in its milieu. Because if you think of the story,
once you got through the rumble at the beginning, the whole
antagonism of the two gangs ending up in a fight, the rest of the
story onstage and in the film is told at sunset and at night. There was
no more daytime stuff in it. The studio wanted me to shoot the entire
thing on a soundstage, and you couldn’t do it. And I finally
convinced them that if I could do the whole daytime opening in New
York, all the rest could be done in the studio. Because at night you
see what you want to see. You see what you light.
 WISE 57

So you’ve made West Side Story, one of the most acclaimed films in
motion picture history. Then suddenly you announce to the studio
executives that you wanted to make The Haunting, a horror film.
What was the reaction?

[Laughs] Well, it was interesting. I had read the review of The

Haunting–The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson–in Time
magazine, and I thought, say, that sounds like a hell of a picture.
And I called nervously to see if it might be available, because usually
by the time a book comes out in New York, the big movie companies
have scouts back there, story departments, and they grab it up
and it’s gone. I found out this one hadn’t been picked up. So I got
the book and was reading it. Nelson Gidding was in an office
right across the way, and I was right in the middle of one of the
hair-raising sequences, and Nelson burst in suddenly with a crash of
the door, and it scared the hell out of me. The hackles of my
neck rose, and I said, My god, I think there’s something here if it
could do that to me from just reading it. Then we went over to
MGM and they said fine, but they didn’t want to put over a million
dollars into it.

It was unheard of to spend that much on a horror film.

Yes. I was going to England just about that time for a command
performance of West Side Story, for the queen, and somebody
suggested MGM had a studio outside of London, and why didn’t we
let them take a look at it and give you a budget you could handle?
So I did. They came back with $1.05 million. And that’s why, even
though I kept the New England background of the Shirley Jackson
story, I finally shot it all in England.

Which explains the casting of Richard Johnson and Claire Bloom.

Was there any pressure on you to make it in color?

No. As a matter of fact, it was spelled out in my contract that it

was to be made in black and white. And recently when the Turner
company was going to colorize it, I got out the contract, and
though that might not have been the strongest case to take to
court about it, they backed off from colorizing it–at least for the
time being.
58 ACTION!

The Haunting is a film which is extremely rich in subtext. The

characters are constantly reaching out to each other in very subtle
ways, being rejected, then reacting by making cruel, snippy remarks
disguised as casual conversation. Without the ghosts, it’s almost
Edward Albee territory.

Yes, that’s right! I hadn’t really thought of it in those terms. But

that’s true. A lot of that was inherent in Shirley Jackson’s book, those
relationships. The whole matter of the hostile lesbian relationship
between Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, which we toned down a little
bit in the film.

Julie Harris and Claire Bloom work so well together.

Don’t they though? The contrast! And I can’t tell you how many
people over the years have said to me, Mr. Wise, you made the
scariest picture I’ve ever seen and you didn’t show anything. How
did you do it? Going back to Val Lewton’s days, the power of
suggestion, you know? People say, That door–how did you do it?
Well, I had it designed, it was all laminated wood. In back of the
door was a two-by-four, and there was a big strong prop man on it,
and I would say, “Push, Joe!” and he would push, and the wood
would just give like that.

I thought it was a rubber door! [Laughs] One of the reasons you don’t
have to show everything is because you do so much with sound effects.

Sure. As a matter of fact, I had a playback for sound effects. Usually

when you have a sound effect in a film you have a prop man
offstage making noise or something, but I realized the importance
of the sound effects of whatever’s out there. So I had prescored
sound effects, and I had a regular playback machine. Like with
the door where the two women are reacting to it, I had a big
playback machine and it was banging away with the sound effects
there. And later, those sniffing noises. I improved it a little bit
before we got done, but what you heard was pretty much what they
were reacting to.

Like West Side Story, The Sound of Music opens with a montage of
aerial shots, yet the effect is totally different.
 WISE 59

That was in Ernie Lehman’s first-draft script, which he did for

William Wyler. And then Wyler got into something with the studio,
they parted company, and that’s how I got into it. So they sent the
script over to me, and I read that aerial opening and I said to Ernie,
No way, we just had that with West Side Story. They’ll say we’re
stealing from ourselves! He said, Bob, if you can come up with a
better opening, I’ll go for it. Well, obviously I couldn’t come up with
anything better, and I’ve had more comment over the years on the
opening of The Sound of Music than on the opening of West Side.

The effect of the aerial shots in West Side Story is of a descent into
purgatory, whereas in The Sound of Music the effect is liberating–an
expansion into paradise.

Most of it was shot by a second unit, and we spent weeks cutting it

together. Many people think that’s one shot. In that last aerial shot,
where we get as close to Julie as we can, I told her to start to turn.
Then she finishes the turn on the next cut, and it looks like one shot.
That fooled so many people!

The Sand Pebbles, I take it, was your reaction to the Vietnam War?

Yes, partially it was. I don’t think it was only that.

Sounds like you started developing it early.

While I was still in post-production on The Haunting. I’d always

been fascinated by China, particularly back in those days when we
couldn’t go to mainland China. So I called Daryl Zanuck, who was
living in Paris at that time–I’d worked at Fox and knew him–and
said, Hey, I’ve got a property you might be interested in it, let me fly
over and talk to you about it. So I flew over to Paris, brought a copy
of the book, told him about it, what I saw in it, how I felt about it.
He said, It sounds interesting. Leave me the book. He read the book,
called me and said, Let’s move. So Fox picked it up from United
Artists. Then I had to fly over to Taiwan. They’d never had a major
picture company in there, and it became very apparent after a lot of
trips there that it would take a long time to get the problems sorted
out. So I finally got the okays to come in and do it there in Taiwan.
But I didn’t have enough river there, so I had to go to Hong Kong to
60 ACTION!

shoot around the edges of the islands to make it look like a river, the
Yangtze.

Was Steve McQueen in your mind all the time for that part?

Not really. When we originally went on it, we started sending some

names up there–Paul Newman, six or seven others. And Steve I kind
of put down at the bottom. So when I went up to talk over the
casting with the front office, the others said Newman would be fine,
but McQueen, he’s not big enough. Then the picture got off track. I
went on to do Sound of Music. In the meantime, Steve got rolling;
among other things, he did The Great Escape, which was a big hit.
That was his breakthrough. So by the time I got back from Sound of
Music, he was way up there and he became my own personal choice.

Jake Holman (McQueen) is a kind of a misanthrope. He doesn’t like

people–only engines. Despite that, he forms profound bonds with
various individuals along the way.

Yes, the lovely relationship with Po Han (Mako), and the girl
(Candice Bergen), and with Frenchy (Richard Attenborough) and his
girl. Yet he’s basically a loner. Steve wasn’t a loner, but he was one
of these guys who loved his machines. He built these cars,
motorcycles, he loved guns, loved to handle them, it was a macho
thing with him. He had a very strong understanding of what made
Holman tick.

The Sand Pebbles was probably your most expensive and elaborate
production to date.

And the most difficult. In terms of the logistics, working over there,
and the weather problems, endless weather problems.

What was the second longest?

I guess Sound of Music and West Side Story–they were six months.
The Hindenburg was pretty long too. I spent two-and-a-half years
producing and directing Sand Pebbles, and the same on The
Hindenburg. The other thing I found on Sand Pebbles that drove me
up the wall–I’d never worked on a boat like that before, and you
 WISE 61

don’t realize how much time it takes to make take two! I would have
a shot lined up and the boat is going down the river and then
something goes wrong, you have to get it all the way around,
chugging all the way back up here to get lined up for take two.
It drove me out of my mind sometimes! I swore, never another
picture with a boat in it. But it’s a film I’m proud of. I like that film
very much.

The most striking image for me is the ending. After his brief
connections with Po Han and the characters played by
Attenborough and Candice Bergen, Holman winds up alone, in the
dark, in this vast temple courtyard fighting against an enemy he can’t
even see. I’ve noticed that an awful lot of your characters die at the
end of their respective films!

[Laughs] Is that true? I guess I hadn’t really counted!

More than usual.

Of course, Bob Ryan and Belafonte in Odds Against Tomorrow.

Richard Beymer in West Side Story. Susan Hayward in I Want to
Live! I’m not always a happy ending guy! Not all Sound of
Music–over the mountain and away.

The most interesting aspect of Andromeda Strain is the casting of

Kate Reid as a scientist.

In Michael Crichton’s original book, all the scientists were men.

I’m not surprised.

Nelson Gidding, my old buddy, was working on the screenplay, and

he came into my office one day and said, What would you think of
taking the character Dutton and making it a woman? I said, Get out
of here! I can see it now! Paulette Goddard in the submarine! See
what the critics are going to say about that. He said, Wait a minute,
let me describe the kind of woman I see. And he described somebody
who turned out to be very much like Kate. And I thought, That’s
different, but I wanted to be sure. I didn’t want to violate the
scientific community. So we asked some scientists at TRW and Cal
62 ACTION!

Tech, what would you think if we took this character of Dutton and
made that a woman, and described the kind of woman we were
thinking of, and they said, Fine, no problem with us. We have more
highly qualified women scientists every year. And the icing on the
cake was when I met Kate.

Andromeda Strain was your first science fiction film in 20 years.

I had just done three period pictures in a row, and I was looking for
something contemporary. Another thing I liked about it was it was
science fiction that was earthbound. I always felt–still feel it–that
Andromeda Strain was closer to science fact than fiction. And I got
a chance to make an indictment of biological warfare, which was
stronger in the film than it was in the book.

In The Curse of the Cat People, you have the little girl and the ghost.
In The Day the Earth Stood Still, you have the woman and the alien. In
The Haunting, there’s the spinster who bonds with the haunted
house. And now we have Star Trek: the Motion Picture, where a man
achieves cosmic orgasm with a female computer.

[Laughs] Well, it all came about not through me, but through
extensive writing and rewriting all the way through the film. Certainly
I had a hand in it, but so did everybody else. Including the actors!
[Laughs] But it was Gene Roddenberry, of course, and Livingston,
who was the scriptwriter of credit up there, and myself, and of course,
Leonard [Nimoy] had a lot of ideas, and whatnot. It was tough going.
That was not one of my most pleasant experiences–not because of the
actors. Shooting was fine; working with Bill and Leonard and Nichelle
and George and all the rest, they were all fine. But it’s difficult when
you’re rewriting all the way through.

That’s amazing, because the final result looks almost as carefully

planned as an animated film!

I guess we kind of knew generally what we were going toward, but

the steps and the moves to get there were changing every day.

Was working with Douglas Trumbull on Star Trek like working with
Jerome Robbins on West Side Story?
 WISE 63

No, not at all. Working with Jerry on West Side Story, you were right
there together, doing it. But with Doug, you worked a different way.
He came in late in the film, after we’d finished shooting.

Did he work from sketches?

From sketches, yes, things he’d worked up, too. Part of the work was
done by John Dykstra. They had to switch. Because the outfit that
Paramount had signed to do the special effects had never done a
major feature, and they just didn’t come up with the work in the time
schedule we had. So we had to change it. Fortunately we were able
to get them both at that time.

Were there any dream projects that you’ve had, things you wanted
to do but didn’t get to?

I’ve got a book up there on the shelf I’m trying to get some
preproduction money on. It’s the real story of a horse who was born
on a stud farm in northern Poland just before the start of World War
II. And it tells the story through the war with the local people and
the partisans and the Russians coming in and going, the Germans
coming in, taking over the stud farm. And eventually he and these
other horses are shipped to a farm in Czechoslovakia near the
Austrian border. And he’s a fine character. I’d shoot the whole thing
over in Poland. Make a hell of a movie!

Thank you very much.

Reference
1. Wise directed one more film before his death, A Storm in Summer [2000], which
again concerns an interracial relationship, this time between a young black boy
and an elderly Jewish man (Peter Falk).
John Huston, Orson Welles, and Peter Bogdanovich during the shooting of The
Other Side of the Wind. Credit: Photograph by Gary Graver/Courtesy of Joseph
McBride

“The Greatest Movie the World Has

Never Seen”: Peter Bogdanovich and
Joseph McBride on Orson Welles’
The Other Side of the Wind
by Damien Love

In 1970, after two decades of European exile broken only by his brief
return in 1957–58 to make Touch of Evil–one of the many films a
Hollywood studio took away from him–Orson Welles (1915–1985)
came home to Hollywood to make his last feature, The Other Side of
the Wind. Funding the production largely from his own pocket and
shooting entirely outside the system, the fragmented filming finally
wrapped in 1976. Thirty years on, the movie, infamously, remains
unedited and unreleased, bound up by bad luck, personal feuds and
byzantine legal tangles that saw the negatives actually physically
locked out of reach in a vault in Paris for decades.1
66 ACTION!

In the intervening years, as scratched and smuggled clips2 and

script extracts have leaked out,3 Welles’ final film’s legend has
grown.4 Shot on the run around L.A. and in Arizona, with a
reportedly dazzling central performance from John Huston, the
movie tells a story that strangely parallels its own making: the
doomed tale of an embattled, aging, old-school director, trying to
make a film to compete with the sex-and-symbolism flicks of the
young guns of the New Hollywood of the early 1970s. A movie
about making movies, it has become the Holy Grail of Welles’ career,
his Rosebud–perhaps the slyest, most mystifyingly revealing
statement he ever committed to celluloid.
Welles spent the last decade of his life fighting to have his film
released. Twenty-one years after his death, that fight goes on.
Rumours about The Other Side of the Wind’s completion have come
and gone in abundance over the years. But, while it pays to have a
pinch of salt handy, it could be that we are now getting close to
finally seeing the damned thing. The latest whispers are that the
Showtime channel, which has been involved in the attempts at
having Welles’ film completed and released over the past decade,5
will soon be making an announcement. Keep watching the skies.6
In the meantime, in the absence of the movie, all we have to go on
are the tantalizing accounts of those who were involved in its
protracted making. Two of the most significant of these are Peter
Bogdanovich (born 1939) and Joseph McBride (born 1947).
As well as being Welles’ friend, biographer, confidante and
collaborator during the last two decades of his life, Bogdanovich
took time out from his prestigious directing career to co-star
alongside Huston in The Other Side of the Wind. McBride, a self-
confessed “filmbuff nerd-type” when he was bewildered to find
himself with a role in the movie in 1970, has since, with his books
on John Ford, Steven Spielberg and Frank Capra among others,
become one of our finest Hollywood biographers. His latest book,
What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an
Independent Career, focuses intently on the period during which The
Other Side of the Wind was made and confirms that McBride is also
one of the greatest Welles scholars.
Here, as the campaign to bring the film to the screen shifts gear
again, Bogdanovich and McBride sit down with Bright Lights to recall
Welles, Huston, the New Hollywood and their long years of “guerilla
warfare filmmaking” on “the greatest movie the world has never seen.”
 BOGDANOVICH AND MCBRIDE 67

Interview

To begin, could you describe The Other Side of the Wind, in terms
of form and content?

Peter Bogdanovich: Okay. The first thing to say is, it’s a hugely
ambitious picture. It’s about age and youth, success and failure, love
and sex, betrayal and friendship. And it’s about Hollywood and
filmmaking. You could call it a mockumentary. The conceit is you’re
watching a documentary on the last day in the life of this old
director, a character called Jake Hannaford, played by John Huston.
He’s an old he-man type director, who’s just returned to Hollywood
from Europe, and is trying to make this very arty film–which is also
called The Other Side of the Wind. But his young leading man has
walked off in anger, in mysterious circumstances, leaving Hannaford
with an uncompleted movie. So, it’s the night of his 70th birthday,
and Hannaford’s throwing a big party for all his friends and enemies,
anybody he knows. Among them is this young director Brooks
Otterlake, who I played, a protégé of Hannaford who’s become more
popular than him. Hannaford keeps up his tough-guy façade, but
he’s really desperate to raise money. During the party, amid the
gossip and bitching, he screens footage from his movie at his house,
then again later, after a power blackout, at a deserted drive-in.
Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, as the sun comes up, he
drives off, very drunk, gets into an accident and dies in a car crash.
That’s not giving anything away. As with Citizen Kane [1941], the
film begins at the end: the first thing you see are shots of this burned-
out Porsche and a voice-over–which was supposed to be
Orson’s–saying: “This is Jake Hannaford’s car. He died on the
morning of his 70th birthday. What you are about to see is a
reconstruction of that evening, made with the footage shot that
night.” You see, a bunch of film students, TV journalists and
documentary crews all turn up for Jake’s party, all of them filming
what’s going on. And Orson shot all of it, all this raw, rough
mockumentary footage, as well as Hannaford’s film, the movie-
within-the-movie, which is very beautifully composed. And so the
movie is extremely complicated visually, woven together from all
these pieces, 16mm, 8mm, and 35mm, color and black and white,
moving images and still photography. It’s really fast and loose, really
cutty, very unusual, very modern, very “today.”
68 ACTION!

How did you first meet Welles, and how did that lead to your
involvement in this film?

Bogdanovich: We first met because I was the first to do a Welles

retrospective in the U.S., and as part of that the first to publish a book
on him in the States. I wrote things like, Touch of Evil was a great film,
Othello [1952] was the greatest Shakespeare film ever made, and these
were anything but common opinions at that point. They might have
been considered correct in Europe, but not in America. Not then. I sent
him that monograph in 1961. He got back to me seven years later. It
was 1968, and I was now living in L.A. I’d made a film, Targets, it had
just opened, and Orson called me out of the blue. “I can’t tell you how
long I’ve wanted to meet you,” he said. I said, “That’s my line!” He
said, “You’ve written the truest words ever published about me…in
English.” I said, “Really? I thought they were kinda superficial.” He
said, “Well…you haven’t read some of the things that have been
written about me.” We met next day, at the Polo Lounge, a hangout
in Beverly Hills, and our friendship began. By the end of that meeting,
we’d agreed to do an interview book together. One of the reasons he
wanted to do the book, which we worked on for years all over the
world, was because he wanted to correct the many myths about his
career, many of which still unfortunately persist.7 We started in 1969.
He was acting in Catch-22 [1970] down in Guaymas, Mexico. One
night down there, he started talking about this idea for a movie he’d
had. I’d mentioned that a lot of the directors I knew who were older
were having serious trouble getting work in Hollywood. People like
John Ford and Howard Hawks; these men were considered over the
hill. Orson got very upset about that. He thought it appalling. He said,
“It’s only in one’s older age that one does one’s best work. Youth and
old age are the two greatest moments; middle age is the enemy of art.”
He went into this whole thing about it. Then told me the story of this
movie, about an old director. The Other Side of the Wind–although it
wasn’t called that yet. I asked if he had a script, and he said he had
five. He talked about it off and on after that. Then, at the end of 1970,
when I was, literally, just about to go to Texas to make The Last
Picture Show [1971], Orson called me out of the blue. He always
referred to Last Picture Show as “that dirty movie you’re making.”
He’d read the script and said it was a dirty movie. So, he said he was
in L.A., what was I doing next Thursday? I said I was leaving for
Texas. He said, “What time?” I said, “Uh, about 2:30.” He said,
 BOGDANOVICH AND MCBRIDE 69

“Good, meet at the airport at noon on your way, that place where the
planes fly low over the street.” I said, “Okay…what are you doing
there?” He said, “I’m shooting.” I said, “What do you mean you’re
shooting? What’re you shooting?” “I’m shooting a dirty picture.
You’re making a dirty movie, so I’m making a dirty movie. The one
about the movie director.” I said, “Oh my God. Who’s gonna play
him?” “I don’t know. Maybe me, maybe John Huston, I’m not sure.
We can keep him off-camera for this stuff.”

Joseph McBride: In the late 1960s, I was living in the Midwest,

in Madison, Wisconsin, and I was writing articles about Welles.
I’d decided to write a book about him,8 and I was selling chapters to
film magazines like Sight and Sound and Film Quarterly in order
to get attention for it, and I started mailing some of those articles to
Welles. He was very elusive in those days. You never knew where
he was. Occasionally there would be a little article in Variety
that he’d been seen in London or Paris, it was all very mysterious.
So the only way I could get ahold of him was I would mail these
things to his lawyer in New York. I had no idea whether Welles ever
saw any of it.
Then in 1970, I went to Hollywood for the first time. I was writing
a book on John Ford, who is my other favorite filmmaker, and I went
out there for the purpose of interviewing Ford, but I wanted to meet
Peter Bogdanovich, because I was a fan of Targets. It was pretty
unknown in the U.S., but I had seen it in Chicago when I was
protesting the Democratic convention in ’68, when there was all the
violence and the tear-gassing, and I was very impressed. So I went to a
film bookstore in Hollywood and they gave me Peter’s phone number!
And as it happened, when I called, he said, “I’m on the other line with
Orson.” It was bizarre. Then he said Welles wanted to talk with me,
would I call him the following day. So I said, uh, sure. I called Welles
from a payphone, and he got right to the point. “We’re about to make
a movie, would you like to be in it?” I was stunned. All I could think
of saying was, “Is this going to be a feature-length film?” This really
stupid question. And Welles chuckled and said, “We certainly hope
so.” I guess that question wasn’t so dumb after all.

Filming on The Other Side of the Wind started late in 1970. What
would you say the popular perception of Welles was in the States at
that time?
70 ACTION!

Bogdanovich: The general conception was of a guy who had made a

film called Citizen Kane, and hadn’t done anything since. That was
pretty much it. I mean, he was revered in some quarters, by serious
film lovers and filmmakers around the world, but as far as
Hollywood and the man on the street in America was concerned, he
was a kind of has-been who’d done one great film and then
disappeared, got fat, and now acted in crappy movies and did TV
chat shows. That persisted for a while.

McBride: He was kind of–I wouldn’t say forgotten exactly, but he

was at a pretty low ebb in terms of his prestige in America. We
would see him mainly in small roles in movies, and a lot of them
were very bad films, most of them made in Europe. He was very
undiscriminating in terms of what films he would act in. He had
complete integrity in terms of what films he would direct. I always
saw that as an interesting contrast to John Huston, who would direct
any old film in order to keep himself bankable. What Huston would
do was, every once in a while, he would direct a really great film, but
the price he paid for that was making a certain amount of schlock.
But Welles didn’t choose that path. Welles would act in a lot of films
to support his habit of making independent films as a director. But
the problem with the public was, they never saw the films he
directed–Chimes at Midnight [1965] hardly got shown in America at
all. So all they would see of him was him turning up in supporting
roles in things like Start the Revolution Without Me [1970], or the
occasional prestige film like Catch-22, where he plays a sort of
buffoonish role. So they just thought of him as a buffoonish
character who would appear in all kinds of garbage. The reason
he came back to Hollywood was to be in The Dean Martin Show,
he became a kind of regular sidekick on the show. But then again, he
really enjoyed that kind of clowning around and getting the
chance to do some Shakespeare on the show once in awhile. And
then, once he was back living in L.A., he began making all those
commercials, so the perception of him was as the guy who would sell
cheap wine on TV.

And do you think the way he was perceived in the U.S.–this schism
between the artist that he was and the burnt-out celebrity he was
perceived to be–actively concerned him?
 BOGDANOVICH AND MCBRIDE 71

Bogdanovich: Yeah, of course. And for one simple reason: because it

made it difficult for him to work, to get money to make movies. One
of the reasons he wanted me to write the book about him was
precisely because he wanted to get the record straight, because the
record that existed was making it difficult for him to get money for
movies. He wanted to correct the misapprehensions. There were a
lot of myths about Orson, a lot of things that weren’t true, and he
wanted to get it right. This general disparagement of him continued
until he died. It did get better after he died–as he predicted. He once
said to me, a few weeks before he died, “God, how they’ll love me
when I’m dead.” And he was right.

McBride: Yeah, he realized his image made it difficult for him to

function. I think that when he came back to Hollywood, he didn’t
have very many illusions about being commercial as a filmmaker.
He’d really given up on that after Touch of Evil. He’d really tried to
re-establish himself as a commercial filmmaker with that, and made
a film that he thought was commercial. But Universal was shocked
by it and basically dumped it. The final trauma in his career as a
studio director, I think, was being taken out of the editing of Touch
of Evil. After that he really had an aversion to working with major
studios as a director. Even though he made sporadic attempts to set
up projects, I think he had more or less resigned himself to working
totally independently. The situation was so completely radical for
him that I think he just accepted the fact that he was never going to
be a commercial filmmaker again.

Bogdanovich: The Other Side of the Wind was a film that, again, he
started financing himself, with his own money; then he got a backer.
So of course what people thought of him was very important,
because it had a lot to do with his ability to raise money. Finally, he
had about a million dollars in it himself, and got somebody to put
up another million, so what he had was about a two million dollar
picture. But, yeah, I think his “public image” weighed on him. And,
yes, I guess the fact that he was back making a movie right in the
middle of Hollywood made it more palpable. A lot of people were
happy to see him–they gave him the special Oscar and the AFI Life
Achievement thing in ’75, and there was a lot of talk about
Orson–but nobody gave him any money.
72 ACTION!

I should ask you to say a little about the characters you play in the film.

Bogdanovich: That first day when Orson was shooting down at the
railroad tracks, I said, “What am I gonna play?” He said, “A
cineaste. I want you to play it like Jerry Lewis”–I do impressions,
you see, and he loved them– “I want you to do your Jerry voice.”
And so I went down the day before I left to shoot Last Picture Show,
and acted in Orson’s movie, playing this cineaste who talks like Jerry
Lewis and asks questions like, “Do you think the camera is a
phallus??” That stuff just amused the hell out of Orson.9 Then later,
at some point, I don’t remember exactly when, but he was shooting
in this rented house in Carefree, Arizona, I called him to see how he
was doing, and he said he was doing terribly. I said, “What’s the
matter?” He said, “Well, I just finished shooting with Rich Little.
I had to let him go.” Rich Little was a comedian noted for doing
impressions, and he’d been playing the young movie director who’s
a friend of the Huston character–this kind of protégé who’s eclipsed
him. So he’d had to let Rich Little go, and it cost him 25 Gs he
couldn’t afford. I said, “Why’d you have to let him go?” He said,
“He does great impressions. But he can’t act.” So, Orson’s saying,
“I don’t know what to do now, I’ve got John waiting, I’m in terrible
shape, I don’t know what to do.” And here was this character who
was (a) a young movie director who’d had three big successes; (b) did
impressions; and (c) was clearly based on me to an extent. And
I said, “Well, why don’t I play it?” There was a long pause, and he
said, “That never occurred to me.” I said, “Orson, the guy’s a young
film director who’s had three hits and he does impressions all the
time–it never occurred to you?” He said “But you’re playing that
cineaste part.” And I said, “Well, you could shoot that stuff again
with somebody else.” He said, “My God, of course you could do it.
You’d be great for it. My God, will you? You just saved my life.” So
that’s how I got that part. And I went to Carefree, and we shot for
more than ten days, some of it with John Huston, then more in my
house in L.A., and later and on the road, in a car. But I shot mostly
in Carefree and L.A.

McBride: I basically play the cineaste type Peter had played at first.
Welles had asked Bogdanovich to find him some “film-buff types” to
be in the film, because it’s a pseudo-documentary about Hollywood
in the Easy Rider [1969] era, so he wanted some real film-buff types,
 BOGDANOVICH AND MCBRIDE 73

just like he had real actors and directors in the film.10 And Peter had
rounded up a few friends of his. Peter had thought I was perfect for
a film-buff type. He was amused by a few things–not only was I a
film maniac, I had been to see Fellini’s Satyricon [1969] that first day
I met him, and, as I tend to do when I run out of paper, I had
scribbled notes on my wrist with a pen. Peter had thought that was
very funny, and he told Welles, who thought it was hilarious, the
kind of thing a crazy film buff would do. And so Welles told me to
write notes on my wrist when we did the first scene, and so for six
years of shooting I had to keep writing stuff on my wrist, which was
quite a nuisance after a while. It’s hard to keep continuity over six
years! But who knew how long this would take? My role was a total
buffoon, the most obsessed, obnoxious film buff. I would follow the
John Huston character around and ask endless questions. Which
I actually tended to do in those days. I was a little intense. Just kept
hammering people with questions, and Welles would find that
irritating sometimes, too. In the movie, he would have me do that to
the point where I got thrown out of Huston’s car–for asking him
what effect his father’s suicide had on his film work. I came up with
that question, because Welles told me the Huston character was
modelled on Hemingway, and I was a big Hemingway fan and so
I knew Hemingway’s father had killed himself–and that was one of
the reasons Hemingway may have killed himself, that terrible sense
of fate. But I didn’t know at the time that Welles himself believed his
father had killed himself, too. So I was treading on some very
sensitive ground there, but Welles eagerly embraced that line as being
disturbing. It’s the kind of thing that cuts too close to the bone for
Huston’s character. I wound up shooting 45 days over the six-year
period. Three days here, four days there and every day I had some
dialogue. But the film is not yet cut together, so how big a part
I have, I don’t really know. But Welles at one point said he wanted
everybody to have the same sized part. It’s a very democratic film in
that sense–although obviously Huston and the Bogdanovich
character are the central relationship.

What would you say about John Huston’s performance? How were
he and Welles together?

McBride: It was fascinating to watch. Welles was about as great an

actor’s director as ever existed. And one of his secrets is that he
74 ACTION!

treated everybody differently, he didn’t just have one way of directing.

And with Huston, it was fascinating to watch, because Huston was
really his peer in a way that nobody else was, someone he respected
greatly as a director, and an old friend. He was not the kind of person
you could order around or bully. You had to treat him with great
diplomacy. But Huston was the most compliant kind of actor, because
he always said, being a director himself, he always wanted to be as
helpful to the director as possible. But Welles treated him with kid
gloves. He would say things that were really quite brilliantly
seductive. I remember one scene that I thought was particularly good,
where Huston’s character has this young blonde teenage girl that he’s
got as a sexual toy. They’d found this young girl in Phoenix who had
never acted, Cathy Lucas. She was so obviously not an actor at all it
was almost a joke, she was just a typical teenager, but what’s amazing
is, when I saw the rough cut, she’s actually really good. Welles
somehow makes her poignant. Huston’s supposed to put the
lecherous eye on her at one point, and he did it in a way that was
crude. It was too much, and it was obvious it was wrong. And there
was sort of a pause and Welles looked down, then he said, “John? Do
you know who you remind me of in this scene?” And Huston said,
“No, Orson, who?” And he said, “Your father.” And Huston
beamed, because he was always very happy when anyone brought up
his father, you know, Walter, a great actor himself. He said, “Really,
Orson, why?” And Welles said, “Well, because he had that kindly,
paternal air–but nobody ever had a higher score.” And Huston
cracked up. He thought that was delightful. But only an old friend
who knew what he was talking about could say something like that
and not irritate somebody. But Huston just thought it was great that
his father was this foxy old guy. Welles didn’t say, “I want you to play
it like that”–but when we redid the scene, it was perfect, because
Huston had this kindly, paternal air and it made it a richer scene, less
obvious and crude. It was a quite brilliant way of directing.

Bogdanovich: Huston was great to work with. He had a really funny

habit of never saying he didn’t know what the line was. If he’d forget
a line, he wouldn’t announce it as actors usually do–“I’m sorry,
I forgot, what’s the line,” or whatever. He would just, with great
authority say something, which usually had nothing whatever to do
with the scene, and then he would simply exit the shot, like that was
what he was supposed to do, leaving me and the other characters
 BOGDANOVICH AND MCBRIDE 75

on-camera saying “…Wha?” Orson found this very amusing, he’d be

laughing. John would say, “Was that the line, Orson?” Orson would
say, “Well, not exactly John. I dunno what the hell you just said.”
And after about 5:30 or 6:00 pm, John would usually have had too
many drinks, anyway, so we’d quit.

McBride: Welles actually encouraged Huston to drink a lot, I guess to

lower his inhibitions. That’s often not considered a very good
directorial technique, but in this case it worked. Actually, Hannaford,
in the movie, gets more drunk as the film goes along and in his two
best scenes, he’s very drunk; there’s a scene in a bathroom, when he’s
really drunk, and he’s unloading on people and ranting about life in
general, and it’s brilliant, it’s like the film’s King Lear scene. I guess
Welles felt he could get Huston sort of drunk and still get him going
as a good actor. Huston didn’t say much on the set, he’d be kind of
introverted. It was hard to get to know Huston. But, y’know–maybe
he was thinking about The Man Who Would Be King [1975] or
something. One of the funniest things about the film was, we were
shooting and shooting and shooting for years, and at one point
Huston had to go, and I asked where he was going and they said,
“Oh, he’s going to go and shoot this film called The Man Who Would
Be King.” So he went away, it seemed like two months, and dashed
off this masterpiece in the mountains of Morocco. Then he came back
and we were still at the house doing pretty much the same stuff.

Bogdanovich: Huston was brilliant in the film. For me, this is better
than his performance in Chinatown [1974]. He loved working with
Orson, loved the casual way he did it, and was very, very
complimentary of Orson, very attentive and deferential, almost. He
told everyone that would listen that the way Orson was working was
so much fun and so creative–“guerrilla warfare filmmaking.” He
wanted to buy the movie actually. Before he died Huston wanted to
try and help get The Other Side of the Wind finished and he wanted
to cut it, because he was so pleased with it. He’s extraordinary in it.
It doesn’t seem like a performance at all, it’s extraordinarily real,
very John Hustonish. An extraordinary film performance, the best
thing he ever did as an actor.

The character that Huston plays, though, is pretty close to home:

he’s this Hemingwayesque figure, this legendary macho director.
76 ACTION!

But then there’s the whole sexual thing about the character that
comes out toward the end of the movie. How did he feel about that?

Bogdanovich: Oh, I think he knew it wasn’t him. It wasn’t him and

it wasn’t Orson. It was a kind of macho type, Hemingwayesque
movie director, like Huston, like Jack Ford, like Hathaway. It was
that sort of guy, but I don’t think John ever thought it was him.
Although he and Orson had private conversations I was never privy
to, but I don’t think that ever came up on the set.

McBride: I remember there was one day Welles was directing some
of Huston’s more intense scenes, this was in the house in Carefree,
Arizona, and all the other actors had to go sit in this other room for
about four or five hours, because Welles didn’t want us watching
him do an intense scene with Huston. It was almost like when
directors do a sex scene–they clear the set of everybody except
the cameraman and the actors. There was something about Huston
that was a little removed and distant as a person, but Welles
managed to get deeply into him, to get him to be less inhibited and
more serious as an actor, but he did it in a very intense way that we
weren’t allowed to witness often. I really think the reason Welles
didn’t play the role himself was that, if he had, people would
have seen it as autobiographical–I think especially the latent
homosexuality of the character would have been interpreted as an
autobiographical reference, which would have been difficult for
Welles, because that was an issue that never got talked about.
You could read a lot of his work as being somewhat homosexual
in its overtones, because the central relationship in a Welles film
tends to be between two men, and it’s a very intense relationship of
love and betrayal, usually. In addition, Huston really was a
notorious homophobe, so I think Welles was kind of having fun,
playing on that and teasing Huston, I don’t know whether Huston
actually realized that his character was supposed to be gay. There’s a
book by Peter Viertel, Dangerous Friends, where he was writing a bit
about The Other Side of the Wind, and he said he thought Welles
was kind of needling Huston by making him play this part to some
extent. But Huston was such a sophisticated guy, and so cynical
in a sense, that he didn’t mind. I’m sure he was aware of a lot of
what was going on, and he didn’t seem bothered by playing this kind
of character.
 BOGDANOVICH AND MCBRIDE 77

It seems that after

he met Oja Kodar
[Welles’ companion
and collaborator
over the last two
decades of his life,
and co-star and co-
writer on The Other
Side of the Wind],
Welles was a lot
more open in
dealing with themes
of sexuality and The first day of shooting The Other Side of the Wind
at Orson Welles’ home in Los Angeles, August 23,
eroticism.
1970: Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, Joseph McBride.
Credit: Photo by Felipe Herba/Courtesy of Joseph
Bogdanovich: Oh, McBride
that’s true. That’s
true. That’s self-evident. Oja’s Slavic, Hungarian, y’know, and she
was kind of funny sexually, by that I mean she would make jokes and
things, and Orson had always been rather reticent about that kind of
thing. She brought him out. He was definitely influenced by her.

McBride: In his later work, The Other Side of the Wind, F For Fake
[1974], The Immortal Story [1968] and the screenplay for The Big
Brass Ring, suddenly all these themes come out, and that, to me, is
his Oja period. She encouraged him to deal with sex and other issues
he’d been avoiding. His films up to that point are rather chaste,
almost puritanical in their treatment of sexuality, but then there’s a
sudden explosion of the treatment of sexuality in the work of this
older director, which is kind of interesting.

Can you describe a typical day on the set of The Other Side of the
Wind? Was there such a thing?

McBride: Every day was different.

Bogdanovich: Every day was different.

McBride: But there are certain general things you could say. Welles
worked long, and I mean long, days. One of the big myths about him
78 ACTION!

was that he was sort of a fat, lazy guy who just sat around and ate
and drank. But he was an extremely hard worker–the days on The
Other Side of the Wind tended to be 18-hour days, which is really
exhausting for anybody. And the crew were all very young guys. The
cinematographer, Gary Graver, was young and he had a bunch of
young people he worked with, the camera guys and sound guys were
as young as 19 years old, so they were able to work long, long hours.
The reason the film was made at all was partly due to the accident
that Gary Graver came into Welles’ life. When Welles came back to
Hollywood, Gary called him out of the blue, there was a little item
in the trade press that Welles was in town, and Gary was a fan and
called him and said he’d like to work with him. What Gary said was,
he could make a film very cheaply for Welles with his crew of several
guys, so Welles realized he could make a film for very little
money–here’s this young guy, and why not.11 And Welles was
indefatigable. He’d just keep going. However, there’d be times,
I remember one day he just decided he’d go home and take a nap.
That reminded me of Charlie Chaplin–if Chaplin didn’t feel good, he
wouldn’t come to the studio for a week or a month. He could do it
because he owned the film. And Welles could do it because he owned
his film–but you could just never do that if you were working for
Warner Bros., say. That was appealing to Welles, because he could
work like an artist, when he felt like it. And he contrived a situation
where we all went along with that. Sometimes it was frustrating,
because you never quite knew what was going on. Sometimes you’d
be all revved up and there’d be nothing happening. But most days it
was very intense. The other thing about Welles was, it was
tremendous fun to be around him. He made the shooting great fun
because he would be constantly telling stories and jokes, and that
kept the set entertained and loose, unlike a lot of movie sets. It was
like a big party, even though it was very disciplined at the same time.
But Welles felt people should have a good time when they were
making a film.

Bogdanovich: It was always a lot of fun. A small crew, between six

and ten people, all overworked, and a bunch of different actors at
various times. Orson would arrive and he’d be very friendly and very
funny and charming, and kind of do everything he could to make
the actors comfortable before getting them to change into
costume–which in my case was my own clothes, but he’d often pick
 BOGDANOVICH AND MCBRIDE 79

out which clothes I was to wear from a bunch I’d brought up there.
I’d brought two suitcases full of clothes, and he went through them
to pull out my costume, pulled out a sweater, another sweater, two
or three pairs of slacks, then said, “There, put those on.” I said,
“You know, these are my clothes, but I’ve never worn them in this
combination.” He said, “Well there, you see, now you know how a
successful young film director dresses.” It was just him jollying me
up and wanting me to be comfortable. That’s what he was like, he
really made life comfortable for the actors on the set. And then he’d
tell you what the scene was–there was a script, but he’d often rewrite
the scene, a little or a lot. You’d be getting pages just before you
made it, then he’d interpose things as you were shooting. He was
very encouraging, funny, rather casual in a way, but very, very
together. I remember one time shooting at night, it was a scene with
Oja Kodar. I had to run up with a rifle–I don’t remember exactly
what was going on–but every time I got up to her, I’d break up,
because I just felt ridiculous, and then she’d break up and we
couldn’t get it. We did that about ten times. Finally, Orson said,
“Alright, let’s just do it.” And I came running up, and I didn’t break
up, and Oja and I were sort of getting into the scene–then from
behind the camera, I hear Orson breaking up. I don’t know if we
ever got that shot. It was like that. It was a lighthearted atmosphere,
even though there was a lot of work being done. The house was total
chaos. He trashed that house in Carefree, but I remember laughing a
lot. A lot of the time we were laughing, having a really good time.

McBride: When Peter was in Europe shooting Daisy Miller [1974],

Welles was living at Peter’s home in Bel Air, and we were shooting
The Other Side of the Wind there for three or four months. It was
kind of extraordinary. There would be hordes of people running
around Peter’s house. I thought Peter was very nice to allow his
beautiful house to be taken over–but I don’t think he actually ever
knew just what was going on there in his absence.

Bogdanovich: When I got back there were certain camera marks on

the floor…but it was okay. Over the years, I’ve actually met a lot of
people who’ve said, “Hey, I was in your house in Los Angeles.” I say,
“Really?” They say, “Yes, I was acting for Orson Welles…” He had
crowd scenes and a lot of extras. Literally, I’ve met 10 or 12 people
like that. “I was in your house…”
80 ACTION!

McBride: I remember one time sticks out. One night I showed up at

Bogdanovich’s house, and there were a lot of people standing around,
and it was kind of dark inside the house, and Welles said, “Get in front
of the camera.” And I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “We’re
doing a musical number.” And I said, “Well, okay. I can’t sing.” He
said, it doesn’t matter, just move your lips, you don’t have to know the
words. We’re doing ‘The Glow-Worm Song.’ ” This goofy novelty
song from the 1940s. I was wearing glasses without lenses, because he
said the lenses reflected the light, so he made me take them out, and
I couldn’t see the cue cards. So I just stood there and looked confused.
Which was perfect for my character. And the actor John Carroll was
leading people in this song, even though he wasn’t actually present that
night and would be filmed later. He was an old Republic Pictures actor
from the forties, he played one of Hannaford’s stooges. And Welles
just decided to do this. “We’re doing a musical number!”

Bogdanovich: He also shot on the MGM lot, but MGM never knew.
I’d arranged for his crew to shoot on the back lot, but I didn’t say
that it was Orson Welles. I said it was a UCLA college student crew,
and Orson hid down below in the car, so he could get into MGM
without being recognized. Every time a security guard or someone
passed by, he’d hide. And they shot for about 24 hours, they didn’t
take a break, they just kept shooting because they knew they
couldn’t be there again, and they had to be careful so no one ever
knew it was Orson Welles. That’s gone now. That whole lot is gone.

McBride: I mean, you’d get to sit around with these amazing people
like Edmond O’Brien, Mercedes McCambridge and John Huston.
Y’know, you could talk about the golden era of Hollywood or
whatever. There was a scene on a bus, where I had a long speech, the
longest in the film that I had, and I was supposed to be reading
transcripts of interviews the Huston character had given, and I was
supposed to read this diatribe he had said about hippies. And I didn’t
really get the point of it, and I didn’t feel I was up to the scene. And
Welles took me aside and he very gently said he was going to give the
speech to Edmond O’Brien. He gave me a beautiful explanation,
“Eddie is such a magnificent ruin.” O’Brien was a wonderful actor,
but he was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. We
didn’t know that then. We thought he had some kind of brain injury
or a drinking problem or something. He was still able to do scenes,
 BOGDANOVICH AND MCBRIDE 81

but he was very eccentric. So what he does in the scene is, he grabs
the transcript from me and begins reading it, and it made the scene
so much better. It was a brilliant improvisation and made so much
more sense because O’Brien was playing this old doddering
reactionary character, raving about hippies–like a lot of old actors
and directors in those days would rant and rave about sex and
hippies and stuff. That’s the kind of improvisation Welles would do,
he’d evolve the film as he went along, based partly on the personality
of the actors. That’s one of the reasons he was such a great
director–he would see what was happening in front of him, and kind
of go with the feeling that he got. Welles had this ability to get people
terribly motivated, where we’d all be fully aware that this was a
great privilege, that we were all doing something very special. That
this was a very groundbreaking film.

One of the themes in The Other Side of the Wind is the whole “New
Hollywood” of the early 1970s, the so-called Easy Riders-Raging Bulls
era. What were Welles’ thoughts on that generation of filmmakers?

McBride: For me, the answer to that lies in an article he wrote in

1970 for Look magazine called “But Where Are We Going?” It’s a
strange article. It’s ostensibly his reaction to the New Hollywood,
but it’s actually a cautionary piece attacking the auteur theory, the
idea of worshiping directors and treating directors like gods. He
connects that to fascism–when he sees pictures of directors up on a
crane, looking very dramatic, all he can think of is Mussolini on his
balcony. He’s also quite scathing in there about how, he says, “Any
young idiot can go out and get a film made these days.” He really
sounds bitter. And there were all kinds of bad directors who got to
make films in that period because they were young–some had talent
and a lot didn’t, and yet Welles, with his great track record, couldn’t
get work. Although, actually, I think the reason he couldn’t get work
is because he did have a track record, of controversial flops and
things like that. But if you had never made a film, people were more
willing to let you make one in that period. It was sort of crazy. In a
way it was good, because a lot of new people were given a break, but
in a way it wasn’t good, because a lot of garbage got made. So his
article is quite scathing to that whole mindset. And I think that was
his attitude. The Other Side of the Wind is partly his reaction to that.
He’s contemptuous of the New Hollywood to some extent.
82 ACTION!

Bogdanovich: I think he had mixed feelings about it. Very mixed

feelings. He thought that maybe the work was gonna debase the
audience, because the movies were getting so vulgar. He thought that
some of the younger filmmakers were simply making films like the
films they liked when they were kids. Some of the work I think he
liked. It’s complicated. He was very encouraging to me–I don’t
actually remember him talking very much about some of the other
directors, I don’t really recall a lot of conversation about that. He
had a slight impatience with a lot of it, but, then, I don’t think he
saw that much of it, y’know.

The Other Side of the Wind has a lot of themes strung through it: an
old director and New Hollywood; an exploration of machismo and
sexuality; Welles himself once called it, “a film about death.” What
do you think the film is about?

Bogdanovich: Oh, y’know, age and youth and success and failure
and betrayal and friendship, and…like that. It’s also about
Hollywood and filmmaking in general, in a way.

McBride: I was standing near Welles on the set one day, and Richard
Wilson, Welles’ longtime aide, was in the scene, and he asked, “Orson,
what’s this movie about?” And he said, “It’s an attack on machoism.”
So I guess, in his mind at least, that’s what the movie is about. It
started out it wasn’t about movies at all, it was about bullfighting,
about a famous man who followed bullfighting, based on
Hemingway–you know that story about Welles and Hemingway
having a fistfight, back in 1937? I always wondered if that planted the
seed of the whole thing.12 And, obviously, Welles had been thinking
about the changes in Hollywood when he’d come back, that it was a
very different place and he was reflecting on the fact that a lot of
young directors were getting to make films. So I think there were a
number of things he wanted to get off his chest. Some sexual issues he
wanted to explore, his view of Hollywood, old age and mortality. He
was having trouble getting work precisely because he had age and
experience–his experience was being held against him, because he’d
had these disasters like The Magnificent Ambersons [1942] and Touch
of Evil being taken away from him. And yet he had made Citizen Kane
and all kinds of great work, and yet it didn’t help him. So that was
really rankling him. That’s probably what the film is about, too.
 BOGDANOVICH AND MCBRIDE 83

[To Bogdanovich] I first interviewed you about The Other Side of

the Wind back in 1997, when there had been a real effort to get the
film finally finished and released, probably via the Showtime
Channel, but those plans stalled. Recently the rumours have been
that the Showtime deal has been reactivated. What is your
understanding of the current state of play?

Bogdanovich: Well, a major American cable company has been

negotiating with the parties involved, which involves Orson’s estate,
Oja Kodar, and the Iranian Medhi Boushehri, who invested some
money into the picture. I don’t want to say which network, but it’s
been going on for six years now, the negotiation, and I would say
we’re one signature away from it becoming a reality. Orson, at one
point in 1971 or ’72, said to me that if anything happened to him
before the film was finished, that he wanted me to finish it. I said, “It’s
not gonna happen, Orson, why’d you even bring it up.” He said, “I’m
very Anglo-Saxon that way, I don’t mind talking about death. If
anything did happen, I’d want you to finish it. Do you promise?” And
I said yes. So, ever since he died, in ’85, I have tried to figure out ways
to do it. And that has been a heavy burden. It’s very frustrating,
because virtually all of it is shot and about 40 minutes has been cut by
Orson. The rest is in vaults, in daily forms. There’s notes on a lot of
stuff, there’s a screenplay, and it’s gonna require quite a bit of work to
get it done, mostly editing, but luckily now we have computer editing,
which makes things a lot easier. Orson would have loved that–he’d
have loved to have lived to see computer editing, it moves things much
faster, you can try stuff far more quickly than you could years ago.

So you’re confident it will be seen?

Bogdanovich: Quite. I’m confident it will be seen within the next

two years. Of course, I’ve been thrown a lot of curveballs, and so
was Orson. This is nothing if not a circuitous tale of woe, but it
seems to me that it should be seen, and I think it will be seen. It will
never be seen quite exactly the way Orson would have wanted
it–because that’s impossible, that died with him. But all we can do is
try to put the footage that he shot together the best we can based on
his notes and scripts, and the memories of those people who were
there when he made it, and based on the template of the sequences
that he left behind that he’s fine-cut himself.
84 ACTION!

From what you’ve seen and what you remember, if it were to be seen,
how relevant would it seem? Would it have any impact on the way
Welles is perceived today?

McBride: This is partly what I write about in my new book, What

Ever Happened to Orson Welles? He was doing all kinds of
fascinating work in his later period, 1970–1985, after he came back
to America. He was breaking new ground all the time, trying new
things, experimenting with the medium in ways he hadn’t done
before. He was doing this all through his career, but the problem is
people didn’t see these films. They thought he was just sitting around
eating and drinking and making commercials. But he was shooting
almost every day, his own films, but he was doing it in a way that was
totally contrary to the norms of the industry. So for the media, he just
didn’t exist. The media are very rigid in America: if you’re not doing
things in the commercial way, there’s something strange and wrong
about you. So people don’t know that he was always fresh and
interesting. People always wanted him to do Citizen Kane again, but
that was the last thing he wanted to do, because that was a film that
was of its time. What could you do that would be similar, anyway?
They had this irrational idea that he’d made this one great film, and
everything else was a failure. But I think, when The Other Side of the
Wind is finally seen, people might be struck that he was trying some
new, looser styles, with handheld cameras and fast cutting, the
modern style that evolved in the sixties, and also dealing with nudity,
sexuality, homosexuality, and dealing with the youth culture, and all
kinds of stuff he hadn’t done before. Y’know, as a student film buff,
I loved Citizen Kane because it was so perfect and designed. Every
shot was meticulously crafted, and to me that was what a film was
supposed to be. So I was kind of surprised when I arrived on the set
of this film and found Welles shooting with handheld cameras and the
actors were improvising, and if something happened, Welles would
put it in the film. It really surprised me that he would be doing
something so spontaneous. But he told me, “Movies should be
rough.” He had evolved into a different style of filmmaker; he was
always changing and evolving, and not just trying to remake what he
had done before, or replicate his success. Hitchcock got frustrated
that he kept having to do the same kind of film all the time, but
he did it in order to keep viable. But Welles would never do that.
That was the basic problem Welles always had. Well, there were
 BOGDANOVICH AND MCBRIDE 85

two: One was that he was an artist and he was intransigent, he

wouldn’t do it “their way.” But the other was he never made the same
film twice. A lot of great directors do repeat themselves. Like a John
Ford. You knew pretty much what a John Ford film was going to be
like, and a Hitchcock film or a Howard Hawks film. There was more
consistency in their careers. But not with Welles. He was always
trying something totally different every time.

Bogdanovich: It’s hard to say how relevant it might seem. It was a

massively complicated and interesting conception, very much in the
Orson Welles style, by which I mean the very different way of
approaching things. He didn’t do the same thing twice, so it’s very
much in Orson’s way. I think it’s very modern from what I’ve seen,
both cut and uncut. And it’s quite relevant to today’s world, even
though it deals with that other world of the early 1970s: it’s still love
and hate and envy and competitiveness, and life and death and
making movies–those things are all pretty much still the same. There
are arty movies today, and this is about a kind of arty movie that
Huston was making, trying to be “with it.” Orson’s last film is
certainly in a modern idiom. And maybe, when they see it, people
will see that he was doing some pretty interesting and pretty unusual
work right up until the end, and regret that he wasn’t allowed to
finish it–and finish a lot of other things he wanted to do as well: King
Lear, The Cradle Will Rock, The Big Brass Ring, The Merchant of
Venice, The Dreamers–there were a lot of movies Orson could have
and should have made. But what he left behind is what he managed
to make, despite all the jealousy and the small-mindedness and the
vicissitudes of art and trying to be an artist in the second half of the
twentieth century in America. If that sums it up pompously enough.

References
1. Briefly: Welles raised $1 million for The Other Side of the Wind himself and
received a further $1 million from a Paris-based Iranian company, Les films de
l’Astrophore, headed by Medhi Boushehri, who happened to be the Shah of
Iran’s brother-in-law. At this point, a Spanish investor embezzled around a
quarter of a million from the production and disappeared into Europe. The
Iranian company agreed to provide further funding to replace the missing cash,
on the condition they received a higher percentage, with the result that
l’Astrophore finally owned around 80 per cent of the film, and were denying
86 ACTION!

Welles the right to final cut. At this point, the Iranian revolution happened, the
Shah fell, and the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and all foreign assets,
including the negative of Orson Welles’ final film, came under his jurisdiction.
Shit happens. (And then your biographers come along and start theorizing
about your “fear of completion.”)
2. The two most famous of these are a long, frenzied segment depicting
Hannaford’s entrance to his party, and a sex scene in a rain-swept car in L.A.
at night that out-Lynches David Lynch. Both of these, along with clips from
Welles’ mountain of unfinished and unreleased late work, can be seen in Vasili
Silovic’s essential 1996 documentary, Orson Welles: The One-Man Band.
3. A fascinating, lavishly illustrated edition of the complete screenplay–or one
version of it–was published jointly by Cahiers du Cinema and the Locarno
International Film Festival in 2005, to mark the festival’s Welles symposium.
4. Indeed, the very notion that The Other Side of the Wind is Welles’ “last movie”
is part of its legend. As ever with Welles, the truth is far more complex; after
Wind wrapped, he continued shooting films and film essays for nine years,
literally until the day he died. When he suffered his fatal heart attack, Welles,
seemingly undaunted by the rejections and disappointments that had greeted
his efforts to attract studio backing over the preceding two decades, was
working at his typewriter on material he planned shooting later that day: an
abridged Julius Caesar in which, true to remarkable form, he would play every
role. Of his myriad of late projects, however, The Other Side of the Wind is
considered by many who worked with him as the most significant, and the
closest to completion. Gary Graver, cinematographer on all Welles’ late works,
himself called it “the film that bookends Citizen Kane.”
5. A Showtime deal to finish and release the film was looking in great shape at the
end of the 1990s. The owners of the movie–Welles’ partner and co-writer Oja
Kodar and the Iranian investor Medhi Boushehri–had reached an agreement;
Joseph McBride was in place as producer, along with Rick Schmidlin; and Peter
Bogdanovich and Welles’ cameraman, Gary Graver, were going to collaborate in
the editing and post-production. But then, as a source intimately involved in the
deal back then puts it to me, “Welles’ daughter Beatrice stopped it. She basically
goes around trying to get money or block projects, claiming that she has
ownership rights of one kind or another. The thing is, Welles explicitly left The
Other Side of the Wind to Oja in his will, so it seems that Beatrice has no legal
rights to do anything with this film. But y’know, when studios or companies are
hassled like that, they often back away. If Showtime is still interested, I guess the
idea is that Beatrice will have to be pacified in some way. On some films she’s
been paid off, y’know. When Universal did that superb revised version of Touch
of Evil, based on Welles’ memo, she actually complained to Universal that they
were ‘tampering with Daddy’s vision.’ And of course, the irony is, they were
untampering with the tampering that had been done to Daddy’s vision back in
1958. But she managed to block that video release for a while, and I think
Universal wound up finally paying her some money and then she went away.”
6. At the time of writing, early October 2006, Peter Bogdanovich, who remains
involved in trying to have the film completed, reports that, “Things are now
moving along very well with The Other Side of the Wind, and there should be
an announcement within the next 2–3 months.”
 BOGDANOVICH AND MCBRIDE 87

7. This indispensable, fantastic and fantastically entertaining interview book was

finally published as This Is Orson Welles in 1992, seven years after Welles died.
A revised, expanded edition was released by Da Capo Press in 1998.
8. McBride’s superb critical study, called simply Orson Welles, appeared in 1972.
A radically revised and expanded edition was put out by the industrious Da
Capo in 1996. It remains, as Cinema Journal put it, “one against which others
are going to have to measure themselves.”
9. The “phallus line” has since become something of a bone of contention. Peter
Bogdanovich has claimed several times that he delivers the line in the movie,
but in fact the line was suggested, and is spoken, by Joseph McBride as the
film’s pesky cineaste figure, Mr. Pister. “Peter sure loves that line,” McBride
adds.
10. Among the actors and directors glimpsed playing themselves in the movie are
Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol, Chabrol’s wife Stéphane Audran, Henry
Jaglom, Curtis Harrington, Paul Mazursky, and Richard Wilson. Citizen Kane’s
butler, Paul Stewart, can also be seen as one of Hannaford’s henchmen.
11. Following a long battle with cancer, Gary Graver, the Vietnam-veteran
cinematographer with whom Welles worked exclusively over the last 15 years
of his life, died on November 16, 2006, while this article was being written. He
was 68. Of all the players involved, Graver campaigned the most tirelessly to
have The Other Side of the Wind completed and released, and kept the film’s
flame alive down the decades by screening extensive assemblages of
scenes–along with clips from the mountain of other projects he shot for
Welles–at film festivals around the world. He was involved in the attempts to
have the movie finished right until the end; that he died without having the
chance to see it released throws new perspective on how frustrating, time-
wasting and ultimately ridiculous the arguments keeping it in limbo have been.
Welles worked with some of the greatest cameramen of his age, of course, and
is instantly associated with black and white. But, working on minuscule, home-
movie budgets, Graver’s colour cinematography captured some of the director’s
most sublime shots: the twilight montage of Chartres cathedral in F for Fake;
the unutterably beautiful fragments of Welles’ unfinished adaptation of The
Dreamers. Joseph McBride says that his book What Ever Happened to Orson
Welles? “is almost as much about Gary as it is about Orson; Gary was the hero
of the book. He was a great guy all around, a wonderful artist, beloved by all
who knew him.” Welles himself nicknamed Graver “Rembrandt.”
12. Welles first conceived the movie–which was originally called The Sacred
Beasts–in the early 1960s, as an attack on the artist as macho man and the jet-
trash, cafe-society crowd that followed the bullfighting circuit. The main
character, a burned-out artist running on past glories, was modeled on Ernest
Hemingway, whom Welles had observed haunting Spanish bullrings with his
flunky entourage in the late fifties. Welles had first met Hemingway years
before, in 1937, when he was hired to read the narration the author had written
for the documentary The Spanish Earth (1937). The two got into a fistfight
when Hemingway complained Welles read “like a faggot.” When shooting on
The Other Side of the Wind finally started, Hemingway seems to have remained
on Welles’ mind: Jake Hannaford’s fatal birthday party takes place on July 2,
the date Hemingway put a shotgun to his head.
Clint Eastwood on the set of Million Dollar Baby (2004).
Credit: Warner Bros./Photofest

“Plant Your Feet and Tell the Truth”:

Clint Eastwood
by Tony Macklin

The toughest interview for me ever to get was with Clint Eastwood
(born 1930). My meetings with John Wayne and Sam Peckinpah
were tough, but Clint was the toughest.
90 ACTION!

I had taught a course on Eastwood’s films at a university where

I spent my teaching career, and I took shots from some alumni
who thought he wasn’t a fit subject. Of course, he was. And, as time
has passed, he has proven to be even more so.
I had tried for 30 years to get an interview. One time I called one of
his people and played my trump card. I mentioned how well
my interview with Wayne had gone. But my trump card was blown away.
“Mr. Eastwood hates John Wayne,” the man on the phone said curtly.
Oops. I felt like collateral damage between two icons at high noon.
Intermittently I made further overtures–I sent Clint a book of
poetry signed by Robinson Jeffers, the poet of Big Sur, Monterey,
Carmel, and environs. But I imagine it never got to him; it probably
wound up on eBay.
Finally, fate smiled. Rob Burke, one of my former students, had
become vice president for marketing and creative services for
Lakeshore International. Warner Bros. turned down Eastwood’s
project Million Dollar Baby, but when Lakeshore agreed to do it,
Warner Bros. changed their mind and hastily signed on.
Rob set up the interview with Clint for me. The three people
I interviewed who were in Million Dollar Baby all won Oscars. I’m
a secret talisman.
I finally sat down for an hour and 45 minutes with Clint, at the
Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, after being prodded, searched, and
scrutinized by studio guards. Later Eastwood’s people insisted to me
that Clint’s eyes are green. They sure looked blue to me.
I was struck and surprised by two things. First, how gentle Clint
is. Second, how well-read he is. I was not surprised by how authentic
he is.

Interview

I have to apologize–I didn’t have enough faith. When I heard you were
going to do Million Dollar Baby, I thought, he has to compromise to
make it commercial. He can’t have it end like the story.

You’re just doing the story the way you see it. I read the book [Rope
Burns] about three-and-a-half years ago and paid close attention to
the story “Million Dollar Baby,” which someone had told me about.
I really liked the story and later on when they came back with the
 EASTWOOD 91

script Paul Haggis had written, I said, “Gee, I really like this. It’s
going to take a lot of nerve to do this.”
But it’s sort of the ultimate conflict: he falls in love with this girl,
his surrogate daughter–she’s the daughter he never had, and he’s the
father she’s never had–and then he’s asked to do this terrible thing.
It’s kind of controversial. But it’s also conflict in the mind of the
person who has to do it.

Actually your persona–the Clint Eastwood persona–helps it, doesn’t

it? The audience is saying, “He’s never done this before; this is
something new.”

Well, I’m at the age in life where I’m not trying to do things I did
years ago. And personas–I’ve tried to shoot down my persona so
many times.

You don’t even fight this time out. Morgan Freeman does the fighting
for you.

That’s true. [Laughs]

So your persona has evolved.

Over the years. I started out in genres of films–the western and the
detectives. I was looking for different stories that go along with the
natural maturing of the years. I probably would have retired years ago
if I hadn’t found interesting things to do. The 1980s were a transition
period for me, but the 1990s were pretty good, because I brought out
Unforgiven [1992], which I had for many years, a story I had sat on.
Then I started playing older people with certain regrets and certain
problems to overcome–In the Line of Fire [1993] and different roles.
Every once in a while a good role would come along. A Perfect
World [1993] came along. I hadn’t planned on being in that one.
I directed it, but I also acted in it because Kevin [Costner] said it
would be right. And then Bridges [The Bridges of Madison County,
1995] came along–the studio [Warner Bros.] owned it. That was a
“mature guy” role. You think there are none of them out there, and
then all of a sudden one pops up. Million Dollar Baby is an example
of that–of a role popping up with a character that has terrific
dilemmas to overcome.
92 ACTION!

I just do what I feel I should be doing. Whether you’re nominated

for something or not has never been a motivating force for me. It’s
just playing the roles. Once you finish a film, it doesn’t belong to you
anymore–it belongs to the audience to interpret it the way they feel
like interpreting.

And your career just keeps on going.

There’s no rule on it. I always was astounded from a director’s

standpoint how many great directors were sort of discarded in their
sixties. Billy Wilder–people like that who live until their nineties–all
of a sudden couldn’t get a job.

Didn’t John Ford go seven years without making a film, at the end
of his life?

Yeah, John Ford. You don’t know whether the material doesn’t coincide
with what people are thinking about then, but it’s always astounded me.
I always felt, as you are maturing and stacking up more information in
your computer, you should be able to expand and do more.

You can do more personal projects like John Huston–his last films.

Yes. John Huston is a great example, because he did a wide variety of

films in his heyday, and then at the end of his career he did The Dead,
which was his last film–a film he did out of his wheelchair, and he still
did a good movie. So, there’s no rule on it. You can be any age.

You said you “sat on” Unforgiven. Then in the early 1990s you did it.

When I did Unforgiven I thought it would be the perfect last western

for me. Not for anyone else, but for me to wrap it up in. It’s turned
out there’s never been a story come along–in my career–to equal that
in that particular genre. So, it may be the last one.
Then in Mystic River [2003], I didn’t act in the picture. It was a
great pleasure to shoot with all the younger players, and I thought,
“Yeah, I’m happy back here,” behind the camera. Then all of a
sudden somebody gives me the Million Dollar Baby script, and I
thought, “I can play this guy. I think I know this guy.” I’m the same
age this guy would be; I’m playing the same age. When you’ve lived
 EASTWOOD 93

so many years, you understand people’s family problems, and you

can draw in your imagination why he had a deteriorating
relationship with his daughter. Maybe it’s a bad divorce, maybe in
his younger days he was too involved in boxing and never spent any
time with her. You’ve seen a lot of relationships come and go–in your
family and other families. You have a lot of things to draw on. You
use your imagination. And the dilemma of finally reaching a revival
in his life and then having to lose it is a tragic situation. It’s a tragedy
that could have been written by the Greeks or Shakespeare.

I’m absolutely sure that at the end–even though it’s left open–he
bought that diner, and that’s him. He’s paid homage to her.

You know something. That’s the way it should be.

And leaving it a little indistinct is great. Then you have other options.

Yeah. You can diffuse it down so you’re not sure. Somebody else
may say, “Maybe he was tormented the rest of his life. Maybe he
jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.” That’s up to the beholder. It’s
kind of like in Mystic River, everybody asks, “What’s the reason for
Kevin Bacon going like that?” [Points his finger like a pistol.]

The book does suggest Sean [Kevin Bacon] is going to get Jimmy
Markum [Sean Penn].

But I go away from the book. I don’t want to get as exacting as that.
I like it when the audience can play around with it.
Just like in the beginning of Million Dollar Baby, the audience
will say, “What happened with his daughter that she won’t even
answer his letters?” We don’t know, but it was something within the
family that didn’t work out well. It’s up to the audience to figure out.

In your career, what gets your juices going?

I still like work. I’m involved–if a story’s challenging. I didn’t know

what I was going to do next before Mystic River. And all of a sudden
I read a critique in USA Today about the book. It’s almost
like I knew it was great before I read the book. I called my office
and said, “Go out and get this.” It was just coming out that day, and
three days later we owned it. I read it almost in one sitting.
94 ACTION!

This one [Million Dollar Baby] had a two-fer in it, because I liked
the idea of directing, but I also liked the role. With Mystic River
there was no doubt I was going to sit in the background. Only
directing was the way I was heading until this came along. I enjoyed
very much playing in this one, but I just don’t go out looking for a
role. If a good one comes along, that’s fine. Most of the roles I’ve had
over the years–especially in Hollywood–are dictated by fans.
People say, “How about bringing back Dirty Harry [1971]?”
I say, “Are you going to have him driving along the highway in
a trailer with an AARP sign on one side, and an ‘I’m Spending the
Kids’ Inheritance’ on the other?” Then what happens? He has to
come out of retirement with a big .44? That’s the kind of thing
people do throw out once in a while. Not too much anymore,
because I’ve pretty well shot that down.

I hate to tell you, but a lot of your fans would love that!

There’s certain times you have to leave certain things. There was
a certain time I was doing films for Sergio Leone, and there was a
certain time I had to go off and do something different. As much as
I enjoyed Sergio–and it was a great time in my life–it was time to do
something else. So I came back here, and did some other things.

And Don Siegel found you, or you found him.

Yes. I did Dirty Harry and those things, and then it’s time to quit.
Then you revisit the genre later on with your own thoughts, your
own imprints–The Outlaw Josey Wales [1976] and Unforgiven. See,
you never let the genre go, you just try to approach it differently, at
different times in your life. The same with detective stories–you try
different things. Sometimes you try detectives who are really smart,
or you get tormented detectives like in Tightrope [1984].

But people try to typecast you.

Yeah, people are submitting you a lot of stuff, but you’re still trying
to do things that are different, that are interesting to you, and that
you think will be interesting to the audience. And then some people
think you’re crazy. Every advisor I had said, “Don’t do the
orangutan movie. Don’t do Every Which Way but Loose [1978].
 EASTWOOD 95

You can’t do this. This is not you.” I said, “Nothing’s me. I’m just
plain.” I said, “There’s something hip about a guy who tells his
troubles to an orangutan, loses the girl, goes on and loses the fight.”
There was something kind of strangely hip about it at that time. And
those films with the orangutan were successful from an audience
point of view. For me, it was reaching out to a younger generation–a
generation of kids who couldn’t go to R-rated detective dramas. So
it offered a way of keeping and expanding the audience. There’s a
time to move on. I don’t know what that time is–a little bird in the
back of your head tells you.

I love the theme of the Fall and Redemption in some of your films. In
Play Misty for Me [1971], Evelyn falls, and Dave is redeemed. The
assassin falls in In the Line of Fire, and Frank Horrigan is redeemed. And
now in Million Dollar Baby, she falls, and Frankie Dunn is redeemed.

I don’t know to what degree he’s redeemed.

But he’s humanized, isn’t he?

He’s finally come to the conclusion that he’s granting her last request.

But doing something for someone else, isn’t that a kind of…

Yes, it is, but is it redemption at the end, or is it like the priest said,
“Forget God and Heaven and Hell. If you do this, you’ll be lost so
deep within that you’ll never be able to recover”?

But why would the priest suddenly be able to speak the truth for Frankie?

Frankie’s definitely had his doubts about his religion, but he’s there
with his religion because of his Irish Catholic background. He stays
with it, even though he’s kind of testing the priest all the time.

And having fun upsetting him.

Oh, yeah. He’s trying to pin him down to the point where he gets the
priest upset, and the priest doesn’t want any part of him. Frankie’s
gone to church every day. The priest says, “Stay out of the church;
don’t come to church.”
96 ACTION!

Boxing is also his church. How much did the boxing attract you?

I grew up looking at boxing movies, and I liked them a lot as a kid.

Body and Soul [1947] and The Set-Up [1949]–which was a
wonderful little picture. It was one of Robert Wise’s first films–a B
movie, but it was great. I remember walking down the Via Veneto
with Robert Ryan; we were both over there working. We met in Italy
and hung out–had a couple of beers together. And people were
yelling out the windows at him, “Hey, The Set-Up!” It’s amazing
how in Italy this film was so popular, but very few people knew
about it in this country, because it just fades into the B movie genre.

Fat City [1974]?

Yeah, I liked that. But The Set-Up I really liked. There was
something about it; it was a small, humble little film. Yeah, Fat City
was good, too. And Raging Bull [1980], I liked that one.

Rocky?

I loved the first one. I haven’t seen them all, so I can’t speak about
the whole group. I always admired Stallone’s tenacity to go ahead
and get that made.

And now there’s female boxing.

I must say that the first time I ever heard about women boxing
I thought, “This is an odd sport for a woman to do.” Much like
Frankie Dunn in the picture–he’s kind of prejudiced towards it.
I was doing a film years ago in Las Vegas called The Gauntlet
[1977], and I was with a friend of mine I’ve known for many years–he’s
deceased now–named Al Silvani, who was a fight trainer. He had
trained Rocky Graziano and Floyd Patterson. I gathered a lot of my
thoughts for this part from knowing him for so many years. In fact,
when this part came up I said, “If only Al was alive. This is the perfect
picture for him to work on as an advisor.” When I was working on The
Gauntlet, a girl I knew who was a cocktail waitress came on the set,
and she said, “You know I’m boxing now.” I said, “You are? Why do
you have to do that?” She said, “Well, I just love it.” So I called Al and
asked if he would go down to the arena and try to help her out, train
 EASTWOOD 97

her a little bit, see if she’s got anything. So he did. He came back and
said, “She’s doing good.”

So you have a history with female boxing! Hilary Swank said she
might fight again. Do you believe that?

I think she loved the training process. I’ve never seen anybody
with that kind of enthusiasm and work ethic. She’s like that
as a person.

She said the trainer screamed at her a lot.

That was Hector Roca in New York. He was a yeller. I don’t know
how she handled that one, but she handled it. Grant Roberts did the
weight training–he’s 300 pounds–he was very gentle with her until
she got really strong. But then Hector worked with her, then she
came out here, and I had her work with Don Familton, who also
plays the ring announcer in the picture.
I had great faith in Hilary. I think she’s a terrific actress. Boys
Don’t Cry [1999]–that was a wonderful performance, and in smaller
roles like Insomnia [2002]. She has a great presence on the screen.
There’s a realness to her. And I knew that’s what it would take to
make this picture work.

The other night on TV David Fincher said, “I made a film with Morgan
Freeman [Se7en], and he does a scene and I don’t think he’s doing
anything. Then when I see it on film, there’s a lot going on.” Is that true?

Yes. Absolutely. Morgan is one of those guys who’s so good, so

consistent for so long, he’s taken for granted. And it comes so
effortlessly, off the top of his head. But it is honest. The old James
Cagney thing: “Plant your feet, and tell the truth.” I’ve worked with
Morgan twice, and I’m always very pleased about having him. He’s
the lowest maintenance actor I’ve ever had. He’s ready to go on
rehearsal. On Unforgiven, I had both Morgan and Gene Hackman,
and with both of them you could shoot rehearsal. Sometimes it’s fun
to have them come out for the first time. It doesn’t always work, but
you try it. That’s a great thing about film.

Did you use any of the rehearsal footage in Million Dollar Baby?
98 ACTION!

Sure.

You mentioned James

Cagney.

Growing up, my
favorite actor was
an opposite of me–
James Cagney. I
loved Henry Fonda.
I like people in
different roles.
Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman in Million Dollar
Grapes of Wrath–I Baby (2004). Credit: Warner Bros./Photofest
was very impressed
with that when I
saw it as a kid. I was reading all those books. Of Mice and Men and
Grapes of Wrath, and all those wonderful books and good movies.
Burgess Meredith’s performance in Of Mice and Men still stands up
today. I remember my dad taking me to see Sergeant York, with Gary
Cooper. That was Howard Hawks.

So you got caught on genre real early. Hawks was a genre director.

Oh, yeah. I used to go to all the B movies, too. Randolph Scott.

Joel McCrea?

I liked Joel McCrea very much, because I loved Sullivan’s Travels,

the Preston Sturges film. Those are the kind of films I grew up on.
But in those days everybody was seeing all kinds of different varieties
of films, because there was no television.

Did Jimmy Cagney give you the idea of a singing career? You’re not
a bad singer. On Rawhide, for instance, there were a lot of times that
you sang and sang well.

Most people remember Frankie Laine, though. [Laughs] I liked

music. I played as a kid. My dad was an amateur singer.

Did he perform in public?

 EASTWOOD 99

He had a group during the Depression that played at functions and

parties. As an avocation. He loved it, and I loved it, too.

Well, it was Lee Marvin that killed your singing career.

[Laughs] He was a classic.

You knew a lot of classics.

I get a kick out of my wife, who is quite a few years younger. She’ll
say, “Did you know Elvis Presley?” I’ll say, “Sure.” “James Dean?”
“Yeah.” “Bobby Darin?” “Yeah.” She’ll look at some old picture of me
and say, “What a babe!” [Laughs] We were all hanging around at the
same time, in the 1950s. We were all here in town, and all struggling in
various things. I was doing Rawhide. There was a camaraderie among
the younger group.

You like a fast-paced set, don’t you?

I think what happens is everybody says, “Well, he’s doing it

fast.” I’m not doing it fast. I’m just trying to move, that’s all. Just
moving ahead. Some scenes go together extremely quickly, and
others don’t. You have to measure that out. That’s the director’s
responsibility.

Can we talk a little about production designer Henry Bumstead?

We have our crack geriatrics team–I include myself in that.

Henry is 89 years old; if he works for me in the next film [Flags
of Our Fathers is in the planning stage], he’ll be 90! But I would
go to no one else first. I initially worked with him in 1972 [ Joe
Kidd], and he was so effortless and such a charming guy. And
then I couldn’t get him back for many years; he was always working
with George Roy Hill, who was very active in the 1970s and 1980s.
Then George Roy Hill retired, and, of course, Hitchcock was
long gone, so I got Bumstead back and we did Unforgiven. He’s
done every picture with me since, except for The Bridges of
Madison County; there was a production designer, Jeannine
Claudia Oppewall, already on the picture, when I came on. She was
wonderful, too.
100 ACTION!

Henry is always saying I take the B.S. out of filmmaking, when it’s
people like him that make you able to take the B.S. out, because he
works effortlessly, and he’s got so much knowledge.

Does anything bother you about the state of movies today?

The one thing I have a little bit of a problem with is I don’t quite
understand this obsession about doing remakes and making
television series into feature films. I would rather see them encourage
writers with new ideas in all different genres like they used to in the
heyday of movies.

You mentioned your wife. How is family life?

I enjoy it. I give all the credit to my wife. Dina’s such a calming
influence in my life. She sort of brought everybody together. She’s
terrific. Bringing together the mothers, my mother and everybody.
She’s the light of me life. [Irish brogue]

Is she a critic? Does she tell you what she likes and doesn’t like about
your work?

Yes. She’s very honest, very outspoken. She’s a writer herself, a

journalist, and she’s clever.

She’s a keeper.

So far. And if she says something “stinks,” I’ll just say, “That’s your
opinion.” [Laughs]

After you left the Armed Services as a young man, how did you get
into acting?

My parents had moved up to Seattle, so I was thinking of going to

Seattle University, which had a good music program. A friend of
mine said why didn’t I come here? So I came down and went to L.A.
College, and I still didn’t know what I would do. I took a Business
Administration major, which was helpful. Then I started taking
acting in the evenings, at various little acting groups. One thing led
to another, and I was out on the street. I got a contract at Universal
 EASTWOOD 101

and was a contract player for one-and-a-half years. Then they

dumped me. I tried to come over here [Warner Bros.], but they
wouldn’t have me. I tried to go to Fox and Paramount; I went to all
the studios. Finally, I decided to do television in the late 1950s to the
mid-1960s. I got Rawhide. I had a steady job.

Did being mayor of Carmel cramp your lifestyle?

I was married before for many years; then I was single for many,
many years. I was single when I was mayor of Carmel [1986–1988],
but I was so busy doing stuff that I never had time to go out. And
you didn’t dare take a date out, because as a politician you had to
go out with a group of people, and you can’t remember everybody’s
name, so if you had a date you’d have to introduce them. I said,
“I can’t do that. I got to be on my own.” I enjoyed it for two years,
but not beyond. At about a year and a half I said, “I might go back
and make some more movies.”

I loved the documentary which you narrated, Don’t Pave Main

Street [1994].

Yeah. That was fun to make for Carmel’s Heritage. And a few things
like that. I made two movies while I was mayor. I did Bird [1988]
and Heartbreak Ridge [1986].

I want to ask you about one more movie. It’s daring like Million
Dollar Baby. Was The Beguiled [1970] Don Siegel’s favorite movie?

He liked it a lot. He enjoyed making it, because it was a challenge. The

studio asked me if I would do it, so I took it to him. I was working
with Don at that time on Two Mules for Sister Sara [1970]. I said,
“Do you really want to try something bizarre? There’s this book called
Beguiled.” There was a screenplay on it, but I read the book first.
He read the screenplay, and then went back and read the book. In fact,
we went back and put the book’s ending on the screenplay because the
screenplay made it a happy ending. And it was one of those pictures
you couldn’t have a happy ending. But anyway, it wasn’t a hit, but we
enjoyed making it.

It’s a very good film.

102 ACTION!

It’s a good swing at bat.

You’re an actor, and you have to cast your films. Does that help you?

I do casting with Phyllis Huffman. We sit in a room, and she’ll have

video tapes–either tapes of previous pictures they have done or tapes
that she has made. That way I don’t have to go in there, because if I
had to go in there and meet them all, I’d say, “Hey, come on, you’re
perfect,” and pretty soon I’d be hiring everybody. So, in order to stay
objective, I’ll look at the tapes first. Then if I’m really close on an
actor, I’ll say, “Come on in.”
In the case of somebody like Lucia Rijker, in Million Dollar Baby,
who is a professional fighter and not an actress, I’ll have her come
in. There’s no film on her, just her boxing film. So I’ll have her come
in to meet her. Going back to Play Misty for Me [1971], I knew
Jessica Walter was the person for that role before I had her come in.
I had seen a scene she had done from The Group years earlier, just
one scene, and I could tell. So she came in and shook hands with me,
and I said, “Well, do you want this part?” She said, “Sure.” I said,
“OK.” End of conversation. “Go to wardrobe.”

You’re pretty free these days.

Absolutely. A friend of mine, a man in his seventies, says, “You

know the great thing about being in your seventies? What can they
do to you?” I thought, yeah, there’s something to be said for that.
What have you got to lose? “Freedom’s just another word for
nothing left to lose.”
That’s a wonderful lyric.
II. Tickets to the Dark
Side: Festival Favorites

“I think what is essential to film so that it is taken seriously is that it

represent not only social concerns, but also debate its very existence:
the medium itself, just as is the case with literature and every other
serious art form.” –Michael Haneke

6. Lars von Trier

7. Mania Akbari
8. Caveh Zahedi
9. Michael Haneke
Lars von Trier and Bryce Dallas Howard on the set of Manderlay (2005).
Credit: IFC Films/Photofest

Manderlay: Lars von Trier

by Karin Luisa Badt
Most directors at Cannes you can meet at their hotels lining the
boardwalk for a Perrier and an interview. Not Lars von Trier (born
1956), the director of such disturbing films as Europa (1991), Dancer
in the Dark (2000), and Dogville (2003). For the 2005 Cannes Film
Festival, von Trier had sequestered himself in Antibes, far from the
maddening crowds, at the exclusive Hotel Cap perched atop a nature
reserve. As my taxi rounded the cliffs, the sky turned gray and mist
floated on the waves, rather like the empty landscape of von Trier’s
own movie, Breaking the Waves (1996). A lone tornado ripped across
the water. The taxi dropped me into total silence–except for the
twittering of birds–and on the mowed slopes to von Trier’s private
cabana, there on a path rounding the sea, I came upon the director
himself, walking calmly alone in his white suit and white beard,
looking like the gentle proprietor of a great plantation. After all, his
newest film at the time, Manderlay, a scathing critique of racism in
the United States, takes place on one.
106 ACTION!

Von Trier is a lot more gentle than one might expect from a man
with the reputation for terrorizing his actresses. A small man, with
a twinkle in his eye, he is quick to tilt his head and mumble
a response, no matter what you ask–and what usually comes out of
his mouth seems to surprise both him and the journalist. Unlike
other film directors, who are prompt with soundbites, repeatable
from interview to interview, a conversation with von Trier is an
original opus. He speaks in spurts, inventing metaphors and images
inspired by whatever word comes before him, rather as if the
journalist is a Rorschach test. For example, we began our interview
discussing why it was he did not fly–why he took a trailer home from
Sweden to Cannes–and he whispered: “I have psychological
problems. Many many. It’s hard right now.” And by the time our
interview concluded–in midsentence (the publicist checking her
watch)–he was on to new revelations about his family life.
Intellectual? Consistent? Ideological? Here too von Trier was
a surprise. The von Trier of the Dogme Manifesto, the von Trier who
bombasts the world with political statements about the death
penalty, about religious and judicial institutions, the von Trier
who has been said to be motivated by a conversion experience to
Christianity, came across as a man tortured by his own con-
tradictions. Throughout the interview, he squirmed in his white
jacket, as if caught and netted by it, and then apologized
sporadically. For what? For being tired of journalists, for rebelling
against his parents, and even, when it could not be avoided, for his
own film, a film that seemed to have disappointed both himself and
the public, for its over-heavy tone.
“I am at war with myself,” he concluded, taking his hands and
swinging fists at each other, rather as if the battle were aimed at his
own frame.
Below is our interview, conducted 20 May 2005, in Cannes.

Interview

How many Lars von Triers are there? Everyone who sees your
movies expects you to be an angry person, but here you are the
kindest person, with lots of humor.
 VON TRIER 107

I am actually quite a nice guy, not mean, not idiotically positive

either. I am just reacting like a slave to the world you meet, the
different people you meet. I have always been very mean to myself.

Why did you call Bush an asshole this week?

I was just speaking my mind, to explain that I am not anti-American.

And then some Israelis yesterday said you called Bush an asshole, and
I said it’s not so good. And they said, well how do you feel today, and
I said, “I feel the same. He’s still an asshole.”

Did you say America is sitting on the world or shitting on the world?
Both comments were published in the international press.

America is sitting on the world. Face-sitting they call it in erotic

terms, which is a good thing for both parties I hope, it’s nothing
I practice, oh sorry for that.

Why do you keep apologizing?

I am a little tired. A situation like this, no matter how friendly you are,
is hostile. You must know this as a journalist. It’s like being back in the
schoolyard, there is something hostile about the situation. I get easily
provoked by situations like this because I was always the one who
was beaten in the schoolyard. Especially in press conferences,
I feel surrounded by the group. Perhaps it’s because I say a lot of things,
and I provoke, and then it becomes a game, but I feel fragile. I was
beaten at school because I was extremely small, and I came to school a
year before the others. My parents were a little bit more wealthy than
the other parents, this was not a good neighborhood, and they moved
there for principled reasons, because they were socialists. I wanted to
go to a private school. I had a terrible time in school.

Why is Manderlay so cynical? Usually, your movies–even

Dogville–show a great faith, an idealism reminiscent of Carl Dreyer.
What has happened between the first Grace and the second Grace?

Has Grace already forgotten that she has killed a whole town, and
this is two months ago, and now she is just eating chicken, yum?
108 ACTION!

There is no real reflection. She is cartoonish and cliché; she is from

a gangster family where, okay, they have to do these things.

But is it true that your movies are motivated by a great faith?

No, I have no faith. I am very happy when we go another 50

kilometers without being killed. My self-worth, my physical self-
worth is low.

What about faith in God, in the world?

I wish.

But the focus in other films such as Breaking the Waves and Dancer
in the Dark has been on faith. Have you changed your focus?

No, I am trying to draw this whole story out in three movies. You
haven’t seen the end yet. Although I don’t make a plan when I do
a film, I just write a story and film it. I was fascinated by the story,
and I wrote it. I was very happy when one night I found out that the
Danny Glover character wrote “Mam’s Law,” and that was after
I did most of the script. It’s quite smart. But if I were to criticize this
film, it is that it is too smart. Story-wise everything fits too well. It’s
superficial in that sense. I blame myself for doing things for the
smartness of it, instead of for what I really feel. It’s not the kind of
director I want to be.

Are you going to redo the movie?

No, no, no, it’s over now!

Is Nicole willing to act in your next movie?

Yes, I asked her, and she has time in the spring. My version of it is
that she always wanted to do the film, and that she was very sorry,
very angry when it did not happen, because it was a matter of our
schedules. When she does a film, maybe it takes two months or
maybe it takes a year. I try to support my actresses the best I can, but
in a way that I want them to be the best they can be in film.
 VON TRIER 109

Since Medea, you have had only women heroines. Why not men?

Well, this was Carl Dreyer’s speciality, and I’ve gotten used to it. Also
my contact with actresses is better. The problem with men is that
they will always piss up your back, like when all the deer are
together in the woods. That’s fine, you can change your shirt. But
also men hold back a little, that is very masculine, so there is always
something to give in case there is a crisis. A woman has a tendency
to give it all. Also, my main characters are also built on my own
person. I think women are better, more understanding. This is my
female side.

In Manderlay, the town is destroyed basically because Grace is busy

masturbating, and then has sex with Timothy, the night watchman.

Yes, you can say that.

So are you implying that there is something wrong with women

satisfying sexual needs?

Not at all. Nobody should be blamed for it, only me. I just had
a good time writing the scene when she goes by the chicken
house–when she gets kind of turned on by the chickens, I thought
that was quite funny.

In the sex scene, is Grace living out a racist fantasy?

Oh yes, she loves black men. There are plenty of clichés in the scene:
black/white clichés. There is also a little joke there about the ritual
that the woman shouldn’t look at the men. All these political issues
have an erotic side, that we don’t like to talk about. Maybe we vote
for people because he looks good, or maybe it’s more complicated
than that. We always talk about politics as if it is only the decent part
of the brain that makes the decisions. We never talk about how
erotic issues and political issues collide.

In Europa, there is the erotic connection between Leopold and the

woman…
110 ACTION!

But here sex is a problem for her. Here Grace is saying she is
a revolutionary, but she is trying to get rid of her erotic fantasies. By
the way, Zentropa, our film company, decided to have some porn
figures for women, by women directors. It should be interesting.
Maybe I am not man enough to see some bald German guys being
sucked, but it depends on your taste, although women think that is
what men want. I would like to see what it looks like, just to learn.

What angle on America are you going to take in part three of your
trilogy entitled Washington1?

Can’t tell you. I have been working half a year on a script, it didn’t
work, and I have thrown it all away, so I will postpone this film,
which is dangerous, because it might not get done. We had planned
to do the film this spring, and the idea was that there would be
a sister, and that we would have Nicole and Bryce would be playing
at the same time. I don’t know who should be the sister. I worked
a long time on the script, and it was no fun, it didn’t sparkle, so my
producer said: well, throw it away, which was great. You need
somebody else to see that. I am going to make a comedy now
instead, a Dogme film, a Danish film that is unpolitical, stupid,
completely empty. It is like cleansing myself. I will cheat like hell on
the Dogme, because everyone cheated, I was the only one who didn’t
cheat. Now I am going to cheat. It will be called The Director of It
All.2 This is a reaction to this exhausting trilogy. I am exhausted.
Also from my psychological problems. Yes, there is a chance I won’t
finish the USA trilogy, if I get hit by a car, but I absolutely will do it,
but then suddenly I might rebel against this will. I actually have these
two personalities struggling all the time.

In this film and in The Idiots [1998], a father comes back at the end.
In The Idiots, the father comes back to get Karen, and here a father
comes back to get Grace. What does the father mean to you? Is the
father “the law”?

It might be. I had several fathers. Lots of my work is a discussion

between me and myself. We are arguing like hell all the time. I also
rebelled against my parents. I was show-off Nazi in high school; no,
I didn’t go that far. The rebellion was to dye my hair. What color?
No color. I never got to it, because my mother broke down behind
 VON TRIER 111

a closed door. She should have told me who my real father was,
instead of using her energy on this! She told me on her deathbed that
my father was not my father, and that I was not Jewish!

One final question: why so many jump-cuts in your films?

I love jump-cuts, because on one hand I am trying to do something

that is very controlled, on the other hand, I am trying to do
something that is not so controlled at all, so it is kind of a medicine
against myself.

References
1. Announced for a 2009 release at this writing (May 2008).
2. Released under the international title of The Boss of It All (2006).
Mania Akbari in 20 Angosht (20 Fingers) (2004).
Credit: BD Productions/Photofest

20 Angosht (20 Fingers):

Mania Akbari
by Dorna Khazeni

As the lights at Arclight’s swanky movie theater go up at the end of

Mania Akbari’s 20 Fingers at Los Angeles’ 2004 AFI Film Festival,
a swarthy Iranian gentleman seated more or less center/center stands
up and begins the Q&A session with the following in Farsi:

“Khanoomeh Akbari, Haalaa keh shoma een zahmat o keshidid behtar

nemibood keh be jaayeh film shoma yek navar soti zabt mikardid va dar
cinema na vaghteh maa na vaghteh khodetoon ro haroom mikardin?”
“Ms. Akbari, seeing as you’ve gone to all this trouble, wouldn’t it have been
better if instead of a film you’d just made an audio recording of the dialogue?
You’d have spared us and not wasted our time or your own on this film.”

And that wasn’t all. After he had received a measured answer from
the director–she acknowledged there were many forms of cinema,
and that a plot-driven drama that might have appealed to him was
not the film she was interested in making–her interlocutor stood up
again to rail against the film and ask his second question: Why did
114 ACTION!

this film not resemble another film he’d seen and liked much more,
Shabeh Yalda, which also dealt with relationships?
There was more to come…
As Akbari (born 1974), an attractive 30-year-old Iranian woman
with close-cropped short hair, walked out of the movie theater at the
end of this official Q&A, a slightly older Iranian came up weeping
and accused her of propagating, “lies and filth” about Iranians and
their relationships, “up there on the screen.”
Mania Akbari’s film 20 Angosht (20 Fingers) was first shown at
the Venice Film Festival earlier in 2004 and has not, at this writing,
received permission to screen uncut in Iran, where it was made. It is
composed of seven vignettes, shot on video and transferred to film,
in which the same two actors–Mania Akbari and Bijan
Daneshmand–the film’s director and producer respectively–represent
seven different couples engaged in intimate conversation.
For the most part, the frame is close and tight, and it is only the
audio track, with its ambient noises of what lies outside the frame,
that lets us see the greater world, the public context in which the
couples’ private life is unraveling. There are a few wider shots. In
these too, the sense of claustrophobic conflict builds palpably. In one
such scene, a couple travels through Tehran on a motorcycle. The
woman carries her infant child between herself and the man as they
zip around the busy Tehran traffic and fight about whether or not he
will allow her to have an abortion. It is a wrenching scene, a good
example of how Akbari’s direction exposes the minute and often
painful negotiations that underlie these relationships.
The film’s strong suit is its ability to turn the relationships inside
out in the course of one parenthetical conversation. 20 Fingers
presents its characters stripped bare of all their masks and defenses
and in moments of extreme intimacy. The picture here is complex
and worrisome, the struggle for dominance within a couple universal
despite the specific Iranian setting and characters. At the second
screening, more than half of the twenty-odd questions were asked by
non-Iranians who saw the film as relevant to their own experience of
intimacy.
20 Fingers is poised to irritate viewers not only because of its
difficult visuals but also because of its challenge to some of the quiet
conventions and self-deceptions that relationships can be built on.
Akbari seems almost obsessed with revealing the characters to
themselves as well as to us and in pushing them to a point where they
 AKBARI 115

must break down and face their own truths. In this regard, her work
brings to mind John Cassavetes’ films. Asked if she was familiar with
his work, she said she has no idea who he is.
In each conversation, we watch the relationship head into
uncharted waters. There is an innate reticence. It’s easier to just stay
on the surface. But there is also a sense of danger that grows with
each line of dialogue. Swirling somewhere inside the maelstrom of
conflicting motivations and desires revealed by the dialogue, the
question that hangs, as if it had been asked and the film were the
answer to it, is, “What is love?” The director seems determined to
dismantle some of the comfortable notions that allow the term to be
used as a safe cover. At the same time, the word’s definition seems to
expand. When Akbari sees her characters playing games, she calls
them on it, again and again, until she reaches truth, no matter what
the consequence. No wonder the reactions are so strong.
The original plan to use seven different couples in each of the
film’s segments was scrapped after she shot the first vignette with
Bijan Daneshmand. Akbari chose to stick with him throughout,
playing the female parts herself. There is a great chemistry between
the pair, and the ease with which they summon intimacy before a
camera recalls the acting of long-standing ensemble casts who have
soldered a relationship together over years. Daneshmand’s
performance is strong and credible in each segment, but it is Akbari
who propels the film forward in every episode–she is the woman
who will not be shushed, who will not let up, and who pushes until
something breaks.
While she readily acknowledges the influence of Abbas
Kiarostami’s cinema–she plays the lead in his film Ten–she seems
utterly undaunted by it. 20 Fingers is distinguished by an unusual
and unmitigated sincerity that is distinctly her own and that
represents a bold new voice.
It is a shame that the film’s English subtitles are so poor–especially
given the weight the dialogue must carry in the film. The Persian
language, idiomatic and playful, runs along almost breezily, and
tensions build. The subtitles here are at best functional and often
archaic. Those who stuck with the screening felt rewarded in spite of
this shortcoming.
Here is a transcript and translation of segments of my conversation
with Akbari at the AFI Fest 2004. The conversation was conducted
in Farsi.
116 ACTION!

Interview

How long have you been working in film, and what were you doing
before that?

I’ve only been involved with cinema for three or four years. I was a
painter before. I began with painting. But I discovered art much
earlier on. I was ten or eleven. My earliest influences were Sohrab
Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad. I began with literature, and
literature always stays with you. I showed my paintings in Iran and
outside. My first serious work in the cinema was Ten with Abbas
Kiarostami.

How did you come to be in that film?

Abbas Kiarostami’s subject was women. I knew him, and we had

spoken several times about women’s issues. He found my perspective
interesting and also aspects of my own experience interesting.
Whenever things actually come together, there is a collusion of events
and energies. You’re aware of some things and not quite aware of
others. Things just came together–there was forward motion.

When you refer to aspects of your own experience, do you mean to

refer to the fact that you yourself are a mother?

Yes. The boy acting in the film [in Ten] is my own son. The
relationship between the mother and son is one that I can feel in an
almost tactile way. I understand their conflicts, their difficulties, their
needs, their jealousies, their problems. I have also experienced
divorce and can understand that, too. Once a person has experienced
something, they can truly represent it, articulate it, and understand
it. At first it is an internal experience, then it becomes external.
Naturally, once it is apparent on the outside, once it’s externalized,
it also affects what is on the inside. That is what happened.

I think this is what is so interesting in this film–it’s also true of Ten,

but more so here–there’s a feeling of penetrating a very private and
interior space that is not often the one we see on a movie screen.
What we most often see on a screen are the dramatic moments of
a story. Whereas all the moments leading to that dramatic moment
 AKBARI 117

are so much more interesting. Usually we aren’t shown them. In this

film we see those moments.

It’s like if you could open the window of a neighbor’s house and
secretly watch and listen in on their relationship. I call this space
“cinema therapy.” I have no objection to cinema as entertainment,
cinema that presents the heights of excitement, action, or fear. That
too is cinema. But for me art is something that acts as a mirror and
that can help you grow and change, that creates a constant
pondering in your mind. It is that that makes you see yourself and
question things as they are. It is a question mark. A question is the
greatest of all things. Somewhere in the film there is this question:
“Can one really love two people?” The very question of what love is
and where it’s used and whether someone can really in his or her
mind nurture and nourish two different people? And whether he or
she should? All this leads to debate. Or where the woman
announces, “I’ve slept with a woman and it made me feel powerful.
After playing at surrender all these years and having you hold the
power in the game–I grew tired of that.” The whole film is about how
much of a game relationships are and how people, for their own sake,
for their own sense of security and their own satisfaction, are willing
to lie so much to themselves just to preserve something–something that
is really fear. My feeling is that today we need to delve a little deeper
within, to see a little where we are. Everything outside us is moving
by at high speed. Maybe soon, the easiest and most ordinary trip will
be a trip to the moon. Who knows? But “so what?” What about on
the inside? Where is this human with this mindset going inside?
What is he or she experiencing within while everything outside
changes? Inside, people are still the same old people, worn down,
old, and holding the same old beliefs and traditions. There is turmoil
in our relationships today.

Do you really believe that all relationships are games? Certainly in

the vignettes in your film it seems the relationships could fall into
your definition of games, but do you believe that a relationship can
be something more?

There is not just one remedy for every ailment. The doctor prescribes
different medicines for different ailments. There are many ailments
and many medicines. My prescription may only work for me and not
118 ACTION!

for others. But with regard to myself I think there exist two sorts of
people. Those who decide only to live with their strengths, who
discover their strengths and also know and embrace their
weaknesses. Then there are those who choose to live only with their
weaknesses. People today must become aware, and that awareness
consists of recognizing both one’s weaknesses and one’s strengths
and even questioning how strength is to be defined. This will allow
one to establish the greatest relationship with one’s surroundings.
Problems arise in relationships when people hide. People have so
many fears and they hide to protect themselves. I believe this
happens more with women than with men in relationships.

Everywhere?

I feel that it happens this way everywhere.

Can you tell me a little about yourself, where you were born, raised,
your childhood?

I was born in Tehran. My father is a physics professor, and my mother

is a chemistry professor. Two very specialized fields. Our bookshelves
at home were full of books about the structure of the atom, Einstein,
Marie Curie, chemistry, this or that molecule, x to the power of y and
so on and so forth. There was nothing but nothing about cinema.
There were perhaps some classics of Persian literature like Hafiz or
Rumi. But the life I began in from childhood was a highly science-
based, specialized home. The papers we received at home were
science journals. My father called me “Mania,” which he believed to
be Marie Curie’s nickname as a child. He hoped one day I would
become another Marie Curie–that is to say, that I would go into labs
and make a significant discovery of some sort.
The other thing I remember is that for our birthdays we always
received mini-labs, test tubes, strange creatures floating in alcohol.
We began writing compositions in school when I was 11 or 12.
I always received the highest grade for my essays. When I was 14,
I wrote a book that received a prize in the school and then in the
whole school district and in the province. My father and my family
were not very pleased. They said, “Yes, well, this is fine. But why are
you getting C’s and D’s in your science subjects?” As a well-known
physics teacher, my father was shocked and disappointed when his
 AKBARI 119

daughter received poor grades in physics. Anyway, parents really

always wish their children to be a repetition of themselves, to be
what they want, not what they are meant to be.
My choice of pursuing art was heavily challenged. It began with the
family and extended to society, to my husband…the whole of society.
At the time I began pursuing a career in art, Islamic law was so
strict–these were the days when the use of the color red was forbidden
in paintings in Iran. The use of black was banned. It was wartime. We
had to go to school wearing the maqna’eh, the veil that is closed
around the chin leaving only the circle of the face open. My
adolescent years, when I was 13 and 14, were extremely difficult
years. This was a period when a poetic sentence could be interpreted
as an expression of love and could have dire consequences. I was
expelled from school several times. I stood up against their rules,
against tradition, against customs. I found the school’s restrictions
unbearable.

Did you have any brothers or sisters?

Yes.

And were they like you?

No. They were quite happy to follow the family’s rules. Although my
youngest sister is now a photographer in Canada. She’s an artist.
I influenced her. Because the world of art is a world of healing and
a world of life. Once someone enters it, there is no going back. The
pleasure is so great, there is nothing else a person can prefer or
choose over it.
The period of my adolescence was the height of war [the Iran/Iraq
war, 1980–88], and when you turned on the TV there were war
scenes on every channel. The only images were of war, of bombings
and rockets. There was nothing called art. Art had been demolished.
Art was silent in Iran. Art was asleep. There were no exhibitions or
art galleries. There were no paintings, no movies. There were things
being written, but in hiding; inside homes many were following these
pursuits, including myself. That was when I began to paint–
I remember how hard that period was. At the time you first had to
go and find a woman–as a girl I could not train in a man’s
studio–you had to find a woman art professor. Then once you’d
120 ACTION!

learned the technique there was nowhere to show your work. Then
there were permits to be obtained, so many permits. It was so, so
complicated. After all these difficulties and the turbulence, things
settled down to some extent. What was interesting was that after
that silence we had a wave of art. There was a wave of younger
painters who entered the scene with some very strong work. There
was a whole slew of new literature, new films. There was an almost
20-year period of silence in Iran, though. It’s as if art that had been
disconnected was reconnecting.

It’s hard for me to imagine that environment.

I believe everything I am today is the product of the limitations and

restrictions and pressures of tradition and culture. I believe that
certain beliefs and traditions harm and hamper people more than
anything else, and the traditions that rule Iran are doing so in spite
of the fact that the world has evolved and grown and moved well
beyond them.

But do you also see these traditions as having a positive role of

any kind?

I believe today they must be renewed. They must evolve. Because

with the old traditions and beliefs, you cannot live in the new world
today. Everything outside has moved on at high speed, and on the
inside many people are clinging to the old beliefs and patterns. Today
we no longer live in homes with large yards and gardens; people live
in apartments. In the old days, people’s doors were open and people
went and visited one another just like that. Today, no one drops in
on someone without calling first. If you knocked unannounced at
someone’s door in Tehran today, I don’t think anyone would open
the door. These are little things that have changed. But there is a huge
collection of these little external changes. The change is immense. As
children we played games in the yard, on the streets. Today, my son
plays in front of the computer screen. I don’t know “the computer,”
I didn’t grow up with it. When I talk to my son of the games we used
to play, he laughs. He says, “I have no idea what these games are,
Mom.” So then I ask him what his favorite games are, and he tells
me the names of these games, and I don’t know them. On the outside
things have changed so much. How can the inside stay the same?
 AKBARI 121

I think nonetheless that your film has a distinct Iranian character in

part because you succeeded in at once referring to these things, like
childhood games, that were so fundamentally Iranian and a part of
our personal history, part of our childhood memories and our
personal cultural history. The reference contains both the past and
the present in the same filmic time. It encapsulates the way the film
is the product of the conflicts in Iranian society today between the
past and the present.

What I like about the film is the absence of slogans in the

relationship these people have to one other and in their discussions.
There is simply life. And to my way of thinking, life is much more
real than the talking. It’s true that the axis on which communication
occurs in this film is that of dialogue, but it is dialogue built upon
the experience of life. It isn’t “the law and its relationship to women
must be reformed, must be changed.” This message may be and is
given in many films, directly or indirectly. I believe what is much
more real is what takes place all around us: a man’s jealousy, a
woman’s jealousy, a man or woman’s sense of ownership toward a
partner. Or the feelings of a woman who does not want to experience
motherhood for a second or third time, because she knows she is not
equipped to handle it. This is a reality. When a woman becomes
pregnant, her stomach swells and grows. It is a physical reality that
her body is deformed by pregnancy. Yes, it’s beautiful to be pregnant,
it is attractive. It’s lovely that a child is growing inside you. All that
is wonderful. But it’s also true that a woman’s looks and beauty
matter to her. So when the child is born and the woman sees her
stomach covered in stretch marks, her skin no longer smooth, even
though she’s young, she feels she has lost the beauty of her stomach.
She can lose some of her self-confidence based on this alone. Starting
to exercise is a way of remedying this. Then the man comes along
and wants a second child after a year or two. But, you see, it’s the
woman that bears the difficulties of the pregnancy. It is true that we
must accept our physical transformation, our aging, our motherhood
and our womanhood. But I believe there has to be a place where you
have the right to say, “I am not ready for this.” Or even, “I don’t
want it.”
Caveh Zahedi and unidentified player in I Am a Sex Addict (2005).
Credit: IFC Films/Photofest

I Am a Sex Addict: Caveh Zahedi

by Peter Rinaldi
Fourteen years in the making and spanning 18 years, Caveh Zahedi’s
(born 1960) I Am a Sex Addict, despite a lukewarm reaction upon
its initial release, might be the most important film of the new
century and will eventually find its place as a major achievement in
world cinema.
Talking directly to the camera on his wedding day, Zahedi uses
reenactments, animation, home movies, photographs, and other visual
aids to tell the detailed story of his sexual addiction; focusing close
attention on the suffering he’s caused the women in his life. Not afraid
of the unflattering self-portrait that emerges, Zahedi plainly shows us
the considerable lengths to which he goes to feed his addiction and
painstakingly examines his inner struggle to face it. When it is over,
aside from being entertained, informed, and ultimately moved, we’re
124 ACTION!

left asking how much of it is true. The answer, according to the

filmmaker and subject, is all of it.
Ridiculous, embarrassing, and unquestionably courageous, I Am
a Sex Addict is what Caveh Zahedi rightly calls a public service
announcement. If only all PSAs were this entertaining.

Interview

There is so much to appreciate about this film, but mostly

I appreciate the truth that’s expressed. Yet the question begs to be
asked: If a part of your life unfolds in such a way that doesn’t
necessarily lend itself to drama, do you flirt with bending or even
completely breaking the truth to serve the film?

I don’t. What interests me more is the challenge of trying to find

a way to make it work on film.

When anyone releases a film, they are instantly made vulnerable.

Would you say with a film like this you’re made doubly vulnerable
because it’s so personal?

I would say a film like this is triply vulnerable. It’s not just
personal–it’s actually embarrassing.

But you’ve never really made a film that wasn’t personal and
potentially embarrassing. Isn’t that true?

That’s true. But this is by far the most embarrassing film I’ve made.
It’s hard because I teach and, the first day of class, someone is always
going to ask, “What was your last film about?” So with relationships
on the student-teacher level it’s especially awkward.

Can you explain the difference between the tuxedoed Caveh

who talks to the camera in the film and the Caveh I’m speaking
to now?

The one you’re talking to now is a better actor.

[Laughter]
 ZAHEDI 125

Well, whenever the camera is on, you really have to not only be
yourself, but be yourself in a very specific way that the viewer will
get exactly X from. Like when I talk to you, I’m not trying to control
the precise effect as much because it doesn’t matter. It can be read in
different ways by different people. But with a film you’re going for
a very specific effect, so you have to have a very specific delivery,
intonation and manner, which is very contrived. I do lots and lots of
takes, and it’s not the ones that seem the most natural to me that we
end up using. It’s a tricky balance of humor, information,
vulnerability, etc.

You break the “fourth wall” by talking to the audience directly.

Would you say you broke the “fifth wall” by stopping the narrative
to talk about and show the actual actresses and each of their real life
problems with the production?

Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.

It gets really interesting for me when you cut to a quick behind-the-

scenes shot of the actress Amanda Henderson, with a drink in her
hand. Your voiceover tells us that she–the actress–has a drinking
problem in real life. Then you cut right back to the story. I found it
hard to reenter the story and think about her character; I was still
thinking about the actress. Instead of being impatient with this,
I found it even more interesting, but I imagine you’ve had audiences
that found it frustrating.

They haven’t. I think people have become sophisticated enough that

they actually watch everything with a double perspective. And
I think cinema hasn’t caught up with the viewers in this case. I think
my film does. I think people really appreciate that moment because
they’re already doing that when they watch a movie. They’re already
seeing it both as the actor and the character simultaneously.

There’s a particularly shameful moment in the film that has the

potential to lose vast members of the audience instantly. It’s when
you admit that it was only when the prostitute says, “Rape me,” that
you were compelled to have sex with her. For me this is one of the
most important moments in the film, and I’m glad you were brave
enough to include it, but I’m sure it was a difficult decision, since
126 ACTION!

you profess a tremendous amount of respect for women in general.

You must have battled with the question, “Must I tell the total truth?
Won’t ALMOST the total truth be enough?”

Yes. I definitely have that struggle. That, for me, was a dividing-line
moment for the film. I think you’re right–half the audience we lose
there and half we don’t. And the whole film’s challenge was, can we
get away with that? Can we have that happen and still have the
audience stay with us? In Europe it’s very different, but in America,
when that scene comes on, a cold chill goes through the audience. And
I lose them.
The question was, “What am I trying to say?” That was an
important thing for me to say because it was part of the message of the
film. This stuff is not only shameful, but it also has all kinds of social
and political ramifications, which is why the story is important.
For me, the whole question of rape in our society and how that
affects our perception of our own sexual drives is really something
no one talks about, and is really an important part of the shame and
psychosexual dynamics of attraction. So that was a key thing. There
were certainly things I did not include that I thought were just too
much for the viewer. But it’s not that I’m ashamed of them. It’s just
that you kind of have to understand your audience and what their
cultural assumptions are, and how far you can push them. I pushed
them as far as I felt I could push them and still have a film that could
get out in the world.

Watching the behind-the-scenes features on the DVD, I saw an

expression on your face that I recognized. It was the particular pain
that comes with film production. Do you enjoy production at all?

I do enjoy production. I think it’s probably my favorite part of the

process. If I could have my way, I would be directing every day on sets,
all day. I don’t enjoy post-production nearly as much as production.

I’m shocked. I would have thought you enjoyed the puzzle that is
waiting for you in the editing room.

I hate that part. It’s so painful to see what you’ve got and to try to
make it work. And it’s so slow and it’s so lonely. I don’t like editing
very much. I like the idea phase, when you come up with the ideas.
 ZAHEDI 127

That’s probably the most fun. And I just love the on-set-trying-to-
get-it-right part. It’s definitely painful, but it’s also exhilarating.

People who are addicted to Internet pornography are also

considered sex addicts. Even though it’s a very different kind of
addiction, I imagine they also can relate to your story. Have you
gotten responses from people that have that specific addiction or
think they do?

Tons.

Wow. I really feel like this is a healing film.

It’s a public service announcement.

It really is. Which is why I don’t understand your reaction to its

initial release. I’ve read that you’re disappointed with how the film
has done. Surely, as a lover of film history, you must know that
everything that’s been new and important throughout film history
has initially been met with indifference or worse.

It’s completely a financial thing. I’m broke. I have to teach to pay my

rent. And I spend dozens of hours each week doing something that
I don’t want to be doing, when I could be making twice as many
films if I wasn’t doing it. So that’s all it is. You want to be able to do
what you love and do more of it, and if the film doesn’t do well,
I can’t. It’s just that simple.

But in other interviews you’ve also talked about becoming more

commercial with each film and wanting to keep that going in order
to reach a wider audience. That worries me.

It worries me too. But I think I did that with Sex Addict. I made
certain choices for commercial reasons that weren’t really my
preference or what I find most radical. To me this film feels much
more compromised than my other films. It’s also the film that the
greatest number of people seem to enjoy, and it’s made it possible for
me to maybe make another one.
You just have to pick your battles. I feel like I’ve made films that
are utterly uncompromising and as good as anything out there, but
128 ACTION!

that very few people have seen or have any interest in seeing. Maybe
they’ll become very important films one day, and that would be
great. But I just have to be able to keep making films. The real
question for me is, “How is it possible to continue?” I’m just trying
to find a way to do that. I don’t mind the compromises in the sense
that there is always a tension or a balance or a dialectic between who
you are and what the world is. What any artist does, is to find
a dialectical process or relationship with the world that works for
both the artist and the world. Every artist has done this. Mozart.
Beethoven. They tried to please their patrons and at the same time
express themselves. Great work can be done that way. I even think
you can argue that better work can be done if it’s not just you
speaking to yourself but you speaking to others in the world, with
their own views and limitations and differences from you.
I really think the transition from adolescence to maturity is
realizing that other people are different from you. They’re not just
going to come to you and say, “Oh, that’s so strange. I bet it’s
brilliant! Even though I don’t get it, it must just be me who doesn’t
get it.” I really think in early youth we’re very self-centered in our
relationships. As we get more mature emotionally, we really start to
see the other person, not just as a projection of us, but as someone
different from us that we can actually give to and grow toward. I feel
like that’s what I’m trying to do in my relationship to the world. I’m
trying to grow toward it, and possibly the future will be different
than the present, and it will require different kinds of compromises
or adjustments than the present does.

You’ve said that when you were young you wanted to be a

commercial filmmaker, but one day you had a particularly powerful
LSD trip that changed your perception of the kind of films you
wanted to make. From that point, you said, you wanted to make
personal films. Do you think maybe you need more LSD?

Well, you know, people change. Like right now I have a bunch of
different film projects. One is my favorite, and to me it’s the most
radical and the most exciting. But I can’t get any money for it, and
nobody would ever distribute it.

Can I ask what it is?

 ZAHEDI 129

It’s another autobiographical film. It’s very personal, but in a

completely different style from anything I’ve done before. To me it
would be the most important film that I could make in terms of the
history of cinema and the future of cinema. But how can I make it?
I don’t have the time or money to devote to it because all my energies
are going to surviving.

If you somehow got the money to make it, would you, without
hesitation, spend the time to make it? Or would you consider the
possibility of making other films that might better secure you a place
commercially?

I think the question for me isn’t so much about which film would be
most likely to secure me a place commercially, because clearly I’d
rather make a film I believe in than a film I don’t believe in. It’s more
about what would happen to the film after I made it because there
would be no means of distributing it. I could put it in a safety deposit
box and hope that posterity finds the key. But what I want is very
simple: It might be a delusion, but if I can make a few films that are
interesting to me and radical, but also commercially viable–which
Sex Addict was an attempt to do–then perhaps I’ll have enough
money and esteem to actually make the less commercial films. So it
seems like something I shouldn’t do just yet, and then hopefully live
long enough to do.

With the current reality craze in full stride, you’d think Sex Addict
would be a much more marketable film.

Yeah. I thought that, but I was amazed at how hard it was to get this
film into the world.

The ending is very powerful and moving. Was that your actual
wedding day?

Yes. I got there at like two in the afternoon to shoot all the wedding
addresses.

Wait–don’t tell me all the tuxedo stuff was shot on your actual
wedding day.
130 ACTION!

No. I tried to shoot it all that day. I started at like two and the
wedding was at six. So I talked for four hours to the camera. All of
the wedding guests were in the church waiting, and I knew I couldn’t
do the last shot twice. I did a lot of takes, but it didn’t feel right. And
then the church people were pounding on the door, saying we had to
begin. The guests had been waiting for like a half hour. I said,
“Okay. One last take. I promise.” And they said, “Okay. This is the
last one. We’re gonna start the organ music now.” And we said,
“Okay. Fine. Roll.” And it rolled, and I started tearing up. I knew
right away that this was good. Then we went in and I got married.

You’re the only guy who would choose to do such a stressful thing
on an already stress-filled day.

It was like the best day of my life. I got the ending of my film, and
I got married to the love of my life at the same moment. It was like
a simultaneous orgasm.
Michael Haneke (2004). Credit: Photofest

Caché (Hidden): Michael Haneke

by Karin Luisa Badt

“I wish you a disturbing evening!” This is how Michael Haneke

(born 1942), who won Best Director award at Cannes in 2005 for
Caché (Hidden), introduced his films one evening at a festival in
London. Audiences–and their complacency towards the political
conflicts “hidden” in the screen–are a prime target for this Austrian
intellectual. Caché is a case in point. The story of a TV producer
haunted by creepy cassettes, videos of his own house, sent him by an
angry Algerian from his past, it boldly addresses the issue of first-
world seclusion from the third-world–and the collaboration of the
media, and its audiences, to keep this issue hidden. As Haneke said
at our interview in Cannes: “Each of us pulls the blanket over our
heads and hopes that the nightmares won’t be too bad.” Notably, the
TV producer (played with tortured intensity by Daniel Auteuil)
watches his own nightmares as if with a wide-angle lens.
We, as spectators, are also kept out. We watch the film through
a distant camera, a reflection of our own alienated relation to the
world around us. The closing shot of Caché is that of two boys,
132 ACTION!

Algerian and French, conversing on the steps of a school, a mute

“dialogue” that we can only glimpse through a wide-angle shot of
a grate.
Similarly, Haneke’s best-known film, The Piano Teacher (2001),
begins (as it ends) with a closed door. Isabelle Huppert, playing
Erica, comes in, shuts it behind her, and says “Hello Mother.” The
setting–dark, grim Viennese hallway–prepares us for the distasteful
violence of the answer: “Why are you late?” Then the mother jumps
on the daughter, tears into her purse, extracts a new sexy dress and
rips it. Behind each closed door–behind each screen–lies the
perversity of violence.
The Piano Teacher brought Haneke his first award at Cannes: the
grand prize of 2001, It established the director’s well-known recipe:
in it, the sadistic relationship between mother and daughter is
a microcosm for bourgeois Austrian society. Erica, a piano teacher at
a conservatory, has no warmer relations with her colleagues and
students than she does with her mother. Piano playing is a cold,
heartless affair, a means for students to try to be upper class and for
teachers to enjoy their hierarchical power. Between the trapped
spaces of her home, where Erica perversely shares her mother’s bed,
and the beige corridors of the conservatory, the pianist finds no space
for expression, except when she detours into the sex shops to watch
live porn and sniff men’s used semen-redolent tissues. Or in the
privacy of the bathroom, where she slashes her genitals with a razor.
The film shows that in a stale, bourgeois, hierarchical, power-ridden
society, where all is “hidden,” the only way out is sadomasochism.
In Elfriede Jelinek’s novel on which the movie is based, the
emphasis was quite different: it was on the disinherited position of
women, and the hatred between the sexes that results. Jelinek draws
a depressed Erica, who is bitter as much because of her awful mother
as because of men who treat women as dispensable objects. Notably
the young seducing student is depicted, from the beginning, as
a despicable representative of malehood, whose sole motivation is to
conquer and destroy Erica. Haneke views the picture differently.
Alienation results more from evil bourgeois authority figures: the
mother and the teacher.
He adds another dimension as well, the theme dominant in all
seven of his films, from The Seventh Continent (1989) to Caché. He
parallels the abuse of parents to the imperialism of the media and its
depictions of war, slaughter and commerce. A television program
 HANEKE 133

plays while Erica hides from her mother in her room: a program on
how the mustang was the result of the Spanish colonization of the
Americas. While television also figures in Jelinek’s book, for her “it’s
the muffled thunder of the TV in which a male is threatening
a female.” For Jelinek, the root of evil is gender politics; for Haneke,
it’s the conspiracy between media, global violence and family. The
collusion is buried in our unconscious: in Caché, the Algerian
tragedy that forms the subtext results from a bad adoptive parent,
a family past linked to the TV producer’s present only through
dreams.
Haneke himself comes from television. He began his career
producing TV programs for German television and did so for l8
years, an experience that evidently marks his vision. His first feature
film, The Seventh Continent, was the true story of a family collective
suicide, where all the family members die slowly on a couch, zapping
between stations. It’s a typical family–husband, wife, daughter–who
live in a town that looks as ordinary as Haneke’s own Weiner
Neustadt, a flat, colorless suburb an hour from Vienna, whose main
attribute seems to be, from my visit there, an icy silence. The film
was the first of a trilogy dedicated to show “emotional glaciation.”
And emotionally cold it is: the first ten minutes show this family as
a compilation of body parts: hands preparing breakfast, carrying
briefcases, feeding the goldfish, raising the garage door. It is a full ten
minutes before we see a face. And as in The Piano Teacher or Caché,
no one in this Austrian society is sensitive to the invisible inner pains
of its suffering outcasts. The little girl complains of strange
psychosomatic symptoms to her teacher–imagined blindness and
scratching–and is slapped. The only emotional outlet comes at the end
of the film, when after the father and mother have chopped apart every
piece of their furniture, flushed their money down the toilet in
a memorable series of 15 shots, the aquarium bursts, and the little girl
sobs watching her goldfish flop to their deaths. Later, the family
members settle down to poison and television, and slowly each dies to
the tune of “The Power of Love,” chanted by a TV singer.
Haneke’s second film, Benny’s Video (1992), also draws a strong
connection between media and family alienation. A boy kills a girl
“just to see how it is.” He videotapes the murder and rewinds it
continuously. The parents who discover the murder want to cover
the crime in case they get accused of “negligence.” So the father
volunteers to cut the corpse in pieces, while the mother and the boy
134 ACTION!

take a deserved holiday to an Egyptian beach hotel, where, of course,

they spend the week in bed zapping between Egyptian TV stations.
Haneke’s most experimental film, 71 Fragments of a Chronicle of
Chance (1994), went so far as to zap between images of alienated
family members: from scenes of one man slapping his wife over
a plate of peas, to shots of television programs on Kosovo. At the
end of this movie of fragments, an Austrian university student
refused change to pay for his gas at a gas station, is sick of the cold
universe he lives in and shoots everyone he sees, who happen to be
all the characters we have met sporadically in the film. Here a direct
link is made between how people do not communicate at home
(especially because they watch a lot of television) to the way those in
media destroy the world at large. The last shot of 71 Fragments is
a TV clip of Michael Jackson in his Neverland Ranch, defending his
abuse of a minor. The last words: “for his career.”
Haneke’s vision is alienation at its irremediable height. His icy
approach–and his own upright posture, aloof on a chair, dressed
in immaculate black–seems aimed to shock the audience that
has so complacently absorbed media news for the last half-century.
To disturb, he suggests, is all we have left.

Interview

This film like your others examines the relationship between “the
hidden” in the family and “the hidden” in politics. Could you
comment more specifically on how the secret problems of a family
connect to the problems between the first world and the third world?

Michael Haneke: You can see the film like a Russian doll with dolls
inside dolls inside dolls. The same story can be seen on different
levels, can represent different levels: the personal level, the family
level, the social level, the political level. The moral question the film
raises is how to deal with this question of guilt. All of us have
moments of selfishness, moments that we prefer to hide. The Daniel
Auteuil character has this choice. The act that he carried out may not
be likeable, may be reprehensible, but it is realistic, all of us have
these hidden moments in our lives. All of us have such hidden
corners in our lives, we all feel guilty, about the relationships
between the industrialized world and the third world, or how we
 HANEKE 135

deal with the elderly, for example. We all take sleeping pills as does
Daniel Auteuil, although it may take many different forms: it may be
alcohol, a drink before we go to bed, it may be sleeping pills, or we
may donate money to children in the third world. But each of us
pulls the blanket over our heads and hopes that the nightmares won’t
be too bad. For example, I am sure you oppose strict immigration
laws that have been introduced in almost every European country.
And yet what would you say if I were to suggest that you take into
your home an African family? I think this is the case with all of us.
All of us have knowledge that tends to lead to tolerance; at the same
time we have selfish interests that are contradictory to this tolerant
ideal.

You worked for 20 years in television. In Hidden, you have a TV

producer punished by a video–a rather telling irony. From your
insider experience, can you tell us what makes TV so evil?

There is a short scene in my film in which the literary debate is

edited, where we see that reality is manipulated by TV to be more
attractive to viewers; TV reproduces and transmits a vision of reality
that is supposed to be more interesting to viewers, and I am glad
I was able to point that out in the film… Yes, absolutely, there is the
problem of the terrorism of the mass media today. There is the
dictatorship of the dumbing down of our societies.

Your films often depict disturbing psychological situations, with an

undercurrent of violence. Do you purposefully make the spectator
uncomfortable?

The society we live in is drenched in violence. I represent it on the screen

because I am afraid of it, and I think it is important that we should
reflect on it. All my films deal with issues that I find socially relevant,
and all my films deal with my own fears. I am dealing with questions
that I find oppressive or important, that interest me dramatically.
I think that the things that are going well in society are difficult to
present dramatically. In my 20 years of working in the theater, I only
staged one comedy, and that was my single failure. My films are also
a protest against the mainstream cinema, a response to the films
screened in theaters today. If mainstream films were different, my films
would be different as well.
136 ACTION!

What inspired this script?

Daniel Auteuil was the reason I wrote this script. I wrote the entire
script for him. I wrote the script with almost all the actors in mind,
including Juliette Binoche.

Why a co-production?

I think that the co-production represents the only chance that

Europe has in film. Beyond the diversity and specificity of each
country and film production, it offers the possibility of working
together to create films and to oppose the American cultural
imperialism. My film has four co-producers. My film should have
been finished last year. We originally planned it as a solely French
production, but it wasn’t possible, we couldn’t raise enough funds,
and it was only because we were able to structure the film as an
international co-production that it is here today. I am very happy
that this possibility exists. It is fortunate for me that I have two legs
that I can stand on: I can work in French and in German. This means
I can work with much more regularity than my colleagues, many of
whom have to wait five to six years between projects.

How do you feel about the fact that engaged filmmaking is so rare
today?

Commitment is not a service, it is not something one can choose to

have. One either is engaged or is not. And if filmmakers are not
committed, I don’t think they should be reproached. It’s simply
a different way of dealing with the world, to approach their art.
I think what is essential to film so that it is taken seriously is that it
represent not only social concerns, but also debate its very existence:
the medium itself, just as is the case with literature and every other
serious art form. The question is, is film merely entertainment, or is
it more? If it is art, it has to be more. Art can be entertaining. The
Passion of St. Matthew [Pasolini, 1964] is entertaining, it is more
than diversion, it is concentration, focuses your thoughts.

The last shot of this film resonates with the last shot of The Pianist:
in both, we have a static wide-angle shot of a closed door, where the
 HANEKE 137

viewer remains outside. How can we spectators break beyond this

alienating distance?

That’s the 64,000 dollar question.

Do you think cinema can change the world?

No, but it can make it a less sad place than it already is.
III. Blows Against the
Empire: Indie Godfathers

“I wanted a movie where the disenfranchised could come out of the

cinema looking each other in the eye and not having to duck their
head.” –Melvin Van Peebles

10. Melvin and Mario Van Peebles

11. Roger Corman, Bruce Dern and David Carradine
Melvin Van Peebles on the set of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).
Credit: New World Pictures/Photofest

Sweet Soul Music: Melvin and

Mario Van Peebles
by Damon Smith

Melvin Van Peebles (born 1932), the godfather of ghetto-punk

cinema, has assumed many personas in his decades-long career
as an artist and self-reinventing iconoclast. But he long ago earned
cine-immortality as the writer-director and revolutionary spirit
behind Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the independently
financed, anti-establishment 1971 film that broke box office records
and established, for better and worse, the lucrative template for
blaxploitation film. Made for $500,000 (including a $50,000
contribution from Bill Cosby), the film depicted a mustachioed
sex-show hustler who goes on the run–and keeps running–after
assaulting a pair of racist cops. Even with its fragmented, Nouvelle
Vague-style aesthetics and a daunting MPAA rating (“Rated X by an
All-Whyte Jury” was the movie’s tagline), Sweetback’s made more
142 ACTION!

than $10 million upon its release, mostly from African-American

audiences who had never before seen such a vivid, angry expression
of black-rebel consciousness on the big screen.
In May 2004, I sat down to chat with Van Peebles and his actor-
director son, Mario (born 1957), whose own projects (New Jack
City [1991], Posse [1993], Panther [1995]) reflect a conscientious
attention to racial disparity, civil rights history and the persistence of
hoary old African-American stereotypes in mainstream Hollywood
film. The pair were in New York promoting Baadasssss! (aka How
to Get the Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass!) (2003), Mario’s Oedipal
docu-fiction homage to his father’s personal struggles in making
Sweetback’s, in which he cast himself as Melvin and his own son as
a 13-year-old version of himself. At the time of the interview, Da
Capo Press had just published a new edition of Melvin’s 1971
production diary, which contained Huey P. Newton’s appreciative
essay on the film, “A Revolutionary Analysis.” British filmmaker
Isaac Julien, who revisited the legacy of blaxploitation himself in his
rollicking 2003 documentary, Baadasssss Cinema!, had also recently
cast Melvin in a three-screen installation project entitled Baltimore,
a dreamy allegorical twist on the genre’s conventions.

Interview

You spent a lot of time in France before you made Sweet Sweetback’s
Baadasssss Song in 1971. And you made a lot of shorts. Once you got
to the point of deciding to self-finance Sweetback’s, and you got the
crew together, and you started making the film, I wonder–it’s a hard
film to categorize. You probably wanted a mainstream audience, and
yet it has so many techniques I associate with avant-garde films and
the French New Wave. Was any of that an influence on you?

Melvin Van Peebles: Not at all. It had nothing to do with art films.
The only thing that interested me was the story, the story, the story.
And how to tell that story. I made the film that way. If nobody liked
it, I was gonna have to eat it for the rest of the week! [Laughs] So
I better be sure I liked it. And I had all of these technical possibilities
at hand, and people never used them except when they were saying,
“Golly, I’m being arty.” For some reason, people don’t give the old
lumpenproletariat credit for any fuckin’ sense. Never have. I had
 THE VAN PEEBLES 143

somebody come and say, “Hey, brother, I didn’t understaaaand.”

Everybody understood. It’s only when we anoint surrealism or some
other “ism” that we look at it and say, “Well, how can the great
unwashed understand?” Everybody understood. Everybody. It’s like,
if Aretha Franklin hits an operatic note or does an arpeggio, nobody
thinks, Ah, folks won’t understand, ’cause it’s an arpeggio. People
often go to the definition of the thing, and the definition is only a
rule-of-thumb label, a generalization.

It’s a miracle that you made this film considering everything you
went through.

Not really.

It seems like you had a lot of hardships.

Not really. Someone once said [gravely], “You could have lost all
your money.” I didn’t know I even had money to lose. Hello?
I started in Paris, France–begging. I mean literally. Stop strangers
about 5 o’clock in the morning, right before the garbage trucks
would come, and you’d find all kinds of stuff. Get yourself a meal.
So. A very true story: Any time I shave, I smile. It’s a wonderful
experience, ’cause I remember when all I had was a razor blade.
A razor blade. Then I got a handle. Then I worked up to warm
water. So it’s all relative. What was viewed [by critics] as these
terrible [obstacles]–all right, well, I was already ahead of the game.
We were already operating on my turf. Before, I wasn’t even on my
turf. That was more difficult.

Where do you think the self-confidence came from? Didn’t you give
up a three-picture deal offered by Columbia?

The contract people made all the money. [Laughs]

Did you feel at any point you weren’t going to be able to make this
picture?

Never. I thought I was gonna make this movie ten years before.
I failed, and I tried again and failed. Hey hey hey–the trick in the
game is not how many times you get knocked down, but how many
144 ACTION!

times you get up! My first feature film, of Academy Award quality,
was 11 minutes long. I didn’t know anything about cinema, but
I imagined it was going to be all these other things. So this had me
back to the drawing board.

So when you started writing, because you were a writer–you are a

writer…

I was a painter first. I had a scholarship for painting and sculpture.

And probably the juxtaposition of the use of color and art and all
that, all mixed up together long before I knew Cubism or Nouvelle
Vague, et cetera. I was just doing what I was doing. As I saw it.

Why did you decide to make films in addition to writing novels?

Because I’m a missionary manqué. That is, a defrocked missionary.

I think that’s probably my real cause. But then, I didn’t have
any congregation. [For] the congregation I wanted to talk to, there
really wasn’t any expressed interest in Pissarro or Delacroix. And
they weren’t that interested in straight books, per se, the people
I wanted to convert. It took me a while to get to the people I wanted
to talk to. They were listening to music, or going to movies.

Yeah, I see. So you thought you could reach more people with a film.

I went to my congregation.

Did you have any idea the kind of impact Sweetback’s would have?

Yes. The whole thing I had figured out from one end to the other.
I actually did. Have you ever read the book?

No, I haven’t.

Oh, you gotta read it. I said, “Nobody’s going to believe this
bullshit.” I wrote it all down in the manifesto: This is how I want to
do the movie crew, with 50 per cent Third World people. I wanted a
movie where the disenfranchised could come out of the cinema
looking each other in the eye and not having to duck their head.
That was my reason for making this movie. And my thoughts were
 THE VAN PEEBLES 145

that Hollywood had an Achilles pocketbook. If I could hit them in

their pocket, it would change [everything]. You know, before [my
film], Shaft was a white detective. Once Sweetback’s made all the
money, they stopped pre-production to change him into a black
detective.

I didn’t know that.

Yeah. Also, it served a double purpose, my steeping the ethos of the

film in the [manifesto] so deeply. Because you couldn’t fake it
anymore–you had to be there to know that, you understand?
Marshall McLuhan says, “the medium is the message.” I could have
called it The Ballad of the Indomitable Sweetback. All right. That’s
nice. But this was before [the term] “ebonics” was invented. So [it
became] Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Hmm? That said
everything that needed to be said. And I felt that if it were a hit, that
would change everything in Hollywood. It would be a tough act to
follow. And only two theaters in the United States showed the
movie–two theaters. One of the second places to show it was in
Boston, Ben Sachs. And he cut six minutes out of the film. Somebody
called me and said, “Well, we saw somebody cutting…” And I got
on a plane–they didn’t have those, what do you call them, goddamn
metal detectors. So I went to Boston [With a gun, presumably–Ed.]
and had a very one-on-one discussion with Sachs.

I bet that worked.

It did. [Smiles]

What did you make of everything that came in the wake of Sweet
Sweetback’s?

Well, it was two things. The political content of the movies for
Hollywood was unacceptable, but they [had] what I think was a
brilliant solution: They sublimated the political aspect, and they
pushed up the sort of comic-strip things–and “blaxploitation”
forms. Now, the film itself was so steeped in the grittiness of the
’hood that they suddenly had to start hiring people who had not
been in the union before. You couldn’t fake the dialogue. It wasn’t
Hallelujah! [1929] King Vidor stuff. They had to hire black writers
146 ACTION!

and dialogue coaches. You couldn’t fake the clothing, the whole
attitude and so forth. So many people got a chance to learn their
skills and join the union. That was the excellent part. It enlarged the
infrastructure and changed overnight the exclusivity of the unions.
That was great. There’s no reason someone of Mario’s stature should
not be able to get funding. However, you have to realize that no one
who is not a white male can green-light a film in Hollywood. And he
found himself in the same position as I had been in.

With the script for Baadasssss!, you mean?

Yeah. With this film. He had to change it, or make it independent,

so he made it as an independent film. And it’s 30 years later. So,
there’s been changes and not changes.

[Mario walks in]

Mario Van Peebles: Is he telling you lies?

[Laughter]

So I got to pepper your dad with questions. Now it’s your turn.

Mario: Hit me, baby.

You and your dad have collaborated on a lot of stuff together over the
years. But this film, Baadasssss!, is really personal. Why make it now?

Therapy you could eat popcorn to. [Smiles] A couple of things.

I was on the set of Ali [2001]. Ali kept coming up, asking questions
about my dad. [Imitating Ali] “Hey boy, your dad still getting
some?” He had come to the premiere of New Jack City, when I did
that in 1990, and we started to talk on the set about, well, we could
get a film made now about a guy who didn’t just use the ring to box,
but to stand for something. What about a movie about a guy who
used the silver screen not just to entertain, but to stand for
something?

In the same era.

 THE VAN PEEBLES 147

Yeah. The civil rights movement was making modest gains, with
Dr. King saying we should seek change by peaceful means, and
Malcolm saying by any means. And they killed them both. And JFK,
RFK–anyone who’s standing up for civil rights or was against the war
was in jeopardy. At the time, Hollywood was still showing black folks
trying to get a slice of the American pie, trying to save their dollars.
The subtext was “colored.” Like the wall right there [pointing] is
colored. It’s not that different from white, it’s just a little colored. “Let
us in. Recognize our humanity.” Once they killed those leaders, and
[black people] hear about “Power concedes nothing without
demand,” they said, “Fuck it. It didn’t work. We’re not gonna sing ‘We
Shall Overcome,’ we’re gonna sing ‘Say it loud/I’m black
and I’m proud!’ ” So then you get the black power movement. And
suddenly we’re no longer straightening our hair; we got the afro
growing, we have the Black Panthers. We understand we’re gonna get
shot, but we’re going into it knowing we’re gonna get shot. The hippie
kids know it, the peace and freedom movement knows it, Mark Rudd
[of The Weather Underground] knows it, and they’re all linking up.
Now with that, the sort of blossoming peace and freedom movement
has itself reflected in the flick Easy Rider [1969]. But black power does
not have itself reflected. There’s no doubt there are movies showing us
going, “Biscuits? Kids, you want some biscuits? You want some tea?”
And the Hollywood studios are asking Melvin Van Peebles to make
another comedy. As I said in the opening [of Baadasssss!], “America
was not in a laughing mood, especially black people.” And so he
makes his black power film, and it changes the game for everybody.
And what Ali did was become that first politically outspoken
athlete–and Melvin made the first politically outspoken movie of that
new movement. And that, in essence, starts what would later become
the hip-hop movement. By any means necessary, I’m gonna do my own
thing, I’m gonna mix my own record.

How did the idea come to you then?

So I’m on the set, and all these Celestine Prophecy, silly messages are
coming at me. The first movie Michael Mann [who produced Ali]
saw with his wife on their first date was Sweet Sweetback’s. I go
to research Malcolm, I spend time with his daughters, I go talk to
my dad, my dad had interviewed Malcolm when my dad was
148 ACTION!

a journalist in France. Malcolm had said, “If they don’t want you in
the restaurant, go to this other one.” My dad had said, “If they don’t
want you in their movie, go make your own movie.” But he went
even further than that, saying, “I want the crew to look like America.
Not just black America, but all of America. I want to have some
hippies in there, some women, Hispanics, Asians, José Garcia.” All
those folks were like, wow, so now not only do you change what the
movie’s going to look like, but who would make those movies. And
even further than that, an independent film. Because in order to get a
film like that made, you had to do it outside the studios. And the
more I thought about it, the more I thought, What an interesting time
to make a movie showing how it was done. And anyone who’s ever
had a complex, layered relationship with their family, their parents,
would get it too. At the center is a guy who had to give up damn near
everything to get where he wants to go with this film. And he’s still
willing to stand for things and has a very complex relationship with
his kids–and around that is the historical fact that it’s real. So there
was a lot to get your head around. I just kept going in circles. Said
well, hell. So I went to see the old man and I thought, you know, Well,
he loves me and he’s going to give me the book. So of course, he said,
“Yeah, I love you…You got to option the book. Pay for it!”

So the script came from that?

I wrote a script with my writing buddy and sent it out to the studios
and promptly got all those wonderful studio notes that would
absolutely homogenize it, pasteurize it, or make it cinematic
Wonderbread. The notes would make it more specifically for a white
festival audience, the intelligentsia–because Melvin changed the
game for independent film–or would make it specifically for a black,
hip-hop-comedy Barbershop audience.

It must have gotten weird for you, with all of those resonances
happening while you’re trying to make this film. Plus, you’re
directing yourself playing your dad, you’re directing a young actor
playing you, and evoking a time in your life that obviously was very
troubling for you. Did it ever get strange or awkward?

Yeah, there were times when I would yell, “Cut!” and my crew
would cut, but I was yelling cut as “Melvin,” not as Mario. There
 THE VAN PEEBLES 149

were times when I was replaying scenes that I had played earlier in
my life, as myself, and now playing it as my father’s position on the
chessboard. It got weird when my son was in the opening sequence,
in black and white, when Melvin decides that he wants to make a
film that empowers the people. He decides, “I want to make a film
that stars the community, stars the people, all the folks, including the
folks that Norman Rockwell forgot.” And that block we shot on was
the actual block that my dad [used]. When I shot that sequence, my
son wanted to be the angel, the inspiring muse, right? I had gotten a
film camera that day for free. My DP had a hookup, which you gotta
have. We’re shooting on someone’s lawn and the lady’s getting
pissed, she’s gonna kick us out, and we haven’t broken for lunch yet.
The camera broke down, we’re running behind, we’re losing light.
And suddenly the camera’s working again, but I look up the street
and see all the kids leaving and my son is going off to have lunch and
he’s taking off his angel wings, and I heard a voice yell out, “Get
your ass back here! [Laughs] We gotta shoot! You wanna be in this
damn movie? Get on that bed, put on the wings, and start jumping.”
It was my dad’s voice. It was coming out of my face. [Chuckles]
You know, 30 years later you’re saying, “Oh shit, I never
thought”–you know, the genetic boomerang has come: shh-POW!
I didn’t have anyone shooting at me, I didn’t have death threats,
I wasn’t losing sight in my eye–but suddenly, I found that walking in
his shoes for that bit of time showed me a lot. ’Cause my grievance
[as a child] was not just being in the scene, or having to get my afro
cut, or having to give back that bike with the banana seat, but that
I was involved in the battle [to make the film]. As I looked at it, how
much can a 13-year-old really understand? Cleo’s a smart kid, but
when I tried to explain it to him–when Melvin says, “Don’t let
people use you to get to me”–well, what people?

Maybe you didn’t understand everything–or maybe you understood a

lot. Did you realize the import of what your dad was trying to achieve?

Well, one thing that did occur to me was like…you and I have our
differences, but if an earthquake comes, and this building starts to
rock, our differences are eclipsed. We got to get the fuck out of this
building. If we run out and we realize there are other people stuck in
the building, and we make the decision at that juncture to put our
lives on the line and go back and try to help people out, you’ll know
150 ACTION!

more about my character in that five or ten minutes than you would
have known in a lifetime. So I had my differences with my dad. But
as I went on, I realized, this guy could be making a comedy. He could
make Fried Chicken Man with the studio, and the studio’s money,
and a nice, white crew that knew what they were doing. There would
be no women on the set, there would be no minorities on the set,
there’d be no hippie folks on the set. It’d be an old boy network. He
could do that and make the money and be a nice credit to his race
and have his picture in some nice colored magazine. And live in the
suburbs. And yet here’s a guy who saying, “No, I’m gonna put shit
on the line. I’m gonna change the game.”

But are you really thinking that when you’re 13 years old?

Yeah, at a certain point you are. ’Cause you see the offers coming,
the agents whispering in your ear, “Your dad’s losing it, you better
talk to him. He’s gonna be a laughingstock.” And the crew guys are
going, “He’s losing weight, he’s gonna die, someone’s gotta do
something.” And the people are saying, “Did you see those people
running out of the audience? Did you see the producers, and the
people splitting?” So when I said [to myself], How I do get this
across?–because it wasn’t just transposing my dad’s book, because
that wasn’t in my dad’s book–the angel muse came to me at 5 in the
morning, and I wrote it down. I wrote down “Testimonials, without
hindsight.” So the characters [in the film] were saying all this stuff
that I heard them saying back in the day. ’Cause if you talk to them
now, it’s like, “I tell you what happened–Melvin forgot to put the
payroll in!” Everyone will have their truth. And I thought, Wouldn’t
this [staged testimonial] be more interesting? And then at the end, let
them become the real people? You know what I mean?

Yeah. That was a nice touch.

I wanted the film to capture a little of the difficult and sometimes

uncomfortable moments between my father and I as we grew–and as
I started to acknowledge him that summer, and then recognize him
as a father.

Were there good stories from the set that didn’t make it into the
screenplay?
 THE VAN PEEBLES 151

Oh, there always are. I mean, scams he had to pull, things that went
wrong. You know, what’s cool is the audience–cause the audience is
like that crew. Back in the day, you could go to the park, the Fillmore
West, and you could see Hendrix, and Santana, and Country Joe and
the Fish, all in the same set. Today, it would be fragmented. That’s
Latino radio, this is soul, this is all rock. But it’s about something
that changed America. So it’s an interesting phenomenon. But yeah,
there were other things that didn’t get anywhere. I said the other day,
we’re on the ship, on this Floating Festival–and it’s basically a cruise
ship. And I’m in bed. We’re sharing. I’ve got a bunk, he’s got a bunk.
He comes in every night at two in the morning with a cigar. I’m in
bed, like, “Where the fuck you go on a cruise ship until two in the
morning?” And I start laughing. And it’s like, Man, thanks for living
a life that’s so crazy, so colorful. I could make three or four movies
out of this and not get bored. It’s like the Big Fish. Did you see the
movie Big Fish [2003]?

Yeah.

It’s kind of like growing up with the Big Fish–or the Big Black
Fish–in that I never really knew which stories were real and which
were Memorex. And that was the fun part about it. The more
I unraveled, the more I was like, “Wow, you know, like you called
up Cosby?!” And he goes, “Yeah, and not only did your dad do that,
he did this this this and this.” Wow. Then on my first movie, New
Jack City, my line producer–a black guy named Preston
Holmes–comes over and he said to me, “You know how I got my
job? Your dad. He stood up for us. And we all stayed in.”

Before you began making movies, you went to school for economics.

My dad kept saying, “Show business is a business.”

So you knew you would eventually go into film?

Absolutely, yes, absolutely. I also thought, I need help. And that’s

cool, because after a while you realize that it’s very important . When
I adapted Sweet Sweetback’s into a movie, my dad charged me
$2,500. [Laughs] And then he took me and my kids on a vacation
for $5,000, so we have that kind of dynamic.
Roger Corman and Bruce Dern on the set of The Wild Angels (1970).
Credit: American International Pictures/Photofest

Nearer My Corman to Thee:

Roger Corman, Bruce Dern
and David Carradine
by Damien Love

Roger Corman (born 1926), who turned 81 in April 2007, has

assured his place in the history books several times over. A fast and
furious director, he established the new land-speed record for
no-budget feature filmmaking across the 1950s, outdoing even
himself with 1960’s Little Shop of Horrors (shooting schedule: two
days). Meanwhile, as producer of almost 400 exploitation movies
since 1955, he remains the most successful independent filmmaker
Hollywood has ever known.
If he’d done nothing but direct the startling X: The Man with
the X-Ray Eyes (1963) or his 1960s cycle of Edgar Allan Poe
154 ACTION!

adaptations, films that found the perfect balance between doomy,

haunted elegance and bright, trippy Pop hallucination, he would be
remembered. But as that turbulent decade wore on, Corman
uniquely divined and responded to currents in the air–and to the
money burning holes in the pockets of a restless new youth
audience–and started making films that reflected the times in ways
major studios couldn’t comprehend. Nihilistic biker flicks such as
The Wild Angels (1966) and head movies like The Trip (1967) led
directly to Easy Rider (1969) (which, of course, he was instrumental
in getting made) and the subsequent revolution in ’70s Hollywood.
His greatest legacy, however, might just be the incredible roster of
directing and acting talent he has nurtured. From Jack Nicholson to
Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper to Martin Scorsese, almost all of the
“Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” generation started out working for him
in the 1960s. After they had graduated Corman University and
moved on to their own careers, he was instrumental in kick-starting
another entire generation again in the 1970s: names such as
Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, Joe Dante, Ron Howard and James
Cameron.
Save for his one-off return with Frankenstein Unbound in 1990,
Corman retired from directing in 1971. But he remains tirelessly
active. In the past six years alone his company Concorde-New
Horizons has produced over 25 movies for the straight-to-video
market–the modern equivalent of the drive-ins he used to feed during
the 1950s and ’60s–and he continues to be called upon by former
employees and fans to play cameos in their movies. Most recently, he
was in Dante’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) and Demme’s
Manchurian Candidate (2004) remake. He was seen also as a
totemic presence in Searchers 2.0 (2007), the first result of Alex
Cox’s new experiment in ultra low-budget “micro-features.”
Here, though, Corman takes time out from his busy schedule to
discuss some of his most illustrious alumni; and, following the
interview with the man himself, two of his more notable alumni
offer their memories of working for him: Bruce Dern and David
Carradine.
As we sit down,1 the King of American Independent Cinema is
suffering from a bad cold, and his office diary is filled with
appointments stacked up and waiting to land. Time is tight,
resources momentarily depleted: the perfect set-up for a Roger
Corman shoot, really.
 CORMAN, DERN AND CARRADINE 155

Interview

The idea here is to go through some of the most famous “Corman

alumni” and find out who they were back then. I thought we could
start off with Jack Nicholson. I think I’m right in saying you first
encountered him through the acting classes Jeff Corey2 was running?

That’s right. As a director, I had no experience or training, I had a

degree in engineering. And with the engineering degree, I was able to
learn about the use of the camera and editing, all the technical
aspects of filmmaking, but I didn’t know enough about acting, so
I joined Jeff’s acting class to learn.

Were you also on the lookout for young, unsigned acting talent you
could maybe pick up cheap?

Yes, that’s right. My main purpose was to learn about acting–but of

course I was always looking for good young actors.

How did Nicholson strike you? Did he stand out then?

Jeff was teaching The Method, which is based to a large extent on

improvisation, and Jack was exceptionally good, really the best in the
class with improvisation–with written work as well–but in
improvisations he had a unique ability to play a dramatic scene with
great intensity and at the same time bring humour to it, without
undercutting the drama. That’s very difficult, and very unusual, to be
able to do that well, and particularly when you consider that Jack was
only about 19 or 20 at the time. And I think it’s one of the things that
have served him well throughout his entire career. The things I saw
then are still there. That inherent ability he had, combined with the
training he got in acting school, now combined with many years of
work and experience, he’s just grown and developed all the time. He’s
always been a fine actor, and is simply getting better as he goes along.

You produced his first starring film, Cry Baby Killer [1958], but it
was a while before you directed him yourself. He always did other
jobs for you behind the camera, though, didn’t he?

That’s right. I did a picture called The Terror [1963], with Boris Karloff
and Jack, which I shot two days of on some standing sets from
156 ACTION!

The Raven [1963], with only part of the script written. Boris worked
those two days, and Jack knew that he was going to be the lead in the
rest of the picture, when the rest of the script was written. And I had
various people directing. Francis Coppola directed part of it, Monte
Hellman directed part of it, Jack Hill did part of it. And the last day of
shooting, there was nobody available, and so Jack said, “Roger, every
idiot in town has directed part of this film; lemme direct the last day.”
So I said, “Fine, Jack, go ahead.” And the work he did was good.3

His depraved performance in Little Shop of Horrors has become

legendary.

That was a pure comedy role. It was a comedy horror film with the
emphasis more on the comedy than the horror, and Jack played a
masochist in a dentist’s office who wanted to have his teeth drilled.
And he was very, very funny; the only problem with the scene was,
it was supposed to end up as a duel between Jack and the dentist,
using a scalpel and a dentist’s drill and–I shot this picture in two
days–and on the first take, at the start of the duel, they knocked over
the dentist’s chair, and so I said, “Alright, this scene ends right here.”
Because we had no time to repair the dentist’s chair, which was
broken apart.

I heard somewhere that he improvised on that film, which struck me

as odd on a film with such a notoriously tight schedule.

Well, the script was followed 90 per cent, but there was a little
improvisation in and around the dialogue, particularly with the
movement, the attitude and so forth. But although I only shot for
two days, all the actors were actually signed for five, and I rehearsed
them for three days, and during rehearsals we did a certain amount
of improvisation which was incorporated into the shooting, so it was
more during the rehearsal.

On The Raven, you had Nicholson working alongside Boris Karloff,

Peter Lorre and Vincent Price. He was always a film fan; did he
relish the opportunity to pick their brains?

Yes, Jack got along well with Vincent, Boris and Peter, and it was
particularly good, because he recognized and was rather deferential
 CORMAN, DERN AND CARRADINE 157

to them because of their great careers and talent and experience. And
they could see very quickly that he was a talented young actor, so
they helped him as much as they could. The relationship was very
good. But Jack has always gotten along very well with his fellow
actors.

Do you stay in touch with people like Nicholson?

I stay vaguely in contact with them, I see them at parties and so

forth. Jack, when he directed the sequel to Chinatown [1974], The
Two Jakes [1990], he offered me a role in it, but I had to be in
Europe at that time, and so I was unable to play it, unfortunately.

Francis Ford Coppola was the first of your “graduates” to direct you
in a movie, in Godfather Part II [1974]. How was he to be directed by?

It was fine. For the members of the Senate crime investigating

committee, of which I was one, he had cast writers, directors and
producers as the various senators, which was an interesting choice.
He talked to all of us, explained the scene as to what we were doing,
ran through the rehearsals, and then left us totally to our own
devices during the takes, which I think is a very nice thing for a
director to do, to work out the motivations and everything during
the rehearsal period, and then really say nothing during the takes,
unless there’s something specific he wants changed.

When you have a young director working for you, are you happy to
stand back and let them develop their own style, or do you prefer to
mold how they go about shooting–or is it case by case?

It changes from director to director, but in general, I have seen

something of his or her work, a student film, or he has directed
second unit for me, or shot a little feature or done commercials or
something like that, so I know something of their style. I talk mostly
about the technical aspects of directing. If I’m producing, I will talk
about the style of the film, the meaning of the film and so forth, but
the actual directorial style, I leave to the director. I feel I’ve made the
choice of director, I have faith in that choice, so I must leave him free
to develop his own style and do the film in the way he sees it,
providing he stays true to the thoughts he and I have discussed.
158 ACTION!

How did Coppola come to your attention?

He came straight out of UCLA film school. This was in the 1960s,
and I had bought the American rights to some Russian science fiction
films, which were very well made technically, but they had really
outrageous anti-American propaganda in them. So Francis’ job was
to recut the films, dub them into English, and then cut out the
anti-American propaganda. Then he became my assistant after that,
and went on to direct Dementia 13 [1963] for me.

I think the film you are talking about became known as Battle
Beyond the Sun [1959/1963]. Is that the film on which Coppola
came up with those outrageous “male” and “female” monsters?

Ah, yes. I wanted an additional battle scene between some monsters

put in, and when I said this to Francis, I suggested there could be
some erotic quality to this. He went beyond anything kind of vaguely
symbolic, and made it pretty blatant. We actually had to cut it back
a little bit.

Was Coppola someone who could turn his hand to anything when
he came to work for you?

Yes. For instance, when we went to Europe to do The Young Racers

[1963] with a very small crew–we followed the Grand Prix Formula
One circuit, working with the English racing team, Lotus–Francis was
first assistant director, he handled some of the sound, and he handled
second unit camera on some of the racing days. He was capable of
doing just about any job there is on a film, and doing it well.

Can you sense when someone is going to go on and make their

mark? Did you get that sense from him?

Both with Jack and Francis, and with some others, I could recognize
early on that they had great abilities, and I expected them to do well.
But I had no way of knowing they would do as well as they did.

How did you meet Peter Bogdanovich? Was he still working as a

critic at that time?
 CORMAN, DERN AND CARRADINE 159

Yes, I met him in a screening somewhere, and we began talking after

the screening and grew very friendly. He came to work for me as my
assistant and then wrote and directed Targets [1968]. I had a couple
of days with Boris Karloff, as a result of a contractual obligation
from a previous picture, and so Peter wrote Targets around Boris’
brief sequence.

It’s a remarkable job of work. Did you have any idea what he was
going to come up with for that film?

Yes, he had given me a number of ideas, which I had rejected, but

then when he came up with the idea of juxtaposing the artificial
horror of the motion picture screen, which Boris of course
epitomized, with the actual horror of a sniper in a drive-in theatre,
I approved that idea. He worked out an outline for the treatment
of the script, which I then approved, then he wrote the script from
that. In the actual shooting, as before, I left him totally alone. He
developed his own style and shot without anything other than those
discussions with me before shooting.

The kind of drive-in that features in that film has all but disappeared;
but other than that, Targets still feels like a film that could have been
made yesterday. It’s eerily relevant, in a way that perhaps many other
films made at your stable at that time aren’t anymore.

Yes, I think that’s true. The concept of random violence in society is

actually more pertinent today, unfortunately, than when the film was
made.

Bogdanovich first worked on your biker movie, The Wild Angels.

How did he get along with the real Hells Angels?

Yes, he was my assistant, and he directed some second unit on that

as well. He didn’t get along, frankly, with them that well. But he got
along well enough that they were able to work together. But, yes,
they clearly came from two totally different worlds.

Has he been the most in love with film of all the people you’ve
worked with?
160 ACTION!

I think almost all of the good directors I’ve worked with have been very
much in love with film. He and Marty Scorsese may have the greatest
knowledge of film history–well, actually, they all do, Francis Coppola
has a great knowledge, as does Joe Dante, almost all of the others.

As a kind of two-for-one deal, I wanted to ask you about Dennis

Hopper and Peter Fonda together. Were they very much together as
people when you first knew them?

I met Peter first, and through Peter met Dennis, they were friends.
Then after The Wild Angels, when I did The Trip, Peter suggested
Dennis for the role in that. And I think their friendship developed
with them working together as actors on that, and that eventually
led to Easy Rider. So it was a friendship that then also became a
business and artistic partnership.

Was Peter Fonda at that period still carrying the weight of his
family’s name? Did he have something to prove, do you think?

I think he was aware of the great fame and stature of his father and,
to some extent, as any son would do, was trying to establish his own
persona.

In The Wild Angels, you had a Fonda and a Sinatra4 in there. How
much of that was to do with having those names on the poster?

Well, it was the two things; it was partially the names, and partially
that they were good actors and could play the roles.

Was Fonda more keen to get on with the Hells Angels?

Peter Fonda probably got on a little bit better with them than Peter
Bogdanovich, certainly, because he was able to ride a motorcycle and
ride it well, and as a result could relate with them. As an actor he
worked with them and tried to help them in their performances, so
he got on a little bit better.

During that period, Dennis Hopper was still trying to come back
into movies following his famous bust up with Henry Hathaway.
How was he to direct?
 CORMAN, DERN AND CARRADINE 161

No problems whatsoever. I had been told that he had given problems

to several directors and he might be difficult to work with. He was
never difficult to work with, in any way. I got along well with him,
and have nothing but admiration both for his ability as well as his
work ethic.

Is it true that he directed some of The Trip?

He shot some second unit, and his footage was very good, and led
eventually to Easy Rider, because I was the original executive
producer of Easy Rider, but then that film moved for a variety of
reasons from AIP to Columbia. But the good work he had done as a
director of second unit on The Trip was one of the reasons I was
confident and went along with the combination of Peter to produce
and Dennis to direct.

On The Trip, Dennis Hopper has that amazing scene where

practically every second word he says is, “man.” Was that scripted,
or was that him?

That was scripted, but as he played the scene, “man” came in more
and more. And more. And, well, I thought it was fine.

Were you surprised at how successful Easy Rider became? Were you
aware of the shockwaves it seemed to send around the industry?

Yes. I mean I thought it was a good picture, and caught the spirit of
youthful rebellion in the United States. I anticipated it being a
success, but I didn’t realise how big a success it would be. You can
almost chart a line from The Wild Angels to The Trip to Easy Rider,
following the counterculture of the day. The Wild Angels and The
Trip were both extremely successful, and then Easy Rider was far
more successful and became a very significant picture. The major
studios were beginning to be aware of the power of the independent
movement, and the great success of Easy Rider really shook them up,
and caused them to bring in a number of the independent filmmakers.

Let’s go to Martin Scorsese. I think he was working with John

Cassavetes as an assistant when you got in touch with him to do
Boxcar Bertha [1972].
162 ACTION!

Yes, I had seen a picture he had done, an underground picture in

black and white that he had done in New York, I don’t even
remember the title of it,5 and it was clear that he was a very brilliant
young filmmaker. He had never done a film in Hollywood. I don’t
remember exactly how I first met him, but we got along well. I had
done Bloody Mama [1970], with Shelley Winters, about a rural
woman gangster in the 1930s, and AIP wanted me to do a second
one. And I had just started New World, my own company, so I said
I would produce it, but I didn’t want to direct it because I didn’t have
the time. And so I chose Marty to direct it, and he did an
exceptionally good job. It was very successful, and it was a good film.

And that was Boxcar Bertha. Is it true that you came under pressure
to remove Scorsese from that movie?

Yes. AIP did not like his work, and they wanted me to step in and
replace him. I said I didn’t have the time, and also that they were
wrong: the work was good. It was simply some junior executive or
someone, I don’t know who it was, had seen the dailies and didn’t
think the work was good. I said I’d seen the dailies and considered
this work to be exceptional. I didn’t think there was any reason at all
to replace him, and eventually they agreed with me.

Scorsese has said that when it came time for him to do Mean Streets
[1973], you had offered to provide backing for the film, but only if
it was done as a kind of blaxploitation movie.

I don’t know if it was black exploitation, but the idea was that the
black films were doing very well, and I felt this type of film as a black
film would be very successful. Weirdly enough, he shot a lot of Mean
Streets in Los Angeles–although everyone tends to assume it was all
shot in New York–and he took a crew and a staff who had worked
with me, that he could shoot interiors with very inexpensively in
L.A.; then he went to New York, where it was more expensive to
shoot, to shoot the exteriors.

Looking back, are you glad he didn’t follow your advice?

Well, yes. In the long run, he was totally correct with Mean Streets.
He being Italian, made them young Italians, and was able to bring
his own perspective through his own culture.
 CORMAN, DERN AND CARRADINE 163

What do you remember about the 26-year-old Robert De Niro on

Bloody Mama? Was there anything of his famous methods of getting
into character back then?

Well, it has become a cliché to say it, but he was and is one of the
most dedicated, most intense actors I have ever seen. We were
shooting in Arkansas, and he went to Arkansas on his own a week
or so before shooting, and just hung around, wandering through
small towns, picking up accents, learning how people moved, what
their opinions were. He was a very, very intense actor; it was clear,
from the beginning, that he was brilliant.

Shelley Winters said that he almost starved himself to get into the
weight loss of his glue-sniffing addict character for your film.

Yes, that’s right. I don’t know how much weight he lost. But he
definitely lost weight for that portion of the film.

Were you surprised by his level of commitment–I know you were

aware of Method, as Shelley Winters was, but did it strike you as out
of the norm?

It was somewhat out of the norm. But it was completely

understandable–I understood what he was doing, and I approved of
it, provided he didn’t damage his health, which he didn’t. But it was
an intensity that you will see in very few actors.

Jumping forward an era, then, to James Cameron, how did he come

to your attention?

He was simply hired as a model maker on Battle Beyond the Stars

[1980]. In our main production, shooting was going well, but in
special effects, model making and special effects photography and
everything was not going well. So I had my offices in Brentwood and
our studio was in Venice, so I had my assistant, Gale Hurd, go down
to the studio and spend a few days to find out what was going on in
the special effects department. So she came back and said that the
people running it, while they were good, were maybe not that
experienced and maybe not that talented, but one of the model
makers, Jim Cameron, really knew what he was doing, and was
164 ACTION!

a very good worker. So we immediately promoted Jim, and this was

an example of simple ability. He was simply a model maker who was
doing better work than anybody else in the department, and one of
the things I take some pride in is the fact that, when we recognize
somebody as good, we’ve always been able to promote them. And
he moved up very quickly, and eventually became the head of the
department and a second unit director as well.

What was his character like back then?

He was intensely devoted to the job, he worked very hard, was very
creative, but he had humour about it, and was very good to work with.

You have always been synonymous with incredible economy–not for

nothing did you call your autobiography How I Made a Hundred
Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. Did the irony ever
strike you that one of your protégés would go on to set the new
benchmark for the most expensive film ever made with Titanic
[1997]?

I thought it was fine. And what I thought was particularly good was,
even though he spent this vast amount of money, and people said,
“Well, this is wasted money, you can’t spend that much money,”
I disagreed, and I still disagree. Because, with Jim, the money he
spent was up there on the screen. You can see in Titanic and his other
pictures why he spent so much money to get the effects he wants. So
I have no objection; in fact, I admire Jim for spending $150 or $180
million, precisely because you can see it. What I object to is
somebody else who spends $80 million, and it’s two people walking
around a room. What happened to the money on that film?

Are you still as enthused by the young people you have working for
you now? Do you see another generation in the making, or is the
whole industry different now?

I’m still as enthused. I have two young directors who have just
finished two low-budget films for us. We have Brian Clyde, out of
the New York University film school, who’s done a picture about
black amateur boxers for us in New York, called Rage and
Discipline [2004], which has played at several film festivals and done
 CORMAN, DERN AND CARRADINE 165

very well; and Henry Crum, who has done a street-racing picture
with a Hispanic background, here in California, called Asphalt Wars
[2004]. And these two are two of the best young directors I’ve ever
worked with.

We should watch that space then?

I think that would be a good idea.

Bruce Dern6

Born in 1936 into a distinguished Illinois family of politicians and

businessmen, Dern started working in the late 1950s and served his
apprenticeship with giants–including Elia Kazan and Alfred
Hitchcock, before joining Corman’s unit as part of the stock troupe
who would subsequently carve out the “New Hollywood” of the
1970s. Corman directed him in The Wild Angels, The Trip, The
St Valentine’s Day Massacre [1967] and Bloody Mama. Dern got
something else from his Corman years, too: his daughter, Laura,
conceived with ex-wife Diane Ladd on the set of The Wild Angels.

When you went to work with Roger Corman, was that a turning
point in your career?

Well, it was definitely a turning point. Because Roger allowed us to

star in movies, instead of being the fifth cowboy from the left or the
guy who dies early in a Ben Casey TV episode. He was making
movies, they weren’t mainstream, big-budget movies, they were
$300,000 movies made in ten days, and yeah, they were drive-in
kind of movies and they were biker films and acid films and all of
that–but that’s what was going on then in the mid-’60s! I tell you,
I quit college after my sophomore year at the University of
Pennsylvania in 1957, but I finished college with Roger Corman.
That’s what he did. He didn’t know it. He didn’t mean to do it that
way, but that’s what it was for those of us who paid attention. He
was just the best. He encouraged us to improvise, he encouraged us
to make a script better, he encouraged us to do two jobs instead of
one–meaning you’d act, and you’d also do a job behind the camera,
like you’d help with the grips, or this or that–and he was very
166 ACTION!

interested in the Actors Studio and its effect on actors. He loved

Actors Studio actors. So he was really quite extraordinary in the
growth of a lot of people. And his movies were fun. Hectic,
maddening, but fun–the only director I ever worked with who shot
faster than Roger Corman was Michael Ritchie. On movies like
Smile [1975] and Diggstown [1992], both of which Michael
directed, we averaged 56 set-ups a day on one camera. Now Roger
didn’t have enough film to do 56 set-ups a day, but there were no
Take Twos with Roger. So you better be pretty fuckin’ entertaining
when he flicked the switch. You better be a really good actor and get
it down, because there were no Take Twos.

On The Wild Angels, infamously, you had a Hells Angels chapter as

extras. How did that work?

Well, Roger didn’t know what he was getting into when he hired real
Hells Angels. But, for some reason, they took to me a little bit,
I think because I was a runner and I used to run long distances then,
they used to say, “Jesus, he’s gotta be nuts to do that.” And they
liked a nutty person. I was kind of a one per center to them, which
is what they think they are, the one per cent of society that doesn’t
fit. That’s why they wear the one per cent on their jackets. And I got
along with them pretty well. They would ask me questions, about
what they were supposed to be doing, and what was this and that,
because Roger, because he’s so bright and glib and quick, he doesn’t
thoroughly let you know, because he expects everybody to get it on
the first level, on the top level, immediately. And they don’t. So these
guys and these girls didn’t, but he was fabulous to them. And
eventually they became incorporated because of Roger. You know,
you wanna make a movie with Hells Angels in it today, then you’re
gonna pay them to wear the Hells Angels logo and everything. So
they incorporated, and it became a successful venture for them. Of
course, this was after they’d already done two movies for Roger and
he didn’t have to pay them any extra for it at all.

He knew how to spend a dollar and make it count?

Oh yeah. But Roger was like that in everything. I mean–there were

no permits. There were no rules. One night, we were doing The Trip,
Peter Fonda runs away from me on this acid trip he’s on, and he runs
 CORMAN, DERN AND CARRADINE 167

into the Whisky a

Go Go, and I run in
after him about 20
seconds later. This
is, like, 1967, and
the Whisky is just
packed with people
every night. Well,
uh, we didn’t tell
anybody we were
gonna do that. We
didn’t tell anybody
we were gonna be
filming there. There
were no police
involved or anything:
Roger went up on the
corner and he said,
“Look”–he had a
walkie-talkie, and
Peter and I had a
Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern in The Trip (1967).
walkie-talkie in our
Credit: American International Pictures/Photofest
cars–and he says
“Now, Peter, you drive
up, get out of your car, go inside. Bruce, when Peter hits the door, you
come up behind his car, get outta your car and go inside after him.
Wait one minute. Then Peter, you come out, then Bruce’ll come out,
and we’ll be up here on the stick recording it. And remember
there’s no Take Two here. ’Cause soon as they see the camera on the
street, they’re gonna come get us, and the Whisky is gonna want
to know what you guys are doing, and somebody will want to be
paid. So you guys are on your own, but take care of it, because this
shot helps make this a much better movie.” We’d do that three or
four times a day, every day. We’d put ourselves at risk–as Roger did
too–but y’know, no one ever stopped us. No one ever screwed with
us. You know what the key word to Roger is? Courage. He had
enormous courage. Enormous courage. And I’ll always be–and so
will Jack Nicholson and so will Peter Fonda and so will Francis
Coppola and so many other people–always be indebted to Roger.
We came from there.
168 ACTION!

David Carradine7

Born in Hollywood in 1936, John Carradine’s eldest boy is still

associated primarily with his TV role as Kung Fu’s ass-kicking
Buddhist, Grasshopper, or, more recently as Kill Bill’s Bill. But it pays
to remember that, under Corman’s aegis in 1972, Carradine was
actually Martin Scorsese’s first leading man, in Boxcar Bertha, and
that entire cults have formed around his role in Corman’s 1975
splatter-fest Death Race 2000. In addition to those two movies,
Carradine has racked up another 13 Corman productions, including
Death Sport [1978], Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II [1989] and,
most recently Dangerous Curves [2000].

I think the first time you worked with Corman was Boxcar Bertha,
which he produced. Was Corman around a lot?

No. Roger’s never around during a picture. He gives a director his

head. And as long as a director shoots the script–and very often
with Roger, it’s the director’s own script–as long as he shoots the
script, Roger will leave him alone. He will come around once or
twice during a picture, mainly just to compliment people. Just to say,
“I’ve seen the dailies and you’re wonderful.” And then he’ll just
leave the director alone, until he’s finished with his first cut. Then
he’ll step in, and start, I guess what he would call “fixing a picture.”
Which sometimes consists of ruining it. That’s Roger. But, you know,
he puts his stamp on it.

Yeah, it often used to seem to consist of editing in some naked ladies

and exploding cars.

Uh, yeah. Roger believes in a certain percentage of certain

ingredients in every picture, and if there’s not enough nudity or
enough sex or enough violence or enough comedy, then he’ll arrange
to add some. In Death Race 2000, he basically added comedy: not
because there wasn’t enough comedy in the film, but because it had
originally been conceived as an Action-Message-Comedy. And he
told me: “What the man8 has given me is a “Comedy-Action-
Message” And so he said, “Okay if it’s gonna be a comedy, it needs
more comedy.” Then, sometimes, y’know, he’ll come in and he’ll
say, “Okay, I need a lot of explosions. Give me a whole lot of
 CORMAN, DERN AND CARRADINE 169

explosions,” right? He’s a very smart guy, Roger. I always thought,

if he ever got off the idea that the main priority of a movie is that it
dare not lose money, then he coulda made some truly great pictures,
because he’s a philosopher, he has great taste on his own, but he
never did. And then he stopped directing, because the last two
pictures he directed were not so successful, so he didn’t take that
chance again.

You made over a dozen films with him as producer, but am I right in
thinking that you always wanted to be directed by him?

Yes, absolutely, I did. I was always trying to talk him into it.
Remember when, after years of not directing, he came back and
directed Frankenstein Unbound? When he was making the picture,
I called him up and I said, “Roger, lemme play the monster.” Right?
And he said, “No, no, no, you don’t wanna do that. Not the way I’m
going to do the monster.” Actually, I would have loved to. But he
didn’t think it was up my alley. I think he thought it was gonna be,
“beneath me.” Roger was always trying to protect me from myself.
I loved that film, actually. I mean, it had some funny things about it,
but what picture doesn’t? But one of the paramount things I could
not understand about that picture was casting John Hurt as an
American. I mean, that was a very odd thing to do.

The other thing he has, and he has made some great films himself,
but he has this uncanny eye for talent.

Oh, yeah. It’s just amazing, really. The way he is able to see it when
it comes. But he doesn’t exactly have to see it. Because, what he does
is: almost anybody can go to Roger’s studio in Santa Monica and ask
for a job. And it’s unlikely they won’t get one. What’ll happen is, say,
he’ll hire somebody as a production assistant, which mainly consists
of running errands. And he’ll give them $50 a day, if they have their
own car, right, and the gas. And, y’know, if they show some spunk,
he’ll give them a better job. It’s really simple. And almost anybody
can get that first job. So, in other words, he doesn’t have
to actually–I’m not saying that he didn’t a lot–but he doesn’t have to
discover talent, because the talent gets discovered while they’re
working for him, and he goes, “Hmmm…okay.” And the result is
you can start out as a production assistant there, and it’s very
170 ACTION!

common to become a producer for Roger, or a director. And the

other thing he does is, a director will wanna get a job with him, and
will show him a piece of film they did at USC or someplace like that.
And Roger’ll say, “This picture shows great promise. I’m gonna give
this guy a break.” And then he does. He’s a very generous guy. And
he’s also honest. I mean, I had a piece of Death Race 2000, and, if
you had a piece of a major studio picture, they’d do everything they
could to cheat you out of it. You’d have to audit them and all that.
But Roger just paid right on schedule, every time. Now, don’t get
me wrong: he didn’t like it. He hated giving me those checks. And he
never made another deal like that with an actor, because that was the
largest-grossing picture he ever made, so he had to give me a lot of
money. But when he’d write me this check, he’d be so unhappy, I’d
say, “Roger, don’t you realize that when you’re writing me a check
for $30,000, you’re still making $300,000 of your own?” But it
didn’t matter. He still just didn’t like it.

References
1. This interview with Corman took place in 2004.
2. Between 1951 and 1963, the American character actor Jeff Corey (1914–2002)
was unable to work in movies as a victim of the anti-Communist blacklist. He
worked as a laborer, until friends encouraged him to start teaching acting, in the
garage behind his house. Across the 1950s, he became Hollywood’s most sought-
after acting coach, with such disparate legends as Gary Cooper and James Dean
among his students, and exerted profound influence on the generation
spearheaded by Jack Nicholson. Word of mouth about his insightful
technique–stressing improvisation and an oblique approach to character–swiftly
spread. Soon the studios that refused to employ him were secretly sending
contract players to study under him. Even while tutoring stars like Cooper,
though, Corey still worked digging ditches. His connection with Dean, and his
reputation for standing up to the system, enamoured him to a generation of
younger actors, including Nicholson, James Coburn, Harry Dean Stanton, Dean
Stockwell, and Jane and Peter Fonda, as well as the writer Robert Towne.
3. Having finished The Raven [1963] early, and still having Boris Karloff under
contract for two more days, the legendarily economical Corman shot most of
this in 48 hours, then completed it by sending various crews out whenever he
could to film exteriors. The resulting, supremely unclear story has Napoleonic
officer Nicholson searching Karloff’s grim, coastal castle for a mysterious (dead)
girl who saved his life.
4. Nancy.
5. Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1968).
 CORMAN, DERN AND CARRADINE 171

6. The Bruce Dern interview took place in 2003.

7. The David Carradine interview took place in 2003; some parts of the Dern and
Carradine interviews originally appeared in Uncut magazine.
8. Director Paul Bartel.
IV. Edgeplay: Avant-Garde
Auteurs

“I have been making art for 50 years and have never allowed myself
to be corrupted. Quite the opposite; I was locked up.” –Otto Muehl

12. Otto Muehl

13. The Brothers Quay
Otto Muehl with Stick and Friend. Credit: ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008

An Actionist Begins to Sing:

Otto Muehl
by Andrew Grossman1

As I reflect on a lifetime of canonical film-watching, I realize that

what I’ve learned is, though not entirely worthless, probably useless.
A certain director swerves the camera around emphatically, one
employs moody colors, another bores us to death with self-
importantly minimalist narratives, and so forth. Though cinephiles
176 ACTION!

and pedants insist that I should care about matters of style, I am

tempted to half-jokingly agree with the Maoists and assent that the
enterprise of the cinema–which can now only be repaired with the
most radical consciousness-raising–is morally bankrupt and
deserving of total abandonment.
I therefore shun the cineaste’s narrow parameters and seek a new
art, not a projected frame supervised by commerce and critics but an
art that strives for a new, autonomous way of being. Nothing better
represents such a praxis than the 1960s Austrian actionist
movement, whose principal members–Otto Muehl, Rudolph
Schwarzkogler, Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch–scandalized the
public with materialistic body art, staged saturnalia, and
polymorphous perversity under the banners of the “Vienna Action
Group” and the “Institute for Direct Art.” Sometimes the actionists
would be jailed on public obscenity charges, and in the 1960s
actionist art became the subject of momentous German and Austrian
censorship trials. In the early 1990s, Muehl became the subject of a
highly politicized trial once again: accused of raping and molesting
underage members of his actionist commune, he was imprisoned for
seven years. In a grand irony, however, Muehl’s legal martyrdom also
cemented his artistic legitimacy, for only after his release from prison
did Muehl–now well into his seventies–enjoy painting exhibitions at
the Louvre.
Though the subject of agitated European debate for over four
decades, Muehl’s work has become in North America a “vortex” (as
Muehl says) of speculation, misinformation and tenebrific rumor.
Not having been privy to the politico-artistic throes of 1960s
Austria, my first impressions of Muehl came primarily from Amos
Vogel’s seminal picture-book cum leftist primer Film as a Subversive
Art (1974) and Muehl’s semi-autobiographical appearance in Dusan
Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1975). Yet Vogel unintentionally subverts
his own intentions at subversion by insisting all art conform to the
universalizing assumptions of humanism, and Muehl distances
himself from Sweet Movie, whose bodily-fluid sensationalism he
dismisses as “downright kitsch.”
More recently, Malcolm Green’s Brus, Muehl, Nitsch,
Schwarzkogler: Writings of the Vienna Actionists (1999) has granted
us invaluable access to Muehl’s performance art action scripts (“I
spread artificial honey on an old grandmother…and then allow
her to be attacked by 5 kg of flies that I had previously starved
 MUEHL 177

for 7 days…I then kill the flies on her wrinkled skin with a fly-
swatter”2), and the absurdist tracts intended to accompany actionist
happenings and festivals. Of the greatest literary value is Muehl’s
manifesto–both satirical and self-parodic–written to accompany the
1967 “Zock” festival: “ZOCK [mandates] general prohibition of
sexual intercourse between people of the same color… the color of
future ZOCK people will be grey…” Indeed, the present interview
combines Muehl’s staccato, stream-of-consciousness irony with the
aphoristic trenchancy of an insurrectionary manifesto–one that,
furthermore, is grounded in the German esoteric tradition, wherein
cultural insiders seek to inspire one another with metaphysical
provocations and cryptic pronouncements.
I’m particularly fascinated by Muehl’s “removal of the frame,”
his jump from being a painter, sculptor, filmmaker and actionist to
the founding of his “actions-analytical” commune, where actionistic
art and performance were transferred from the imagined spaces of
fiction and recontextualized as “practical actionism…extended into
everyday life.”3 The members of the commune–which flourished in
Austria in the 1970s, but is now a far smaller settlement in
Portugal–collectively owned property, practiced exogamy and used
psychophysical aesthetics to expand the idea of the body-as-text into
the realm of naturalistic autotherapy.
Integral to Muehl’s idea of communal actions-analysis is Wilhelm
Reich’s Character Analysis, which outlines Reich’s theories of a
quantitative sex-economy and the egoistic “character armor” that
socializes and represses healthy libidinal energies. While Reich
borrows heavily from Freud and Marx, he was beholden to neither,
repudiating the mechanized and nationalistic tendencies of traditional
Marxism and trading Freud’s cycles of inescapable neurosis for an
optimistic model of non-neurotic, hygienic sexuality and orgasmic
release. More importantly, Reich, unlike Freud and Marx, breaks
with the traditional linguistic understanding of alienation and turns
to biophysics, the polar drives of productive sexuality and consuming
hunger, to address the workings of psychopathology. It is thus no
accident that Muehl’s early avant-garde shorts are not only body-
centered but focused on literal, ritualistic representations of food
consumption and ecstatic-orgasmic release (including vomiting). Just
as Buñuel exposes hypocritical anxieties about consumption and
biological function in The Phantom of Liberty (1973), in whose most
famous scene the privacy of fecal discharge and the publicity of eating
178 ACTION!

are inverted, so too must we reconcile what in Reichian-Muehlian

terms are the polarized spheres of egoistic production and the
consumption of the outer world.
Many of Muehl’s 1960s actions were documented by the Austrian
experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren, whose patented “flash-editing”
technique mathematically fractures images into multiple cuts per
second, creating a stroboscopic effect wherein the number of cuts
within each frame is determined by the number of cuts in the last.4
We therefore encounter the paradox of Muehl’s real-time,
“materialistic” performances being discontinuously flash-edited and
temporally reconstituted through Kren’s anti-realist machinations. If
anything, this paradox of a real-time performance being
dematerialized through radical montage only emphasizes the
eventual necessity of moving from representational art into the realm
of Muehl’s actions-analysis, or living “self-representation.”
In Muehl and Kren’s early collaborations, the human body is just
as much an object to be manipulated by Kren’s editing as it is an
organic canvas to be slathered with Muehl’s paint, organic
discharges and trademark foodstuffs. In O Tannenbaum (1964), a
red-painted woman orally services Muehl, while human bodies
alternate their sexual positions not through mise-en-scène actions
but according to Kren’s omnipotent jump cuts, as if the models’
pulsating sexuality were being displaced to the technology
representing them. More naturalistic is Muehl’s Oh Sensibility
(1970), which introduces animal-human amorousness (the term
“bestiality” doesn’t do it justice) as a means to sublimity, not organic
outrage. Muehl rises up, spirit-like, behind a woman as she makes
love to a goose, passionately kissing its beak with questionable
consent from the animal. Muehl then licks the goose, thrusts it onto
his pelvis, embraces it like a child, lashes it with a strap, and offers
it to a communal group where it is decapitated and its stump
bloodily utilized to masturbate the woman. Though suggestive of
mystic primitivism and pagan rites of purification, the film
outrageously defies attempts at pigeonholing analysis and close
reading. Unlike the simplistic, mock-Christian allegory of Thierry
Zeno’s pig-fucking Vase de noces (1974), this actionist zoophilia
is tautegorical, not allegorical, restating selfhood in different,
non-linguistic terms whose only offense is unapologetic naturalness.
As Muehl says in his “Material Action Manifesto” of 1964, “the
material action works with symbols (its difference from theater),
 MUEHL 179

which in themselves constitute the storyline, a consecutive series and

mingling of symbols as self-existing realities…they do not aim to
explain anything, they are what they appear to be.”5 Nothing
better represents this paradoxical “transcendental literalism” than
Muehl’s coprophilic-urolagnic films Scheißkerl (1969) and
Sodoma (1969), which thumb their noses at interpretation. But
their flash-edited imageries of enemas, urolagnia and coprophagia
are not simply an affront to our denial of bodily realities. The ass
is not always a cosmic vacuum or the gaping unknown; contrarily,
it can be that which is known all too well, and the shit issuing
forth frightens and enlightens for its incorruptible democracy.
And if we garland, either resignedly or with idiotic glee, the
figurative shit that clogs our cinemas–and here I mean the
supposed art houses more than the popular cinema, which at least
has fewer illusions–are we not hypocrites to be repelled by the
genuine article?
Malcolm Green concludes the introduction to his edition of the
actionists’ writings with a warning: “To portray the actionists simply
as (auto-) therapists would be to miss the point entirely…they had
too much destructive glee, too much verve and downright humor, or
too much aesthetic power to be passed off as mere social workers.”6
Yet Green’s unwittingly conservative view, whose covert
romanticism cannot progress beyond caricaturing social change as
the territory of banal policymaking and uncreative bureaucracy, is
itself the greatest of all banalities. There is nothing “mere” about
social transformation, nor is it clear why humor, destruction or
aesthetic power should be at logical odds with the restructuring
of social orders. Utilitarianism needn’t be lifeless, nor is it opposed
to art. Muehl is no “mere” controversialist or provocateur but
a pragmatist whose radicalisms are entirely rational responses to
both moral hypocrisies and the limitations of representational
objectivity. Admittedly, in this interview–conducted entirely by
written correspondence–Muehl acknowledges there were limitations
to this pragmatism: “I was of the erroneous opinion that the group
as a social, sexual experiment would itself be a kind of remedy for
people with great difficulties.” Nevertheless, I look undeterred
to this experiment, where aesthetics, sociology, biophysics and
psychology intertwine, where “art” is not understood as repre-
sentation but as life, as self-representation, regulated neither by
commerce nor the State.
180 ACTION!

Interview

Translated from the German by Robert Mark Grossman

In Germany in the late 1980s, and then in the United States in the
late 1990s, there was a revived interest in your art, which prompted
a number of museum showings and publications about your work.
What caused this resurgence of interest?

It’s really simple. If something appears too bold or outrageous to the

public, it needs its time. Van Gogh and Cezanne were initially
dismissed. Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life–to a critic.
Marcel Duchamp also needed time, and therefore I have as well.
Regis Michel, curator at the Louvre, believed four or five years ago
that an exhibition with Otto Muehl would be possible either in the
Louvre or at the Pompidou Center. Now the time is ripe. In April 2000
and the Fall of 2001, Regis Michel showed works of mine in two
exhibitions. The former had the provocative title “posseder et detruire,
strategies sexuelles dans l’art d’occident (“Possess and Destroy: Sexual
Strategies in the Art of the Occident).” Watteau, Gericault,
Michelangelo, Vasari, Rembrandt, Poussin, David, Delacroix, Ingres,
Degas, Picasso, Duchamp, Artaud, Yves Klein and Muehl.
The title is sensationalist because its concept of destruction is
aimed at society. Yet destruction is a method in modern art, and
directs itself against old values. I am no sexual destroyer–art is a long
way from sex murder (Lustmord). Sexual strategies serve to arouse
attention.
The second exhibition, entitled “la peinture comme crime”
(“Painting as Crime”), opened in the Fall of 2001. Breton writes in his
surrealist manifesto that it would be a surrealistic act to go out on the
street and shoot passersby at random. The Dadaists actually shot at
the public during their plays–that was very dangerous. They reckoned
up with art but that doesn’t mean they were criminals. After the First
World War, people expressed outrage against society, because millions
of human beings were killed. No one was making art any more.
Instead, artists turned to destruction. Everything was possible. That
was situationism, something completely different from actionism.
After the Second World War, Tachism and object art came on
strong. Marcel Duchamp played an important role there. He simply
 MUEHL 181

exhibited a bicycle or a urinal and wrote underneath it: “Fountain.”

In art, the rules were demolished. I don’t consider that a criminal act.
I am against aggression. An important event for actionism occurred
in 1966: “DIAS,” the “Destruction in Art Symposium,” which
advocated destruction within art, but not outside it. Hitler wanted to
become an artist, but he worked in real life–he was never an artist.

It is probably a cliché to say that there is a tension in, or irony about,

the idea of actionist art being “legitimized” by bourgeois institutions
such as museums. Have you long since reconciled this tension, or do
you still have misgivings about your avant-gardism becoming part of
the canonical politics of the museum?

This assertion is a total misrepresentation of reality. I make art

because I enjoy it, and naturally I also want to get something from
it. I must and want to live from it. I am no idealist. After ten years
of actionism, I extended actionism into the fashioning (Gestaltung)
of society in reality. By that, I mean making life into a work of art.
After the dissolution of my marriage, I founded the commune, not to
save the world, but rather out of “self-interest” (as Max Stirner
might say7). I am an egoist who is idealistically, not materially,
oriented. My life should be flawless, have direction, be an artwork.
I have nothing against earning money through art. Nobody
starves to death willingly. I would like to earn a great deal of money
just once–not for me, but rather for the development of the group.
I myself hardly need anything. I walk around all day long in sweats
and a tank-top. It is fantastic. But I say, whoever works for a salary
turns himself into a slave, and whoever accepts employment in the
state apparatus sells himself. Here Marx’s comment is valid: “Being
(existence) defines consciousness.” What you do for a living–that is
who you are.
I need art for myself. It is my spiritual and ethical bodybuilding.
I have been making art for 50 years and have never allowed myself
to be corrupted.
I put all the money into the communal group in which I live. Our
present group of 12 children and 15 adults [in the Algarve] is small
and private, and differs fundamentally from my earlier [Austrian]
commune, which reached 700 people at its highest point. Later it
settled down to about 350.
182 ACTION!

I’d like to return to your communal life later, but first I’d like to
know about your genesis as an artist. You had written that in 1961,
as a young painter, you realized that the act of “daubing a canvas is
itself half-witted,” whereupon you “fetched a kitchen knife, slashed
the canvas, tore it apart with both hands,” and then “set [your]
sights on the human body.” Can you explain how this epiphany
came about? Was the idea of focusing on sculptural forms a
personal, spiritual transformation, or did this idea come about
through the influence of other artists?

It was not completely my invention. There was already Tachism. Picasso

and Matisse joked that any ape could paint like this. But here it is not a
question of formal criteria, but energy. I would view the destruction of
the canvas in 1961 as my big bang. That’s when I first began to exist as
an artist. There were forerunners like Lucio Fontana, Pol Bury, Milares
and Yves Klein, though their works are too aesthetic for me.
I worked a lot with material–with plaster, cement, ashes and
cigarette butts. At that time I went into Café Hawelka in Vienna,
where cigarette butts were collected in milk cans to be taken to the
garbage tip. I fetched two of these buckets and worked them into a
picture. That work actually still exists, but doesn’t belong to me.
While I worked, I felt “IT” build up inside me and the emotions
exploded. I had opened the gates of the unconscious. It streamed out.
I knew it was good, but I didn’t know anything more. Then I painted
again tachistically. Despite the lunatic energy, the result was a mere
patterning. I see something similar in Jackson Pollock: what comes
forth when he drips is decorative and doesn’t match up with his
intentions. I went into the kitchen, took a knife and thought: “Now
I will take it a step further.” I slit the canvas open, tore it to shreds
and knotted it together; but that was not enough. I lay the picture on
the floor, trampled the wedge frame underfoot, and hacked and
smashed it to pieces with an axe. Nothing was left of the picture but
the shattered frame with the canvas coiled around it. This step could
have been without consequence, if I hadn’t–and that is the most
important thing–given it a meaning after the event. I hadn’t
destroyed a picture and I hadn´t destroyed art itself. I was merely
going in another direction–and arrived at sculpture.
On the next day, a piece of barbed wire lay on the ground.
I picked it up, took it home with me, and wrapped it around the
sculpture so that it held together, and hung it on the wall.
 MUEHL 183

With my next picture I started right away by putting material

onto the canvas. Because I did not demolish the frame this time, the
torn-up canvas was visible. I immediately began another painting
with a shattered frame and added further materials to it, first wood,
wood sticks and canvas, and afterwards wire. I stretched the torn-up
bits of canvas onto the frame tightly, trod upon them, and pulled the
pieces together, and once more tore them apart. I entwined the whole
thing with wire. Thus new forms came into being, expressions of the
unconscious. I have often experienced this destructive action in
painting: whenever I was dissatisfied with a completed picture and
sought to improve it, the changing of one part made it necessary to
form the entire picture anew. The destruction progressed until finally
the old picture was destroyed and a new picture came into being.
Destruction effects a change in one’s personality. I was madly
inspired. Every day brought me another step farther.
Once the construction had been established, I could lay it on the
floor or lean it against the wall. I hung the artwork in the middle of
the room. Moving away from the wall was an important step. Soon
the sculpture filled the entire space. I could no longer work in my
studio, where I also lived. So I rented a cellar and pulled an old hand
cart down to a second-hand dealer on the upper Augartenstraße,
where I found roller blinds, old bicycles and pots. I took all the
interesting items with me. In the subsequent act of destruction,
I naturally smashed the pots to pieces and came to know the
material. The spokes of the bicycle splintered off. I trampled it to
pieces, twisting the bicycle as it might appear after an accident.
I deformed the objects, unlike Marcel Duchamp, who left the object
unadulterated. Marcel Duchamp is a philosopher who utilized
artistic means to make a statement.

Your material actions in a live performance must be very different

from your filmed actions staged for the camera, as those actions
become necessarily abstracted through Kurt Kren’s radicalized
editing technique. How do you think Kren’s formalistic editing
changes the content of the action and the way it is understood?

Kurt Kren’s editing technique was totally new. To a certain extent

I liked it. I was pleased that someone filmed the actions at all,
since I wanted to document them. Kurt Kren did not intend to place
the action at the center: he wanted to use it as raw material for his
184 ACTION!

own project. He generally didn’t shoot screen-played films but

worked instead with existing material. He is a concept artist. When
he showed the films in Berlin, the public asked whether this filming of
the Muehl-action did not constitute a break in his work. He became
angry and wanted to stop filming. When I said, “I guess in that case
I’ll film the works myself.” Kurt answered, “What, you think that it
would be so easy! You want to film? Now that really is a joke.”
With the film O Tannenbaum, edited by Kren, I saw that the short
cuts produced a strange effect. In the film, it all went briskly and the
themes were rapidly cut together. That was not bad. I have always
worked by quick editing.
The actions that I now make can be traced back to that period.
Lately I am making an especially large number of photoactions,
including my “Grimuid-actions.”8 In the action Can Anyone
Explain? [2002], every shot was checked in front of a mirror. I stage
an action, photograph it and assemble the snapshots in rhythmic
succession. By means of this staging, the photo becomes a work of
art. Just like a painted panel, the photograph conveys art. Art lies not
in the photographing but in the orchestrated production, in the
staged happening with objects and materials.
In the material actions of the 1960s, there was still a difference
between the actionists and the model, but I now enjoy making myself
into an object of art. Rather than standing in front of the picture, the
artist is in the picture. He does not sit like an analyst behind a screen.
The analyst-patient role is abolished. It is preposterous and obsolete.
These are despicable old roles: playing the priest and sinner in the
confessional, the teacher and the pupil, the judge and the accused.
What I liked best of Kurt Kren’s was his “Szondi-test”: from
photos of mental patients you’re supposed to choose the ones who
appeal to you. Based on this, it is determined whether you are
schizophrenic, very aggressive, or autistic. The idea to make a film
out of such a test was very appealing to me. It is an alienation. That
is one of his best works.
But Kurt’s editing method had the disadvantage that short cuts and
frequent repetition of the same images create the illusion of movement.
I stage situations. Editing techniques do not interest me–I do not want
to simulate. My “actions” in the basement were made for still
photography. I planned every shot. An action was divided into various
phases: first comes the still life. I begin very economically. Warm water
runs over the bodies of the models. That doesn’t do much. Then comes
 MUEHL 185

oil, paste, various soups with noodles or carrots and perhaps some
grapes. After that, color flows over the body–ketchup, marmalade and
red beet juice. The skin is still visible. Then we bring on the heavy
artillery: dough, which stretches down ponderously, or flour, an egg,
or cabbage. Finally I poured on bed feathers. There was a certain
layered arrangement in the application of the materials one after the
other, like in cooking. In “The Breading of the Buttocks,”9 the woman
knelt in an armchair with her ass turned to the audience. Provocatively
I sprayed only the ass–not the entire body–first with milk; then I
dusted it with flour, which stuck fast as when breading a
Wienerschnitzel. Then I spread the egg yolk over that and at last the
breadcrumbs. That looked really great! Once Schwarzkogler dropped
by and I asked him, “How do you like it?” He said, “Very dirty!”

To my knowledge, your actions–and thus your films–were screen-

played far in advance, though they may have the appearance of a
spontaneous performance. Did you ever perform any actions
spontaneously?

I have also made spontaneous actions staged for the public. At first
I had a rough plan, but what actually took place was spontaneous,
as with the action with the rolling pin in Cologne, for example. It is
true that we had used the pin when staging this action earlier, but it
was not planned that I would offer the rolling pin to the mother and
daughter out of the audience, and allowed them to put it between the
legs of the model. I made another spontaneous action in London
during “DIAS.” On the spur of the moment, I decided to do
something inside Conway Hall. Some Frenchmen were making
actions with voices. One of them intensified his heartbeats with the
microphone. I saw that and thought, “Hey Brus, get this, we’re going
to make a breath concert.” This actually anticipated the later action
analysis. We sat outside. I planned it quickly: breathing, stronger
breathing, noisy breathing, hoarse groaning to the point of vomiting,
and holding one’s breath so that one almost becomes giddy. Finally
there was staggering, knocking over the chairs and going around on
all fours. Brus became slightly faint. He breathed too much and got
an oxygen rush.

Through the 1970s and ‘80s, among the few available books in
English that discussed your films was Amos Vogel’s 1974 Film as a
186 ACTION!

Subversive Art. Vogel says your films are suffused with, “…a stench
of concentration camps, collective guilt, unbridled aggression,
hallucinatory violence that…has the dimensions of an atavistic
generalized myth of evil.” Do you demand that your works be
understood within a particularly Austro-German (or other
historical) framework?

I know that they cannot be understood by the great majority of

people because people aren’t interested in art, don’t care about the
medium, are too uneducated, and ostensibly see only the repulsive.
Art is an accusation, a form of critique.
It is not my fault that my films are suffused with the stench of
concentration camps. I can only emphasize this: that the stench
which I experienced in the Nazi period and during the war was the
most horrible thing imaginable. In 1945, I experienced something
grotesque. The war was at an end. There was a ceasefire. We were
quartered in a school in Czechoslovakia when I heard an
extraordinary report over the radio: the Führer had fallen in battle
while spearheading his troops against the Bolshevik menace. Then
Wagner’s music was played. The most astonishing thing about this is
that everyone believed the lie. This radio dispatch showed that they
were criminals.
I fling the stench of the concentration camps into their faces with
pleasure. In 1970, German television approached me to film an
“action.” The action was called SS and the Star of David. A playpen
for small children was set up. The Jewish actress Lisel Nürnberger,
who played the Jewish girl, understood our critique and the subject
matter. Herbert Stumpfl, Otmar Bauer and I made the action.
We wore pants and our upper bodies were bare except for the
armbands. We danced homoerotically with one another and beat the
mesh of the playpen–behind which Lisel stood–with leather straps.
Lisel slipped back so anxiously into her childhood experiences that
she could not see through them as such. In panic she fled on all fours
out the door. The cameraman said he wouldn’t go along with it
anymore, that none of it was true, and that the SS certainly were
neither such queers nor as malicious as we had represented them.
As for Amos Vogel, I have no bad memories of him. He
mentioned me alongside Eisenstein as one of the most radical
filmmakers. At that time I got to know him personally. I had a very
good relationship with him. He admired me.
 MUEHL 187

In his edition of your and other actionists’ writings, Malcolm Green

implicitly criticizes those who have recontextualized actionism to fit
their own political ends. However, in your Material Action
Manifesto of 1965, you emphasize the importance of the
“associative” meanings of your work. Does the insistence on
understanding your work within the context of postwar Germany
and Austria limit these associative meanings?

Art contains everything that one has experienced since childhood.

The artist creates from the unconscious. He makes it visible. The
musician makes it audible, and the writer makes it readable.

Amos Vogel remarks that your films “captur[e] society’s essence by

means of harrowing violence and perverse sexuality…” Do you
think that critics have dwelt excessively on the “shocking” qualities
of your films, to the exclusion of everything else? In a live
performance, an act such as shitting may repulse because of its
immediacy. In a film, however, we are alienated from the action, not
only because it is framed and edited, but because we can use only
two of our five senses to experience it. So, for example, when I see
the model shitting in close-up in your film Scheißkerl [1969],
rendered in extreme slow-motion, it strikes me as oddly beautiful
rather than repellent. Did you intend to aestheticize or romanticize
the action through slow-motion?

I wanted long scenes because shitting is wonderful. In reality,

everything happened very quickly; all at once it went “brrrrrrrrrrr,”
fell down splashing, and was over. The action was too short, so
I used slow-motion in Scheißkerl to make the shitting visible. Art
makes the invisible visible. If you don’t see something in a film, it
doesn’t exist. One should also see the repulsive.
I wanted to make Scheißkerl, and everything was agreed upon. All at
once the people who had made themselves available to be models said
at the last minute that they wouldn’t do it because they were afraid that
the film would be shown somewhere. This was understandable. On that
account, I made myself available. I saw that we had no other option:
I had arrived with my team and regarded the action as important.

Let’s turn to the film Oh Sensibility, one of your most taboo-

breaking works. In this film, the killing of the goose and its
188 ACTION!

subsequent use as a sexual tool is not merely shocking, but somehow

transcendent because the act of swan-love that precedes it seems so
remarkably tender. We have seen many animal killings on film, but
this is a rare instance in which the animal has first been made love
to; would you define the intercourse with the swan as an act of love?

For the [filmed] action Oh Sensibility I did not use a plastic blow-up
doll nor a dummy for the swan, but a real goose. It was a
transgression of boundaries that strove towards reality. The goose
was already destined for slaughter–it would have been eaten anyway.
It was shortly before the festival of St. Martini, during which several
thousand geese are slaughtered in Burgenland. In this country, it all
comes down to a full-blown goose massacre every year.
The goose was no aesthetic object. This was not a tender play, but
a trance. At first the goose was restless. If one looks at the goose,
speaks with it and sways it gently, in a short time it falls into a
trance. I held it in my hand. When I performed dance-like
movements with it, it became calm. It no longer fluttered, and went
about with me willingly. It sat quietly on my shoulder. Its tranquility
affected me in return, and put me in a trance as well. With this,
I became Jupiter, and it became the symbol of woman. I became the
priest who would not kill it in order to devour it, but rather to carry
out a kind of magic ritual with it. I placed the throat of the goose
between its legs; with one sharp cut, the head was neatly severed. It
was not my intention to torture either myself or the animal. I did it
according to the proper method, just as I had learned from my
grandmother. Once, when I was younger, my mother asked me
to slaughter a chicken for Sunday dinner, and at that time I couldn’t
do it. In the action many things became possible for me that I would
not have been able to do in everyday life, because art is ecstasy for
me. The process of artistic creation is a stepping out from the day-
to-day. In the last shot of this performance, I hold the goose over me
and the blood drops onto my face. I feel guilt-ridden, like a murderer.
In Oh Sensibility, I had no sexual experience with the goose myself.
In another action, I did use a goose as a dildo after I had cut off
its head. I stage myself pornographically in order to expose truths.
I hold the mirror before those who make similar transgressions
in their everyday lives. They have marriage laws, morals, and at
the same time, the brothel. I make no accusation, but I reveal the
dichotomies in which human beings live.
 MUEHL 189

The public was appalled–which is what I had intended. The

spectators rejected the slaughter of the goose. Yet I think that the
killing of human beings in the prisons of the USA is a crime. I do not
condone animal murders. I show the sentimentality and the
hypocrisy. With tears in their eyes they gobble up their geese!
Actionism is provocation and agitation, the representation of moral
double standards.
Lately I have avoided meat from mammals. In the Algarve
commune, we live mainly on vegetables, fish, tofu and soy products.

Are there any contemporary filmmakers–including those who may

cite you and the other actionists as “inspirations”–who you think are
truly subversive? Or, contrarily, are there any contemporary
filmmakers who you would single out as people whose attempts to
shock have failed? Today, has the very possibility of “shock” been
forever lost to commercialism?

To answer the first question, no, I’m not familiar with anyone.
To answer the second: I saw some Russian artists who imitated
actionism. Anton Kolik had himself chained like a dog and then
barked. What’s the point of that? Insulting the public? That’s an
absolute joke!
The avant-garde is not shocked by my films. Many of my films are
deeply human. I inform and reveal what should be permitted. I do
have a flaw. I have a great lust for women. If that were depicted,
everyone would get all worked up. Those who are shocked I have
rightly shocked. I count on shocking them and make my actions
accordingly.
The artist clears away taboos. What really shocks is when the
artist confronts you with the facts. There ought to be plenty to show.
No one questions the State, even though the State doesn’t work. One
cannot change it, not even through revolution. As long as there is
private property, you can forget about ethics. Rousseau writes: “The
first person to fence off a spot of earth and say, ‘That belongs to me,
no one is permitted to trespass,’ should have been declared insane or
beaten to death.” With this, the catastrophe of exploitation began.
In the end, the police and the courts hold the State together. Mr. Bush
would have signed 400 death warrants had there been no protest in
Berlin. A judge commits a murder without further ado. If he takes
this job, he must murder–otherwise he would lose his job. But I say
190 ACTION!

that all murderers are innocent. No child is born a murderer. If a

murderer does surface, one must shield others from him, but he must
live in luxury. Every one of his wishes should be fulfilled because we
are all responsible. We have allowed him to grow up in the ghetto.
He has been trampled underfoot. We fail to cope with the problems
of the world. We let them drift. Where is the critique of our
educational system? Murderers, thieves, muggers, armed police,
priests, deceivers, proletarians, swindlers and ordinary idiots are the
end products of our educational system.
It has never yet been shown in a film that fidelity in marriage is
only preserved by the brothel. The State needs the whorehouses for
the maintenance of law and order. The brothels bring money and
taxes to the State. Sexuality cannot be ruthlessly lived out, but must
be placed in a social framework. It should not be purchased.
Sexuality is no game. Sexuality without social ties dramatically raises
the risk of AIDS. Free sexuality is a challenging problem. He who
received insufficient love as a child has a fear of open sexuality
because he fears rejection. Abreaction in front of the TV or watching
a porno is then pleasurable because there is no danger. The imagined
woman can’t defend herself. There, in his fantasy, he can do
whatever he wishes with her. Free sexuality is an ethical, moral
undertaking. Through an organizational model in which sexuality is
socially bound to the group, visits to brothels, restaurants and coffee
houses will become superfluous. All of these businesses that thrive
on this failure of social communication would no longer exist.
I see the family as a model. But I’m not returning to the
monogamous nuclear family, but rather to the large extended family,
which in this form probably never existed. Men and women have
equal rights; there is democracy.
I see no one, here or abroad, who advances a socially relevant
idea. In Totem and Taboo, Freud investigated the prohibition against
incest. He believed that such a taboo is necessary in order to
maintain the institution of marriage. One can imagine sexual contact
between the father and the daughter, the son with his sister, and the
mother with her brother. It would be a total catastrophe. There
would be beatings, massacres. The family would break up and
disperse, and with them, the State as well. The incest prohibition is
neither mystical nor religious. Incest doesn’t worry animals at all.
Freud mentions that an animal was supposed to be condemned or
sentenced to death by Christians on account of incest.
 MUEHL 191

In earlier times, a bull ruled the primal horde, who demanded for
himself alone the right to have sex with all women and froze the
other men out. If one of them nonetheless ventured to risk it, he
needed to act in secret and reckoned that he would be driven out
because of it. I imagine that it is similar with the apes, where
the alpha has precedence. In the case of human beings this was the
prerogative, at least as Freud’s theory rigidly posits it. Why was
the leader killed? How did they dare it, even though he really was the
strongest?
In the course of evolution, human beings were naked; by means
of fantasy arousal, sex was no longer merely reduced to the fertile
days of the woman. The woman “made a discovery”: she became
more alluring as her breasts became larger and by means of her wide
pelvis she intimated that she was capable of bringing forth the most
modern genus, a large-headed child. Because she was always
available for sex, the bull alone could no longer provide for the herd
sexually. He had to constantly stand watch over the 20 or so females.
That was a lot of work. The other men sensed this and become
sexually aroused as well. I imagine it in just this way: it becomes
dark. Fire burns in the cave. Thirty are fucking there. Groans in the
dark. The bull sees nothing. He gropes around and wants to tear two
of the fuckers apart. Maybe he gets hold of one, chokes and strikes
out at him. Then they ambush him. They cannot hold themselves
back any more and they murder him. As the sun comes up, the bull
lies beaten to death, the victim. Now they experience feelings of
guilt. Transfiguration follows the murder. I regard this theory of the
primal parricide, devised by Freud, to be a good explanation. The
loving God is nothing more than the murdered primal father,
projected and apotheosized in heaven. God forbade man to eat from
the tree of knowledge. Adam and Eve sinned, because they fucked
one another in spite of God’s prohibition. That is the original sin.
Everyone is infected by the primal sin. Why did the old father forbid
sexuality? Presumably, the old bull wanted to have Eve for himself.
Adam is his son and she his daughter. God made up for the incest by
producing Jesus, sanctimoniously represented as an immaculate
conception through the Holy Spirit. One must see through the whole
of Christian morality, the whole morass. These would be film
themes. It is also interesting that Mao Tse Tung had a swimming
pool built for himself in the basement, where he invited many
young girls for his enjoyment. There awakened the old bull. I made
192 ACTION!

a mistake in my commune: I allowed the adult men to participate.

That was an incredible advance. Reich said that marriage is the
hotbed of all mental illness.

We’ll discuss your commune shortly, but I’m curious to ask about
your “Zock” manifesto of 1967–how do you view it today? Though
undeniably a product of its times, its vicious social satire is in a sense
more relevant–and revelatory–today than it was in the 1960s.

Zock is a comedy. The new humor. It made many things look

ridiculous. I also make fun of myself. Everything’s overdone, but
behind it all there’s a small truth. I don’t believe anything. I don’t
even believe in myself. I also don’t believe in the commune, in
the future, and so forth. I believe that I’m very happy at present.
Whoever wishes to participate is cordially welcome. You too,
Mr. Grossman, to whom I give this written interview.
My dear Mr. Grossman, change yourself. Presumably you also live
wrongly. I enjoy confounding people–for example, all the dropouts of
the commune. As hippies they were in total confusion–stuck in puberty
or raised in a proletarian milieu. I resocialized them. I tamed them.
Now they are more faithful citizens as ever there were. I didn’t want
that. They only had the fear that I could see the traitor in them. In a
word, they had a bad conscience. They carried out a kind of parricide.
They opted for materiality, which I held to be disadvantageous. If
I appeared, it was as if the evil Genghis Khan were coming.
All violence that emanates from a center oppresses and prevents
the development of the individual. I take the view of Bakunin:
capitalism hinders the development of the individual. Those who
work capitalistically fritter away their lifetime on the clock, as
consumers fritter away their time with consumption.

What prompted you to stop making films in the early 1970s?

I won’t give that away. “That is my secret which I will take to the
grave.” This quote comes from one of my films, Back to Fucking
Cambridge, which deals with turn-of-the-century Austrian society:
Emperor Franz Josef, Klimt, Schiele, Gerstl and Schönberg. The
performers are artists such as Nam June Paik, Philipp Corner,
Dokupil, Orlane, Francesco Conz, Brus, Nitsch, Dieter Roth,
Oberhuber and Norman Rosenthal.
 MUEHL 193

But you are misinformed. I have never stopped making films.

I was in America in 1973. After that, I started the commune;
actionism led to self-representation and to material action. Art
became therapy.
But in the commune I made films that almost could compete with
Hollywood, such as Picasso and Van Gogh. I also filmed Emily,
Inferno, No cookies today (Kein Keks heute) and with the children I
made critical character portraits of Stalin and Hitler, among others.
Jesus was my last film. I could not finish my Andy Warhol film
because I had to go to prison. That was the enforced seven-year
break, because I was on State vacation. In jail, I developed a
screenplay for a “Freud” film.
I have never heard anything of you [laughs]. Perhaps I am
misinformed. You can also send me your works. I would like to
exploit you a little too. I find no one whom I could exploit. If one is
still a beginner, one can exploit Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso and
Marcel Duchamp. In jazz, Charlie Parker is not alone in this regard;
there is also Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Fats
Waller, Earl Hines and Sonny Boy Williamson. Schönberg too can be
exploited. But they are already gnawed-up carcasses–all of them. All
that survives is the bony remains. Now is the time in which the
worms begin to gnaw at me. Being exploited is a great honor for me.
The creation of the actions-analytic commune was not a
renunciation of public life–which I in fact despise–because I’ve never
been a politician. I make a higher art, the art of life. I no longer
worry about painting or the visual arts. I began the practice of giving
life form. The art of the 21st century is the formation (Gestaltung)
of the future.

Indeed, the creation of your commune seems to signify the

destruction of the boundaries between life and art, as the “frame”
that defines art becomes indistinguishable from the social “frame”
that defines a life-as-performance.

It did not destroy the boundaries, but it was stepping over the
circumscribed boundaries that lay in the minds of little dwarves. It is
completely natural to create one’s own life. A person cannot only
make art. That is a petit-bourgeois thing. The artist makes art, is
free, and lives without sex or must go into the whorehouse. It is
pitiful what Van Gogh or Gauguin had to go through. What kind of
194 ACTION!

freedom is that? Nobody is changed by art. Life is art and not a

show. Performance is a show that is limited by theatrical means. The
action also has a frame, a stage, and people stand around. As the
word “art” suggests, art is not serious, but artificially produced.
What interests me is the border that lies between reality and art. In
my actions I became aware that the crossing of boundaries is as
much formal as it is thematic. In my ten years of continuous
actionism, which practically speaking began in 1961 with the
destruction of the canvas, I worked my way from paintings to spatial
figuration and finally to temporal events. The process of
composition was more important than the pictures produced.
Creativity lies in the formative process, from which tableaux fall out
like a woman giving birth. Actionism crosses over into life and
changes everything, including your objectives.
I never wanted to change the political world. I have, at most,
undermined it. I am no warrior.

Now let’s talk about your first commune in a more direct fashion.
How was it formed, and what kinds of people joined it? Did the
commune members come from particular social classes? Had they
been previously involved with your art works?

They were naïve people who were washed ashore during the student
revolts of the 1960s. They came in innocent and left the same. They
didn’t know the meaning of the idea, “We don’t want to live in the
box of the two-person relationship anymore.” They didn’t
understand that idea. They were attracted by the notion of free
sexuality, but also came to see that it would overburden them. The
women in the commune were those who created culture. They chose
their partners for themselves. Those who could not successfully
inspire a woman to love them in outside society had even less success
in the commune because the competition was greater. Many were
very disappointed.
Here I invented the actions-analytical method. It was as effective
as an injection one receives to cure an aching back. For two or three
days the pain eases; then it returns at will. After the analysis one was
in the best mood, perhaps for a week until the next setback. Then the
analysand experienced a disappointment–a female commune
member was suddenly not as thrilled with him as he expected, and
then it all went downhill again. I don’t believe that analysis can
 MUEHL 195

really change anyone. People only change if they do something

themselves.

How many children were in the commune? How did you educate
them about sexuality–did you treat child sexuality differently from
adolescent and adult sexuality?

There were no sexual secrets. Everything was talked about.

Whenever children asked questions, they were informed. I remember
a story that my mother and my father told me when I was four or
five years old, that the stork would bring small children. We did not
tell our children such absurd nonsense. Sexuality should not be
treated as something special. One can talk about sexuality just as one
speaks of food. Coming to terms with sexuality is not perverse. The
perversion comes from the denial of sexuality. I believe that sexuality
is energy that binds society. If sexuality is embalmed in marriage, it
becomes misdirected energy, squandered. Yet marriage is hard to
avoid. Whoever does not marry is not nourished; no one is there
when something happens to you. The worst is when a partner dies
and the other remains old and alone. Often the surviving partner dies
soon after because nobody cared for him or her. The problems of old
age are a consequence of unresolved sexuality. In this respect, the
group is the ideal accommodation for the aged, not only financially,
but socially. No one wants to be alone. Aristotle once said that man
is a social creature. Sexuality is an exceedingly positive energy.
It brings us together. It is no original sin, nor does it soil; one should
not damn it as the church does.
Human beings are exogamous. Marriage contradicts this exogamy.
People search for variety and surge outwards because marriage is no
solution for sexuality. Two are too few. The ideal would be 12–14
adults of each gender. But that is still very few. Perhaps sexuality
desires even more diversity. The younger ones rush ever more
outward, as do our teenagers who have no sex inside the group.
They repudiate it, because they know one another too well–this
repudiation appears to be inborn from an earlier time, when there
was no sexuality inside the primal horde.
Our youngsters formed a band two years ago, the “Art & Life
Sahara Baby Jazzband.” There are 9 children. The oldest is 19 years
old and the youngest is 12. They practice incessantly, often 8 hours
a day, except when someone nags them to stop. Then they play in
196 ACTION!

the band and every

night at our “self-
representation”
evening session.
They made a
great leap to bebop
and Charlie Parker
in the shortest time.
No artist can
surpass this musical
giant. Charlie Parker
is Cezanne, Van
The Art & Life Sahara Baby Jazzband from the Muehl
Gogh and Picasso in
commune. Credit: V. Roussies
one: wild rhythm
and powerful expression mixed with objective mathematics. In the
meantime, the baby-jazzband has become well known in the Algarve.
I have taught them actionistic interludes. The public is very
enthusiastic about this, especially when they lay down the “Baby
Rap”: actionistic music without instruments (voice and noises). Jazz
musicians who have played in public jam sessions with our
youngsters are amazed at their ideas, and considered them to be no
ordinary act; one even predicted world fame for them if they can
continue on as they have up to now.

Can you tell me how you applied the principles of Wilhelm Reich in
the actions-analytical commune?

With respect to Reichian body therapy, I moved away from Reich’s

original notions to develop ideas of self-representation. The patient was
no longer a passive object, but became the active subject himself.
Actions-analysis had the aim of awakening creativity. By training as a
creative, expressive artist, the subject becomes capable of treating his life
as art, of developing ideas and of actualizing his own path. The artist
does not have a picture before him; he himself is integrated into the
picture and makes himself the object of creation. But I could not and
cannot comprehend Reich’s late period in which he worked with orgone.

In his “Character Analysis,” Reich suggests that the key to therapy

lies “not [in] the use of human language, but by getting the patient
 MUEHL 197

to express himself biologically.” This seems like a core idea in your

approach to Reich. When did you begin to study Reich’s work?

I began to study Wilhelm Reich’s work at the beginning of the 1960s.

I worked in Vienna in a therapeutic home which was founded
by some American Quakers after the war. It was under the
psychoanalytic leadership of Frau Rosenfeld, a friend of Anna Freud.
There I came into contact with psychoanalysis. Frau Rosenfeld gave
lectures, carried out dream interpretations, and conducted a kind of
group therapy. Later, a friend who wanted to become an analyst
asked me if I would like to be a patient for a training analysis
supervised by his teacher. I gladly participated for a very humble
compensation. During these two years I grappled with the literature
of Reich, Freud and Ferenczi, as well as that of Jung and Adler,
whom I do not value because they deny sexuality.
Psychoanalysts today make a living from the health insurance
companies. They totally conform to the State. Freud fought against
this tendency, as one gleans from reading Freud’s so-called
“Wednesday evening with Freud” psychoanalytic sessions.
I used the work of Wilhelm Reich as a stimulus. One should never
cling to a theory. One dare not remain an eternal student, idolater
and parrot. I would be an epigone and no artist if I only used
the experiences of others without developing them any further.
I went beyond normal psychoanalysis, emphasizing actionism’s
psychomotoric action. The essential idea was that through body
movements and above all, by breathing to the point of regurgitation,
one could enter the state of ecstasy. That brought me to Reich, and
the ecstasy brought me beyond him.

Some filmgoers in North America–who perhaps haven’t seen your

avant-garde shorts–may be most familiar with you from your
appearance in Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie. Is the
sensationalistic commune sequence in Sweet Movie an accurate
representation of life in the actions-analytical commune? Was there
anything you were unable to show in the film?

I really don’t like this film at all. It is downright kitsch. Today

I would prefer that the film hadn’t been made. There wasn’t much
to do; to a large extent, it was all prescribed.
198 ACTION!

Was anything cut from the film because of censorship problems?

No, nothing was cut out of the film on account of censorship.

Unsurprisingly, people tend to focus on the literally and figuratively

sensational aspects of your commune. But can you tell me something
about your actual communal life?

Today in the Algarve, eight women live in the group. With four of
them I have strong, long-standing sexual relationships: Claudia,
Violaine, Isabella and Margit. I am married to Claudia. The women
made a plan to divide up the nights with me fairly so that there are
no tensions. In the [earlier] Friedrichshof commune it was different,
simply because it was larger. There were 150 women. I was highly
coveted. A great many women were fixated on me and wanted to
have children with me. For me, that was pleasant. I even fell in love
with a 14-year-old, who also loved me very much. I became jealous.
She desired that I love her alone and prefer her above all the others.
When that was not the case, it all came to deep tensions and
differences. Obviously the young people were not satisfied with this
situation. I didn’t really come to terms with this problem; perhaps it
is a problem one cannot overcome. I believe that it is better for adults
not to attach themselves to adolescents, but to allow them to create
their own experiences of love. I think adolescents still need to
experience infatuation to overcome their fears of sexuality. Love
means to regress to a state of infancy. Infatuation is an incestuous
thing, whereby each partner feels loved like a baby and sees the
father or the mother in the other. Evolution clearly supplies us with
ardent feelings that, by infantilizing us, ease the way into sexuality.
Partners suddenly become hormonally compelled toward sexuality,
and what is more, are placed into a trance. But the realization of the
dream of love has not yet succeeded for anyone. Passion becomes
lovesickness and sexuality falls to pieces. Love is like a butterfly: if
one grasps for it, wants to take it in one’s hand, the dust falls off its
wings and it can no longer fly.
I don’t think that I have found the solution, but at least we have
come somewhat closer to it. We approach it asymptotically. One can
discard certain frustrations and foster an intelligence by which life
can pass by more happily, more securely, more creatively and more
carefree.
 MUEHL 199

To return briefly to Reich: Dusan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the

Organism [1971] presents Wilhelm Reich in a satirical, absurdist
light. Did you also approach Reich with a sense of humor, and
incorporate humor into your communal therapy? Or, on the contrary,
do you find that elements of Reich that might at first appear absurd
become rational when practiced normatively? Is it necessary to view
Reich with a sense of humor, or is humor a conventional defense
mechanism that cheapens and trivializes Reich’s work?

It doesn’t pay to talk about Makavejev. Sweet Movie is a mediocre

film–I saw it again years later and I was ashamed to have been
involved with it. Therefore I am surprised that this film made such a
big impression on you. Makavejev is no thinker. Neither is he a good
film director. He even had a crisis because Sweet Movie’s lead
actress, Carole, no longer wanted to film with him. She came to me
and I took over the direction for a short time–then Makavejev
stepped in again.
But all of that has little to do with Reich. I cannot approach Reich
with humor. I cannot joke. Humor is a characteristic of the turn of
the century: “That guy has humor”–apparently things are going very
badly with him and he is nonetheless merry. If I were personally to
encounter Reich, maybe I would joke around with him.

Despite your negative opinion of Makavejev, can you tell me

something about working with him? What was his opinion of your
commune?

He was really enthusiastic, but I think that is because he had in mind

the usefulness of the commune for his films.

In achieving a communal sexual life, did you go about destroying the

conventional distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual
relationships?

Not at all, certainly not! I must unfortunately confess that I had

at first avoided homosexuality. That is different today. I have
homosexual friends with whom I get along very well. The artist
has a large feminine component. His feelings are as strong as
those of a woman. He sets himself apart from the tough world of
heterosexual men.
200 ACTION!

I think that homosexuality is a product of education. Greece was

above all a homosexually constructed State, and the culture that was
produced at the time would never have been possible without
homosexuality–our present Western culture would be equally
impossible without it.

In the 1960s, you were employed as an art therapist for children–in

the therapeutic home you mentioned before. Were you able to
translate any particular therapeutic techniques you learned as an art
therapist into the therapies practiced in your communal life?

In the commune, where I invented actions-analysis, the patient

becomes an actor in front of the public and takes his therapy into his
own hands. Instead of dialogues, actions are carried out. This was
the origin of our so-called, “self-expression actions.”10
The material action can be carried out as individual or group
therapy. It takes place before an audience and has a festive character.
The therapist has the task of firing up the patient under analysis so
that he has the courage to continue, just as Duke Ellington stood up
in front of his soloists urging them on with his shouts, driving them
into frenzies that became creative ecstasy. The jazz musician gets into
a kind of trance when he improvises. He is suddenly “there.” He, too,
becomes an “actionist.” This ecstasy is not only a “being-outside-of-
oneself,” it is the highest convergence of form and reality. This form
of psychic discharge I understand as pure art and complete therapy.
Van Gogh would have surely killed himself much earlier without art.
I learned to synthesize visionary and rational thinking in ecstasy,
and to translate this into coolly formal pictures.

In the early 1990s, you were subject to a trial on charges of child

abuse, after which you were imprisoned. How did this trial of the
’90s differ from the morality trials you endured in the 1960s? Did
the Austrian and German arts communities support you in your
1990s legal battle more now than they did in the 1960s?

In the 1960s, I was publicly denounced for pornography. The cause

was the Christmas action O Tannenbaum in Braunschweig,
Germany. I lay with a woman naked in bed under a Christmas tree.
For the killing of the pig, I had hired a butcher with a slaughtering
gun. He tore the heart out and hurled it onto us. The heart was still
 MUEHL 201

twitching. Blood spattered. Breathless silence reigned in the room.

I slowly climbed high up a ladder and urinated on the woman and
the pig’s heart in the bed below. At that point, a women’s libber lost
control. She rushed the ladder on which I stood and screamed in
drawn out syllables: “You pig, you filthy swine!” I had 1 kg. of flour
handy and dusted her down with it. A white fog. She screamed
again, “You swine!” and she was gone, vanished. In the meantime,
someone attempted to pelt me with potatoes. He came closer and
closer and it was dangerous. I had another 1 kg. of flour and threw
it over him. The flour dust covered his face and his suit. He stood
there white as a snowman. The public laughed and even applauded.
That was the end of him and his potatoes. Some days later there was
a big political discussion. The butcher had been expelled from the
butcher’s guild. The director of the academy where our action had
been staged was fired, though he was later reinstated. Today both are
very proud of their courage. An association for the salvation of
human dignity had been formed, which filed a complaint against us.
The action was discussed in the German Parliament. I was acquitted
by the state prosecution on the grounds that it was a matter of art.
If this had been in Austria, I surely would have been locked up for
months, because I was naked, and would have faced charges of
desecrating religious symbols or indignity toward animals.
After my trial in 1991, letters of appeal to the Austrian president
arrived from artists in America and from artists all over the world.
But there was no response. The politicians were afraid of the right-
wing extremist Haider, who today sits in the government. His party
appointed the vice-chancellor, interior minister, finance minister and
justice minister. Fortunately something very curious came to pass.
When the EU intervened, Haider apparently pulled back and
installed a trusted woman as his proxy. It would have taken a lot of
courage to release me after I had been labeled a child molester and a
rapist. When the court in Austria pronounces the word “child
molester,” it amounts to character assassination. They wanted to
completely finish me off. Seven years: they thought I wouldn’t
survive at my age. I was in jail from 1991 to 1997. I was 73 when
I came out. Now I am 77.11 No parole was granted to me, although
it would have been a rightful entitlement as a first-time offender.
The last third of the sentence was not commuted either, and almost
everyone receives commutation. The rationale: I have too much
charisma and everyone would run back to me again.
202 ACTION!

My trial must be seen in connection with the dissolution of the

commune, which no longer functioned for a variety of reasons.
The increasing size, together with communal property, necessitated
a central organization, which led to bureaucratization and to a
strengthening of my authority, the extent of which I did not realize.
Looking back, it is incomprehensible to me that I was unable to
recognize the cause of the members’ dissatisfaction. I interpreted
their resentment as personal slights. The idea of free sexuality, at first
a genuine liberation, became an ideology over time, and that was
probably our greatest weakness in every way. Naturally, free
sexuality leads to a questioning of the father role. When we founded
the commune in 1970, the winds of change of the 1960s wafted
above us. Although we once managed our communal property
collectively, this practice can only work when the people identify
with the group. Bruno Kreisky, the Austrian chancellor who
supported us, said, “There is one thing that I don’t understand,
which under no circumstances could I accomplish in the socialist
party: why would people work without being paid, and surrender
their money to the collective? I can no longer go along with that. It’s
like witchcraft to me.”
Nevertheless, my task was to work against this tendency toward
dissolution, because the group had to care for 120 children.

I have read a number of conflicting accounts of the arrest and seven-

year prison sentence. At least one source I’ve read implies that your
arrest was the result of some sort of conspiracy, perhaps from within
one of the cliques in the commune. Is there any truth to this?

Because everyone was very tied to me, it was difficult for them to
dissolve the group. I had a great deal of influence. I had to be cut off.
I think there could have been other possibilities, but they believed
that they had no other choice. So then some people stooped to the
execution of the plan, that is, the “deposition,” with the help of the
State. I should have defended myself. I remained much too silent.
They alleged things that were not true, and the judge believed
everything they said without evidence or corroboration.
But to return once again to the essential problem: as Bakunin said,
“Every central organization leads necessarily toward oppression of
the individual.”
 MUEHL 203

Your present commune is located in Portugal. Do you have any

desire to return to Austria?

I have no love for the fatherland. I was always against that idea. My
homeland is with the group, wherever it is. If the climate is to some
extent tolerable, that’s great. I cannot understand how all the former
communal members have fallen back into monogamous
relationships. They often ask whether I see them as betrayers. At
most, they can betray themselves. Betrayal is an idiotic word that I
repudiate. They have abandoned an idea that probably would be
vital for them. They have given up a way of life that I take to be
necessary for life, one that produces happiness, at least for me. I am
an egoist–not a materialist, but an idealistic egoist. I think only of
myself, but in the sense that I would like to actualize myself to the
best of my ability. My ethical demand is to be flawless wherever
possible, in order to become capable of being affirmed by everyone
and to be able to integrate myself socially into the community. That
is my task.

Do you plan on making more films?

I have never stopped making films.

Now I make photo actions. I revived the “grimuid” theme from
actionism once again. What’s important isn’t the execution of a
program but, above all, the free associative communication between
the actors through grimaces. I probably never would have discovered
this new approach to actionism if my German dentist in Portugal
had not given me a portable set of dentures. It was this detachable
dental prosthesis that inspired me towards new “self-expression
actions.” I had been amusing myself in front of the mirror with my
toothless mouth in a childlike way already for more than a year.
I played the crazy, toothless, old man. I took the artificial teeth out,
put them back upside-down in my mouth and played Mr. Hyde.
At a high school reunion in 2001, all my classmates became
indignant about my prosthetic playfulness during a photo session.
My colleagues, all over 70 years of age, had similar devices in their
mouths and placed great store in hiding this fact. They felt violated
and said, “Otto, please stop, it is so terrible, it is so unpleasant.
Please stop it!”
204 ACTION!

The human being is not a predator. He does not need incisors to

realize his potency. His potency lies not in his teeth but in his head.
He replaces his incisors with the corresponding tool.
This new self-expression action is all about self-deformation, self-
irony and self-destruction. I’m clearing away all beliefs in illusion.
I’m unmasking myself. I make myself ludicrous and expose that
which everyone seeks to hide: his age. The collapse of my body and
the toothless mouth are powerful means of expression. I transform
myself into Dracula. I become Rumpelstiltskin. I lament, scream,
frolic and smile stupidly with senility at all those around me.
The feeling of happiness that these grimacing “jaw actions”
produces in me is overwhelming.
In my latest photoaction, which is presently showing in Paris,
I represent myself as a geezer, as a revolting old man. The actress
involved, Violaine, is cynical, eager to help like a nurse, disparaging.
Young, somehow very arousing. The French, my gallery owner, and
all those familiar with the photos compare Violaine to Marlene
Dietrich. Artists have been extremely enthusiastic over these “De-
monumentalizing” actions, in which I represent myself as a broken,
junkyard sculpture. I like it, and “my” Marlene Dietrich grimaces as
well. Vio is a great woman, my discovery. I really cherish her.
We create art naturally, without language. One can invent a text, but
the depiction, dance and gesture as we look at one another–what we
make–require no words. It calls to mind a silent film. Charlie
Chaplin is very superficial, a petit-bourgeois who demands pity
when he plays this oppressed, half-starved American fellow: a
pauper who never has anything to say. Admittedly, he’s very funny
and talented, in a circus-slapstick manner. But he should never have
taken on Hitler, because then he descended into sentimentality. At
the end, he should have hit harder, going into cruelty. One cannot
deal with Hitler with jokes and comic juxtaposition alone.

References
1. Thanks to Martin Christopherson and Danièle Roussel for their editorial
assistance. Otto Muehl’s website can be found at http://www.archivesmuehl.org/
homeen.html.
2. Brus, Muehl, Nitsch, Schwarzkogler: Writings of the Vienna Actionists. Edited
and trans. Malcolm Green. London: Atlas Press, 1999, p. 83.
3. Ibid., pp. 122–23.
 MUEHL 205

4. For a discussion of Kren’s montage, see Peter Tscherkassky’s article “Kurt Kren:
Lord of the Frames,” at http://www.hi-beam.net/mkr/kk/kk-bio.html.
5. Ibid., Green, p. 87.
6. Ibid., p. 20.
7. The 19th-century philosopher Max Stirner championed egoism and
individualism as a means of subverting oppressive social institutions (including
religion), and maintained that self-interest was the motivating factor in
human actions. His best-known work is Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum
(The Individual and His Property), written in 1844.
8. These actions are described at the end of the interview.
9. Muehl’s informal script and a photo of this 1964 action can be found on page
83 of Green’s edition.
10. Selbstdarstellung, or self-portrayal.
11. As of 2002, when this interview first took place.
Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay and Amira Casar on the set of The Piano Tuner of
Earthquakes (2005). Credit: Zeitgest/Photofest

“They’re Panicking, Look at Them!”

The Brothers Quay
by Damon Smith

Ever since their Palme d’Or-nominated Street of Crocodiles brought

them to the attention of critics and new fans in 1986, identical twins
Stephen and Timothy Quay (born 1947) have parlayed their willfully
weird stop-motion animation into a dazzling array of projects for
film, music and theater. Disciples of Czech surrealist animator Jan
Svankmajer and early pioneers like Ladislav Starevich and Walerian
Borowczyk, the Brothers Quay are masters of a dreamscape all their
own, creating phantasmagoric fables literally cobbled together from
the junk-box detritus of yesteryear: wire, string, spools, buttons,
forks, doll parts, flywheels, and other antiquated oddities and
homemade mechanisms. Equally inspired by the pessimistic strain of
Continental literary fabulism (Kafka, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz),
their hermetic, quasi-mythic visions of madness and existential
distress have an Old World patina that makes them as beautifully
otherworldly as they are beguiling.
208 ACTION!

Natives of Philadelphia, the Quays attended the Royal College of

Art in the 1960s for graphic design and soon acquired a taste for
Eastern European animation and puppetry, especially the tradition
of marionette theater extolled in German Romantic Heinrich von
Kleist’s famous 1810 essay, “On the Marionette Theatre.” Apart
from their own darkly fascinating shorts, which look and feel like
interpretive tweaks of nonexistent fairy tales (Nocturna Artificialia
[1979], This Unnameable Little Broom [1985], Rehearsals for
Extinct Anatomies [1988]), the Quays helped create Peter Gabriel’s
“Sledgehammer” music video, contributed an animated sequence to
Julie Taymor’s Frida (2002), and designed projected stage décors for
the Grand Ballets Canadiens production of Tchaikovsky’s The
Queen of Spades. In 1995, they directed their first live-action
feature, Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human
Life, based on Swiss writer Robert Walser’s tragicomic novel Jakob
von Gunten. Mark Rylance played the gloomy title character, a
submissive simp who enrolls in a purgatorial academy for domestic
servants out of a fatalistic sense of his own worthlessness.
After an aggravatingly long phase of inactivity (except for
two shorts, Duet [2000] and the haunting In Absentia [2000], a
collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen), the Quays are finally
back with The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), a mesmerizing
live-action fantasy rooted, like so much of their work, in waking
nightmares, Symbolist art and the literature of the fantastic. Set on a
remote island studded with cypress trees and perpetually aglow in an
amber, crepuscular light, Piano tracks the interlocking fates of three
characters: opera chanteuse Malvina van Stille (Amira Casar);
Mabusian scientist Dr. Emmanuel Droz (Gottfried John), who has
kidnapped Malvina and put her in a necromantic trance, intending
to imprison her voice in one of his ocean tide-triggered automatons;
and gaunt tinkerer Felisberto (César Saracho), the unwitting cog in
Droz’s scheme. Although the film’s narrative borrows from many
sources, including Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel and
Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Solus, it hews closely to Jules
Verne’s The Carpathian Castle, about the abduction of a famed diva
by a sinister Baron.
Of course, the main draw of this alluring fantasia is neither the
story nor the acting (though luscious Almodóvar alum Assumpta
Serna obliges with her turn as a sylvan enchantress), but the ethereal
visual atmosphere conjured by the Quays and cinematographer
 THE BROTHERS QUAY 209

Nic Knowland. Here they mix unusually rich high-def imagery (one
reverse-motion sequence in a shimmering moonlit grove is a direct
homage to Cocteau) with lurid animated sequences that depict each
of the seven musical automatons Droz has ostensibly brought his
Orphic piano tuner to the isle to fiddle with. Sometimes images
appear without warning, like a brief flash bulletin from the
subconscious, and it’s hard to know what you’re seeing: a laboratory
jar with a fleshy octo-whatsit pulsating within, a creaking set of
wheels and levers tensing fibrous wire, a puppet axman working to
some oblique, circuitous purpose. Through these and other profane
illuminations, the Quays chart a reliably unsettling path through
the nether regions of our collective imagination, exploring places
where the real and the virtual meld in the erotically charged realm of
the senses.
While the Quays are hardly hermits, there is an aura of mystery
hanging about the fraternal film artists that a face-to-face meeting
only partly dispels. Handsome, elusive and quick-witted, Stephen
and Timothy, 58, both sport a long mane of hair dramatically swept
back from their forehead, which gives them an almost Olympian
appearance. Also, each has a slight, quasi-Euro vocal inflection
(elfin, perhaps?) that belies their origins in the City of Brotherly
Love. In conversation, they not only finish each other’s sentences,
but refer to themselves using the collective pronouns “us” and “we.”
(Distinguishing one from the other on an audiotape is maddening!)
We spoke in New York in November 2006, as The Piano Tuner of
Earthquakes was getting its first U.S theatrical release.

Interview

What were the difficulties that created this giant lapse between your
two live action features, Institute Benjamenta and The Piano Tuner
of Earthquakes?

Timothy: We started right away after Benjamenta–we went to

Channel 4 with this project, and they made a lot of stipulations
about accessibility, color… Stephen:… a recognizable genre, so we
went for “poetic science fiction,” thinking like, That’ll pass muster!
And then we wrote a script and they instantly rejected it, so it
coasted for years and years. We would make revisions and try again
210 ACTION!

because a new person came in to Channel 4. That was rejected. In

the end, Terry Gilliam, through our producer–and we’ve known
Terry for a long time–our producer said, “Get Terry to put his name
[on it] as executive producer,” and like that, the German money was
on the table, and then the French money, then the Japanese, and
lastly the English. So that’s how we got a big co-production off the
ground.

Gilliam was already quite familiar with your work, wasn’t he?

Timothy: Yes. We’ve known him and he’s behind it–and I think it’s
great that he was earmarked as executive producer–but he hasn’t
even seen Piano Tuner yet.

One of the things I noticed right away in Piano Tuner was how many
of the same visual motifs and narrative themes from your prior work
found their way into this film. As Felisberto says at one point, “It
feels as though I’m living in someone else’s imagination.” I wonder
if that’s been a guiding principle for you in the work that you’ve
created.

Stephen: You mean living in each other’s imagination? [Laughter]

Maybe in the sense of creating something through which a viewer

can experience that objectively.

Stephen: I think it’s an external application from our point of view that
Felisberto says “I like living in someone else’s imagination,” meaning
Droz, something higher or beyond. We wouldn’t want to occupy each
other’s imaginations. It’s like holding up two mirrors. We tend to hold
the mirrors out, towards life, towards a kind of a theoretical beyond,
without getting into huge quotes. Timothy: In a way, I would say that
we reflect our mirrors toward libraries. That also clearly represents
something Bruno Schulz talked about–the apocryphal 13th freak
month, which is an area we keenly want to explore. And I think that
all the films could go into that niche, that bottom drawer.

One of the things that’s truly a constant across your animation work
and live action features is this fascination with oneiric imagery and
antiquated objects. How did you develop that fetish?
 THE BROTHERS QUAY 211

Timothy: Let’s just call it consistency. Because in a sense, if you’ve

been trained as animators or in graphic design and illustration or
painting, you rely on a peripheral world. We’ve never asked our
puppets to talk. So in that sense it frees them, therefore frees the
imagery and you, individually, have to read it. You’re not being
told to think. It’s for you to interpret. In that sense, it’s more like
ballet, where a choreographer choreographs rhythms, but there’s
never dialogue. So it gets much closer to the world we inhabit.
Stephen: Are you talking about the visual textures?

Set design, animation, the overall look that you get during production.

Timothy: It was our mother who took us to flea markets. We were

always drawn towards texture, towards the organic, nothing shiny
and computer-like. It’s in our side of the family: there are
cabinetmakers, there were tailors on one side. And I think wood, the
organic, is really crucial; found objects, dispossessed objects.
Stephen: And that they possess memory. History is something
they’ve brushed up against, and they hold all of history in their
bodies. And for us it’s a way of wanting to release that side of their
history, if possible.

Did you find a kind of vindication in that interest when you first
encountered the work of Eastern European animators and
puppeteers?

Stephen: I think what we recognized instantly was a coded language.

And there was a really strong tactility about the work, like
Starevich’s early films or Borowzyck’s early animation work. They
didn’t go for “cel” animation, which was labor-intensive and filling
in the lines. It was very graphic, it was cut-out collage, almost Max
Ernst-y, which I think gave the work right away a texture, and a very
bold graphicness. And above all, it was never made for kids. It was
already aimed at a very metaphoric language. Of course, kids could
look at it and be charmed by it, by the oneiric side of it, but for us it
clearly carried a deeper coded message. I think that’s why we liked
Eastern Europe, because of the subtlety of that coded language–what
you could smuggle under the table, while the façade was something
else. And clearly, it was very hard to see puppet work in America,
much less England. Only the East European schools still maintained
212 ACTION!

the schools for it. Timothy: To this day! Stephen: And they also had
a governmental system, socialism, that actually fully supported
animation, puppetry, and also puppet theater troupes. Every city had
its own troupe. We knew firsthand visiting Poland, going around to
some of the things and seeing the kind of work that they were doing.
It was amazing. And Russia was the same, Czechoslovakia too.

What were the specific challenges you faced making Piano Tuner, as
opposed to Institute Benjamenta?

Stephen: [Sarcastically] Oh, you mean to be “accessible,” to pick an

“acceptable genre”… Timothy: I think even when we wrote it, we
were under the impression that we were completely at liberty to do
what we wanted. When it came to the final editing of the film,
suddenly they all came out of the woodwork with a different idea of
what they thought the film was about. And their idea of accessibility.
They would make a point of saying “This, we don’t understand,” and
the French would say “Well, this we don’t understand.” It became a
mess. And the Japanese weren’t even there, amazingly. The English
were screaming bloody murder, screaming the loudest–and paying the
least. But that didn’t happen in Benjamenta, where the final cut we did
ourselves–so there we learned something. Also, with Benjamenta we
had an extra week compared with what we had on this film. It gave us
a lot more chance to explore and it wasn’t so rigid. With this last
production, it was [completed under] the sign of the watch, and we
just forced scenes through. Because there were a lot of special effects,
it took up a lot more time than the producers anticipated. So the
crunch came, and you suddenly are having to spend more time getting
those important plates for the special effects that were driving us crazy.
Next time, that won’t happen. Stephen: If there’s a next time. [Laughs]

Did any of those pressures find their way into the film, say, in terms
of editing?

Stephen: Lots of cuts. They even asked that some scenes not be
shot–just do without them. We did a kind of round-up to say no,
this, this, and this can go out. I think what happens is, because of
dramatic cuts, sometimes, you just drop the scene and plug it up with
[collides his hands]. Of course, either you make the leap or people
fall by the wayside.
 THE BROTHERS QUAY 213

There are a lot

of those elliptical
moments across your
work. Sometimes, in
Piano Tuner, it’s hard
to tell which world
we’re in.

Timothy: We didn’t
bat an eye about
cutting or suddenly
lopping something
Amira Casar and César Saracho in The Piano Tuner of
out because we
Earthquakes. Credit: Zeitgest/Photofest
thought, If you
bridge it to this
scene, then actually you are escalating something. People will either
take the hurdle or they’ll fall. And as the one French producer said,
“You lose some, but you gain a lot. Don’t be afraid. Make it as
musical and as visual as possible.”

When you’re creating an experience like The Piano Tuner of

Earthquakes for viewers, what is it you hope to elicit by way of a
response?

Stephen: For this one, ultimately, it’s the journey. It’s not going to be
a straight run-through. You’ll get lost, you’ll go into a deep forest
and get disoriented, but ultimately, you know, I guess you have to
feel your way through it without knowing exactly where you’re
going. There’s no handrails. I think that’s very important for us in
the short films, this sort of subjective rung or pathological rung that
you have to go with. And we’ve always said that the musical laws are
more important than the dramaturgical laws. It’s a feeling that you
think the feature film can be pushed along that route. [Long pause]

How did you make the crossover from animation to feature

filmmaking? What motivated you? Because it seems like a huge leap
from puppets to people.

Timothy: Well, it’s not that big of a leap. We do talk to people in our
life. I remember our producer [Keith Griffiths] said, “Why don’t you
214 ACTION!

think about doing a feature film?” And of course our first impulse
was precisely, as you said, Why? But we were reading Robert Walser
at the time and we thought, Yes, if we kept it chamber-like, under
control, we could do that. We were just beginning to do décors for
theater and opera, and I think that acquainted us with leaving the
studio and going to see the puppet sets blown up to 25 times, being
populated by a chorus of 80 singers, and that just gave us a kind of
gentle confidence that we could fill it with real people and not just
puppets. Stephen: But also, because all our life we’ve looked at live-
action cinema, we’ve seen how [others] have handled it. And there
are a lot animators who’ve moved from animation into live action,
people like Borowczyk, like Kon Ichikawa. But it’s also like any
composer who has been doing piano pieces, who then does a string
quartet. Finally, he says, “I’m going to do a symphony. I’m ready.”
There’s got to be a time when you feel it’s right and you make that
step. Of course, for us what was important by going from animation
to live action was to say that everything we learned in animation
wasn’t to be cast aside. It will be an independent film, it will be a
marginal film, we should do it with our sensibility. In Europe, the
independent strain is very on the edge and marginal and I think we
sort of aimed in that direction. And again, it’s not with arrogance.
It’s the feeling that this is the way it should be done.

One of the things that I think distinguishes your live-action work is

that there’s a very strong erotic component to these features, an
undercurrent of sensual power. And it’s triangulated in both Institute
Benjamenta and Piano Tuner between Gottfried John’s character and
the other, more innocent or vulnerable male and female characters:
Felisberto and Assumpta in the case of Piano Tuner.

Stephen: Eroticism is in the indirectness, rather than stating it out in

the open. There’s this dark undercurrent tugging all the time which
comes from our own sensibility, where you push it under rather than
float it on top of the surface. But I’m not sure that everyone would
share that view. It sort of surprises us.

Well, I see a lot of interplay between the female and male protagonist
in both films–Jakob and Lisa Benjamenta, Felisberto and Assumpta
or even the near-catatonic Malvina–that’s very sensual and physical.
 THE BROTHERS QUAY 215

Timothy: Yeah. We actually thought we brought it off better in

Benjamenta, maybe because it seemed less baroque than The Piano
Tuner. A dilapidated boarding school for servants: it’s just right to
create that kind of heat inside, the repressed feeling of eroticism.

I wondered if it had something to do with the fact that you were

using flesh-and-blood actors as opposed to objects and puppets.

Stephen: Probably for us the most sensuous moment in Institute

Benjamenta is when you suddenly see Gottfried’s big hands come up
from behind as he grabs the back of Lisa’s waist and pushes those
massive thumbs in, and she just arches back. It’s very disturbing, in a
way. I remember Gottfried, when Lisa [played by Alice Krige] goes like
this [swooning], at that point Gottfried went off set and we needed
somebody to put their hands on Alice. And I remember I did it, I put
mine on her and she just tremored. She just shivered. Timothy: And
I thought, God, I should try that! [Laughs] Stephen: She knew that this
was her incestuous brother, a mixture between the forbidden and a
side of her where the frisson was there. It was very powerful.

How did you come to decide on casting Amira Casar and Assumpta
Serna?

Stephen: Three of the originals who were on from the word go were
Assumpta, Gottfried and Cesar, who we wrote it for. Amira came on
at the last hour, basically, through our casting agent, who is Terry
Gilliam’s casting agent, and she mentioned Amira. We saw one film,
but we hadn’t seen Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell at that
point. It had just come out. But she said right away “No nudity.” She
was running far from that. She was in trouble, I think. But we saw a
film where she learned Arabic for her role and she was pregnant and
very depressed and we said, “That looks fantastic!” [Laughter]

Another deep, abiding strain in your work is a sense of the tragic.

There’s melancholy, despair, madness, a sense of entrapment. And
there’s often a character, like Gottfried’s Dr. Droz, who’s a godhead
figure, who’s devious in some way. In this expressive of your
worldview or is this an essential component of the types of tales you
gravitate toward telling?
216 ACTION!

Timothy: I suspect everything is slightly doomed. Even in the

animation films–and I don’t mean “doomsday”–there’s a kind of
fated quality, to be unhappy or to be caught in some kind of elliptical
loop or something. [Long pause] Yeah, we should correct that,
shouldn’t we? [Laughter] Stephen: I guess it’s true. It’s the kind of
literature that we choose: You could lay them one on top of the
other, and if we pooled them all together that way, it would be purely
indicative of the level we’re choosing.

Those qualities seem to be integral to the genre of the fairy tale itself.

Timothy: True. Normally, you would expect that everyone would

live happily ever after. But Walser was very deeply involved in fairy
tales and wrote a few reworkings of fairy tales and gave it a very
dark slant. And Piano Tuner is very Bluebeard’s Castle with Droz’s
obsessive collecting of eight voices. I was thinking of Walser when he
admitted himself to the institution. The man who wrote his bio
visited him 18 or so years later and said, “Robert, why don’t you try
writing?” And Walser said, “I’m not here to be writing, I’m here to
be mad.” Stephen: It’s like in In Absentia, where a woman’s
condemned to the madness of writing letters to her husband as a
form of catharsis. Her writings are a kind of exquisite mud, a kind
of misery. They’re unintelligible, but in that film we’re using his
example. Because Walser was in the same institution that Adolf
Wölfli was, and we were told he was given two pencils a day. That’s
the little detail we have in In Absentia.

Let me ask you a little more about the technical aspects of The Piano
Tuner of Earthquakes. I’m a fan of 19th-century Symbolist painting,
so I recognized immediately the visual reference to Arnold Böcklin’s
The Isle of the Dead, which provided the look of Droz’s island and
some of the lighting and set design.

Stephen: He painted five of them, you know!

Yes, and one is hanging here in New York, at the MOMA. You
should go see it.

[Gasp, they look at each other with delight.] Timothy: Which

version? [Laughter] Stephen: That was a crucial image right from the
 THE BROTHERS QUAY 217

beginning, as was the famous painting by Magritte, The Empire of

Light, where it’s daytime above this beautiful blue sky and then you
pan down and there’s this dark forest and this little house where the
lights are on. So it’s simultaneous day above and night below. We said
to [cinematographer] Nic Knowland, “That’s the sort of atmospheric
climate that the film should really inhabit.” And the idea of
Earthquake Island just seemed like part of the archetype. When we
talked about doing science fiction, you had to go for these big, grand
archetypes, like the mad composer or the Earthquake Island. Hence
Böcklin, the doomed opera singer, seven days to tune the automatons,
a “final performance,” all that sort of thing. Those elements should be
one-eighth of [what’s] showing on the surface; the seven-eighths below
the surface was really where we wanted to operate, around the
contamination between, say, the automata and the live-action realm.
Who belonged to whose realm.

How did you and Nic Knowland work on the lighting scheme for
this film using these paintings as sources?

Stephen: We shot in high-def, which we thought would be the best

way to keep things homogenous. Apart from showing Nic those
images, we desaturated a lot in post-production. That original
gambit where Channel Four said, “It has to be in color,” but we said,
“Okay, fuck you, we’re going to design it in black and white” and
we’ll put color in the faces and a yellow handkerchief or something
like that. So we tried to do as much black and white as possible on
the central side of the color. But with the last one, Nic came down
and saw all the models that we had built, so he knew the tonalities.
For Benjamenta, we wrote in, very powerfully, all the lighting
states–and that the light had to be an erotic light–and he responded.
You really didn’t have to say much. He just took off and ran with it.
We’d seen some of his work in black and white, like the film he shot
on Shostakovich [The Story of Shostakovich], so we knew he
could handle black and white. And he also worked with a very
interesting ballet troupe called DV8. And he did a film version of
some of their work which again showed that he worked very
theatrically. So we said “He’s our boy.” We interviewed a couple of
people, but I think there was no doubt. He’s very intuitive, he’s very
quick, and he’s a real gem to work with. Then we’ve also done
another film ballet [Duet: Variations on the Convalescence of “A”]
218 ACTION!

with him–it’s only 18 minutes–but it makes you shiver, what he does.

He’s such a great talent.

Can you give me a quick and dirty lesson in how you create stop-
motion animation, such as the wood-chopper automaton from Piano
Tuner?

Timothy: Yes. The set would have been about 4 ⫻ 4. The top is about
that big [indicating the 3-inch-high ax-wielding figure], it has an
armature inside it, bore and socket, screwed into the ground. Then
you start to raise his hand up, just a little bit, then you make a shot
and another one. It just multiplies like that. And you light it, but it’s
all very small pin light that we use. So it’s incredibly simple.
[Laughter.] It’s like a piece of metal with wire and mirrors on them.
Then you dangle the light into those mirrors while aiming the
mirrors down. You can really make a very fine sort of pin lighting.
Basically, all of it was done like that.

How much is planned ahead of time, to coordinate all these

moments for 24 frames per second?

Stephen: We said that there would be seven automata, and we knew

that every one should have a cycle or a loop. The little guy looks up,
he shouts something, then goes to fell the tree, but the ax slips and
bounces off and cuts his leg off, like this, and then he points to it and
it bleeds into the water and then it starts all over again. Which is
really what automata, if you wind up an old one, that’s what they
do: one figured loop for infinity. That’s all. But what we wanted
originally was that the automata are run by the tides, so when the
tide comes in, off they go. When the tides go out, they become inert.
But we also wanted–as the tides increased, or if there were variations
in the tide–to introduce variations in what the puppets would do. So
in theory, there could be 364 variations. It would have been
impossible to film. We realized it was creating too much complexity,
something we didn’t have the time to explore, and we had to back
off that kind of embellishment. Of course, Felisberto arrives, and
depending on what point he arrived, we looked at whether it was in
the middle of the night or the daytime, when they were inert. At first
he’s charmed, and then he realizes they have a secondary strata,
which he has to build off, like a mystery solver has to detect what’s
 THE BROTHERS QUAY 219

going on. And of course, he has to divine that this is a symbol of

Malvina. That’s your dirty lesson. [Laughs] It’s all done on
camera. There was no special post-production. We did shoot it all in
the camera.

How much do you think that your commercial work of the past ten
years has fed into your film shorts and features?

Timothy: It’s just the opposite. We’re hired to do commercials

because of previous work. I don’t think there’s been any commercial
[job] that’s informed us. The only thing that a couple of commercials
did was allow us a bit of post-production work, digital post-
production, which we got familiar [enough] with to know “Ah, we
can do this.” Commercials have big budgets. Whereas usually, like
on Street of Crocodiles, or any of our animation films, there’s never
any budget for post-production. None, ever. You try to do as much
as you can inside the camera.

What is your scheme, then, for pushing yourselves ahead, creatively

speaking?

Stephen: Ideally, what we’d like to do is Bruno Schulz’s novel

Sanatorium. We don’t have grand schemes. It’s better that we be
pushed into a corner. Our idea is to be pushed further and further
into a corner where another kind of infinity opens up. I mean, to do
In Absentia II would be great. We wanted to do it from the
husband’s point of view, but nobody’s bitten. Every time we’ve had
a project, like Benjamenta, it’s closed doors for us. Absentia closed
doors for us. On Crocodiles, we got Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”
out of it. Otherwise, basically, we don’t get any work.

How exactly did Benjamenta close doors for you?

Stephen: We didn’t work for ten years. That’s what we felt. That’s
the two of us being paranoid. Nobody would accept another feature
film project from us. We did some commercials and a lot of theater
and opera. But we didn’t do one film that whole time.

Do you–either of you–ever have a desire to work alone, apart from

the other?
220 ACTION!

Stephen: No, you’re sort of joined both psychologically and

metaphorically at the hip or at the heart. I think the kind of work
that we do is very demanding. Most animators tell us how they envy
our duality. We’ve grown up together our whole life. We went to art
school, and we each did our own art, but when it comes to film, we
have to come together–they’re not going to give you two budgets to
make two films. And it’s forced us to work things out. And who
better than identical twins could feel at home with the other? If
Timothy has an idea, immediately you sort of build on it, and it goes
quickly. It’s really just focusing it, where you’ve got lots of bottles of
wine on the table and notepaper and the film evolves. Timothy:
There’s a lot of intuition. And when we start to actually make the
puppets and build the décor–it’s a stage where you really open up.
That’s where the journey really starts to take place. So it’s very
important, that expiration, that sigh, it’s very important for us. And
if it was somebody else you were working with, they’d say, “Well,
what are you doing?” and you’d say, “I’m exploring.” They’ve
usually got storyboards, and it’s all blocked out. But we don’t have
storyboards, we have it here [points to his head], between us. On a
commercial, they ask for storyboards and we do it, reluctantly.
Stephen: Our hands sort of edge into the film–he from the left and
I from the right–and we edge toward the making of film, very slowly,
a bit like the tide comes in from two angles.

Does it ever present any conflicts for you when you’re trying to
direct together?

Stephen: You mean on the features? There you’re in public. When

we’re doing animation films, no one else is around, ever. It’s just the
two of us beavering away, you know, in a dark room, 12 hours later.
Timothy: It’s hard to be intuitive when you’ve got 42 crew behind
you and they’re like, “Hey look, they’re being intuitive!” or “Look,
they don’t know what to do here. They’re panicking, look at them!”
[Laughter] Because you’ve really got to represent a united front, even
if it’s going badly. It’s scary. If you do it once every ten years, you
don’t have that confidence or that experience. Stephen: Or Gottfried
[John]’s acting up.

He acted up on the set of Piano Tuner?

 THE BROTHERS QUAY 221

Stephen: Yeah, this time he was very edgy, very tetchy. Benjamenta
was a dream, but in this film he was always on edge. A few times, he
started shouting and everybody just backed off and ran into a hole.
[Laughing]

He was having a Klaus Kinski moment.

Timothy: Yes, he was having a Klaus Kinski moment. He came a

couple of times unprepared, he didn’t know his dialogue. And of
course he reacted and embarrassed himself. He apologized. He’s very
good, very honest like that, but it was a bit scary when it happened.

That temper worked in service of his character, I would imagine.

Stephen: Well, it does. For all the tetchiness, what we were surprised
by as we cut the film [was that] he was all there, not what we could
remember of him being uneasy, uncomfortable. Also, he couldn’t
remember his lines, so he had [notes] all over [the set], just like
Brando did. Watch the next time, you can almost see him looking
[imitates the actor looking up at cue cards], he’s just reading the text.
But English isn’t even his first language–French is his better second
language–and he did it very well.

Both Institute Benjamenta and Piano Tuner of Earthquakes involved

the casting of multilingual, international actors speaking in English.
Was that deliberate?

Stephen: On this film, there had to be a German contribution, hence

Gottfried. The French needed a contribution, so Amira. The other
two they let us have–the two Spaniards, of which one is Basque,
Cesar, and Assumpta is Catalan–but the Germans and everybody
wanted it to be in English, because it gave it more… [trails off]
Timothy: What’s interesting is that the film, I mean, it’s a Euro
pudding. And we know that, we’re aware of that. But what intrigued
us was that in Paris, because it’s now subtitled, they can hear the
sound of the English but they can actually read the precise text. And
that gives it a kind of remoteness at the same time. They can read
what’s actually being said, because a lot of people do have a problem
with hearing some of the lines. Although we know what’s being said,
222 ACTION!

we can see a lot of people saying “I didn’t quite get that.” They all
came back in and dubbed their lines with a coach. But you know, an
accent is an accent. And probably because there’s a German accent,
a French accent, and Cesar’s Basque accent was heavily influenced by
him living in Sweden, so he has a heavy [one]. Amira speaks
beautiful English–she was born in Ireland–and English is her first
language, too, so she was flawless. [Beat] But she barely spoke.
[Laughter]

What you call a “Euro pudding” in some ways contributes aurally

to that feeling of alterity and otherworldiness.

Timothy: Yeah, a strange scientist on some remote island–it could be

off the coast of Italy or Albania, for all you know. Droz is German
but he happens to like a French opera singer. And he happens to have
a Spanish maid who happened to have answered a want-ad column.
How can you tell the piano tuner’s [nationality]? But in a way, you
should feel like that. It’s like [unintelligible name]’s dance troupe.
Every nation is there, and every one speaks in their nationality and
we always liked that. She made all that fiction come together, but I
know that it can freeze out a lot of people as well as pull them in.
You win some and you lose some.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet has gotten a lot of accessibility with his last two
films, Amelie and A Very Long Engagement. Is that something that
interests you, that kind of accessibility? And would you ever
consider working in the States again?

Stephen: It was really with the Aliens movie that he made a big hit,
didn’t he? Somehow he always got the right project off the ground
that allowed him to keep building his confidence. And for us, when
you do something every ten years, it’s hard to get that. Did he think
when he was doing Amelie that he was really being accessible, or
that this is a postcard from France that Americans will love? I didn’t
particularly like the film, it was too sweet. Timothy: But is that a
calculated venture that he made? I don’t know. Either you have that
directorial skill where you say, “I know how to make something
commercial,” or you’re like us. We don’t know. Or if we did, it
would be by accident. There’s certain ways you want to tell a story,
and you go with your intuition and hunches.
 THE BROTHERS QUAY 223

And yet you have a pretty hardcore audience of people who really
appreciate your artistry.

Timothy: When we went out to Los Angeles to the Academy of

Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last spring for an animator
conference, we thought, Oh, okay, there’ll be 19 people in the
audience, of which we’ll know half a dozen. And it was sold out. So
we said, Maybe L.A. needs that kind of work. It is a marginal thing,
but it’s quite intense, and I guess we all need our alternatives.

David Lynch is fairly uncompromising in his view, which is deeply

indebted to French surrealism. And people go to see his movies.

Stephen: Yeah, right. We’re big supporters of his. Is his new one
out yet?
V. Women in Revolt:
Artist-Activists

“I wanted to show that women think as well as feel and that what
you so often get when you listen to a woman’s story is a feeling. But
behind it is the ability to analyze and figure out what happened and
why and what to do about it.” –Allie Light

14. Allie Light

15. Barbara Kopple
Allie Light in Dialogues with Madwomen (1994).
Credit: Light-Saraf Films/Photofest

Dialogues with Madwomen:

Allie Light
by Gary Morris

The connection between mental illness and female articulation,

assertiveness and creativity is one that society has nurtured. The idea
that a woman who speaks her mind, acts in her own interests
and–most significantly–openly expresses her sexuality must be
insane goes back millennia, linked to the concept of “female
hysteria” recorded by Plato and found even earlier in Egyptian
papyri. Closer to home is the modern woman whose refusal or
inability to conform to stifling social norms has resulted in her
incarceration and abuse at the hands of family, church and the
mental health industry who gain from the silence of women.
In Dialogues with Madwomen (1994), filmmakers Allie Light
and her husband Irving Saraf have coaxed seven “madwomen”–
including Light herself–into telling their stories. Using a mixture of
home movies, archival footage of mental wards, reenactments and
(mostly) interviews with their subjects, Light and Saraf have created
a complex, moving portrait of women in whom depression,
228 ACTION!

schizophrenia and multiple personalities coexist with powerful,

sometimes inspired levels of creativity.
These women are often dazzling in their verbal facility, talking
with honesty, humor and passion about the most intimate details
of their lives. The first interviewee is director Light, who recalls
the loss of interest in her domestic life that made her check herself
into a hospital for treatment. She tells of her doctor’s unusual
attempts at behavior modification: “One weekend he told me I could
go home if I promised to bake a turkey. The next weekend I could
go home if I promised to mop all the floors.” Her depression, which
happened in 1963, may have been her unconscious mind’s way of
telling her she could do more than bake turkeys and mop floors.
Eventually, against the advice of others, she pursued a career as a
teacher and filmmaker, and it’s clear that her depression was a key
factor in this decision.
We also meet R. B., an African-American woman whose troubling
exposure to what she calls “the sons of the ruling class” at Stanford
University helped her decide to drop out. After being raped in a hot
springs, “I left my body,” she says, eventually losing her apartment
and living on the streets. R. B. cooperated with director Light in
recreating scenes from her history, including haunting footage of her
huddled barefoot in the corner of an airport bathroom, pulling a
hood over her face and going to sleep.
R. B. is typical of the “madwomen” in this film, but suffers
specifically from an unpredictable euphoric state that transforms her
into an instrument of powerful self-expression. One scene shows her
sitting alone in a stairwell at Stanford, throwing back her head and
singing an evocative melody. One of R. B.’s poetic descriptions of her
early sense of moving through unknown terrain–“As a child, I’d
butterfly up to the ceiling”–is a persuasive metaphor for the power
of the interior world to break through social strictures.
Light found two of the women through her teaching. Hannah, her
T.A. at Oakland, California’s Laney College, is a manic-depressive
obsessed with Bob Dylan. She talks about the powerful lure of
madness: “I do believe in these non-ordinary realities… there’s
something trying to emerge. It feels intensely alive, which is why it’s
so hard to give up…it feels so imaginative.” Hannah’s imagination
helps her create a variety of fascinating visual and performance
artworks.
 LIGHT 229

Dee Dee is Light’s other former student seen in the film. She
methodically documents the things the Catholic Church taught her
were good: “dying…self-mutilation. The nuns were quite violent. A
lot of us would cut ourselves secretly.” Dee Dee took extraordinary
steps to prove her lack of personal self-worth and her adherence to
church norms by violently attacking her own body. Eventually she
attained some kind of peace with herself, became a lesbian, and is
studying homeopathy.
Most of the subjects of the film live in the San Francisco Bay area.
Mairi, a multiple personality, is an Oakland librarian. She tells
horrific (and apparently not uncommon) tales of abuse at the hands
of her family, but she too has moved toward a situation where the
psychic fragmentation of multiple personalities was no longer
needed as a coping strategy. She can talk with humor about her
situation now: “I love the fact that I’m pretty, that I’m a lesbian, that
I’m a good librarian!” she says.
One of the most disturbing, but also inspiring, stories concerns
Susan, a strong woman who was viciously abused from childhood,
but speaks with leveling insight into her own condition. Like most of
the women here, in spite of the sense of personal power that informs
her life, she is never far from the dark side of her own emotions:
“One of the last vestiges of immense anger I have left inside of me,”
she says, “is that I was totally robbed of any innocence.”
Karen Wong, who produced the film and is one of the seven
subjects, was raped and murdered during the filming. She describes her
early awareness of racism and becoming politicized, joining a
progressive Maoist group that–typical of doctrinaire radical
groups–kicked her out when she appeared to have “mental problems.”
Karen’s sardonic sense of humor, a coping mechanism common to
these women, emerges: “It’s 1980, Reagan years, I could write a
resume saying, ‘Ex-communist madwoman, will you hire me?’”
Dialogues with Madwomen indicts the murderous axis of family-
church-medical establishment that moves swiftly to smash
extreme modes of self-expression on the part of women. At the same
time, the film is not simply a detached problem drama. Light shows
that these women exist both as part of society and as unique
individuals capable of serious cultural contributions. The sometimes
uncontrollable psychic and artistic forces that gave society the excuse to
lock them up has also helped them survive and in some cases flourish.
230 ACTION!

Interview

Why did you make Dialogues with Madwomen?

The first thing was the growing need to tell my own story. I was a
Women’s Studies teacher for many years, and I always tried to share
my experiences at Langley-Porter and at San Francisco General.
I taught women in the arts and, you know, you make art from your
own life. And what it did was, I got these amazing stories back from
students, about themselves, their mothers and their grandmothers.
Actually two of the women in the film are from my class. Hannah,
the woman who loves Bob Dylan, was my T.A. at Laney College.
And Dee Dee, who walks into the ocean. This was an assignment she
did for my class. She did it with slides. I loved that image so much,
I had it on my desk for ten years. Then when I started to get the
money for the film, I knew I wanted to have her on the film and
I had to track her down. She was living in Juneau, Alaska. She came
back and she walked into the ocean again. She had done it originally
to a poem her lover wrote, an adaptation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl
written from a lesbian point of view. And so that whole poem
culminated in the walk to search for Sappho, as she says in this film.

Where did you find the other women?

Mairi, the woman with multiple personalities, Irving and I met when
we were taking care of a friend who had a brain tumor. During the
year and a half of chemotherapy, Mairi and I became friends. When
she saw footage from some of the other interviews, she told me she
was a multiple personality and asked if I would be interested. Then
Susan, who was tossed back and forth between her mother and
father, her therapist was a friend of ours, and he had seen some of
the material and he said, “I have this client I’ve been seeing for seven
or eight years, and she’d be wonderful in your film.”
Karen Wong and I met when we both joined the Writers’ Union.
She was actually the associate producer on the film. After her
murder, it was really impossible for us to work on the film. It was
delayed at least a year by that tragedy. We just couldn’t look at her.
Then R. B., the African-American, was introduced by mutual
friends who were studying this therapy called process work and
R. B. was doing that. She’s amazing because she can do just about
 LIGHT 231

anything. She has

her law degree
from Stanford, and
passed the bar, but
she works mostly
for arts organiza-
tions. She did all the
music for the film.

People who see the

film will want to
know what the
women are doing
now. Hannah in Dialogues with Madwomen (1994).
Credit: Light-Saraf Films/Photofest

Well, everybody is really about the same, they’re living their lives.
That’s one reason for putting the crew in at the end. I really wanted
people to see that this was a film, not real life. There’s much more to
these women’s lives than you’ve seen here.

And have they all seen the film?

Yes. In fact, I have this wonderful letter from Dee Dee, saying
“I want you to know I just looked at it for the 100th time!” She’s
back in Oakland now, studying homeopathic medicine.

Was it difficult to get them to open up the way they did? Karen
talked about being repressed.

I think her interview was the most difficult. But none of them were
as difficult as you would think, because the camera, as Irving says, is
a great confessional. People will say, “I don’t want to talk about such
things,” and you turn on the camera, and they almost invariably do.
And where else do you get so much focused attention, with a whole
group of people standing around hanging on every word you say, so
that helps. And I think the fact that they all knew I had done the first
interview with myself, and I wasn’t hiding behind anybody. That
really helped develop trust. I have much greater respect for the
person who sits in front of the camera now!
232 ACTION!

This film seemed visually very complex. Was it more challenging

than previous ones?

It was. It’s a step beyond our last film, Shadow of the Stars [1991]. Lots
of formats. [Laughs] But Irving and I both feel the documentary form
has to change–it’s too stilted. As more and more docs get theatrical
runs, and are getting longer, they have to become more dramatic.

The culture seems to be more receptive to documentaries–to reality.

And actually, when docs first began, years ago, they were scripted.
Flaherty’s films were made from scripts. Then when cinema vérité
came along, people were just fascinated with capturing what was
there, and they forgot about the interior world. That doesn’t get
realized through cinema vérité.

What kind of budget did you have?

Irving and I raised $20,000, and we put in $43,000 of our own.

A lot of people think that madness, so-called, comes out of nowhere.

But the film links it up with their environment.

I didn’t set out to make a film about child molesting or sexual abuse,
but it’s there. It’s probably the common denominator, although three of
the women were not abused sexually as children, Karen being one of
them. But then look what happened to her. Eventually, we all get it.

The target’s still there. There’s that constant motif in the film of the
authoritarian male who’s indicting the sexuality of the woman–for
example, your encounter with that weird doctor asking if you kissed
your husband’s penis.

That’s still a hard story for me to tell, because even this many years
later there’s still something in me that feels I must have been
provocative. Irving constantly reminds me that it’s not me, but the
doctor, who should be ashamed.

Over the past 30 years or so, there’ve been attempts to redefine

schizophrenia as a not unreasonable response to a chaotic world–the
R. D. Laing school. Do you think there’s been progress there?
 LIGHT 233

I certainly think you can see it in the stories in the film. I don’t know
if it’s generally recognized. It should be. Laing did make a big
impression. But certainly in Mairi’s case, if you think about multiple
personalities being madness, heavens! It’s not. It’s sanity. What could
be more sane than to split off a little piece of your mind to take all
the abuse? That’s very sane.

A coping strategy. These women all have strong, creative

personalities, and that’s all mixed in with this view of them as
“madwomen,” which sounds ironic.

In the fifties, any woman who was articulate and spoke out could be
labeled mad. I wanted to show that women think as well as feel and
that what you so often get when you listen to a woman’s story is a
feeling. But behind it is the ability to analyze and figure out what
happened and why and what to do about it.

You also make clear connections between the idea of art and
madness. For instance, you show Karen looking at ocean waves
where she sees “mocking faces,” then you cut to an art print of ocean
waves. Can you comment on this connection?

The only similarity between them is in the imagery, in that artists know
what to do with that kind of imagery. You can take that power and
use it, whereas you sort of get lost in it when you’re “mad.” When I
was depressed, it was the least likely time I could work as an artist.
Whereas somebody in a manic state could make art out of that feeling.

Hannah seems to be a good example of that.

Yes, she’s prone to do all kinds of things when she’s in a manic state.
She says the only thing that limits her is that she doesn’t have good
concentration, she can’t focus on a project. That’s the other side.
Now R. B. also has this euphoric state, where she’s extremely
creative and hears the music she composes.

In the movie she has a great description of the tremendous rushing

sound that came to save her during a trauma.

And that was true when she was a bag lady, she had that little
musical instrument in her head.
234 ACTION!

How has the film been received so far?

We thought we had this little film on rinky dink equipment, that it

would be like a guerrilla film, playing only to women’s groups. After
the opening at the Castro, the first call I had was from a psychiatrist
who wanted it for the APA. But he didn’t want to pay a rental fee.
I told him, “I couldn’t get one dime from any of the helping
professions when I needed money to make the film. Not only should
you pay rent, but you should pay a rather high rental fee!” Of course
I never heard from him again. The film will be shown at the World
Congress of Psychiatrists in Hamburg. That came from out of the
Berlin showing. The film has taken off. It won the prize at Sundance,
and from there went to Berlin. Then all kinds of good things have
happened.

How has the film affected you personally?

I have my struggles with the visibility of my life. And so I’ll be glad

when this year is over, and I don’t have to stand up before an
audience and say I’m a “former anything.”

You want to be a present-day something!

I’m pretty private, but it’s really rewarding when people come up
afterward and tell their stories. There’s such a blurred line between
who gets committed and who doesn’t. It often doesn’t depend at all
on what the behavior is. Somebody once said to me, women are in
mental hospitals, and men are in prison.
Barbara Kopple. Credit: Photofest

Shut Up & Sing: Barbara Kopple

by Damon Smith

New York native Barbara Kopple has been a vital and socially
progressive voice in documentary filmmaking for the past three
decades, bringing a compassionate and unblinking scrutiny to the
lives of miners, meatpackers, professional musicians, journalists and
even disgraced boxing champ Mike Tyson. In her career-making,
hard-hat couplet Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and American
236 ACTION!

Dream (1990), Kopple illuminated two of the more shameful

episodes in recent U.S. labor history, demonstrating an abiding
sympathy for the struggles of ordinary people and training her gimlet
eye on the ironies and ignominies of economic oppression.
One of the founding members of the collaborative group that
produced Winter Soldier (1972), a soldier’s-eye view of atrocities in
Vietnam with disturbing parallels to Bush Inc.’s military
misadventures, Kopple began making films while attending college
in West Virginia. In 1973, she spent a year living in a small Kentucky
town filming the ugly, embittered, ultimately violent conflict between
workers seeking a union contract from their overlords at Eastover
Mining Company, and the gun-wielding scabs sent into their midst
by greedy coal operators and their lapdogs in local law enforcement.
Kopple, who was targeted by one goon for hoisting a camera during
an early-morning picket-line melee (a chilling incident plainly visible
in the Criterion DVD of the film), won an Academy Award for
Harlan County, U.S.A in 1976. Today, Harlan remains one of the
most uncompromising depictions of class strife in American cinema,
a gritty, fiery, visually dynamic testament to human dignity and the
heroic spirit of resistance.
With her next film, American Dream, Kopple followed another
labor standoff, this time between striking meatpackers at a Hormel
plant in Minnesota and corporate negotiators who wanted to
drastically reduce their hourly wages and benefits despite a
Reaganomically splendid year of profits. Forgetting their own
complicity in a factory system where bottom-line economics had
become de rigueur by the mid ’80s (thanks to the advent of the almighty
blockbuster), Academy voters responded favorably to Kopple’s Dream
and honored her with another Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
Since then, Kopple has been very active as a director and producer,
working with leftie media critic Danny Schechter on two projects,
Beyond JFK: The Question of Conspiracy (1992) and WMD: Weapons
of Mass Deception (2004). She also directed a postmortem on the
rebellious era of ’60s music, My Generation (2000), which followed
Gen X revelers at Woodstock ’94. Bearing Witness (2005), an A&E
doc on female combat journalists, aired in 2005, followed by the
Stephen Gaghan-scripted teen drama Havoc (2005). But her biggest
commercial success came with Wild Man Blues (1997), an intimate
portrait of Woody Allen as he leads his New Orleans-style, hot-jazz
band on their 1996 tour of Europe.
 KOPPLE 237

Our conversation was occasioned by the release of Shut Up & Sing

(2006). Co-directed with Cecilia Peck, Sing is a backstage portrait of
the Dixie Chicks, the gutsy, talented country music sirens who told the
Dark Prince of Pennsylvania Avenue and his neocon cohorts to take
their war and shove it–sort of. In 2003, on the eve of the U.S. military’s
shock-and-awe campaign to oust Saddam Hussein, lead singer Natalie
Maines mused to a London audience, almost worrying out loud, “We
don’t want this war, this violence.” When the sold-out crowd at
Shepherd’s Bush Empire responded with cheers and applause, the
Lone Star native added with a bit of Southern gumption, “We’re
ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas,” a puckish
remark caught on tape by the Chicks’ own video operators but never
seen until the footage was given to Peck and Kopple. Within a week,
Maines’ comment–mentioned in a lone AP wire report–sloshed
through the mephitic tributaries of right-wing-activist Web portals like
Free Republic, and eventually crested into a tsunami of indignation
and outrage back home, a nasty turn of events that derailed the best-
selling female artists just as they prepared to embark on the North
American leg of their ironically named Top of the World tour.
For better or worse, the Dixie Chicks had become, perhaps not
martyrs for the cause of free speech, but cautionary emblems of the
ominous watch-what-you-say attitude that was palpable in much of
the nation in the lead up to our then-popular unilateral war.
Shut Up & Sing toggles between the immediate aftermath of
Maines’s off-the-cuff Bush slap–protests, CD burnings, a country
music radio ban, talking head bitchfests, death threats, tour date
cancellations and the loss of roughly half of their diehard fan base–
and their road to renewal in 2006 recording Taking the Long Way
with producer Rick Rubin. Glimpsed backstage, at home and in
strategic meetings with manager Simon Renshaw, Maines and her
partners Emily Robison and Martie McGuire come across like the
badass, fiddle-and-banjo-shredding glamazons they are onstage,
making tough business decisions and working to manage their now-
controversial image while also, in more private moments, hanging
out with their families. What’s astonishing to see, aside from the
strength of their sisterhood, is their tenacity in the face of crisis:
instead of cowing to the Nashville establishment that turned on them
or issuing insincere apologies to dismayed fans, the Chicks stick to
their guns, declaiming their right to air a political opinion, however
“inappropriate” it may be deemed to be.
238 ACTION!

I spoke with Kopple a few weeks after the world premiere of

Shut Up & Sing at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. Cordial,
good-humored and down to earth, Kopple talked about how
she and Peck filmed the Chicks, why she was inspired by her
subjects, and how the film fits in with her body of work.

Interview

Tell me the story of your involvement in this project.

Cecilia Peck and I wanted to do a film about the Dixie Chicks even
before “the comment.” They had these Web guys who were out
there, and they had just hired them to shoot little pieces for their
website. So they thought, Why would anyone want to make
a film about us? Then the comment happened, so of course we
wanted to do it even more. “Oh, we could have been there, we could
have done it!” Anyway, they still weren’t ready for us. A bit later
they decided yes, maybe what they have to say means something
and that they would think about the idea of someone doing
a documentary. So they spoke to us, and they spoke to other
filmmakers as well, including Michael Moore and D. A. Pennebaker,
and they picked us.

Then you signed on to do the film and traveled to…London?

Los Angeles. We met at Simon Renshaw’s office. He was out of town,

so we didn’t get the wonderful experience of his presence. [Smiling]

At that point, what did you initially hope would come out of it?

You never think about that, doing a documentary. Because once

some-body says to you, “OK, you can film us,” you come to it with
absolutely no agenda. You try to allow these characters to take you
on a journey with them. And that’s always the way that I approach
filmmaking. When I got to do the Mike Tyson film [Fallen Champ],
I just let every single thing I thought about Mike Tyson out of my
head and started to allow the story to emerge, to follow it along. The
same with Woody Allen [on Wild Man Blues]. It’s so key if you’re
going to do something real and sincere.
 KOPPLE 239

We’re accustomed
to seeing these three
women superstars
onstage in all their
glittery glory. But
behind the scenes,
they turn out to be
savvy strategists,
and hard-driving
businesswomen
juggling everything Emily Robison, Natalie Maines and Martie Maguire
in Shut Up & Sing (2006). Credit: Weinstein
from tour-sponsor
Company/Photofest
jitters to a radio
boycott, death threats and tour date cancellations. Did that
surprise you?

Yeah, especially their business savvy and how they are women in
control. That nobody tells them what to do totally fascinated me,
and I loved every minute of it. Plus, I learned a lot about how the
business works. But I think if I had to pick one element about them
that moved me as a person, it’s their friendship and their bond. I look
now at my life and think it is so important to connect with people.
And that when things go wrong, not to run from it, but to pull
together as a unit.

It’s amazing how rock solid they are. Martie says they are,
“a sisterhood.”

Two of them are sisters. [Laughs]

Right, but they are truly, “undivided,” like Dan Wilson, the
songwriter they’re working with, says at one point. Their show of
solidarity in the Diane Sawyer interview, for instance, and not
breaking rank under so much pressure was impressive.

They’re undivided in everything they do. Sure, they argue and

discuss, but when it comes down to it, they are there for each other.
And each one cares so much about the other. One of the most
moving parts of the film is when Martie breaks down and cries
and says “I would give up my career for Natalie”–if she wanted and
240 ACTION!

needed it–to find some peace. What more of a friendship can you
have than that, to give up everything you love for somebody else?
The most intimate relationships between people aren’t like that.

Shortly after 9/11, press secretary Ari Fleischer said people should
watch what they say.

Which he should have done! [Laughs]

Well, it’s interesting because I think in one sense his warning reflects
the chill that came over the national media in the lead up to the war.
And also, it immediately raises the issue of free speech. Martie says
that dissent “had to come from an unlikely voice,” from a place that
is usually aligned with conservative feeling.

Right. The “all-American.” That’s so true. And that’s probably why

country music got so mad at them, because they didn’t tow the line
in a sense. Country music probably thought of them as very
conservative [people], and when they came out like this I guess
they felt betrayed by them. And then you also had groups like
Free Republic and others doing massive organizing drives to boycott
their music in many of the red states, and going online and saying
some of the most horrific things about the Dixie Chicks imaginable.
I spent many days reading the Free Republic Web site and was
absolutely amazed. Last night, by the way, I was in Washington, and
someone from Free Republic came and we put them on the panel!
I couldn’t for the life of me get them to really talk about their ideas
and talk about politics. It’s also an anonymous kind of group.
But what he said was, he liked the film. He didn’t like the politics,
but he liked the family stuff and his favorite scene was the
Halloween [sequence]. So it was pretty interesting. And he’s going to
write a review–a “good” review–of the film.

That must have been interesting for you, coming into contact with
one of the Chicks’ nemeses.

Oh, I loved it. I mean, we were supposed to be talking to the

audience, and there were quite a few people on this panel. And every
time I got the mic, I would ask him a question. [Laughs]
 KOPPLE 241

Do you think the backlash would have been as vitriolic if it had

happened to a male artist of the same stature?

Well, it’s hard to say, but I think probably not. I think they thought
that they could set an example with the Dixie Chicks, that they would
crumble. But I think they had no idea who they were dealing with.

One of the things that comes across–one of the most powerful

elements of the film–is the personal and artistic transformation that
this incident set into motion for the Dixie Chicks.

Yeah. And also seeing them mature over three years and become
totally comfortable within their own skin, writing this wonderful
album [Taking the Long Way, 2006] that deals with everything from
politics to infertility to love, all of the universal themes that are so
much about who we are.

I’m curious about something, because you followed that

transformation, you captured it as it was happening. Did you ever
think when you first got involved after “the comment,” that you
might be observing a meltdown or a capitulation on their part
instead of a show of defiance?

The magic of documentary is that you don’t know and you just go
with life and go with what happens. I mean, you would never come
back from a shoot presupposing what you think would happen. The
fascination and the excitement of documentary is that you don’t know,
so why guess? Just put your sneakers on and go. Go on the journey.

Do you think that your presence emboldened them somehow?

No, they are emboldened all on their own. In fact, we tried to not be
much of a presence. We tried to let them forget we were even there,
because what they were doing in their lives and the things they were
figuring out and the music they were writing or the relationships
they were having with their families is what was important.

Was there any sense in which you think you affected them by filming
what was happening to them personally and professionally?
242 ACTION!

I don’t think so. I think all of this would have gone on whether we
were there or not there. I don’t think we mattered. [Laughs] As much
I hate to say that.

You have an amazing body of work that you have received commen-
dations for over the years: two Oscars, and more recently, a Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Yeah, that was something. Alan J. Pakula gave it to me.

A big moment.

For sure. And then a week later he died while driving up to the
Hamptons. [Sad face]

How do you see this film fitting into your vision, your overarching
goals and themes, from Winter Soldier and Harlan County to Wild
Man Blues and Bearing Witness?

Well, I think that maybe the majority of the films that I do–not so much
Wild Man Blues–but with many of the other films, it’s all about people
who are fighting for social justice and people who are standing up for
what they believe in, and people who won’t be silenced. And I think if
there was a theme, that would be it. It’s also people whose stories you
might not know–or who you might think of in a totally different way.
I’m sure many of the people who’ll see this Dixie Chicks film would
never have thought they would be so complex, so bright, such great
businesswomen and so alive. They know that they’re talented, but not
all the different complexities that make them who they are. You see
them in a different light. I’m hoping the people who don’t agree with
the Dixie Chicks, or with what they said, will see this film so they can
understand where they’re coming from. Because it seems like in this
country, and I don’t want to harp on about this, that we have a real sort
of cowboy mentality. “You’re either with us or against us,” and that
kind of thing. Dialogue has been lost, and communicating with another
has been lost. So we need people like this more than ever to stand out
there and say something.

There is that strain of defiance in your work. You seem to gravitate

naturally toward people who are insurgent in some way, who’re
resistant.
 KOPPLE 243

Or in crisis. [Laughs]

And recently you seem to have taken an interest in female combat

journalists, with Bearing Witness and your current project.

Well, I never know what my next project is going to be. I don’t want
to say too much about the new one.

How did the temporal structure of Shut Up & Sing aid in telling the
story you wanted to tell?

Actually, we started to edit as we were shooting. We accumulated a

lot of stock footage, we found stuff that was really amazing, such as
when they were playing in the club. We didn’t leave a stone unturned.
So it was very helpful to be filming still and editing at the same time.
Not that it changed how the film was going to be, but the film was
very hard to structure, because doing it in a linear way you really
didn’t get to know them. So it was very important to us as filmmakers
to be able to allow you to get to know them, feel who they were, feel
their talent enough so that you would care what happened to them in
2003. And we take you to 2003 three different times, so it was hard
also to make that structural leap to get you there. It was tricky.

Did it take you a long time to integrate into the Dixie Chicks’
operation?

No, we just showed up.

As a socially conscious documentarian, do you think that the left-

leaning, agit-prop documentaries that are popular now–like those by
Robert Greenwald and Michael Moore–are a good thing for the form?

I think that having lots of different styles and ways of expressing

yourself is always incredible, because what you are trying to do is tell
a story. And whether you tell a story with very sharp, hit-you-over-
the-head images to get people’s attention, or you tell a story by
allowing people’s lives to unfold and look at people on a human
level, and from the human level go to politics, it’s all wonderful,
whatever people take in. As documentarians, we are so supportive of
each other and we care about each other and we look at each other’s
rough cuts and comment because we want each other to succeed,
244 ACTION!

because it’s been such a struggle to get our films out there. And
finally, the public is catching up with our passion.

Shut Up & Sing will certainly be seen by a lot of people. What for
you is the most important thing you hope people will take away
from watching it?

That it’s really good to stand up for what you believe in and to never
let anyone silence you or manipulate you. And no matter how bad
you feel and how hard the times are, if you’re true to yourself, that’s
what’s going to be important.
VI. The Canon: Brilliance
without Borders

“Life itself is mysterious, and we must let that show through on the
screen. The effects of things must always be shown before their
cause, as in real life, where we are unaware of the causes of most of
the events we witness. We see the effect and only later–if ever–do we
discover the cause.” –Robert Bresson

16. Federico Fellini

17. Robert Bresson
18. Abbas Kiarostami
19. François Truffaut
Federico Fellini (center) on the set of Juliet of the Spirits (1965).
Credit: Rialto Pictures/Photofest

“For a Kind of Pleasure”:

Federico Fellini
by Toni Maraini

Trans. by A. K. Bierman
Federico Fellini’s (born 1920) fantasy world, which has become
more dreamlike over the years, shows us the spectacle of life. Yet,
paradoxically, the most surreal of Italian directors invites us to
reflect on reality.
248 ACTION!

What is this reality, which contains everything that happens?

Where is it? In us? Outside of us? In our memory, which turns into
myth? In the real events that seem like dreams or in dreams that
materialize in an immense farce wherein existence is the tragicomic
appearance? Like Pirandello before him, Fellini meditates on the ease
with which we cross the borders that supposedly mark the difference
between reality and appearance.
As in the 1987 film Intervista [The Interview], which he made for
Italian television, Fellini identifies a film director with the demiurge
of a Great Spectacle. “My films are not for understanding. They are
for seeing,” Fellini reminds anyone who persists in undervaluing the
aim of his aesthetic orientation.
I talked about this and other things with Fellini in his Rome
studio sometime after his last film, La Voce della Luna [The Voice
of the Moon] (1990). Courteous, cordial, gifted with a good sense of
humor, Fellini, who is mistrustful of journalists–and who loves
paradox and ambiguity–kindly tried not to talk about this mistrust.
“Really, we should chat about other things,” he told me.

Interview

You don’t like to give interviews and it’s difficult for a journalist to
get one. You should know I’m more a poet than a journalist.

Splendid.

Here’s something that will amuse you. Because of the anxiety I had
about doing this interview, I woke up voiceless this morning, unable
to make a sound!

Perfect. I love journalists who don’t talk much.

I’m reluctant to give interviews because I believe we should avoid
them, and I’m trying to hold to this sane decision. But in certain
cases I end up by accepting, because there are friends who insist I do
interviews. Then there’s the curiosity of meeting somebody new.
Also, it’s flattering; so, out of an indecent vanity and a shameless
desire to prattle about myself, I consent.
I’ve given a lot of interviews; so, I don’t trust what I say. I repeat
myself. I try to remember what I’ve already said and what I still
 FELLINI 249

haven’t said. For fear of repeating something I’ve already said,

I invent other things.

You mistrust yourself, then?

Yes, that’s right. I mistrust myself, not the journalist, even if for
50 years I’ve had the feeling that journalists asked me stupid
questions.
An interview is a halfway point between a psychoanalytical sitting
and a competitive examination. So, I experience a slight uneasiness
about all the interviews I’ve given. I try to rethink myself rather than
repeat myself. And besides, I have some embarrassing limits.
Sometimes I don’t have answers.

Your answers are already in your films, by having created them.

That’s right. The author’s most important answer is the work itself, and
in my work people have found the few things I tried to say. Despite that,
the author generally is the least suited to talk about his work.

Those who see the film want to ask questions, and, after all, this
need is stimulated by creation. In order to try to understand your last
film, for example, I reread some paragraphs from Krishnamurti,
whom you know as a thinker.

Yes, yes. In which book did you find these paragraphs? I’d like to
see them.
Nevertheless, I don’t think that an author, when he creates, poses
“others” problems. Really, when I’m working, I don’t think of
others. Certainly, the author is conscious of the, as we say, “craft”
side of his own creation, of the how to express what he wants to say.
But I don’t think he worries too much about the problem of why and
who to tell.

Yet, even if you don’t tell it “to others,” like every creator you tell it
to yourself. In this self-telling, doesn’t reevaluation go on, a gradual,
revelatory consciousness of self?

As in life generally, the experience of working brings a greater

mastery at the technical level, and, therefore, better reasoning about
choices and how to carry them out. But in the deeper sense of
250 ACTION!

knowing to which you alluded, the idea that through my work I may
have a greater knowledge of myself, I will tell you I don’t think there
has been an evolution. On my last birthday, a friend asked me what
it meant for me to be seventy, and my spontaneous response was,
“Seventy? It seems to me I’ve always been seventy!”
So you see, my answer reflects my true feeling. For me, at seventy,
I’m not much different from what I was at forty, thirty-five, twenty-
five, or even earlier.

This doesn’t so much mean you’ve always had the feeling of being
seventy, but rather–if I understand you–that reaching this age and
looking back you have the feeling of always having had the same age
from youth on.

Yes, the adolescent age. Exactly. It’s totally an adolescent age. Whoever
has created knows this state that I would call “motionless time.”

But it’s precisely this state of pure consciousness and spontaneity

that anyone who creates tries to conquer or rather to safeguard.

You’re referring still to our Krishnamurti!

Yes, and to the importance of existential time, so typical of your film

creations, in contrast with time understood as a historical, straight,
linear sequence in which facts, chronologies and so forth pile up.

It’s true. Unfortunately, because of our goal-oriented training, we

Westerners have a vision of ourselves living through a continuous
time line that requires steps, changes, conclusions and a goal one
must reach.

I’d like to ask you something. Some say that all your films are the
same. Furthermore, you seem to agree that your fantasies have this
circular repetitive motion. Yet to me, over the course of years, this
movement travels in a spiral, as if each time a new element shifts the
problem to a higher level.
In your last film, The Voice of the Moon, the ingredients are as
always the world as a stage for visions and appearances,
fragmentation, the reality/dream conflict, but the questions posed in
the course of the film seem to me to announce a final, symbolic,
 FELLINI 251

almost whispered reconciliation with death, nature’s energy, women

and love, the generational conflict.

Maybe. I haven’t been able to see the difference in this film. I always
seem to make the same film.

This was the most exhausting one, you said.

I get exhausted when I’m trying any way I can to put off starting
a film. It’s an honest to goodness matter of a “starting neurosis,” this
attitude of total aversion, like someone who puts off the moment
when he’ll have to look at himself in the mirror, an image he wants
to disown. It’s worsened in these last years.
I have a tendency to hold off starting a film until I feel myself
forced to begin in order to see where I want to go, where I will take
myself.
I wrote about this in my book Making a Film [Fare un film],
about La Strada [1954]. At the beginning I had only a confused
feeling, a kind of tone that lurked, which made me melancholy and
gave me a diffused sense of guilt, like a shadow hanging over me.
This feeling suggested two people who stay together, although it will
be fatal, and they don’t know why. But once this feeling crystallized,
the story came easily, as if it had been there waiting to be found.

What crystallized your feeling?

Giuletta [Masina]. I’d wanted for some time to make a film for her.
She’s singularly able to express astonishment, dismay, frenetic
happiness, the comic somberness of a clown. For me a clownesque
talent in an actor is the most precious gift she can have. Giuletta’s the
kind of actress who’s very congenial with what I want to do, with
my taste.
My slowness in starting a film is certainly unacceptable in a
profession that requires planning, but I confess to needing this
climate in order to begin a film. When I’ve begun, I try to find a
lighthearted mood, that unfathomable poise of storytelling, that
pleasure I experienced in filming The Interview.
That movie was filmed day by day while making it up. I’m aiming
more and more toward this kind of film. So, for La Voce della Luna,
my latest film, I tried to do the same thing, to do like the circus
252 ACTION!

people do: create a scene, a spectacle for nothing. I need to construct

the scenario from life–with buildings, lights, situations, seasons–as a
premise in order to see how things are going.
For this film, I designed and created everything, from buildings to
the publicity. Then every once in a while I visited the set, saw it
empty, saw the dust invading, some windows shattered by the wind,
and I asked myself, “What’s happening?” At the risk of appearing
romantic, I’ll tell you that something in me said, “You’ll see, the
piazza will come alive, the sacristan will appear at the church’s
portico, someone will go into a store to buy something…”
And so it was. As if by necessity, the set came alive. I let the film
happen; important things were tossed off as banalities, and casual
things seemed important. I wanted to achieve the naturalness of The
Interview.

The Interview is autobiographical. We see a young Fellini, an

adolescent journalist, who one day in 1941 visits Cinecitta. He is
seduced by the Spectacle, by its imaginary games, and by the almost
supernatural power of the director who constructs and deconstructs
the story of life.

When, as a young man, I went to Cinecitta and saw the directors

filming, I admired their power–to shout, scream, make beautiful
actresses weep–I remember in particular having seen Blasetti make
the very beautiful and very famous Isa Pola cry–but I also found
them boorish, overbearing, vulgar, arrogant.
I tried to catch this picture of the tyrant director in The Interview.
He was a figure that seduced me despite everything. But at that time
I never thought I’d be a director; I lacked the temperament, the voice,
the authority, the arrogance…I thought that I would be a writer or a
painter, or, better, a “special correspondent.” But it turns out that I had
all those defects! Because I became a director…for a kind of pleasure.
Out of an entomologist’s curiosity. My films are films of expression.
I agreed to direct The Interview in order to keep a contract. I see
in myself an artist of the 1400s, one who needed a client, which at
that time was often the church. In its deep understanding of the
human soul, the need for being lured and at the same time
threatened, the church understood the adolescent nature of the artist.
But today this aspect is no longer taken into consideration. Yet I, for
example, need a client.
 FELLINI 253

For The Interview, I had a commitment to TV, a contract for a

Special. Since I had an upbringing that respects the rules of a pledge, I
wanted to keep it. So, this TV film came about in this way, by itself,
without traumas, because it offered the freedom of lightheartedness,
the seductive aspect of something that doesn’t build up expectations.
Making a film is an adventurous journey, above all for producers.
Looking back, I can’t say I complain. Every film has its troubles, its
delays, but the obstacles on a journey represent part of the journey
itself. The trip is enriched by difficulties that reveal mysterious, even
providential expressions of friendship. For The Interview, I didn’t
have these problems of getting started, of setting off on the film’s
journey. But for my last film, The Voice from the Moon, yes.
I covered this last film with insults, I tried to kick it away like one
does with an illness you don’t want to catch. In order not to catch
pneumonia, what do you do? You try to defend yourself.

You declared once, long ago, in 1969, that, “a film is like an illness
that is expelled from the body.”

No doubt there’s a connection between pathology and creation, we

can’t deny it. Yet I view with pleasure the work of film professionals
I love, such as Buñuel, Kurosawa, Kubrick, Bergman.
I’m perhaps a special type of spectator. I experience pleasure when
I find myself in front of something that is the absolute truth, not
because it resembles life, but because it’s true as an image for itself,
as a gesture. And therefore vital. It’s the vitality that makes me
appreciate and feel that the action succeeded. I think the expression
of an artist’s work finds consensus when whoever enjoys it feels as if
they’re receiving a charge of energy, like a growing plant does, of
something pulsing, mysterious, vibrant with life.

Going back to the difficulty of starting your Voice… film, from

documents it would seem that these difficulties started with shooting
the first scene in your first film as director, The White Sheik [1952].
And then there was that long business of completing The City of
Women [1980].

Yes, perhaps, but sometimes the problems aren’t caused by me but

by producers. However, when I’m in the harrowing phase and feel
restless, it means I’m ready to start, that I must start, that I can begin
254 ACTION!

the film. And initially I need to observe, to meet people with

simplicity, as happens on a bus or a train; I need to sketch. I reflect,
observe some details, a tic, a gesture, a color, a face.

An “entomologist’s curiosity,” you said. Also toward women?

Woman is a marvel; woman is a universe. This may be a tantric

conception: Woman is the alien part of man, but she is higher than
he, because women are born adults, ancient. You’re born knowing
everything. As mothers, you’re superior. For survival, an archetypal
rebellion exists in women’s memory, because man has invented for
himself an intellectual supremacy, a violence he uses to dominate her.
But the struggle is unequal.
You smile. You really don’t seem to believe me! Or maybe you’re
asking me how it was done, because I still haven’t written a beautiful
love story for my films.

But the story of Zampano and Gelsomina in La Strada is a love

story, even if unusual and terrible.

Yes, it was. But I, and I’m embarrassed to share this confidence,

I have to confess that I’ve never identified myself with excesses of
passion and love. I seem never to have been in love in that sense.
I don’t understand the desperation of love as an irreparable loss.

I’d like to ask you a question concerning the costumes you draw for
your films, which sometimes are particularly elegant, as if they were
from a different era than ours. What does this mean?

In certain films like Satyricon [1969] or Casanova [1976], the

costumes of the era were necessary because the films were historical.
That’s obvious. I have the habit of looking back to styles of
the twenties and thirties, because this unconscious reference goes
back to an emotional reality when I discovered and noticed things.
Lights, colors, attitudes, moods, usages, rhythms belong to this
emotional reality.
In addition, there is another fact. A person’s clothes make up part
of his character. I draw the character with his costume. I suggest it
to the stylists with my drawings; the drawings translate some of
my emotional impressions. For me elegance happens when there
 FELLINI 255

is a correspondence
between a person’s
personality and how
she dresses herself.
Finally, don’t forget
that costumes, like
dreams, are sym-
bolic communica-
tion. Dreams teach
us that a language
for everything exists–
for every object,
every color worn,
(foreground) Giuletta Masina, Richard Basehart and
every clothing detail. Anthony Quinn in La Strada (1954). Credit: Trans Lux
Hence, costumes Inc./Photofest
provide an aesthetic
objectification that helps to tell the character’s story.

You talk about a certain “first impression,” which is tied to the play
of memory and nostalgia. Is it perhaps a flight from the present era?

Our times are extraordinary and marvelous; everything has

happened and continues to happen. After the Berlin Wall fell, the
people on either “side” were no longer enemies, and ideologies
stopped being barriers to truth. All of politics is up for rethinking.
But you know, I never managed to follow the route of neorealism,
the problems of the working class.

Yet there are so many social critiques in your films.

Certainly! If metalworkers didn’t dream, there would be only a hunk

of metal.

Tell me about a film you never started, the one about Carlos Castaneda.

It’s a very complicated story.

I first looked for Castaneda through his publishers. I talked
with the publisher, who gave me the address of Castaneda’s agent,
a Ned Brown in New York. The publisher told me it would be easy
for Brown to give me Castaneda’s address. Once a year a Mexican
256 ACTION!

boy brought the publisher manuscripts. Ned Brown told me he had

never met Castaneda.
Persisting in my search, I was told that Castaneda was in an
insane asylum, even that he was dead. Someone else said he’d met
him and that he was alive, that he had seen him at a lecture
Castaneda gave. Then, in Rome, there was a Mrs. Ioghi who put me
in contact with him. And I finally met Castaneda.
Castaneda’s personality is quite different from what you might
imagine. He seemed like a Sicilian–a cordial, easygoing, smiling
Sicilian host. Brown skin, black eyes, a very white smile. He has the
effusiveness of a Latin, a Mediterranean. He’s Peruvian, not Mexican.

Are you sure it was really him?

What are you trying to say? Of course; he was surrounded by other

people. Mrs. Ioghi knew him.
This likable gentleman, who had seen all my films, told me that
one day with Don Juan, 30 or 40 years ago, he had seen my film La
Strada–which was made in 1952. Don Juan had told him, “You will
have to meet the director of this film.” He said that Don Juan had
prophesied this meeting. That’s what Castaneda told me. I told you
that he came to find me, here, in this living room, seated right here.
From the beginning I was fascinated by his book The Teachings of
Don Juan, a book about esoteric, parapsychological ventures. Then
I was fascinated by the overall idea: that of a scientific man, an
anthropologist, who starts with a speculative, scientific purpose, a
man who keeps his feet on the ground, watches where he’s going and
literally looks at the ground, in fields, in vegetable gardens, in glades,
toward the hills–where mushrooms grow. This man of science then
finds himself, after initiation, following a path that brings him into
contact with some ancient Toltecs.
I like the route supplied by a scientific, rational curiosity, a route
that he took with a rational attention and which, at the same time,
led him toward the mysterious world, a world we define in a vague
way as “irrational.”

This relation between science and a supernatural world seems

especially interesting. In this connection, you talked about
your experience with LSD, your belief in Jung’s psychoanalysis,
and your friendship with Roll, the most famous Italian clairvoyant.
 FELLINI 257

Yes, this seems to me the end point of true science. The more it
advances, protected by its parameters, its mode of inquiry, its
certainties and its doubts, also its distrust, the closer it comes to
something, that is, “the mystery.” And, therefore, it approaches a
religious vision of the phenomenon it’s investigating.
The one thing that fascinated and also somewhat alienated
me–an Italian, a Latin, a Mediterranean, conditioned by a Catholic
education–was Castaneda’s and Don Juan’s particular vision of the
world. I saw something unhuman there. Independently of Don Juan,
who is charming in a literary way and whom we are made to see as
an old sage, I couldn’t help being invaded at times by a feeling of
strangeness. As if I were confronted with a vision of a world dictated
by a quartz! Or a green lizard!
What I found fascinating was that you felt transported to a point of
view never before imagined, never suspected, that truly had you
breathing outside yourself, outside of your humanity, and that for an
instant gave you an unfamiliar shiver of belonging to other elements, to
elements of the vegetable world, animal world, even the mineral world.
A feeling, that is, of silences, of extraterrestrial, extra-planetary
colors. This was what seduced my propensity for the fantastic, the
visionary, the unknown, the enigmatic.
In Don Juan’s vision of the world, there was no comfort, nothing
of what so many other texts can give you or that other esoteric
authors like Rudolph Steiner or the Templars give. In short,
Castaneda’s stories, unlike so many other esoteric or initiatory
texts that try to tell you about other dimensions, offered a vision
lacking any psychological comfort. This was what made them
terrible and fascinating for me. Yet I seemed to find myself in an
asphyxiated world.

You told me once that from the moment you arrived in Los Angeles,
where Castaneda was waiting for you, some strange events began.

Phenomena and wonders popped up. When he came to my hotel, he

brought along some women. I never saw him again, but after that
I found strange messages in my room and objects moved around.
I think it was black magic. His women, but not Castaneda, went
with me to Tulun, and the same things happened there.

You felt threatened, and Castaneda disappeared.

258 ACTION!

It’s been some years–that was in 1986–and I still haven’t been able
to figure out what really happened. Maybe Castaneda was sorry to
have brought me there and worked out a series of phenomena that
discouraged me from making my film. Or maybe his associates
didn’t want me to make a film and did these things. Anyway, it was
all too strange, so I decided not to make the film.
Castaneda’s books brought back some feelings that I had
experienced as a boy…. It’s difficult to define… Maybe madness can
resemble this kind of astral, icy cold, solitary silence. I put one
boyhood experience in The Voice from the Moon, when Benigni tells
his grandmother that he became a poplar tree. It happened when
I was a boy and spent the summer with my grandmother, Francesca,
my father’s mother, in the country at Gambettola.

The name of this place, Gambettola, could come from a fable, some
sort of Pinocchio adventure…

Yes! It was also called “the forest,” because there was a large forest
nearby. There, I had a few experiences that I remembered only thirty
or forty years later. They came back in a more hallucinatory or more
revivified way because I was reading some parapsychological texts.
In short, they were experiences of special feelings. First was the
episode of the poplar tree.
I was able to translate sounds into colors, an experience that
happened to me afterward. I could chromatize sounds. It’s a faculty
that can surprise us, but which seems natural to me, given that life is
a single thing, a totality that we have learned to divide, file, separate,
tying different sensations together in different ways.
Here I was seated under that poplar at Gambettola, and I heard
the ox lowing in the stable. At the same time, I saw coming out
of the stable’s wall something fibrillating, like an enormous tongue,
a mat, a carpet, a flying carpet moving slowly in the air.
I was sitting with my back to the stall, but I could see everything
around me and behind me, 360 degrees. And this wave dissolved,
passing through me, like a huge fan of very tiny, microscopic rubies
that shimmered in the sun. Then it disappeared.
This phenomenon of translating sounds into colors, the chromatic
equivalent of sound, stayed with me for many years. I could tell you
about other such episodes that happened when I was a child, and
also when I was 20 and had come to Rome.
 FELLINI 259

But let’s go back to what happened under the poplar. At a certain

moment, while I was playing, I seemed to see myself up above, very
high, I seemed to be swinging there, and to hear a light wind in my hair.
Then I felt–it’s difficult for me to describe it–that I was solidly planted
in the ground. And that little boy I saw–which was me–now had his legs
sunk in the ground, so far that I felt I had roots. And the whole body
was covered by a kind of hot, thick blood that rose, rose, rose up to the
head because of the sound that I was making (“whooo”) while I was
playing. I heard this sound with a different organ, magnificent, more…

Like a mantra!

It was a mantra, yes, like “ommm.” And then this feeling of rapture,
of lightness, of lightness and power, power in the roots and lightness
above in the branches shaking in the sky. I had become the poplar!

These are the great intuitions and feelings, the great visionary
wisdom of childhood that one has to tell later as fantasies.

Let’s say they need to assume the form of fables. The fable is always
the more human, and also the more faithful, way of recounting.

And your grandmother, what did she think of this fantasizing little boy?

My grandmother could have been a character in a fable herself.

She was an old peasant woman; she was capable of great
tenderness. She was an old, tall, thin woman with many petticoats.
I still live on the fantasy income from those summers spent with
my grandmother. Even La Strada lifted a little from memories of
those summer endings and autumn beginnings in the country,
from that almost spiritual contact with the animals, smells, places.
I remember the first veglia in the stable.

What do you mean by “veglia”? [Literally, “waking” or

“wakefulness.”]

Peasant men got together in the stable at night to drink, and eat
bread and cheese. It was a way for them to be together for some
hours, even up to eleven at night, which was late for them because
they had to get up at four in the morning.
260 ACTION!

Besides telling stories, they laughed, joked; they laughed talking

about women. The laughs were a way of exorcising, of defending
themselves, a form of nervousness. And I, still a young boy, didn’t
understand very well why, when the men were talking about women,
they poked each other with their elbows and laughed. As if they were
alluding to something vaguely comic, but also indecent, something
from which they defended each other, protected each other,
conspiring to create a solidarity.

You told me in one of our conversations that you’ve always had a

latent envy for anyone who expresses, even in a primitive way, a
conviction, a creed, a dogma. You, who don’t want to take refuge in
any rigid system of convictions or ideologies, what’s your “center,”
your “pivot”? The cinema?

Do you mean “when do I feel at home”?

Yes.

You ask a question that’s not so simple to answer. I think my pivot

point is finding myself in a nowhere in which I recognize myself. Said
that way, it can seem like romantic complacency, shamelessly poetic.

No, no, I understand your answer very well. I’ve written about
the nowhere. It’s a perception I know well precisely because I believe
that creative people are acquainted with it. That is, people who
have refused the comfort of certainties, of dogmatic, ideological
constructions.

A less esoteric and less presumptuous center is my work, when I’m

seized, when I have an identity, am caught up by what I’m doing. As
in driving a nail, putting up a wall on a set, putting a wig on an
actress’s head, seeing that the makeup is just right; when I’m on
the go, obsessed in filming in the midst of a group of people who
look at me with the respect due to age and, maybe, also with a little
worry and amusement.
I lend my body, my common sense, or talent to something that is
a stream, a stream that invites me, obliges me, forces me to personify
myself in so many things, persons, thoughts, attitudes. And there,
just at the moment in which I’m not there–since I’m in so many
places taken up by so many details–is, I believe, my pivot point.
 FELLINI 261

I believe that for me this is happiness–to lose one’s memory, to

forget the self, the part you call yourself, which is really just a
superstructure. This is the part you forget in order to be inhabited by
an energy that borrows your body and your nervous system.

There’s a big contradiction between what the West maintains,

driving people to look for themselves, fortifying their own
personality, and what the East maintains, which encourages you to
free yourself from yourself. The problem seems to be that of
liberating the self without destroying it.

It’s important to put yourself in a condition to be everlastingly

born. In any case, I consider myself particularly fortunate because
of my profession. Which isn’t a profession, but only a path, a
route for amusement, for levity. It can lead you to have–in a free,
nonschematic, nondogmatic way–intuitions that others have had
with more sacrifices and in a more dramatic way. It’s a game
that puts you in touch with other territories, intuitions of different
possibilities. Perhaps these intuitions are paler, less colorful
than those earned more dramatically and knowingly, with more
sacrifices.

You said that you love directors like Bergman, Buñuel, Kurosawa.
Do you go to the movies often?

I’m embarrassed to confess, no, I don’t go to the movies much. I’ve

never gone much. As a boy in Rimini, they let me go to the movies
once a week.
No, no, it wasn’t a matter of cost. Our family was petit bourgeois.
My father was a sales representative. My brother and I went to the
movies accompanied by Alfredo, a handyman who worked in my
father’s warehouse.
When I came to Rome, at 18, I began to go more often. There
were two cinemas on the street where I lived, San Giovanni. But
I went most of all because I was fascinated by the crude variety shows.
First there was the film and immediately after it the variety shows.
I was taken by those colored posters. The theater put photos of
the film outside and also the huge playbills for the variety shows that
had pictures of these beautiful fat women with naked thighs and
piggish faces. If I saw some films then, I owe it to the attraction of
these playbills.
262 ACTION!

What kind of films?

American. There were only American films then. The Italian films
were either about war or Romans; and there was always fascist
propaganda–these were the early forties. They weren’t very
seductive.
For my generation, born in the twenties, movies were essentially
American–a cinema supported by the most powerful press office that
the history of film may have ever had. Even today, the sympathy
Americans enjoy is due to their movies, movies that have always told
us–and during those times in Italy, this was perceived more
yearningly and strikingly than today–that there was another country,
another dimension to life, a dimension more fanciful than the Italian
priests’ Sunday sermons about paradise.
American movies were more effective, more seductive. They really
showed a paradise on earth, a paradise in a country they called
America. For our generation, this was an inexhaustible source of
admiration for a country, a people, movie personalities, for a
nonchalant way of acting, without rhetoric.
Even the Americans’ military rhetoric was acceptable, because the
heroes were Gary Cooper, Clark Gable. They were cheerful guys
who had nothing to do with the obligatory sadness of our soldiers.
In our films from that time, our soldiers had to be mangled, starved,
ragged. In order to get people interested, the Italian soldier had to die
or be seriously wounded! Meanwhile, everything went swimmingly
for the American soldier, who got married, maybe to a beautiful
actress like Myrna Loy.
However, I didn’t go to movies much. But I loved them. I loved
seeing the variety show from the stalls like holds of pirate
ships, seething with spectators. Take Sunday afternoon, for example.
It seemed like going into a big, hot potbelly–a potbelly of rascally
humanity–that consummated a magic rite, which was to dream
together.
In the little towns in winter, the movie theater was like a tiny
galaxy, a planet under a spell, a grand passion that seems forgotten
today. Or that no longer seems to have the same seductiveness it had
when I was young. Now the people stay home to watch television.
Until seven or eight years ago, we made around 100 to 150
pictures each year. Today, it’s a miracle if there are ten in production.
That’s really okay, but it’s always with or for television. And these
 FELLINI 263

are films made under reduced, censored circumstances, a castrating

way of dealing with a fable that needs telling.
Almost all the studios, Elios, Incom and so forth, have closed
down. Half of Cinecitta has been sold, turned into Cinecitta II,
which is a commercial center. Now it looks like they’re also selling
the other half. The only place that’s left is where I made my last film,
at Pontina, which was created by Dino De Laurentiis in 1960. But
it’s having continued failure.

This leaves things more open to American competition.

Yes, of course. But it could also be stimulating for Italy, because

Americans often give us impeccable films, very well directed, with
splendid actors, with stories that tell about their own country. The
whole American show keeps something in mind that we, in our
conceit as spoiled children, look at almost with distaste. They keep
in mind a Master of Ceremonies’ fundamental fact. He knows that
to tell something to someone he has to seduce his audience with
entertainment. Journalists, writers, poets, playwrights, directors are
consistent in this sense.
Robert Bresson. Credit: Photofest

Transcendental Style, Poetic

Precision: Robert Bresson
by Bert Cardullo

The following interview took place over a five-hour period at Bresson’s

(1901–1999) home on Île St Louis in Paris, shortly after L’Argent
(Money) shared the 1983 Grand Prize for creative cinema at the Cannes
Film Festival. It was conducted in both English and French, all of which
I myself later translated. Parts of this interview have previously been
published in other places; this is the first appearance, in print, of the
entire, uninterrupted conversation between me and M. Bresson.
266 ACTION!

Interview

If it’s all right with you, M. Bresson, I’d like to organize this
interview around four films of yours: your latest, L’Argent, and three
others of which I myself am particularly fond–Au hasard Balthazar
[1966], Pickpocket [1959], and The Trial of Joan of Arc [1962]. We
can digress as we like, of course, but our discussion will revolve
around these four films. Okay?

Yes, that’s fine. Why not?

Let’s go back in time to 1966, the year in which Au hasard Balthazar

was released, and then gradually return to the present with L’Argent.
Where did you get the title Au hasard Balthazar, anyway?

The title came from my desire to give the donkey a Biblical name. So
I named him after one of the Three Wise Men. The title itself is
the motto of the nobles of Baux, who claimed to be heirs of the
Magie Balthazar; their motto was indeed “Au hasard Balthazar.”
I like the rhyme in this title, and I like the way it fits the subject of
the film exactly.

What is that subject? What is Au hasard Balthazar about?

It’s about our anxieties and desires when we are faced with a living
creature who’s completely humble, completely holy, and happens to be
a donkey: namely, Balthazar. The film is about pride, greed, lust and
cruelty–the need to inflict suffering–in the measure found in each of
the various owners at whose hands he suffers and finally dies. This
character resembles the Tramp in Charlie Chaplin’s early films, but it’s
still an animal, a donkey–an animal that evokes eroticism yet at the
same time evokes spirituality or Christian mysticism, because the
donkey is of such importance in the Old and New Testaments as well
as in the ancient Roman Church. Au hasard Balthazar is also about
two lines that sometimes run parallel and sometimes cross or
converge. The first line goes as follows: in a donkey’s life, we see the
same stages as in a man’s–a childhood of tender caresses; adult years
spent in work, for both man and donkey; a little later during this work
period, the blossoming of talent and even genius; and, finally, the stage
of mysticism that precedes death. The other line is that of the donkey
 BRESSON 267

at the mercy of his different owners, who represent the various vices
that bring about Balthazar’s suffering and ultimate death.

What was your chief aesthetic concern while making Au hasard

Balthazar?

It was that the central character, who wasn’t always present, but was
always the focus of the main storyline–glimpsed only from time
to time and yet still the chief subject–was the donkey. It had to be
clear that the donkey was the main concern, the main character,
despite the fact that all the events didn’t happen in his presence or
that he only got a glimpse of some of them.

How did the characters other than the donkey originate in this, your
first film to be based entirely on your own idea?

It’s hard to say where the other characters came from: they just
appeared to me. I can’t really explain their provenance. I simply saw
them, and then I drew them in like portraits. I cannot explain these
characters the way a novelist could his.

Louis Malle once said that Au hasard Balthazar was “essentially a

film about pride. What drives absolutely all the characters is pride–a
kind of haughtiness about their condition and their fellow man’s and
even about the world, about who they are and where they stand.”
What’s your response to Malle’s statement?

This pride, if you really take a look at the people around you–this
pride, isn’t it essentially a good and useful thing? If we weren’t proud
of ourselves, what would become of us? This humanity of ours,
which some people find so bleak, I don’t find any less lovable than a
humanity that would be less dark, less bleak.

Let’s talk for a moment about the script of Au hasard Balthazar. It’s
admirably constructed, but it is also full of ellipses and question
marks. For example, at one point Gérard is summoned by the police,
yet no one in the audience knows why he has been summoned.

And neither do I. I’m kidding, of course. I do want, however, to

eliminate all details of the backstory. If someone has been summoned
268 ACTION!

by the police, we’ll just see what happens. But I do think this is a
good rule–though I also think that rules are made to be
broken–always to show the effect before the cause. The cause must
be passionately desired on the part of the audience so that the images
of one’s film grab its interest.
This young man, Gérard, is summoned and we don’t know why.
We believe we do: someone’s been murdered. But it doesn’t really
matter who did it. We think it was he, and then we see that we’re
wrong. Next we think it was the tramp, Arnold, but he didn’t do it,
either. Again, it doesn’t matter as far as the story is concerned.
Maybe the police will never know what happened. Maybe the death
wasn’t the result of a murder but only an accident. Yet whether it
was a murder or an accident has absolutely nothing to do with my
story, or the point of my story, and I always try categorically to
eliminate whatever’s not essential to my meaning.

Can you say something about the relationship between Gérard and
Marie in Au hasard Balthazar?

I don’t think either one loves the other. It’s their lust, or sensual love,
that finds a niche in this film. The scene between these two characters
is about sensuality, not real love. I won’t say “eroticism,” because the
term has been overused to the point of becoming meaningless. It’s
only by chance–which is responsible for so much in our lives–that this
young man, Gérard, is at Marie’s side and causes something to stir in
her. It’s spring, the birds are singing, and sensual love is born at this
particular moment. Maybe Marie believes that this love is specifically
for Gérard, but it could easily be for someone else as well.

Was that scene written in detail in the script or was it improvised

during the filming?

No, it was on paper. But there’s a world of difference between

writing a scene and filming it. To me, the most important part of a
film is its rhythm, not its writing. Everything is expressed by the
rhythm; without rhythm, there’s nothing. There’s nothing without
form, either, but there is also nothing without rhythm.
To me, the scene between Gérard and Marie is about taking two
characters, and their attitudes, and finding the connection between
them. But everything that happens during this scene, happened more
 BRESSON 269

during the editing than during the actual filming. It’s the editing that
creates everything, that brings it all forth. The camera simply
records. It’s precise and, fortunately, unbiased. But the drama itself
is created in the cutting room. When images are juxtaposed and
sound is added, that’s when love blossoms, so to speak.

There is something quite troubling, dark and ambiguous about

Marie’s relationship with Balthazar.

That is love, but without a clearly defined object. Adolescents can be

in love with something very vague, very undefined; yet love must
have a definite object in order truly to exist. And the object of
Marie’s love isn’t the donkey. The donkey’s just an intermediary,
that’s what I think.
The difficulty here is that all art is both concrete and abstract or
suggestive at the same time. You can’t show everything; if you do, it’s
no longer art. Art lies in suggestion. And the great difficulty for
filmmakers is precisely not to show everything. Ideally, nothing
should be shown, but that’s impossible. So things must be shown
from a single angle that evokes all other angles without showing
them. We must let the viewer gradually imagine and, at the same
time, keep him in a constant state of anticipation. This is something
akin to what I described earlier as showing the cause after the effect.
It is in this way that we let the mystery remain. Life itself is
mysterious, and we must let that show through on the screen. The
effects of things must always be shown before their cause, as in real life,
where we are unaware of the causes of most of the events we witness.
We see the effect and only later–if ever–do we discover the cause.

Speaking of causes or reasons, why does Marie hide in that man’s

house in Au hasard Balthazar?

Because it’s her final refuge. Through experience, she’s become clever
and skillful and cunning enough to titillate him, so he’ll let her sleep
in the hay.

What exactly happens between them that night?

Certain extremely contradictory currents pass between them, at the

end of which the girl’s fundamental honesty prevails. At first she
270 ACTION!

accepts his money, because she really needs it. Or maybe she’s
thinking of giving it to her father, who is penniless after being
swindled by this miser. But after hearing the miser’s cynical speech,
which makes her very sad, Marie realizes that money isn’t everything
he claims it is, and she returns it. That’s her moment of greatness. As
to what happens afterwards, your guess is as good as mine. I don’t
know if she spends the night with the miser, or if she simply spends
the night in a chair waiting for daylight. Whatever the case, in the
end she treats this man with contempt.

From Diary of a Country Priest in 1951 up until Au hasard

Balthazar, God is explicitly present in your films. God the Redeemer
is there. But Au hasard Balthazar gives the impression of a world
without God, or, let us say, a world uninterested in God.

First, I don’t think that just speaking of God or saying the

word “God” indicates his presence. If I use a filmmaker’s tools to
represent a human being–by which I mean someone with a soul, not
just a jiggling puppet–then if the human is present, so too is the
divine. Merely pronouncing the name of God isn’t what makes
God present.

No, but, to my knowledge, Au hasard Balthazar is your first film

where a character–Marie’s father, to be exact–rejects God.

If he rejects God, then God exists, and therefore God is present.

Surely you know this, since you yourself are a Roman Catholic–and
one who, as you have told me, received his secondary education
from Jesuits.

But suddenly God is no longer good. He’s not involved with or

concerned about mankind, which is something that, until Au hasard
Balthazar, you had never demonstrated.

I don’t share your impression that God is absent from this film, for
the reasons I’ve just given.

Okay, since we disagree about God’s “place” in Au hasard

Balthazar, let’s move to a different place: the one you give to cinema
among all the arts. What is it, in your opinion?
 BRESSON 271

I don’t know the cinema’s position. But it may be able to capture this
thing that words can’t describe, that shapes and colors alone can’t
render, by using several combined means.

What do you think of the state of the arts in general?

I think–maybe I’m wrong–that the arts are on the decline. They’re

dying, perhaps from too much freedom, perhaps due to their incredibly
wide distribution, like everything today. I believe that movies, radio and
television are killing the arts. But I also believe that, oddly enough, it’s
precisely through cinema, radio and television that the other arts will
be reborn, perhaps in a completely different form. The word “art” one
day may no longer even mean what it does now. Yet it seems to me that
there’s hope. And that’s because I believe in the cinema in particular as
a completely new art, one that we really don’t even quite grasp yet.
I believe in the muse of cinema. Degas once said, “The muses don’t
speak to each another. They dance together.” But actually I believe that
the cinema is, or will soon be, a completely independent art, and that it
is not, as many people imagine, a synthesis or “dance” of the other arts.
It’s an art completely apart and autonomous.

Do you think that it will be limited by its beginnings as simple

entertainment?

It’s very possible that movies as entertainment will continue to

exist; there’s no reason why such movies shouldn’t continue to exist.
But I firmly believe in the cinema as serious art. Not as entertainment,
but, on the contrary, as a way of taking a deeper look at things, as a
kind of aid to mankind in discovering hidden aspects of itself.

Speaking of taking a deeper look at things, what gave you the idea,
in 1962, of making a film about Jeanne d’Arc?

I had read the transcript of the trial and was captivated by it, and when
I reread it, I immediately wanted to make a film out of it; but it had to
be a film that was as accurate as possible, because of the respect I have
for Jeanne d’Arc and the care that was therefore required.

Your Trial of Joan of Arc was not the first time a film was made
about her, as you of course know. The most recent one before it was
272 ACTION!

the 1957 picture directed by Otto Preminger, from the play by

George Bernard Shaw, and prior to this film there were Georges
Méliès’s in 1899, Cecil B. DeMille’s in 1917, and Carl Dreyer’s in
1928. Yet you wanted to make your own such film. Is that because
you believed that the others didn’t address the subject of Jeanne
correctly, or was there another reason?

In her book on the life and death of Jeanne d’Arc, Régine Pernoud
states that in 1840 a scholar calculated that there were already
500 works about Jeanne; 50 years later, Pernoud says, this figure
had increased fivefold, and there has never been more interest in her
than since the start of the twentieth century. Now I also believe that
Jeanne d’Arc is an inexhaustible treasure trove. But there was a
special reason why I was drawn to the idea of making a film about
her: I hoped to make her “present.” That is, we are kidding ourselves
if we see Jeanne merely as the little peasant girl of the legends.
Witnesses, people around her at the same, said the opposite–that in
fact she was very elegant. I think so, too, and I see her as a modern
young woman.

She is resurrected in your film through the minutes of the trial,

because you have used only the judge’s questions and Jeanne’s
responses. Actually, you were faithful not only to the transcript of
the trial, but also to the transcript of her later “rehabilitation” trial.

My only sources were the minutes of the cross-examination, which

history has preserved for us, as it has the minutes of the sentencing;
for the final moments of my film, I used the testimonies and
depositions from the posthumous appeal–what you have called the
“rehabilitation” trial, and which took place 25 years later.
Just by reading the transcript of the trial, one can sense its
simplicity. Indeed, the trial of Jeanne d’Arc is a kind of fifth gospel–so
much so that the poet Charles Péguy compared the passion of Jeanne
to that of Jesus. I wanted to translate to the screen something that, in
my view, no one had previously captured about the trial, or about
Jeanne’s life, for that matter: again, its extreme simplicity. There are
only the two basic colors of black and white in the film, and Jeanne’s
words themselves are strong and direct, as piercing as arrows; they
give us the extraordinary impression of purity, because nothing
incidental, nothing romantic, nothing dramatic, nothing tragic
 BRESSON 273

intervenes. If you like, the tragedy and the drama come out of the
events themselves, not any artistic arranging of those events.

Weren’t you afraid that your characteristic sobriety, your manner of

going for the very essence of a subject, could run counter to the
emotion that people often feel towards or for Jeanne?

I don’t think that aesthetic complication and disorder themselves

have ever been sources of emotion. On the contrary, when you want
to create a work that arouses emotion by linking several strands, you
must “clean up” those strands, lay them completely bare. When an
electrician wants to join two wires, he himself starts by stripping
them, doesn’t he?

You stripped the trial’s wires, then?

Exactly.

For the first time in history, or at least film history, Bishop Cauchon is
represented in The Trial of Joan of Arc in an almost sympathetic way.

He is a bishop like almost any other, and from this point of view
I have tried to be truthful. We condemn Cauchon and I think we are
right to do so, but let us also see how Cauchon could have viewed
the historical character of Jeanne d’Arc. I don’t want to excuse him
in the film, but only to explain his behavior. Jeanne herself is quite
admirable in my version because she doesn’t try to be. That is, she
doesn’t realize she is admirable.

How did you find the woman to play your heroine?

Sheer chance, which often helps us out, in art as in life.

A friend of Florence Delay was kind enough to bring her along to me
one day. And I saw right away that there was a great similarity
between her and the Jeanne d’Arc that I had imagined.

Delay was just as you had imagined Jeanne?

Just as I had imagined. And just as she was, I believe. Florence Delay
herself is not an actress; there are no actors in the film. Delay is the
274 ACTION!

daughter of Jean
Delay, at the time
a professor and a
member of the
French Academy;
and Bishop Cauchon
is Jean-Claude
Fourneau, who was
a well-known painter
in Paris; the judges
and their assistants
were, in real life,
university lecturers,
lawyers, doctors.
Again, there are no Florence Delay in Trial of Joan of Arc (1962).
Credit: Pathé Contemporary Films/Photofest
professional actors
in the film; ever since 1945, with Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne,
I have not used any such actors.

Could we move the discussion now to what you have called your, or
the cinema’s, separation from the theater?

Yes, certainly. Let me begin by saying that I think the cinema is

misguided, that it has its own language, its own means, and that it
has gone wrong since its birth. That is to say, it’s trying to express
itself by using tools that are those of the theater. Now there are
wonderful actors in the theater. Believe me, I get such a hard time
because I don’t use them; but such performers are not really my
pleasure. I believe in the very special language of cinema, and I think
that, once you try to express something through mimicry, through
gestures, through words and vocal qualities, you can no longer have
cinema. It becomes filmed theater.
Cinema is not that, however: it has to express itself not through
“talking” images alone, but through their relationship to one
another, which is not the same thing at all. This is also the case for a
painter, who does not use colors by themselves but in their
correlation to each other. Blue is blue in itself, but next to green, red
or yellow, it is not the same blue anymore: it changes. The aim of a
film should be just such a correlation of images. You take two
images, and each of them is neutral; but all of a sudden, next to each
 BRESSON 275

other, they vibrate as a new kind of life enters them. And it’s not
really the life of the story or of the characters; it’s the life of the film.
So what I am looking for is expression through rhythm and a
combination of images, through their positioning, their relationship
and their number. Before anything else, the purpose of an image
must be some kind of exchange. But for that exchange to be possible,
it is necessary that this image have something in common with other
images, that they participate together in a sort of union. That is why
I try to give to my characters what amounts to linkage, and I do this
by asking my actors–I call them “models”–to speak in a certain way,
to behave in a certain way, which is always the same way.
Yes, for me, the image is like a word in a sentence. Poets
themselves use desperately common words–as I use “common”
actors (or everyday people who are not actors by profession)–despite
their ability to elaborate immensely on the vocabulary we all use. But
it’s precisely the common word, the most commonly used one,
which, because it’s in the right place, all of a sudden shines through
extraordinarily in sound and meaning.

Doesn’t your description of cinema border on mysticism?

I don’t know what you mean by mysticism. To summarize something

I said a little while ago, I think that in a film there is also what you
did not put in it. You have to put things in without actually doing
so; I mean that everything that’s important must not be there at the
start, but end up being there in the end, or beyond the ending.
So what you just called mysticism must come from what the
feeling I have inside a prison, as the subtitle of my 1956 film, A Man
Escaped, indicates: The Wind Blows Where It Wishes. I’m talking
about those extraordinary currents, the presence of something
or somebody–call it what you want–or of a hand that controls
everything. Prisoners are very sensitive to this strange atmosphere,
which is not a dramatic one: it is on a higher level that some have
called symbolist. There is no apparent drama in prison: you may
hear someone getting shot, but this is normal, part of life in
a prison. That is, the subject is not in the finger that pulls the trigger
or the hands that strangle; it’s somewhere else, in the currents that
are flowing beyond these actions. At such a moment, something
quite odd occurs: objects become more important than characters.
That terrace up there, this wall over here, a curtain, the sound of
276 ACTION!

a train–all are more important than what is happening in the

inmates’ midst. Objects and noises, then–in a mystical sense, if you
will–exist in intimate union with man. And it’s a much more serious
union, a much more significant one, than the “union” of a man’s
hands with the neck of the guard he is strangling.

So, paradoxically, in an art that is all about the outside–about things

or objects–it is the inside that counts or commands.

Yes, exactly. Only the conflicts that take place inside the characters
give a film its movement, its real movement. A film is the kind of
creation that demands an inner style: it needs an author, a writer,
whose goal is to produce an internal effect or series of effects. If he
is conscientious, his preliminary work will consist precisely in going
back from the effect desired to the cause. Starting from what he
wants to engage, the emotions of the audience, he looks for the best
combinations of images and words to elicit those emotions. It’s a
path walked backwards, with selections and rejections, mistakes and
interpolations, all of which lead him fatefully to the origins of his
composition–that is to say, to the composition itself.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to digress for a moment to the subject of
painting. Isn’t there a part of you that is plagued by a recurrent, nagging
pain? What I mean is, if we look at your work as a whole, wouldn’t you
rather see it in a gallery than on the shelves of a film archive?

No, I love the cinema because I know it’s perishable. I enjoy making
something that won’t last; it’s precisely this immediate, perishable
aspect of film that appeals to me so much. I don’t believe in the
immortality of works of art, I absolutely do not.

But painting–

The cinema is there at one point in time and, after a relatively small
number of years, its products will be gone. Painting is something else
entirely. But fame, immortality through art, is something I never
think about. To begin with, I’m far from being famous; I’m fairly
unknown, more or less unknown. And this doesn’t concern me at all.
I think instead about the pleasure of filming, the pleasure of a job
well done.
 BRESSON 277

But isn’t a small part of you still the painter you once were, before
you started making films?

Not a moment goes by, it’s true, when I don’t think about painting. I tell
my eye to paint, never to stop painting. Like a composer’s, my ear, too,
is constantly hearing things in the sense of re-creating them in an aural
mode. But all this is a good thing. At a time when painting itself is in a
state of flux, when the arts as a whole are unstable, I find that it’s great
to be a filmmaker. The cinema encourages me; it buoys me up. I believe
in cinematographic writing; I believe it’s the writing of tomorrow.

What kind of value do you place on a particular form of

cinematographic writing, voice-over commentary, as you have used
it in certain films of yours?

It’s a rhythmic element, another element that interacts with all of the
other elements in the picture and modifies them. I would maintain
that in A Man Escaped, for example, the drama unfolded from the
meeting of the tone of the film’s voice-over commentary with the
tone of its actual dialogue.

What role do words in themselves have in a film?

I think words should say everything an image can’t say. Before

having characters speak, we should examine everything they could
express with their eyes and with body language–certain kinds of
interaction, certain ways of behaving that do not use words. Words
should only be used when we need to delve deeper into the heart of
things. In short, ideas must be expressed on film using appropriate
images and sounds, and dialogue should only be used as a last resort.
I don’t like talking about technique in this way. I don’t feel I have
one, in any event. It’s more an obsession I have with “flattening out”
images. Let me explain. I believe–rather, I’m certain–that without
transformation, there is no art, and without transforming the
image–“flattening” it and then positioning it–there is no cinema. If
the image remains isolated on the screen, just as it was filmed, if it
doesn’t change when juxtaposed against other images, there is no
transformation and you don’t have cinema. Images bearing the
“rounded” seal of the dramatic arts can’t be transformed because
they’re indelibly identified by that seal, like a table made out of
278 ACTION!

wood that’s refinished yet nonetheless still clearly bears the mark of
its original carving. You must therefore create images free from all
other arts, especially the dramatic arts, so that they can be
transformed into cinema through what I have called flattening, and
then through contact with other images and with sound.

Of course, you write or adapt everything for the screen yourself.

Because, from a film’s origin, I need to be the absolute master of its

ideas. All the more so if one wants to improvise.

Have you improvised a great deal in your films?

I’m believing more and more in the necessity of improvisation.

Watching your films, I don’t find it obvious that a great deal is left
to improvisation. Everything seems foreseen, as if you knew
precisely where you were headed. Everything seems very carefully
graduated and finely tuned.

I’ll try to clarify my point. I deliberately don’t want to know

what I’m going to be doing the next day when I am shooting
a film, so that I can get very strong impressions or stimulations–even
enormous difficulties–spontaneously, on location. I want to be
inspired, but if I prepare too much in advance, I won’t be; I won’t be
surprised with an inspiration. In addition, I want to capture the
feeling aroused by what I see before me at the moment that it occurs.
So the experience must be immediate; it’s not the past or the future,
it’s the present, now. I believe in the immediacy of cinematographic
creation–just as a pen writes when the thought arrives in the writer’s
mind. You don’t see painters knowing exactly what their
canvases will look like when they are finished. That would no longer
be a picture: it would be something amorphous, vacuous,
uninteresting. Similarly, you don’t see writers preparing in advance
what they’re going to write. When a writer sits down at his desk,
or scribbles away on his knees, he writes one word first, but he
cannot know at that point how the sentence will turn out. He has
a vague idea, but perhaps nothing more than that. His hand
simply leads him on, helping him to continue, and his state of
artistic grace–let us call it–helps him to continue, too. But the writer
 BRESSON 279

absolutely cannot, and must not, know in advance what exactly he

is going to say.
Something I found shocking from the moment I started making
films was some directors’ habit of preparing everything, including
the actors. These filmmakers know more or less exactly what they
will be doing at every step, so there’s no surprise element, no element
of chance or change. And I believe that art which has been so
prepared is not art. Toulouse-Lautrec himself declared, “I no longer
know how to draw.” He meant that, when you work, you must
forget everything. It’s afterwards that things come together and the
film appears, which is why editing is so fascinating. Of course you
can have a general idea in advance of how your film is going to turn
out, of its pace and rhythm. In fact, you edit it once in your head,
while you’re filming, and once with the film in your hand, when you
put it together all over again at the editing table.

How do you combine the element of chance or spontaneity with the

composed shots that typify you?

It’s not that I haven’t thought about the film. I’ll already have made a
storyboard, a plan on paper, before I begin shooting. I shut myself up
all alone to do this and, in my mind, I make the film. After that, I put
the storyboard aside; I don’t look at it again, and I go to make the
film. There’s an enormous gulf between the film as it exists on paper
and the real, finished film. They’re not the same thing at all. In fact,
it’s surprising how different the celluloid and paper versions are.

Let me get this clear, then: when you come on the set in the morning,
do you, as Jean Renoir said, let the unforeseen come into a shot? Or
do you prevent it from doing so?

Renoir said a lot of things that weren’t true, but some of what he
said was what I said. He used professional actors, however. And he
tried to give the impression that he was using them, not as actors
who were acting, but as actors who weren’t acting. I’m not really
sure what that is all about because an actor can’t go back, can’t be
natural. He just can’t. So…what was your question?

Renoir aside, you arrive on the set to film, and–…Let’s get back to
this subject, if you don’t mind.
280 ACTION!

No, I don’t mind. I don’t know what’s ahead of me when I arrive on

the set in the morning. Not at all. I don’t want to know what I’ll be
doing that day or the next; I want spontaneity. I don’t even know the
day before where I’ll be filming. And “set” is not the right word,
though I just used it. The setting is always somewhere real and the
objects are real; I don’t add anything special to the place. And, again,
above all I try not to think about what I’m going to be doing the next
day. It’s no different from painting, as I’ve already indicated: a painter
doesn’t know what his next brush stroke is going to be, let alone how
his picture will end up. He can’t know that. Art cannot exist without
this kind of surprise, or without change. I myself try to let ideas emerge
spontaneously. Sometimes you have to wait for the ideas, but it’s the
only way I can work. I would get terribly bored if I knew in advance
what I was going to do. For me nothing is written “in cement,” as you
Americans like to say. Especially in a film like L’Argent, where there
were a lot of actors, a lot of models, and often I wouldn’t know
who was going to be coming to work that day. I didn’t know how
people would look under the lights, for example–how I would be
lighting them. So, no, I don’t know anything when I come to the set.
And I don’t want to. I want everything to be as spontaneous as
possible. I want spontaneity present. To repeat, it’s not the past or the
future, it’s the present: now.

When you were filming L’Argent, were you aware of this sense of the
now or the new?

Yes, I felt that I was doing things more intuitively, flinging myself
into the process. When I film, naturally I think about how each
image will be embedded between two other images, the preceding
one and the following one. But, as I’ve described it, chance plays
a part, too. Basically, my film is a product of chance, just as any
work of art is a product of chance.
L’Argent itself is a simple enough tale. A deliveryman, wrongly
accused of passing counterfeit money, gets into trouble with the police.
This incident, which might have been so easily settled, ends up turning
his whole life upside down. One thing leads to another in a downward
spiral that culminates in the drastic act of murder. That’s a brief
summary of the written script of my film, but my cinematographic
writing of this picture is another matter altogether. And it has to be.
It has to be a surprise–or the result of chance, spontaneity and
 BRESSON 281

change–and I want that surprise to be total. You have to come face to

face with the new. That’s very important to me: novelty and nature.
Not the natural, but nature. I want such moments–in which the script
becomes something else by being immersed in its setting, in a real place
among real things–to create something within me, and what is created
I want to commit to film. I have great faith in beauty, you see, but
beauty is only beauty when it is new.
Let me add that, strangely enough, some of my films seem to have
been very planned and weren’t at all, like 1959’s Pickpocket, which
was written in three months and shot in the midst of crowds in a
minimal amount of time. For L’Argent itself, I dreaded that the
frequent changes in location, with their different groupings of people,
would cause me to lose the picture’s thread, for all–indeed, on
account of–its “newness.” But I managed to pass from one sequence
to another by means of sonorous, I should say “musical,” transitions.

Why did you choose Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Fantasie Chromatique”

for L’Argent?

Because I didn’t want my pianist to play sentimental music. But,

then, Bach’s music is always sentimental, so I fooled myself a bit.

As you know, some critics took exception to your having shown the
bottom of pants legs in L’Argent.

You must be referring to the pants of the passersby in front of the

terrace of a café on one of the “grands boulevards.” The impression
one has, on arriving at one of these boulevards where there is a
crowd, is that of a jumble of legs on the sidewalk making a brisk
sound. I tried to impart this impression through the use of sound as
well as image. I was similarly reproached, you may recall, about
showing the legs of horses in Lancelot du lac, my film from 1974.
But I photographed the legs of the horses, without showing their
riders, in order to draw attention to the muscular power of these
animals’ hindquarters when they braced themselves before taking off
during the tournament.

Even in D. W. Griffith’s time, legend has it, producers complained

about filmmakers’ shooting close-ups, because they had paid for the
whole body of the actor.
282 ACTION!

To show all in a film comes from the habits of the theater, in the
same way as the acting of film actors does.

Didn’t you begin your work on Pickpocket, incidentally, by shooting

freely in the streets, only to change your method of filming?

Yes. I had been told, “Hide, it’s easy.” I hid. But I quickly discovered
I had to use tricks to get what I wanted, because a hidden camera is
not precise. Crowds are a mess, for example, though I wound up
using some of that mess in a few shots.

What about the sequence at the Gare de Lyon?

It was shot entirely amidst crowds, in July, during the annual

vacation departures. I needed the camera to be very mobile, so rails,
a dolly and marks on the floor were required. Nothing like that could
be hidden. On top of all this, there was the din and the jostling.

Yet the camera movements in this film are not really visible.

No more than in my other films where the camera constantly moves.

You don’t want the movement to be seen?

The camera is not a moving eye but an encompassing vision.

Did you use these dolly shots in Pickpocket so that you could more
easily maintain the same distance from the subject?

Not the same distance. On the contrary, it’s never the same distance.
It’s the necessary distance. There is only one place in space where
something, at a precise moment, asks to be seen.

What did you want people to feel in Pickpocket?

Rather than having a story I wanted to tell, I wanted people to get a

feeling of the atmosphere that surrounds a thief, the particular
atmosphere that makes people feel anxious and uncomfortable.

Have you ever met any thieves?

 BRESSON 283

I think I’ve met several thieves, but you don’t really know until after
you’ve been robbed.

You felt nothing at the time, in the presence of a thief?

Yes, I did. I remember one time when I was out in the country. I was in
a room with my host and a third person, and we both felt that this third
person either was going to steal something or had already stolen it.

What made you feel that?

It was something very mysterious that I can’t put into words. This
was the same feeling I wanted to express in Pickpocket. That, and
the terrible solitude of the thief, the solitude which shuts him in.

Was that the starting point for this film?

I don’t really know what a film’s starting point is, but there’s no
doubt that in Pickpocket there is a solitude, which I didn’t want to
show directly; and the film is driven by that solitude.

Pickpocket is quite unlike most other films on the subject of stealing.

Is that something you were, or are, aware of?

No, not one bit.

But, from what I know of you, you don’t much like the cinema of
Pickpocket’s time or any other. That is, you yourself don’t want to
film nicely structured stories, about thieves and thieving or anything
else. How in fact do you see the cinema of today?

There are some films that I like, even though they may not be made
according to my methods. But, the fact that they are made in such a
way, contrary to mine, may be why I go to the cinema less often than
I used to. There are certain things that annoy me when I see them, things
that I wouldn’t do, techniques used today that I wouldn’t use. It’s quite
natural, of course, for me to think that the others are wrong and not I.

One essential characteristic of your films, as we’ve discussed, is your

rejection of the theatrical.
284 ACTION!

The theatricality that I reject, or, rather, that I try to reject, because
it’s not so easy, is expression by means of different or varying facial
expressions, physical gestures, vocal qualities.

So you are looking for some kind of anti-expression. You push to

extremes in which not only do you not want acting, but you also
don’t even want realism. It’s as if you make the actors blank, or less
expressive than in real life.

I don’t think so. I try to draw them towards automatism, which is

something quite different from what you describe, and which
occupies such a large part of our daily lives.

But can you see how people might think you’re turning your back on
what audiences want to see?

Again, I don’t think so. It’s not something I’m aware of, in any
event. I don’t think I’m turning my back on audiences, or that
they’re turning their backs on me, because I work from my
own experience–of audiences as well as of life. After making a film,
I sit in the audience and try to feel what they’re feeling, and to
experience my own original feelings while making the picture. I
would say that audience members generally seem happy or satisfied
with what they see; they end up feeling exactly as I did and being
very moved.

Why do you think that audiences found it easy to feel what you
wanted them to feel in A Man Escaped, for one salient example, but
were less sensitive to those feelings in Pickpocket? Or do you
disagree that audiences were less sensitive to Pickpocket?

No, I agree with you. It’s probably because the story itself, the story
of the escape, is much more, maybe not dramatic, but certainly
more heroic; and the character of the escaped prisoner is much more
sympathetic, far more accessible to many more people.

Everyone wants to escape, you mean, but no one wants to be a thief.

Exactly. And the story of the escaped prisoner ends in freedom,

whereas Pickpocket ends in prison.
 BRESSON 285

After all I’ve heard you say thus far, may I ask why you impose such
difficulties on yourself during the making of your films?

So that I capture only reality. In any event, difficulty clings to me, in

the same way as speed does. I’ve often noticed, for example, that
anything I’ve not been able to resolve on paper, if I resolve it on
location, while filming, that’s the thing I do best and fastest.

Was it difficult, in Lancelot du lac, to film with horses, knights in

armor, and an enormous cast of extras? You had not previously done
anything like this.

Contrary to what people may think, when you can do it with a little,
you can do it with a lot. Besides, having bigger means doesn’t relieve
you of the responsibility of capturing details, suggesting rather than
showing, and giving prominence to sound. The tournament sequence
in this picture, for instance, was staged for the ear, as were virtually
all the other sequences.

But the sound isn’t realistic in your films. You don’t use sound effects
so much as you exaggerate the sound that is otherwise natural to the
scene. You exaggerate the noise of objects or things at the same time
as you lower the volume of the dialogue.

Sometimes I reduce the volume of dialogue, it’s true. Yet at other

times I do the opposite and exaggerate its importance. It depends on
what I feel intuitively and on how the film is unfolding. Since I didn’t
have the luxury of enormous amounts of money in the making of
Lancelot du lac, I concentrated on sound rather than spectacle.
Usually, such huge budgets don’t bring good luck to the cinema,
anyway.

Still, for you, this film was a “super production.”

But as anachronistic as possible.

Anachronistic?

You need to remove the past to the present if you want to make it
believable. And, don’t forget, the Holy Grail, the Christian symbol
286 ACTION!

that the knights seek but do not find–the Grail, which represents the
absolute in God–already figures in pagan Celtic legends. So why can’t
we extend the quest for this holy cup or platter into contemporary life
as you and I know it, whether I do this literally or metaphorically?

What is piquant in Tolstoy’s novella The Counterfeit Note–from

which you adapted L’Argent–is its own contemporary detail: the
high school students, the seller of picture frames, and so on.

I wanted to keep this point of departure because it is apt. But

I Gallicized it in L’Argent: I made it Parisian and modern.

A Man Escaped is also “modernized,” like a new version of

Robinson Crusoe. The hero sets himself technical problems, so as
not to let himself be led to metaphysical despair; he tries to find
within himself the spiritual resources necessary for survival.

My heroes seem like shipwrecked men, leaving to discover an

unknown island, a “story idea” you can find even as early as the
creation of Adam. My next film happens to be Genesis, for which
I will be undertaking preparations over the next few months.
[Interviewer’s note: Genesis in fact was never filmed.]

After what’s happened with L’Argent, do you suddenly find that the
desire to keep on making films is somehow stronger? You’ve been
praised by some for L’Argent, but strongly criticized by others; the
film has certainly received mixed reactions. So much so that when it
was presented at Cannes, you refused to talk to the press.

The critics don’t affect me so much, one way or the other. So, despite
them, there is another film I’m going to make–Genesis, to which
I just referred–and which I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
I might have done it had I not been able to make L’Argent.
The advance funding for L’Argent was rejected outright three or four
years ago, by the subsidy selection committee under the last French
government. And, at the time, I didn’t think I’d be able to make it
without that financial support. I’ve written quite a lot about Genesis,
the beginning of Genesis, which is a subject I’m very much interested
in, but it will be a much more difficult film to make than
L’Argent–much longer, and therefore more expensive.
 BRESSON 287

Where will you shoot your Genesis?

I don’t know yet. Not in Palestine or in any of the Middle Eastern

countries. I don’t want to typecast countries–and, besides,
landscapes have never been very important to me. Animals
themselves are animals all over the world.

Now that you bring up animals again, what is affecting in the

quadruple murder sequence in L’Argent is that the emotion comes
from the cry of the victims’ dog.

Many animals have an exquisite sensitivity that we don’t try hard

enough to know. I myself would like to make more use of it. It’s like
a doubling, an extension, of our own joys and sufferings.

In L’Argent, you have a very harsh view of the bourgeois world. The
likable characters are Yvon–the fuel-oil deliveryman–and the
exploited old woman.

L’Argent is not an antibourgeois film, though. It’s not a question of

the, or of a, bourgeois world, but of particular instances in it.

Yet Yvon is to some extent the exterminating angel of this world.

Society abandons him, and his carnage is therefore like the explosion
of his despair.

To move to another subject, how did it come about that you dropped
actors in the conventional sense and began to use in their place
“models”–or, as you say, people taken from everyday life?

From the first seconds of my first full-length film, Les Anges du

péché in 1943, my actresses–there were only women in this
picture–suddenly were no longer people and there was nothing left,
absolutely nothing, of what I had imagined.

How so?

Because, I suppose, of their very exterior or external way of speaking

and their useless gesticulating.
288 ACTION!

A question related to the one about the use of the term “models”
instead of “actors”: why does it irritate you when people describe
your films as “works,” which is a standard or general term to which
almost no one else objects?

Because that word simply doesn’t describe my films. What they are–
I know Jean-Luc Godard said this, but I said it long before him, and
Bertolt Brecht said it before me–are attempts, strivings. They are
striving towards something that I know to be the ultimate truth of the
screenwriter-director. I’m following a path that I can see quite clearly,
and I’m still traveling it, without yet having reached perfection. But I
think I’ll get there. What I do now, the artistic path on which I continue
to find myself, is simply a consequence of my early experiences as
a director. It wasn’t some idea that I already had in my head, since I was
surprised myself by what came to be my filmmaking practice.

What are you striving for, again? The ultimate truth, you say?

I am striving towards the truth–there’s a difference. But perhaps

I should qualify the phrase “ultimate truth” and simply say “the
impression of truth.”

You don’t believe, do you, that the cinema represents reality

truthfully or realistically? You said earlier in our conversation that
you wanted to “capture only reality.”

What we take in through our eyes and ears has come from two
machines that are said to reproduce the real world perfectly. But one
of these machines is only capable of representing things in a
misleading fashion, via the lie that is photography; while the other
produces a truthful representation of the elements that constitute
sound. How can one ignore this dichotomy, the fact that the sound
is true but the image false? From this dialectical starting point, you
must work hard, not always knowing where you’re headed, to
achieve what I think cinematographic writing should encompass,
which is the indefinable combination of the aural and the visual–the
“impression of truth,” as I have described it.

It’s been said, to return to the subject of performance, that you hate
actors.
 BRESSON 289

That’s absurd. It’s as if one were to say, “He’s a painter, therefore he

doesn’t like sculptors.” I like the theater and I like actors–some are
good friends of mine. But I wouldn’t be able to work with them, as
I indicated to you before. I don’t ask anyone to follow me, nor do
I wish to follow the way of theater and dramatic acting.

What exactly do you dislike about actors? The fact that they are
poor machines?

They are excellent machines for whom I have a lot of respect, as

machines. I love watching them at the theater, and go there often.
But it’s not the same thing at all: I trust that I’ve made this clear by
now. It’s not the same work–or shouldn’t be–as acting in the cinema.
It just isn’t. The two have been equated simply because it’s more
convenient financially to do so. This is one of the evil effects of
money. And this is why I say “cinema” to distinguish films from
“movies”; by “movies,” I mean conventional ones, which to me are
just filmed plays. The director has the actors, from stage or film or
both, perform a piece, and he films it. To me, cinema is something
entirely different. To elaborate on something I said earlier, it’s
an independent art born of the juxtaposition of image with image,
image with sound, and sound with sound–images, and sound, which
are thereby transformed. But the images themselves must have
a certain quality that might be called neutrality, and that earlier
I termed “flattening.” They mustn’t have–and this is very difficult to
avoid–too much fullness or roundedness of dramatic meaning. Their
dramatic meaning, as I say, must come from their juxtaposition with
other images and with the sound.
That’s what is extremely difficult: to know how a particular image
should be shot, and from what angle, in order to allow it to interact
with other images. This is true creation, not reproduction. When you
film actors performing a play, the camera reproduces the scene; it
doesn’t create that scene. To the degree that theater is thus an external
and decorative art–which is not an insult in my mind–the contrasting
aim or goal of cinema is to depict interiority, intimacy, isolation. In
other words, the innermost depths. To me, cinema is the art of having
each thing in its place. Only in this does it resembles all other arts. You
know the anecdote about Bach playing for a student: the student gushes
with admiration, but Bach says, “There’s nothing to admire. You just
have to hit the note at the right time, and the organ does the rest.”
290 ACTION!

To sum up, and to reiterate a point worth repeating, I believe that

the cinema is not the theater and the theater is not the cinema;
and that in a film, one should believe in the character, not sometimes
in the actor and sometimes in the character. An actor is someone
who continuously hides behind his acting, behind his art, as if he
were hiding himself behind a screen.

So the character must be new, authentic, which explains why some stars
of your films, to use an expression you dislike, haven’t had a career.

Exactly.

They are the stars or actors or modelers of a role.

Of a particular role.

Do you think they are incapable of acting another role?

If you use them as I use them, with no messing about or special

effects, it’s better that I don’t use them again.

You’re so strict that they won’t often get the chance to act in any
conventional way, at least under your direction.

You know, I never show them the previous day’s work, as one
normally would, and I believe strongly that they must be totally
unaware of what they are doing. I believe that this method draws
from them the deepest things, which you could not draw from an
actor, because, as I said to you, normally they hide behind their
science, their art. Whereas one could say, if you like, that the cinema
is a means of psychological discovery, rather than being a form of
photographed theater.

How do you look for the people you call your “models”? Do you
choose them because, when you look at them, they seem to be
interesting people? Do you hope that more of this interesting quality
will be revealed during filming?

Formerly, I looked for my “models” and chose them on the basis of

their moral resemblance to my characters. But this approach cost me a
 BRESSON 291

great deal of time. I think that men–and women, too, of course–are too
strange, too contradictory, for me to know in advance what is going to
come out during the filming. Maybe the more contradictory someone
is, the more internal contradictions he seems to have, and for this
reason the more he interests me. And, as far as casting goes, there’s
something that tempts me–perhaps some demon within me–that tempts
me not to take the person who would be the obvious choice. At some
point, I ignore my obvious choice and say, “Let’s just see what happens
if we go with this other person.” I find that interesting. Indeed, these
days, as long as nothing appears in a potential “model” that is contrary
to my general conception of the character, my decision is made.

Why?

Because characters of our own invention are all too much of a piece.
As you well know, people themselves are full of eccentricities, or
“character traits,” that often don’t appear until they are shown in,
or exposed to, a particular light. Above all, I rely in casting on my
flair for doing it and on chance–an element that, like surprise,
I treasure. Nonetheless, there is something else to consider: the voice,
which is a divine thing. Taken apart, separately from any physical
aspect, it doesn’t permit you, or nearly doesn’t permit you, to be
misled. So I have to choose very carefully when it comes to the vocal
quality of anybody who is to appear in one of my films.

What about your direction of actors–or I suppose I should say,

“models”?

It isn’t a question of directing someone, but of directing oneself. The

rest is telepathy.

Nonetheless, I know that you ask your actors to express themselves

through body language and physical gesture. Yet you also restrict
those very elements.

We are back to talking about technique again, or rather my

obsession with mechanical behavior. I think that most of our
gestures, and even our words, are automatic. If your hand is on your
knee, you didn’t put it there; it put itself there. Montaigne wrote
a wonderful chapter on this subject, about how our hands go where
292 ACTION!

we don’t tell them to go. Our hands are autonomous, you see. Our
gestures, our limbs, themselves are autonomous; they’re not under
our command. That’s the cinema as well, or what I conceive of as
acting that’s suited to the cinema. What filmic acting is not is
thinking out a gesture, thinking out words. In reality, we don’t think
of what we’re going to say; the words come even as we think, and
perhaps they even make us think. Looked at this way, theater acting
is unrealistic and unnatural. What I attempt with my films is to
touch on what’s real about human speech, behavior, action.

I’d like to get your response to the charge that you transform your
characters into your desired form rather than letting them evolve in
their own way. Is that true?

Not really. It’s a strange combination, a combination of them and

me, a transfer of energy between us. It’s a kind of mixture obtained,
not from my directing or staging, but from a kind of divination,
a shared assent, a kind of friendship or affinity in all matters.
This “mixture” absolutely does not come from merely directing the
actors or from staging things. “Staging” is an apt expression here.
This word shows that today’s movies–yet again, I emphasize
the difference between movies and cinema–they are filmed plays.
I apologize for repeating this distinction once more.

You don’t consider yourself a director, then?

Not in the least. I am not even a cinephile.

What is Robert Bresson’s profession?

Someone once said that I’m one “who imposes order.” I prefer that
to “director,” as on the stage, because I don’t see a stage anywhere.

In that case, why don’t you ever let your actors improvise, in
contrast to your own “improvisation” with regard to scripting,
locations and shooting?

They improvise, but not in the way you think. By that I mean I like
the actor’s mind to be completely uninvolved in what’s happening.
We keep repeating lines, 50 times if necessary, until the mind no
 BRESSON 293

longer intervenes in the dialogue or the gestures. Once things become

automatic, I throw the actor into the action of the film, and then
completely unexpected things happen that are a hundred times more
real than theatrical acting, where the actor has memorized his lines
and thinks out his every movement, sound, and gesture. There’s no
way acting of this kind can seem real.

So using this method, your actors sometimes do unexpected things?

All the time, not just sometimes. That’s the improvisation I speak of.
We shouldn’t imitate life; we have to find a way to reproduce it
without imitating it. If we imitate life, it’s not real. It’s fake. I think
using a mechanism, or method, like mine can lead to something
lifelike and even real. May I ask you a question now?

Yes, of course.

You study film and write about it at present, yes; but much, if not
all, of your formal education was in the theater, both as a performer
and later as a critic. Am I wrong?

No, you are right.

It shows. I mean no disrespect, but it shows.

Let’s talk about acting of a subhuman–or perhaps superhuman–kind.

Did the donkey cause you any problems in Au hasard Balthazar?

The donkey was a big problem, because I didn’t want a performing

donkey. Even while writing the film, I was wary of using a trained
donkey. I didn’t want the animal to be “professional.” The circus
scene where the donkey does math tricks was shot much later than
the rest of the film, to give the trainer time to train the donkey to do
math. I waited two months to shoot that scene and then add it to the
other footage, so that the donkey would be completely free of
training, free of any artificiality. But this created a situation where
the donkey never did what we expected.

It seems to me that what you ask of your human performers

resembles a psychiatric exercise called “psychodrama,” which
294 ACTION!

people have often attempted to transform into art. You put your
actors in a particular situation and ask them to test their inner limits.

What interests me is not what they show but what they conceal.

And you manage to film what they conceal?

Yes, thanks to that extraordinary device, the miraculous machine

called a camera. As a matter of fact, what surprises me is that such
an incredible device, capable of recording what our eye cannot, or
more precisely what our mind does not, is only used to show us
tricks and falsehoods. That’s what surprises me.

And you believe, as you’ve made clear, that professional acting

contributes to these tricks and falsehoods.

Of course, because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to change an

actor’s nature. There’s something Chateaubriand said about
seventeenth-century poets that goes something like, “They don’t lack
naturalness. They lack Nature.” In the theater, being natural is a
learned skill based on the careful study of feelings from life. That’s
the theater’s raw material. In the cinema, the raw material isn’t the
actor, it’s the person–it’s life itself, as opposed to life from a distance.

Without putting anyone on the spot, I’d like you to name some
actors who are natural in the way you describe. For example, in
France, Michel Simon was very “natural.”

Yes, but once again, you’ll make me go too far–

Please do.

–and speak my mind about acting. Traditional stage acting is simply

projection. An actor projects himself into the character he’s imagined
and, at the same time, he’s watching himself. In a conventional film
it’s the same thing. If an actor happens to lose focus or daydream and
project himself elsewhere, what’s left? Nothing. The character is
hollow. You can often see this in close-ups, where the actor seems
absent, absent even from his own image.
 BRESSON 295

So when you hire people who aren’t actors, who haven’t been
“distorted” through training and who watch themselves less, the
results are more real, in your view.

The greatest talent, and the greatest difficulty–isn’t it to be “charming,”

as we commonly call this quality in everyday life? In reality, people are
charming–they attract one’s eye, if you will–because they aren’t aware
of their charm. That’s what I’m looking for: true charm. That’s what
the cinema needs. And that’s a clue to one of the things the cinema does
so well: delve deeply into human psychology, so deeply at times that the
camera itself seems to be a psychoanalyst.

I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard that you don’t give your
performers the entire script when you film. In other words, they
don’t know the story they are about to be thrown into.

That’s not quite correct. They have a script. What they don’t know
is how they’re doing on screen. As I’ve noted, unlike what is
commonly done in the movies, I don’t show my performers the
previous day’s rushes. I never show them what they’ve done, so that
they won’t watch themselves on screen as if in a mirror and try to
correct themselves, as all professionals do. These actors think, “My
nose is too far to the right. Next time I’ll face more to the left. That’ll
be better.” You see what I mean.

How do you ask your performers to learn their lines? Do they have
any input into the dialogue you write?

I think I’ve already answered this question: I ask them to learn their
lines while ignoring the meaning of those lines, as if they didn’t have
a meaning, as if the words were just syllables–as if sentences were
made not of words but only of syllables. The meaning comes upon
my performers unaware, at the moment I described earlier, when
I finally set them loose in the film.

They learn their lines in a foreign language, as it were, only receiving

the translation at that moment when they are set free.

Yes, if you like.

296 ACTION!

Do you think long takes allow your performers to express

themselves better?

You are showing your theater training once again. To me, the substance
of cinema isn’t gestures and words; it’s the effect produced by those
gestures and words. So that effect is completely independent of me and
even the performers. It occurs completely without their knowledge.
What counts is what these gestures and words emit, what we read in
the performers’ faces, utterances, and above all their activities or
actions. As Montaigne said, “We’re revealed in our gestures.”

Your working methods are very secretive, I’ve learned. You film in
secret, and you don’t like publicity. I must say it was even difficult to
arrange this interview with you. This is part of your character,
I sense. Is it absolutely essential to your work, this secrecy?

I believe that filmmaking takes a lot of concentration, and, what is

more, I don’t think it’s good to talk about yourself or about what
you’re doing. It is very difficult to explain to others something
that you can’t even explain to yourself. I have tried to do so today,
with your help, but I cannot know if I’ve been successful.

Do you think you are in the vanguard of the film world?

I don’t know. But I do think that films in the future will be moving
further and further away from the theater, as I have tried to do in my
work. The techniques used in these films will be completely different
from the theatrical techniques used now.

So you think that the cinema still has unfulfilled possibilities?

Oh, yes, of course. Not in technical terms but in terms of inner

artistry, the cinema is still lacking in genuine practitioners.

Do you think, then, that today’s acclaimed films will be forgotten in

twenty years?

I really can’t say. I don’t like making such critical pronouncements.

Do people understand you?

 BRESSON 297

I don’t know if they understand me, but…is this about me or my

films? If it’s about the films, I’d rather people felt a film of mine
before understanding it; I prefer that their feelings cut in before their
intelligence.

Do you yourself feel alone, or that you stand alone?

Again, as a man or as an artist?

Both.

I feel very alone in each case, but I don’t derive any pleasure from
this feeling, if that’s what you mean.

May I conclude by saying what I think of you and your work?

Yes, if you want to.

In my view, you are the greatest of filmmakers. When I see one of

your films, I feel such turmoil, such deracination, that it’s as if I’m
experiencing cinema for the very first time in my life. With each
Bresson film this happens. Every one of your films has had a
profound effect on me that has lasted for years. I feel as though
you’re working in some secret medium to which you alone have the
key; the provenance of any film of yours thus seems to be different
from that of other films. The film itself seems to be printed
somewhere else than other films. Your immensity, your immensity in
film art, is contained as much in a single one of your images as in the
entire body of your images, of your work. It’s a new product, or,
better, a new phenomenon–that’s all I can say.

You are too generous, M. Cardullo. But I would be dishonest if

I didn’t say I hope you’re right.
Abbas Kiarostami on the set of A.B.C. Africa (2001). Credit: New Yorker
Films/Photofest

“The Fruitful Tree Bends”:

Abbas Kiarostami
by Bert Cardullo

Abbas Kiarostami (born 1940) is the most influential and controversial

post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaker and one of the most highly
celebrated directors in the international film community of the last
decade. During the period of the 1980s and the 1990s, at a time
when Iranians had such a negative image in the West, his cinema
introduced the humane and artistic face of his people. Kiarostami
has been involved in the making of over 40 films since 1970,
including shorts and documentaries; he first attained global critical
acclaim for directing the Koker Trilogy (Where Is the Friend’s
House? [1987], Life and Nothing More… [1991], and Through the
Olive Trees [1994]), A Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will
Carry Us (1999).
Kiarostami belongs to a generation of filmmakers who created the
so called “New Wave,” a movement in Iranian cinema that started
300 ACTION!

in the 1960s, before the revolution of 1979. Directors such as

Forough Farrokhzad, Dariush Mehrjui, Sohrab Shaheed Saless,
Amir Naderi, Bahram Beizai and Parviz Kimiavi were the pioneers
of this movement. These filmmakers had a number of techniques in
common, including the use of poetic dialogue and of allegorical
narrative as a way of dealing with complex political and
philosophical issues. They were followed not only by Kiarostami,
but also by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahman Ghobadi, Jafar Panahi
and Hassan Yektapanah.
In his own movement toward an elliptically compressed, nearly
plotless cinema, Kiarostami not only breaks away from conventional
or mainstream narrative, he also questions the audience’s
role–playing with audience members’ expectations and provoking
their critical thinking as well as creative imagination. In addition, he
has a reputation for using child protagonists, for filming stories that
take place in rural villages and that therefore emphasize landscape
and architecture, and for employing small crews, non-actors and
often no script. Kiarostami’s documentary feature A.B.C. Africa
(2001) signaled the emergence of yet another new approach, as it
was his first film shot outside Iran and on digital video.
The following interview took place in Istanbul, Turkey, in May of
2005 at the Istanbul Film Festival, where Kiarostami was an
honored guest.

Interview

Jean-Luc Godard famously said, “Film begins with D. W. Griffith

and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.” What do you think of that?

Well, Godard doesn’t believe this anymore, especially since I diverted

cinema off its course a bit when I made Ten [2002].

Let me give you another quotation. Anthony Minghella said that, “If
Samuel Beckett had made films, he would have made them like
Kiarostami.” Do you agree?

Maybe. Beckett did make one film, actually, with Alan Schneider
directing and Buster Keaton in the leading role: Film. So there is some
evidence if anyone wants to prove or disprove Mr. Minghella’s thesis.
 KIAROSTAMI 301

How did you become a filmmaker?

It’s all because of my friend Abbas Cohendari’s shoes that I became

a filmmaker! At the time I had passed my baccalaureate and had
failed the entrance exam in painting at the School of Fine Arts. So
I became a traffic cop. One day I was in Abbas Cohendari’s dry goods
shop and he asked me to go with him to the Tajreesh bridge. I told
him that I’d rather not because I had sandals on. So he gave me a pair
of new shoes, just my size, and we set off for Tajreesh Bridge. Then
we went over to Farhad Ashtari’s, where I met a certain Mohaqeq
who ran a painting workshop. So I enrolled in his classes and took
the entrance exam for the Fine Arts School over again–this time
I passed. I then began working in advertising. I had left my parents’
home when I was 18 and had to earn a living. In the beginning,
I worked as a painter and graphic artist in a number of studios; I did
book covers, posters, etc. Then I went to Tabli Film, which, at the
time, was the main production center for commercials. When
I offered my services as a director, they asked me to write a sketch
about an isothermal water-heater. I spent the night writing a poem
about water-heaters. Three evenings later, to my great astonishment,
I saw a commercial on TV with my poem in it. That was how I got
into commercials. Little by little, I made progress. I wrote more
sketches and started directing commercials. From 1960 to 1969,
I must have directed more than 150. I really enjoyed those
commercials. You have to condense the introduction, the story itself,
and the message into one minute; you must broach a subject, explain
it quickly to everyone, and make the public want to go out and buy
the product. I learned about cinema from commercials and graphic
art: in a graphic project, you have a page, a column or an insert on
which to draw something that will immediately grab the reader’s
attention. I think graphics is the father of all arts. By its very
limitations, this kind of commissioned work forces you to use your
imagination. During the last few years of my work in advertising,
I designed credit sequences for a few Iranian films; this was the
turning point between my graphic work and my directing of non-
advertising films. I discovered the camera during my work on these
credit sequences.

Are you at a point yet where you regard yourself chiefly as

a filmmaker?
302 ACTION!

I have many professions, and none of them appeases me. There are
filmmakers who, when they are making one film, are thinking about
the next. This kind of filmmaker tends not to be an artist. I am not
like that. I am a vagabond. Being this vagabond leads me to all sorts
of places and leads me to do all sorts of things. I spend a lot of time
doing carpentry, for instance. Sometimes there is nothing that gives
me the contentment that sawing a piece of wood does. Working in
quiet gives me inner peace.

You are nearly as well known for your still photography as you are
for your films.

For me, still photography, video and film are all elements of one
spectrum. The question is how we can best get close to our subjects.
And, where that goal is concerned, the future belongs to digital video.
The non-actors I like to use, for example, feel more comfortable in
front of a digital camera, without the lights and the large crew around
them, and we therefore arrive at far more intimate moments with them.
Moreover, because of the requirements of the 35mm camera and the
mode of production that comes with that camera, there were a lot of
people who just couldn’t afford to use it. Now, this digital camera
makes it possible for everybody to pick it up, like a pen. If you have the
right vision, and you think you are an instinctive filmmaker, there is no
hindrance anymore. You just pick it up, like a pen, and work with it.
I photographed Ten and Five [2003] in digital video, but I did
return to 35mm for the episode I shot in the three-episode anthology
film made in Italy called Tickets. [The other two episodes are by Ken
Loach and Ermanno Olmi.] If you are not going to take full
advantage of digital, I must say, then 35mm is a better
medium–especially for shooting dramas.

Could you say something about the paintings you still do?

Let me start by saying that I do not call myself a painter even though
I do painting. It is more important to engage in painting than to label
oneself a painter–I simply feel comfortable painting. When people
ask me to judge their paintings, I decline and remind them that what
is important is that they have been engaged in the activity of
painting. Engaging in the art of painting itself is the worthwhile
activity, and so I paint.
 KIAROSTAMI 303

Though you say you aren’t a painter, one of the extraordinary things
about your films is the way you picture and frame the landscape. But
painting is a solitary activity. You couldn’t find something more
socially and even artistically opposite from filmmaking, which
involves so many people, and a big metaphorical canvas as opposed
to a small, actual one.

I have gotten used to looking at reality in an artistic way, especially

through the viewpoint of painting. When I look at nature, I see
a frame of painting. I see everything from an aesthetic angle. Even
when I am in a taxi looking out the window, I put everything in
a frame. This is the way I see painting, photography and film–all
interrelated and connected because they capture reality in frames. All
interconnected, also, because they take advantage, or should, of
mistakes, accidents, chance. I take my lead from Renoir the painter,
who says that if you drip paint on your canvas, don’t get too worried
about it; instead try to use the drip as an element and evolve
something else out of it.

Let me introduce a subject that couldn’t be farther from such

fortuitousness, which itself is a kind of artistic freedom. What is the
relationship between censorship and filmmaking in Iran?

The government has not shown any of my films for the past ten
years. I think they don’t understand my films and so prevent
them from being shown just in case there is a message they
don’t want to get out. They tend to support films that are stylistically
very different from mine–melodramas. The government doesn’t
just own the cinemas, but also the means of production, so I have
to work around them. The government is not in my way, but it is
not assisting me, either. We lead our separate lives. Two things
you have to keep in mind: one, an Iranian official hardly ever
remains in his position for a very long time; when one goes and
another comes, that is the best time to try again. Two films of mine
have escaped the sharp censorship scissors, probably because the
censors did not quite understand what they should censor in them!
A movie is good, I think, when the censor does not understand
what should be censored. If a film is made from which a censor cuts
some parts, then those parts should have been cut, because he
understood them!
304 ACTION!

Let me add that the Iranian cinema today is distinctive from that
of the rest of the world not only because of its unique vision and
perspective, but also because it reflects the way in which each
filmmaker has come to terms with, and found ways of expressing
himself within, the limitations that exist. I like to use the phrase
“restrictive” to describe the conditions I work under rather than
oppressive, as some people do; and I understand that oppressive
means many different things in many different contexts, but for us as
artists and filmmakers what we are dealing with are the realities of
restrictions, and I like to approach the subject of censorship from
that angle. I look at these restrictions not in the context of the
cinema alone but in the broader context of life. For me these
restrictions exist everywhere and have always been there. Life in the
East has never been without them. We have always had to live within
certain boundaries. Life is the combination of, and the movement
between, restriction and freedom–the field of action is limited, and
the field of power is limited. When we were kids we were always told
what we could do and what we couldn’t, and how far we could go
in doing things we could.
The best example I can give for this concept comes from the
classroom, when our teacher told us to do a composition. When he
gave us a topic, we would write about that topic and come up with
something worthwhile. But when he did not specify the topic and left
us free to choose our own, we usually couldn’t come up with
something worth writing about. We needed to be told what the
boundaries and restrictions were. This has been the nature of our
society and has been replicated in the realities of our film industry.
For instance, during the first four years of the Iranian revolution,
there was a great deal of chaos in the film industry because not many
rules were set yet. Interestingly enough, most of the Iranian
moviemakers didn’t produce much during this time, though a great
deal could have been done. No one used the opportunity because
everyone was waiting to find out what the restrictions were!
I don’t want to imply that these limitations are good and should
be there, but we have been brought up with them and it is in our
mentality. This is not limited to my profession–it’s in every
profession: limitation makes people more creative. I have a friend
who is an architect. He tells me that he is at his best professionally
when he designs structures for odd lots, because these pieces of land
do not fit into the normal pattern and he has to work within
 KIAROSTAMI 305

a framework of great limitation. So he must be creative and he

enjoys this. It is these restrictions that provide an opportunity for
people to be creative.

Just before A Taste of Cherry was to have been shown at Cannes,

there was speculation that Iranian authorities might stop it because
it dealt with suicide. But afterward some reports said its subject
matter had not been a problem. Did that film run into difficulties
with the censors because of its subject?

There was controversy about the movie, but after I talked with the
authorities, they accepted the fact that this is not a movie about
suicide–it’s about the choice we have in life, to end it whenever we
want. We have a door we can open at any time, but we choose to stay,
and the fact that we have this choice is, I think, God’s kindness: God
is kind because he has given us this choice. The authorities were
satisfied with that explanation. A sentence from the Romanian-French
philosopher E. M. Cioran helped me a lot: “Without the possibility of
suicide, I would have killed myself long ago.” A Taste of Cherry is
about the possibility of living, and how we have the choice to live. Life
isn’t forced on us: that is the main theme of the movie.

Why, may I ask, did you decide to remain in Iran after the 1979
revolution, unlike many Iranian filmmakers of your generation?

When you take a tree that is rooted in the ground, and transfer it
from one place to another, the tree will no longer bear fruit. And if
it does, the fruit will not be as good as it was in its original place.
This is a rule of nature. I think if I had left my country, I would be
the same as the tree.

Do you think your films genuinely depict the reality of Iranian life
after the revolution?

No, I’m not sure of this at all. I’m not sure that my films show the
reality of life in Iran; I show different aspects of life. Iran is a very
extensive and expansive place, and sometimes, even for those of us
who live there, some of the realities are very hard to comprehend.

Are you yourself religious?

306 ACTION!

I can’t answer this question. I think religion is very personal, and the
tragedy for our country is that the personal aspect has been
destroyed. It would be the easiest thing in the world for me to say
that I am religious, but I won’t. This most personal aspect of our
lives has become the tool of the government’s power. The value of
people is equated with their religiosity.

Does restrictive religion have anything to do with the fact that

almost all of the protagonists in your films are male?

Such restrictions aside for the moment, I simply don’t like the role of
women as mothers, or as lovers for that matter. Or the role of
women as victims, beaten and long-suffering. That’s not my
experience. Or women as exceptional. I don’t like showing
exceptions. Especially women as heroes, since it doesn’t correspond
to the real situation. And there’s another role, women as decorative
objects–not only in Iranian but in world cinema as well. So what am
I left with? I did feature a woman in Ten, though.

Was the film drawn from your own marital experiences, may I ask?

Definitely. I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced

myself. I divorced 22 years ago. In Iran, while women can sue for
divorce–only, I might add, if they charge their husbands with abuse
or drug addiction–they are not economically able to look after their
children afterwards and, as a result, often see their children only
rarely. Women, after divorce, lose their independence, and therefore
they are less and less able to take responsibility for their children.
It often results in tragedy for all concerned, and I was trying to
explore that in Ten.
The woman in the film, who has divorced her husband, drives
around Tehran with various passengers: her son, a friend,
a prostitute and an old woman. And I try, especially, to depict the
consequences of her divorce in the person of her aggressive young
son, who treats his mother disrespectfully from the passenger seat. He
thus seems, already at the tender age of seven, to have internalized the
masculine license of my patriarchal–some would say “sexist”–society.

Why have you consistently chosen to populate your films with

non-actors, who more or less play themselves?
 KIAROSTAMI 307

Working with non-professionals has got an advantage for me, in that

they correct my script. That’s the reason I use them. If I write
something and it does not sound right coming from the mouth of the
non-professional actor, if he cannot say it naturally, then I know it’s
wrong. The non-professional actors “interfere” during the entire
period of filming. And finally, that helps me to produce a better
movie. I do not want to make it sound as if using professional actors
is negative, but I am able to create the personality of the characters of
the film by working in my way. Usually directors bring stars to play
the role of the normal people, but I bring normal people to play the
role of themselves. And they cannot play any other role except their
own. There is a saying that every person can be a romantic writer if
he writes about his own love life. Therefore, these non-professional
actors are performing very well, because they are playing themselves.
Once you explain the scene to them, they just start talking, beyond
what I would have imagined. It is like a cycle, and I don’t know where
it starts and ends: I don’t know whether I’m teaching them what to
say, or they are teaching me what to receive!

What is the relationship of such actors to the filmgoing audience?

Non-professionals “do” less, and that fits my scripts, which do not spell
things out so clearly. And both of these–the use of non-professionals
and the writing of pared-down scripts–help the viewer to participate
more in the filmmaking process. I am in favor of the “half-made
film,” which the spectator must complete with his mind. The cinema
of the future is the cinema of the director and the viewer. I make one
film as a filmmaker, but the audience, based on that film, makes 100
movies in their minds. Every audience member can make his own
movie. This is what I strive for. Sometimes, when my audiences tell
me about the mental movies they have made based on my movie, I am
surprised, and I become the audience for their movies as they are
describing them to me. My movie has only functioned as a base for
them to make their movies. There is a Persian expression that
captures this notion: the translation is, “seeing with borrowed eyes,”
which defines my desire to have the audience both see what is in a
given scene and imagine, with their “borrowed eyes,” what is outside
that scene. Let me put this another way. The usual way in film is
to show–and to say–something. But my aim is to create a cinema
in which we see how much we can do without actually showing,
308 ACTION!

or saying, it. How much use we can make of the imagination of the
spectator. You must be able to imagine what is going on beyond what
is physically shown, because you are actually only showing a corner
of reality. It is a good idea when pictures and action guide you to
something which is outside the story without actually showing it.
I believe in Bresson’s method of creation through omission, not
through addition.

Is this the reason your films are often consciously “un-concluded,”

as in the case of A Taste of Cherry?

Yes. The idea not to end movies with some kind of conclusion
occurred to me several years ago. Most of the time, people go to see
a film with the expectation that a story will be told. I do not like this
arrangement where there is a dichotomy between me, as the
storyteller, and the spectator, as the one sitting there and watching
the story as such. I prefer to believe that the spectators are much
more intelligent and actually see it as unfair that I get the chance to
captivate them for two hours telling them the story, ending it the way
I say it must end, and so on. So I actually want to give them more
credit by involving them and distributing the sense of belonging or
creation between myself and the spectator. Some artists like their
movies to be perfect as they describe it, but I don’t seek that kind of
perfection. To me, perfection is defined by how much the spectator
can engage in the movie, and so a good movie is one that involves
the spectator as a part of it and not as a captive person.

Could you elaborate both on how you get your non-actors to be so

natural and on how you go about creating scripts for your films?

I do not have very complete scripts for my films, as I have already

indicated. I have a general outline and a character in my mind, and I
make no notes until I find the character in reality who’s in my mind.
When I find that character, I try to spend time with him and get to
know him very well. Therefore my notes are not from the character that
I had in my mind before, but are instead based on the people I’ve met
in real life. It’s a long process and may take six months.
I only make notes; I don’t write out dialogue in full. And the notes are
very much based on my knowledge of that person. When we start
shooting I don’t have rehearsals with the actor-characters at all.
 KIAROSTAMI 309

So, rather than pull-

ing them towards
myself, I travel closer
to them; they are
very much closer
to real people than
anything I could try
to create. I give them
something, it’s true,
but I also take
from them.
There is a Rumi
A.B.C. Africa (2001). Credit: New Yorker
poem from about Films/Photofest
1,000 years ago that
helps to explains
this–it goes something like this: You are like the ball subject to my
polo stick; I set you in motion, but once you’re off and running, I am
the one in pursuit. You are making me run, too! Therefore, when you
see the end result, it is difficult to see who is the director, me or them.
Ultimately, everything belongs to the actors–I just manage the
situation. This kind of directing, I think, is very similar to being a
football coach. You prepare your players and place them in the right
places, but once the game is on, there is nothing much you can
do–you can smoke a cigarette or get nervous, but you can’t do much
else. While shooting Ten–which, as you know, consists of ten scenes
set in the front of a car–I was sitting in the backseat, but I didn’t
interfere. Sometimes, I was following in another car, so I was not even
present on the “set,” because I thought the actors would work better
in my absence. Directors don’t always create–they can also destroy
with too many demands. Using non-actors has its own set of rules and
really requires that you allow them to do their own thing.

Do you think you prefer this method because of the way you started
out at Kanoon [Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of
Children and Young Adults], working very often with children,
where you probably had to work in this manner?

This practice is very much rooted in that period of my life. If I hadn’t

started with children, I would never have arrived at this style.
Children are very strong and independent characters and can come
310 ACTION!

up with more interesting things than Marlon Brando, and it’s

sometimes very difficult to direct them or order them to do
something. When I met Akira Kurosawa in Japan, one question he
asked me was, “How did you actually make the children act the way
they do? I do sometimes have children in my films, but I find that
I reduce and reduce their presence until I have to get rid of them
because there’s no way that I can direct them.” My own thought is
that if one is very grand, like an emperor on a horse, it’s very hard
for children to relate to that; you have to come down to below their
level in order to communicate with them. Actors are also like
children.

Can you talk about your relationship with cars, since they feature so
prominently in a number of your films?

My car is my best friend. My office. My home. My location. I have

a very intimate feeling when I am in a car with someone next to me.
We are in the most comfortable seats because we are not facing each
other, but sitting side by side. We don’t look at each other constantly,
but instead do so only when we want to. We are allowed to look
around without appearing rude. We have a big screen in front of us
and side views. Silence does not seem heavy or difficult. Nobody
serves anybody. And there are many other aspects to this experience,
as well. One of the most important things is that the car transports
us from one place to another.

I’m an American and I’m sometimes appalled by the anti-Iranian

bias in the American media. I’d like to think that your
films–particularly your cinematic love affair with the automobile,
which may not be so different from Americans’ own such love–can
create more understanding between Americans and Iranians, but
I fear that the U.S. news media encourage Americans to think in
somewhat simplistic ways about your country. What are your
thoughts on this?

Thank you for your very positive view on the issue. Unfortunately, film
critics like you are very few in America, but there are many, many
critics of Iran. It is very important for us film people to find common
ground between cultures, and maybe that’s less the case for politicians,
who benefit more from finding the conflicts and differences between
 KIAROSTAMI 311

peoples. One of the mandates of art cinema, as you well know, is to

show the universal reality behind the daily headlines.

Let’s continue with the reception of Iran, and Iranian cinema, in

America. In major U.S. cities, the films of yours that have been
released commercially have come and gone in the blink of an eye.
And it’s puzzling when you consider that there was a time when films
by the great filmmakers of the world–Bergman, Fellini,
Godard–regularly received healthy international distribution, and
caused crowds to line up around the block. You might be the first of
an entire generation of similarly talented filmmakers whose work
will be known almost exclusively within the constricted world of
film festivals.

Thank you for comparing me with those three filmmakers. I, too,

think they were making great films, but, at the same time, the
Hollywood cinema wasn’t as dominant then as it is now. It is a more
formidable competitor today, and that’s the reason its movies don’t
leave any audience for us. The fact is that movies train the eyes of their
audience, and when they have been trained on these types of
Hollywood movies, it is very difficult to then convert them to our
films. But, sort of unknowingly, the Hollywood cinema is going in
a direction that may end up helping our kind of cinema. Audiences are
being left dissatisfied now. The viewers leave a film unfulfilled, hungry
and uncertain as to the experience they have had; and this is where the
genuine filmmaker has the chance to ensnare them, to win them over.

My feeling is that people don’t expect very much today. They don’t
expect great pleasure; they expect action or something like that.

It’s because the films have gotten them used to expecting action and
not pleasure, because the technicians are making the films and not
filmmakers. We are going to get to a point where that will become
clear and the situation will have to change.

Does serious art always create in the spectator the desire for some
other reality?

Yes, I believe so, because otherwise art would have no purpose.

Should religion not prove successful at accomplishing that mission,
312 ACTION!

art always can attempt it. They both point in the same direction.
Religion points to another world, whereas art points to a better
existence. One is an invitation, an offering to a faraway place, the
other to a place that is closer by but nonetheless difficult to reach.

Who are other filmmakers you feel might be working on a similar

wavelength?

Hou Hsiao-hsien is one. Tarkovsky’s works separate me completely

from physical life, and are the most spiritual films I have seen. What
Fellini did in parts of his movies–bringing the dream life into
film–Tarkovsky did as well. Theo Angelopoulos’ movies also achieve
this type of spirituality at certain moments.

You’ve spoken in the past about a desire to create a kind of “poetic

cinema”–more indebted to poetry than to novels or theater. Indeed,
the title of The Wind Will Carry Us comes from a poem by a woman
named Forough Farrokhzad–a poem that is recited by the Engineer
during one scene–and the film also features The Rubáiyát of Omar
Khayyám.

Well, the cinema has been referred to as “the seventh art,” and you
can interpret that in two ways: either it includes the other arts and is
some sort of summation of them; or, maybe, it is the most complete
art form. But even if the cinema is the seventh art, it’s ironic that all
other art forms, such as painting and music, have gone through
stages of evolution and have changed. For the cinema, however, this
has not happened yet; the cinema is the same as it always was: it
relies too much on storytelling. When I talk about “poetic cinema,”
I’m not talking about sending a humanistic message. I’m talking
about the cinema’s being like poetry, possessing the complicated
qualities of poetry, and also having the vast potential of
poetry–having the capabilities of a prism.
This kind of cinema–the prism-like cinema–has an enduring
capability, and, in any given situation, in any given time period, you
can relate to it in a different way and people can discover themselves
in it. I think cinema should follow the other arts, go through the
same process of development, and assume the same outlook that
they do. But the viewers have to make a concession, in the sense of
not expecting only entertainment from films, in the same way that,
 KIAROSTAMI 313

when they don’t understand poetry, they don’t fault the poetry for
being bad poetry. They live with it. And when they go to hear music,
they don’t expect to hear a story. When they are looking at an
abstract painting, it brings other things than a narrative to mind; it
is through imagistic association that they “get” the meaning of it,
not through the apprehension of immediate or linear reality. I wish
they would do the same in front of a movie screen.

You’re giving them a chance to do that with Five, where you shun
storytelling in favor of five single-take short films shot on the shores
of the Caspian Sea.

Yes, Five is at the crossroads between poetry, photography and film.

It’s an experimental work of art. It has to be, since it features waves
breaking, ducks waddling, walkers promemading, a pack of dogs
and, finally, moonlight on waves!

One of the differences between a film and a poem is that most people
assume they can see a film once or twice and “get it,” which is very
different from the attitude you suggest toward poetry, which we
return to over and over again. Will there always be problems
reaching audiences with a poetic form of cinema, since people aren’t
accustomed to seeing a film again and again? Do you expect people
to watch a given film of yours many times, or do you at least hope
they will?

I would be too selfish if I said everyone should see my movies more

than once. I know one thing, however. Many viewers may come out
of the theater not satisfied, and yet they won’t be able to forget the
movie. I know they’ll be talking about it during their next dinner.
I want them to be a little restless about my movies, and keep trying
to find something in them. In that sense, they will be seeing my
movies more than once.

Like the “poetic” or “abstract” Five, the documentary A.B.C. Africa

was shot in digital video as well, wasn’t it?

Yes, that was the first film in which I used this new format. At first,
I didn’t use the digital camera as a serious work tool. I took it with
me more like a still camera, to take some notes with it. But when
314 ACTION!

I actually started using it–and when I realized its possibilities and

what I could do with them–I realized that I have wasted, in a way,
30 years of my career using the 35mm camera, because, as I argued
earlier in our conversation, that camera, for the type of inti-
mate, immediate work that I do, is more of a hindrance than a
communication tool.

Which made the journey for you between making The Wind Will
Carry Us and A.B.C. Africa not unlike the journey of the Engineer
in The Wind Will Carry Us, who goes from filming with a big crew
to capturing snapshots, surreptitiously, with his still camera.

Yes, actually. I was lucky that this new medium appeared to me

between these two films. Because I also had that same sense of
exhaustion that the Engineer has in The Wind Will Carry Us; this
new camera appeared to me, in a sense, like an angel and saved my
artistic life. Not necessarily in terms of my mental approach to
making a film, but in terms of the ease of making one.

How did the A.B.C. Africa project originate?

The U.N., since they knew that I had made films for children for so
many years, decided to invite me to make a film about the children
orphaned by AIDS in Uganda. Their intention was a sort of general
mobilization to attack this problem, and this movie became an
invitation to the rest of the world to help these orphaned kids in their
plight.

Could you speak a bit about your experience in Uganda? Why did
you go there as opposed to some other African state?

I went to Uganda because it had less civil strife. Sometimes we drove

for hours at night without there being a flicker of light. And people
would be lining the road, dressed in white. There was no light at all.
No electricity, no candles, no light at all. During the day, everything
there is very green and beautiful. I saw people who are
poverty-stricken, but extremely rich within. They are very happy
people–something I’ve almost never seen anywhere. I asked a friend
why these people were so happy. He said it was because of the three
 KIAROSTAMI 315

things these people do not have: pollution, tension and competition.

The competition that they do have, however, is a big one, between
life and death. And that’s why their lives have so much meaning,
because death, in the form of AIDS, is so close at hand. They’re
happy just to be alive.

Is the subject of AIDS of any interest or concern to an Iranian

audience?

They have kept the whole question of AIDS under the rug in Iran; it
is like a secret illness. There was an attempt in 2001 to bring it out
into the public arena for discussion, but this attempt was aborted. To
me, AIDS is an international epidemic and every country potentially
can be affected by it. Therefore, it should be discussed on an
international level. Unfortunately, AIDS doesn’t require a visa.

Were you eager to accept the U.N. invitation, or did you have initial
reservations about making the film?

I didn’t quite officially accept the invitation, but I agreed to go to the

area for a visit. So, the trip was a sort of location scouting, but we
had cameras with us and we started shooting–not for the purpose of
making the actual film. Then, when we finished shooting, we looked
at the footage we had and decided that maybe we could make the
movie out of this footage.

This is hardly alien to you: this idea of making a movie on the spot,
as you did in Homework [1989] and Close-Up [1990] previously.
And yet most movies endure long and arduous pre-production
processes–only to produce an end result that is, in terms of clarity and
sense of purpose, frequently inferior to your own impromptu films.

I agree with you about this style of working. A good movie is made
by an initial burst of energy that contributes to the quality of the
work. When I talk to some of the younger filmmakers, they are so
worried about their films that, eventually, this state of being worried
reflects itself in, and actually helps, the final work. Whereas, with
projects that are meticulously planned, you look at the end result
and it is full of emptiness.
316 ACTION!

There is a lot of corruption in the film industry–all of it related to

money–and the artistic results in general are not very good. What
can we do to oppose this?

You are obviously doing your part because, in your criticism, you
point out the films that are made with smaller budgets–the films that
are small in name only. It’s not possible to change this situation
dramatically because the wheel of film is being turned by industry,
by business. Many people work within that film industry, and a lot
of people go to see films just to be entertained. That sort of film
exists, and that is as it should be. And that is the cinema which
allows our films to be made, because otherwise there would be no
reason to show our films. What you do, pointing a finger at the films
that are different, is all that can be done.

Can you envision artists organizing some kind of alternative

production and distribution structures as well?

I think it is going to happen little by little. There is no choice for cinema

other than to become a little bit more internalized, more intimate, more
profound. To begin with, the technique and the facilities created by the
commercial film industry are going to self-destruct eventually. The
bombastic film will destroy itself, because it is so full of itself; it will
become so full that it will implode. So there will be a return to, or
revisiting of, a past cinema at that point.
I was channel-surfing last night with the remote control in my
hotel room, and the two times I paused anywhere and focused, I was
looking at black-and-white films. And that was not even a conscious
choice. One was a Tarzan picture with Johnny Weissmuller. It was at
least watchable, and even though it was just entertainment, it felt
like a healthier thing. The other, newer, color films I couldn’t even
watch, because there was so much going on and they were moving
so fast that it just disturbed my vision; it disturbed me. Therefore
I believe that even the eyes of the commercial viewership are going
to need some serenity, some calm, soon. This itself will increase the
opportunities for independent films. And, of course, your relentless
finger-pointing at mindless action films will do this as well.

It seems difficult for many artists today to treat individual

psychological truth, sociopolitical reality and artistic form with
 KIAROSTAMI 317

equal seriousness, with equal commitment. Is that a reasonable

statement?

I completely agree. As I have implied, moviemakers are always being

pushed to focus on the excitation and manipulation of the audience.
The question to which I don’t know the answer is whether or not the
viewer wants to be manipulated. I don’t know anyone who says,
“Instead of letting me see reality, manipulate me. I would prefer it.”
This is an illness that comes from somewhere in society–maybe from
escapist movies themselves.

You yourself are choosing to make films about ordinary people, poor
people. That itself is quite rare today.

I get my material from all around me. When I leave my house in the
morning, those ordinary people are the ones I come into contact
with. In my entire life I have never met a star–somebody I have seen
on the screen. And I believe that any artist finds his material in
what’s around him. Human beings and their problems are the most
important raw material for any film.

How can film art in general contribute to the lives of ordinary

people?

The biggest impact of cinema on the viewer is that it allows his

imagination to take flight. There are two possible results of this.
Perhaps it will make his ordinary, day-to-day life more bearable. On
the other hand, it may result in his day-to-day life seeming so bad to
him that, as a result of his newfound awareness, he may decide to
change his life.

A related question. Humanity has suffered a great deal in the past

and continues to suffer. How do artists treat such a situation
honestly without surrendering to fatalism or pessimism?

It’s a difficult question and I cannot answer precisely how artists do

that, but the ones who do are the artists, the ones who accomplish
the task of turning that painful experience of humanity into art.
Without becoming cynical. Making it possible for everyone to get
some pleasure out of pain, making beauty out of ugliness or desolation.
318 ACTION!

And the painful experience of humanity, be it in Iran, Africa or the

United States, isn’t going to change any time soon. In my relatively
short lifetime, I haven’t experienced a reduction of injustice
anywhere, let alone in my own country. And never mind
a solution to the problem of injustice. People keep referring to the
“global village,” but in Africa, in Uganda, I watched as parents put
the corpses of their children in boxes, tied them to the backs of
bicycles, and pedaled away–barefoot. I’m quoting an author I don’t
know who said that, by the twenty-first century, humanity will only
be four years old. I think that applies. Humanity today, in 2005, is
just about at the stage of a four-year-old. So we’ll have to wait a long
time before humanity even reaches the maturity of an adolescent.

Doesn’t the future of cinema also depend on an improvement in the

social and political atmosphere?

I don’t think so. I actually sometimes think that at least in my

country art has grown the most when the social situation has been
the worst. It seems to me that artists are a compensatory mechanism,
a defense mechanism in those kinds of unfavorable circumstances.

There is an idea in many of the Iranian films that I’ve seen that art is
for everyone, and I think that’s entirely healthy and democratic. But
sometimes some directors, in my opinion, present the artistic problem
too simply, as though art were an automatic reflection of life.

Yes, the exact imitation of life is not art. There is a comment by

Godard that life is a film that is not well-made. When you make
a film you have to make it well, you have to edit it, you have to
choose, you have to eliminate. You have to create its essential truth,
not merely render what exists in reality.

Western culture is so accustomed to background music, and there is

an absence of such music in your films. Could you say something
about that?

Music is a perfect art by itself. It’s very powerful and impressive.

I dare not try to compete with music in my films. I can’t engage in
that kind of activity, as the use of music has a great deal of emotional
charge, and I do not want to place such an aesthetic burden on my
 KIAROSTAMI 319

spectator. Music plays on the spectators’ emotions, makes them

excited or sad, and takes them through a veritable emotional roller-
coaster ride with its ups and downs, and I respect my spectator too
much to do that to him.

Given, for example, your attitude toward background music as

opposed to that of Western moviemakers in general, is it still
appropriate to speak of national cinemas today, or has film become
too internationalized for that kind of labeling?

The answer to your question is yes and no. Each movie has
a national ID or birth certificate of its own. Yet a movie in the end is
about human beings, about humanity. All the different nations in the
world, despite their differences of appearance and religion and
language and way of life, still have one common thing, and that is
what’s inside all of us. If we X-rayed the insides of different human
beings, we wouldn’t be able to tell from those X-rays what the person’s
language or background or race was. Our blood circulates exactly
the same way, our nervous system and our eyes work the same way, we
laugh and cry the same way, we feel pain the same way. The teeth we
have in our mouths–no matter what our nationality or background
is–ache in exactly the same way. If we want to divide cinema and the
subjects of cinema, the way to do it, finally, is to talk about pain and
about happiness. These are common among all countries.

Let’s talk for a minute about Close-Up’s national “ID” or “birth

certificate.” The film was made under particular social
circumstances in which Iran and Iranians seemed to be going
through an identity crisis. A radical change with great political and
social consequences forced people to begin asking questions about
who they really were. Close-Up poses some of those questions about
the collective identity of a nation.

This can be an appropriate interpretation by an intelligent viewer or

a film critic. But this could not have been something I was thinking
about as I was shooting the film. And actually, I was not. But now
that we are revisiting the film, I tend to agree that it can be seen in
different ways, one of them being from the angle of identity. And if not
identity, then the state of collective depression after a big revolution,
in which someone like Sabzian–the obsessive cinephile who got
320 ACTION!

caught impersonating the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf–did not

find a thing he was looking for, and people like the Ahankhah family
lost some things they had. But these people have somehow come
together. This was pointed out to me once by a non-Iranian viewer,
and I found it to be so true. This viewer thought these were people
from opposite ends who come together under particular
circumstances similar to those of an earthquake or an apocalypse of
some kind. A common problem brought these people closer together.

Most of your characters seem to be living in a no man’s land between

reality and illusion. That may explain why the goals they set
for themselves are out of their reach: the boy in Traveler [1974],
Mr. Firooz Koohi in The Report [1977], Hossein Sabzian in Close-
Up, Hossein in Through the Olive Trees, Hossein in The Experience
[1973], the boys in The Wedding Suit [1976], etc.

Someone once told me the reason I was drawn to these characters

was that they were all abnormal. And I think the abnormal people
who go to great lengths and break the boundaries and cross the lines
do us a service, in a sense, by telling us, “The limits you have set for
us are too confining and we need more space.” We should look at
abnormal people, that is, from an artist’s point of view. We should
not act like a court and put them on trial. We should never want to
display their shortcomings. We should show them as examples of
people who didn’t receive proper and timely care. Despite all the
laws designed for the protection of deprived people, they were
somehow left uncared for and started using their imaginations at
a point where there was no room left for using one’s
imagination–which then will inevitably turn in on itself.

So you’re defining the children in your films as “abnormal,” too.

Yes, they are the products of the same type of education and society
as the thirtysomething Hossein Sabzian in Close-Up. I remind you of
what the actor Hossein says in the film. He says, “I am the child
from the film Traveler who’s left behind.” And I would say the child
from Traveler is somewhat like the kids from Homework. Those
kids are all like the kids from Where Is the Friend’s House? I think
these kids are somewhat alike, and they just grow up–or don’t.
 KIAROSTAMI 321

Let me conclude by remarking on how curious it is that truly

talented people, like you, never create difficulties during interviews;
it is only those of dubious ability or talent who put up barriers.
Thank you so much.

We have a proverb in Iran that captures perfectly what you just said:
“The fruitful tree bends.” Thank you.
François Truffaut on the set of The 400 Blows (1959). Credit: Zenith International
Films/Photofest

Alter Ego, Autobiography and

Auteurism: François Truffaut’s
Last Interview
by Bert Cardullo

This interview was conducted both in English and French (translated

by me) in late May of 1984 in François Truffaut’s (1932–1984)
private office at Les Films du Carrosse, the production company in
Paris he founded and ran. His last public appearance had been in a
television interview on 13 April 1984, for the Apostrophes series
hosted by Bernard Pivot. When Truffaut generously agreed to meet
with me for what was intended to be a print interview (which did not
materialize at the time), he was clearly weak, but unquestionably
lucid. He died from brain cancer on 21 October 1984.
324 ACTION!

Interview

I’d like to focus our discussion today on the Antoine Doinel cycle,
M. Truffaut–though perhaps we’ll have time to treat some other
films of yours as well. Could we begin by talking about your life
prior to becoming a movie director?

Yes, of course. During the war, I saw many films that made me fall
in love with the cinema. I’d skip school regularly to see movies–even
in the morning, in the small Parisian theaters that opened early. At
first, I wasn’t sure whether I’d be a critic or a filmmaker, but I knew
it would be something like that. I had thought of writing, actually,
and that later on I’d be a novelist. Next I decided I’d be a film critic.
Then I gradually started thinking I should make movies. And I think
seeing all those films during the war was a sort of apprenticeship.
The New Wave filmmakers, you know, were often criticized for
their lack of experience. This movement was made up of people with
all kinds of backgrounds–including people like me who had done
nothing more than write for Cahiers du cinéma and see thousands of
movies. I saw some pictures 14 or 15 times, like Jean Renoir’s The
Rules of the Game [1939] and The Golden Coach [1953]. There is
a way to see films that can teach you more than working as an
assistant director, without the viewing process becoming tedious or
academic. Basically, the assistant director is a guy who wants to see
how movies are made, but who is constantly prevented from doing
just that because he gets sent on errands while the important stuff is
taking place in front of the camera. In other words, he is always
required to do things that take him away from the set. But in the
movie theater, when you see a film for the tenth time or so, a film
whose dialogue and music you know by heart, you start to look at
how it’s made, and you learn much more than you could as an
assistant director.

Which films first struck your attention when, as a boy, you began
frequenting the cinema?

The first films I truly admired were French ones, like Henri-Georges
Clouzot’s The Raven [1943] and Marcel Carné’s The Devil’s Envoys
[1942]. These are movies I quickly wanted to see more than once.
This habit of multiple-viewing happened by accident, because first
 TRUFFAUT 325

I would see some picture on the sly, and then my parents would say,
“Let’s go to the movies tonight,” so then I’d see the same movie
again, since I couldn’t say I’d already seen it. But this made me want
to see films again and again–so much so that three years after the
Liberation, I’d seen The Raven maybe nine or ten times. But after
I wound up working at Cahiers du cinéma, I turned away from
French film. Friends at the magazine, like Jacques Rivette, thought it
absurd that I could recite all of The Raven’s dialogue and had seen
Carné’s Children of Paradise [1945] 14 times.

A little while ago, you mentioned two Renoir films that you had also
seen a dozen or more times. Could you say something about Renoir’s
impact on you?

I think Renoir is the only filmmaker who’s practically infallible, who

has never made a mistake on film. And I think if he never made
mistakes, it’s because he always found solutions based on
simplicity–human solutions. He’s one film director who never
pretended. He never tried to have a style, and if you know his
work–which is very comprehensive, since he dealt with all sorts of
subjects–when you get stuck, especially as a young filmmaker, you
can think of how Renoir would have handled the situation, and you
generally find a solution.
Roberto Rossellini, for example, is quite different. His strength
was to completely ignore the mechanical and technical aspects of
making a film. They just didn’t exist for him. When he made notes
in his scripts, he said all kinds of extravagant things, such as “The
English army enters Orléans.” So you think, “Okay, he’ll need lots
of extras.” And then you see Joan of Arc at the Stake [1955], where
there are only ten cardboard soldiers jammed onto a small set. When
Rossellini achieves serenity or even casualness in a film, like the one
he did about India, it’s phenomenal yet at the same time inexplicable.
Such a film’s minimalism, its humility before its subject, is in the end
what makes it such a magnificent work. My favorite Rossellini film
is Germany Year Zero [1948], probably because I have a weakness
for movies that take childhood, or children, as their subject. Also
because Rossellini was the first to depict children truthfully, almost
documentary-style, on film. He shows them as serious and
pensive–more so than the adults around them–not like picturesque
little figures or animals. The child in Germany Year Zero is quite
326 ACTION!

extraordinary in his restraint and simplicity. This was the first time
in the cinema that children were portrayed as the center of gravity,
while the atmosphere around them is the one that’s frivolous.
Rossellini reinforced a trait already evident in Renoir: the desire
to stay as close to life as possible in a fiction film. Rossellini even said
that you shouldn’t write scripts–only swine write scripts–that the
conflict in a film should simply emerge from the facts. A character
from a given place at a given time is confronted by another character
from a very different place: and voilà, there exists a natural conflict
between them and you start from that. There’s no need to invent
anything. I’m very influenced by men like Rossellini–and
Renoir–who managed to free themselves of any complex about the
cinema, for whom the character, story or theme is more important
than anything else.

What about the influence on you of American cinema?

You know, we owe so much, here in France, to American cinema,

which Americans themselves don’t know very well. Especially early
American cinema, which Americans hardly know at all and even
scorn. As for influential Americans around the time of the French
New Wave, I’m thinking of Sidney Lumet, Robert Mulligan, Frank
Tashlin and Arthur Penn. They represented a total renewal of
American cinema, a little like some of the New Wave directors in
France. They were extremely alive, the first films of these men, like
early, primitive American cinema, and at the same time they were
quite intellectual. Their movies managed to unite the best of both
qualities. At the time, Americans scorned these filmmakers because
they didn’t know them very well and because they weren’t
commercially successful. Success is everything in America, as you
know far better than I.

Why was the French New Wave an artistic success?

At the start of the New Wave, people opposed to the young

filmmakers’ new films said, “All in all, what they’re doing is not very
different from what was done before.” I don’t know if there was
actually a plan behind the New Wave, but as far as I was concerned,
it never occurred to me to revolutionize the cinema or to express
 TRUFFAUT 327

myself differently from previous filmmakers. I always thought that

the cinema was just fine, except for the fact that it lacked sincerity.
I’d do the same thing others were doing, but better.
There’s a famous quote by André Malraux: “A masterpiece isn’t
better rubbish.” Still, I thought that good films were just bad movies
made better. In other words, I don’t see much difference between a film
like Anatole Litvak’s Goodbye Again [1961] and my picture The Soft
Skin [1964]. It’s the same thing, the same film, except that in The Soft
Skin the actors suit the roles they play. We made things ring true, or at
least we tried to. But in the other picture, nothing rang true because it
wasn’t the right film for Ingrid Bergman or Anthony Perkins or Yves
Montand. So Goodbye Again was based on a lie right from the start.
The idea isn’t to create some new and different cinema, but to make the
existing one more true. That’s what I had in mind when I began making
films. There isn’t a huge difference between Jean Delannoy’s The Little
Rebels [1955] and The 400 Blows [1959], either. They’re the same, or
in any event very close. I just wanted to make mine because I didn’t like
the other one’s artificiality–that’s all.

We know you were a film critic before you became a director. What
film was your first article about?

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times [1936], an old print of which

I saw in a film club. It was seized afterwards by the police because it
was a stolen copy! Then I started writing for Cahiers du cinéma,
thanks to André Bazin. I did an incendiary piece in Cahiers against
French films as typified by the screenwriters Jean Aurenche and
Pierre Bost, the fossils of French cinema. That article got me a job at
the weekly Arts and Entertainments, where I wrote the film column
for four years.
I think being a critic helped me because it’s not enough to love
films or see lots of films. Having to write about films helps you to
understand them better. It forces you to exercise your intellect. When
you summarize a script in ten sentences, you see both its strengths
and its weaknesses. Criticism is a good exercise, but you shouldn’t
do it for too long. In retrospect, my reviews seem more negative than
not, as I found it more stimulating to damn rather than praise; I was
better at attacking than defending. And I regret that. I’m much less
dogmatic now, and I prefer critical nuance.
328 ACTION!

You were a film critic for four years, but all the while you were
looking for an opportunity to make a film, right?

Oh yes, absolutely. I started making little movies in 16mm that

weren’t worth showing. They had all the same flaws as most amateur
films: they were extremely pretentious; and they didn’t even have a
storyline, which is the height of conceit for an amateur. I probably
learned something from this work, like how to suggest rather than
show. But in the first of these shorts, there was nothing but doors
opening and closing–what a waste!
My first real film, in 1957, was Les Mistons–The Mischief Makers
in English. It had the advantage of telling a story, which was not
common practice for short films in those days! It also gave me the
opportunity to start working with actors. But Les Mistons also had
commentary interspersed with its dialogue, so that made making it
much simpler. The film met with quite a bit of luck. It was awarded
a prize at a festival in Brussels, I believe. Les Mistons is based on a
story by Maurice Pons; it’s not my original script. I saw it as the first
of a series of sketches. It was easier at the time, and would be even
now, to find money for three or four different short films than to find
enough financial support for a feature film. So I planned to do a
series of sketches with the common thread of childhood. I had five
or six stories from which I could choose. I started with Les Mistons
because it was the easiest to shoot.
When it was finished, I wasn’t completely satisfied because the
film was a little too literary. Let me explain: Les Mistons is the story
of five children who spy on young lovers. And I noticed, in directing
these children, that they had no interest in the girl, who was played
by Gérard Blain’s wife, Bernadette Lafont; the boys weren’t jealous
of Blain himself, either. So I had them do contrived things to make
them appear jealous, and later this annoyed me. I told myself that I’d
film with children again, but next time I would have them be truer
to life and use as little fiction as possible.

Is it awkward for a writer-director to have been a critic first? When

you start a scene, does the critic in you tap you on the shoulder and
say, “I don’t think so!”

It is indeed rather awkward, because not only was I a critic, I have

also seen nearly 3,000 films. So I always tend to think, “But that was
 TRUFFAUT 329

done in such-and-such a film,” “Compared to X’s movie, this is no

good,” etc. Plus, however necessary they may be, I’m very skeptical
of storylines. So much so that I turn a script’s narrative over in my
head endlessly, to the point that often, at the last minute, I want to
cancel the filming of it.

How, then, do you ever manage to complete a film?

Because the advantage of cinema over novels, for instance, is that

you can’t just drop it. The machine’s in gear, contracts are signed.
And besides, I like actors a lot, at least some of them–those I choose!
There are promises to be kept, there is motivation to keep your
word. But once you’ve begun, that type of problem falls away, that
doubt of a general nature. Then there are just the daily problems of
moviemaking, which are strictly technical and can be solved amid all
the noise and laughter–it’s really quite exhilarating. When the
filming is over, though, the doubts come back.

What was the provenance of The 400 Blows?

When I was shooting Les Mistons, The 400 Blows already existed in
my mind in the form of a short film, which was titled Antoine Runs
Away.

What caused you to lengthen Antoine’s story and make The 400
Blows longer?

It was because I was disappointed by Les Mistons, or at least by its

brevity. You see, I had come to reject the sort of film made up of
several skits or sketches. So I preferred to leave Les Mistons as a
short and to take my chances with a full-length film by spinning out
the story of Antoine Runs Away. Of the five or six stories I had
already outlined, this was my favorite, and it became The 400
Blows.
Antoine Runs Away was a 20-minute sketch about a boy who
plays hooky and, having no note to hand in as an excuse, makes up
the story that his mother has died. His lie having been discovered, he
does not dare go home and spends the night outdoors. I decided to
develop this story with the help of Marcel Moussy, at the time a
television writer whose shows for a program called If It Was You
330 ACTION!

were very realistic and very successful. They always dealt with family
or social problems. Moussy and I added to the beginning and the end
of Antoine’s story until it became a kind of chronicle of a boy’s 13th
year–of the awkward early teenaged years.
In fact, The 400 Blows became a rather pessimistic film. I can’t
really say what the theme is–there is none, perhaps–but one central
idea was to depict early adolescence as a difficult time of passage and
not to fall into the usual nostalgia about “the good old days,” the
salad days of youth. Because, for me in any event, childhood is a
series of painful memories. Now, when I feel blue, I tell myself, “I’m
an adult. I do as I please,” and that cheers me up right away. But,
then, childhood seemed like such a hard phase of life; you’re not
allowed to make any mistakes. Making a mistake is a crime: you
break a plate by mistake and it’s a real offense. That was my
approach in The 400 Blows, using a relatively flexible script to leave
room for improvisation, mostly provided by the actors. I was very
happy in this respect with Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine, who was
quite different from the original character I had imagined. And as we
improvised more, the film became more pessimistic, then–in brief
spurts, as a contrary reaction–so high-spirited that it almost became
optimistic.

Does the screenplay of The 400 Blows constitute in some ways your
autobiography?

Yes, but only partially. All I can say is that nothing in it is invented.
What didn’t happen to me personally happened to people I know, to
boys my age and even to people that I had read about in the papers.
Nothing in The 400 Blows is pure fiction, then, but neither is the
film a wholly autobiographical work.

Let me put my question another way: it has often been said that
Antoine Doinel was you, a sort of projection of yourself. Could you
define that projection, that character?

There is indeed something anachronistic or composite-like about

Antoine Doinel, but it’s difficult for me to define. I don’t really know
who he is, except that he is a kind of mixture of Jean-Pierre Léaud
and myself. He is a solitary type, a kind of loner who can make you
laugh or smile about his misfortunes, and that allows me, through
 TRUFFAUT 331

him, to touch on sad matters–but always with a light hand, without

melodrama or sentimentality, because Doinel has a kind of courage
about him. Yet he is the opposite of an exceptional or extraordinary
character; what does differentiate him from average people,
however, is that he never settles down into average situations. Doinel
is only at ease in extreme situations: of profound disappointment
and misery, on the one hand, and total exhilaration and enthusiasm,
on the other. He also preserves a great deal of the childlike in his
character, which means that you forget his real age. If he is 28, as
Léaud was in 1972, you look at Doinel as if he were 18: a naïf, as it
were, but a well-meaning one for all that.

A related question: Is it because Montmartre holds personal

childhood memories for you that you came back to it in at least two
of your Antoine Doinel films–the first two, as a matter of fact–The
400 Blows and Love at Twenty [1962]?

Yes, most likely. It’s easier to orient myself when I shoot on familiar
streets. Also, when you’re writing, you tend to think of people and
places you know. So you wind up coming back to these familiar
places and people. As for my method of writing, I started making
“script sheets” when I began work on The 400 Blows. School:
various gags at school. Home: some gags at home. Street: a few gags
in the street. I think everyone works in this way, at least on some
films. You certainly do it for comedies, and you can even do it for
dramas. And this material, in my case, was often based on memories.
I realized that you can really exercise your memory where the past is
concerned. I had found a class photo, for example, one in the classic
pose with all the pupils lined up. The first time I looked at that
picture, I could remember the names of only two friends. But by
looking at it for an hour each morning over a period of several days,
I remembered all my classmates’ names, their parents’ jobs, and
where everybody lived.
It was around this time that I met Moussy and asked him if he’d
like to work with me on the script of The 400 Blows. Since I myself
had played hooky quite a bit, all of Antoine’s problems with fake
notes, forged signatures, bad report cards–all of these I knew by
heart, of course. The movies to which we truants went started at
around 10 in the morning; there were several theaters in Paris that
opened at such an early hour. And their clientele was made up almost
332 ACTION!

exclusively of schoolchildren! But you couldn’t go with your

schoolbag, because it would make you look suspicious. So we hid
our bags behind the door of the theater. Two of these movie houses
faced each other: the Cinéac-Italiens and the New York. Each
morning around 9:45, there would be 50 or 60 children waiting
outside to get in. And the first theater to open would get all the
business because we were anxious to hide. We felt awfully exposed
out there in the middle of all that…

As a former critic, if you had had to talk about The 400 Blows, would
you have spoken about it in the glowing terms used by most critics?

No, I don’t think so. I honestly think I’d have liked it, because I like
the ideas in the picture–they’re good ideas–but I wouldn’t have gone
so far in praising The 400 Blows as the critics did. I couldn’t have
called it a masterpiece or a great work of art, because I can see too
clearly what’s experimental or clumsy about it.

Was the film received well in every country outside France?

No, it flopped in Italy, for one, maybe because it’s too similar to
Italian neorealist films, and they always flopped there, too! The 400
Blows didn’t go over very well in Germany, either; and the Spanish
didn’t even want to distribute it despite the Catholic prize it won at
Cannes. But the film worked in Japan, in Holland, in America, and
of course elsewhere, too.

The 400 Blows drew some reaction from French censors, didn’t it?

Yes, because of the situations in the film: adultery, a child seeing his
mother with another man, escaping from reform school, things like
that. Initially, the French censors rated The 400 Blows for 16-year-
olds and over. But after the film was awarded not only the Catholic
prize but also the prize for best director at Cannes, the 16+ rating
was rescinded.

Were the censors afraid they’d look like idiots?

I think that’s it, yes.

 TRUFFAUT 333

I’d like to get back for a moment to the matter of Renoir’s, as well
as other filmmakers’, influence on you–particularly in the instance of
The 400 Blows.

Well, Jean Vigo’s influence is obvious in The 400 Blows. But

certainly The 400 Blows is also, if less obviously, influenced by
Renoir’s work, be it in a simple gesture or in some solution to an
artistic or technical problem. For example, Renoir’s secret is his
casual style, yet that “styleless style” never prevents him from
handling larger-than-life scenes. I had the problem of such a larger-
than-life scene in The 400 Blows. The boy Antoine–who told the
teacher that his mother had died to avoid having to hand in a note
for his absence, and who is found out in the afternoon when his
mother comes to the school–decides never to return home. And after
school, he talks with his young friend about his plans. This was quite
difficult dialogue to do, because it wasn’t natural. These words
weren’t something a child would normally say; I’m very realistic, and
such moments, as originally written, went against the–or my–grain.
It was hard, therefore, to find the right stance with which to direct
Jean-Pierre Léaud in this scene. For some reason, the situation
reminded me of a scene in The Human Beast [1938], where Jean
Gabin, as Jacques Lantier, returns at the very end of the movie. He
comes back to his locomotive the morning after killing Simone
Simon’s character, and he has to explain to the other conductor,
played by Julien Carette, that he killed this woman. Renoir directed
Gabin marvelously here, precisely by using the hallmark of his
cinematic style: its utter casualness or offhandedness. Gabin says,
“It’s horrible. I killed her. I loved her. I’ll never see her again. I’ll
never be by her side.” He said all this very softly, very simply. And
I used my memory of Gabin’s performance to direct Léaud, who did
his own scene exactly like Gabin’s.
That was a tough scene. It was easier to coach Léaud in the scene
where he goes to school without a note after a three-day absence and
decides to say his mother died. In this instance, there wasn’t any
question of someone’s directorial influence on me but only of my
own directorial instinct. We don’t know that Antoine has decided to
tell this lie, only that he’ll say something big. Of course, he could use
a number of ways to say his mother had died. He could be shifty or
sad or whatever. I decided the boy should give the impression that he
334 ACTION!

doesn’t want to tell

the lie. That he
doesn’t dare say it,
but that the teacher
pushes him to do so.
The teacher asks,
“Where’s your
note?” and the child
replies, “It’s my
mother, sir.” The
teacher inquires,
“Your mother?
What about her?”
Jeanne-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows. Credit: Zenith
It’s only because International Films/Photofest
the teacher badgers
him that Antoine suddenly decides to fight back and say, “She’s
dead!” I told Léaud, “You say, ‘She’s dead!’, but you think in your
head, ‘She’s dead! What do you say to that?’” He doesn’t say this, but
he thinks it, and that gives him the exact look and tone of voice
I wanted–even the upturned head. There’s a lie you can use only once!
Let me give you another example, returning once again to the issue
of directorial influence–this time of someone other than Renoir. If in
The 400 Blows, I had filmed the father coming to the classroom and
slapping his son after the boy returned to school and said his mother
was dead, then I’d have had problems editing because I would have
wanted fast action here and could have gotten that only with a lot of
cutting. But the rest of the film was just a matter of capturing a lot of
situations without an excessive amount of cutting. So I knew I’d have
to create the drama in this scene within the frame itself, with little or
no cutting, and I thought of Alfred Hitchcock. Otherwise I had no
point of reference; I had no idea how to edit the scene in order to
create the intensity I wanted. I knew now that I had to show the
headmaster, then there’s a knock on the door, the boy senses it’s about
him, and next you see the mother. I told the actress Claire Maurier
that, instead of scanning the classroom for her son, as might be
natural since she had never been to the school before, she was to look
right away in the direction of Antoine’s desk. I knew that this would
create the dramatic effect I was looking for, and not the reality of her
searching for her son’s face amidst a sea of other young faces.
 TRUFFAUT 335

The 400 Blows was filmed on location, but without direct sound,
right?

Yes to your first question: we filmed in real locations. We found a

tiny apartment on Rue Caulaincourt in Paris, but I was afraid that
my cameraman, Henri Decaë, wouldn’t want to film there. I showed
it to him and he nonetheless accepted, knowing the numerous
problems he would face. For example, when we wanted to show the
father, the mother, and the boy around the dinner table, Decaë had
to sit on the windowsill, on the sixth floor, with the whole crew
waiting outside on the stairs. Things like that happened all the time.
I don’t like studios, I have to say; I overwhelmingly prefer to shoot
on location. And I’ve shot all my pictures on location, with the
exception of Fahrenheit 451 [1966], where we had to burn the set in
the end! It’s a simple question of reality. On location, there may be the
necessity of going indoors from the outdoors, but even if that weren’t
an issue, what happens inside is truly different depending on whether
you’re in a studio or a real apartment. A real apartment would cost a
fortune to create in a studio: the thickness of the wood in a door, say,
the lock or set of locks, the way the door closes. You don’t get these
things in a studio, where everything’s made of plywood.
As for your second question, yes again: The 400 Blows was shot
almost entirely without sound. It was dubbed afterwards, except for
one scene, where the psychologist questions Antoine. If this scene got
so much notice, it’s not just because Léaud’s performance was so
realistic; it’s also because this was the only scene we shot with live
sound. The shooting of such a scene, as you might guess, is heavily
influenced by television. Although I believe TV is misguided when it
attempts to compete with the cinema by trying to handle poetry or
fantasy, it’s in its element when it questions someone and lets him
explain himself. This scene from The 400 Blows was definitely done
with television in mind. Jean-Pierre didn’t have a script. I gave him
an idea of the questions and a basic sense of the answers so that they
would match the storyline, but he used his own words, his own
language–and, of course, it was much more interesting this way.
Aside from this scene with the psychologist, the dubbing worked
rather well, because children are easily dubbed, and Jean-Pierre
Léaud is dubbed so well you can’t tell. With the parents in the film,
the post-synchronization is not so good.
336 ACTION!

Why did you shoot The 400 Blows in CinemaScope?

Because I had the naïve feeling that it would make the film look more
“professional,” more stylized and less naturalistic. CinemaScope has
this strange quality of being an oblong window that hides many
details, so that when a character moves through a room, he moves
almost abstractly, as if he were in an aquarium. I shot Shoot the Piano
Player [1960] and Jules and Jim [1962] in CinemaScope as well, and
perhaps such stylization works better in these two “stylized” films.

Could you say something about the relationship, in your career, of

Shoot the Piano Player to The 400 Blows?

Shoot the Piano Player, my second feature film, was made in

reaction to The 400 Blows, which was so French. I felt that I needed
to show that I had also been influenced by the American cinema.
Also, after the exaggerated reception and publicity for The 400
Blows–its disproportionate success–I became quite agitated. So
I touched on the notions of celebrity and obscurity in Shoot the
Piano Player–reversed them, in fact, since here it is a famous person
who becomes unknown. There are glimpses in this film, then, of the
feeling that troubled me at the time.
I had made The 400 Blows in a state of anxiety, because I was
afraid that the film would never be released and that, if it did come
out, people would say, “After having insulted everyone as a critic,
Truffaut should have stayed home!” Shoot the Piano Player, by
contrast, was made in a state of euphoria, thanks to the success of
The 400 Blows. I took great pleasure in filming it, far more than in
The 400 Blows, where I was concerned about Jean-Pierre Léaud. I was
wondering whether he would show up each day, or, if he did, whether
he had had a fight the night before and would appear on the set with
marks all over his face. With children, we directors worry more,
because they do not have the same self-interest or self-regard as adults.

Is it true that you placed an ad in the newspaper France Soir to

recruit the boy who would play the hero of The 400 Blows?

Yes. I didn’t like the idea of finding a kid on the street and asking his
parents, “Would you let him make a movie with me?” For this first
feature film of mine about children, I wanted the children to be
 TRUFFAUT 337

willing–both the children and their parents. So I used the ad to get

them to come to a studio near the Champs-Elysées, where I was
doing 16mm screen tests every Thursday. I saw a number of boys,
one of whom was Jean-Pierre Léaud. He was more interesting than
all the rest, more intense, more frantic even. He really, really wanted
the part, and I think that touched me. I could feel during the shoot
that the story improved, that the film became better than the
screenplay, thanks to him.

Léaud’s work gave birth not only to The 400 Blows but to the whole
Antoine Doinel saga, which I think is unique in the history of
cinema: starting in 1959, to follow a character for 20 years,
watching him grow older over the course of five films. Let’s talk now
about the other films in the cycle: Love at Twenty, Stolen Kisses
[1968], Bed and Board [1970], and Love on the Run [1979]. At the
end of The 400 Blows, we left Jean-Pierre Léaud on the beach. He
had just escaped from a reform school, where he had been up to
some mischief and had suffered various misfortunes.

When I brought him back, in Love at Twenty–which was really just

a sketch, called “Antoine and Colette,” as part of an anthology
film–he was 18 and perhaps living on his own. In any case, you no
longer see his family in this film. Antoine is starting his professional
life, working in a record company, and we see his first love affairs a
few months before he must go into the army. Stolen Kisses is simply
the continuation of the adventures of Antoine Doinel. It is the same
character: like me, but not me; like Jean-Pierre Léaud, but not Léaud.
I must say that I like to start with more solid material than this.
I like having two or three reasons to make a movie: say, the coming
together of a book I want to adapt or an atmosphere I want to depict
with an actor that I want to film. In Stolen Kisses, I admit, I just
wanted to work with Jean-Pierre Léaud again; I more or less set a
specific date by which I wanted to begin making a film with him.
And with my screenwriters Claude de Givray and Bernard Revon,
I sat down and said, “What are we going to do with Léaud?” For his
professional life, we adopted a perfectly simple solution. Leafing
through a phone book, we found an ad for private detectives. We
thought, “Here’s a job you don’t see in French films, usually only in
American movies about a famous detective named Marlowe.” But it
should prove funny in France. For Doinel’s romantic life, I suggested
338 ACTION!

putting him opposite a girl his own age, even younger. We’d even
suppose that he wrote her when he was in the army and therefore
already knows her. We would then have him live what I think is
every young man’s fantasy: an affair with a married woman.
I thought right away of Delphine Seyrig for the part of the married
woman, because I didn’t want this affair to be sordid, but instead a
bit dreamlike or idealized.

Well, Seyrig was the perfect actress to achieve that end.

Exactly. We know that Jean-Pierre is in love with Delphine, but we

also know that she knows, and that Léaud doesn’t know that she
knows, so the game goes three ways. The scene of their having coffee
is thus not just between Jean-Pierre and Delphine. It’s between Jean-
Pierre, Delphine and the audience. It’s much stronger with three
players, much more intense, which means in filmic terms that you
can take your time. The long silences make you expect something
unusual: perhaps he’ll lunge at her for a kiss. We don’t know what
to expect, but we expect something. My only direction to the both
of them was, “Stir the sugar not once but six times. Don’t sip the
coffee right away. We have all the time in the world in a scene like
this, where the situation is so fraught with tension.”
The anticipation comes to a climax when Léaud responds, “Yes,
sir” to Delphine’s question, “Do you like music, Antoine?” The
wrong way to do the scene at this point would have been to fade to
the next scene. But this, “Yes, sir” is like a moving locomotive. And
to keep it on track, you have to keep up the momentum. As a
director, your only salvation is flight, and flee Léaud does as the
music becomes very frenzied. I asked Antoine Duhamel for
something like the music you find in chase scenes in American
movies–music, that is, that would sustain the tension and not
dissolve or break it. And this music mustn’t stop, even when there is
dialogue. It’s a total frenzy. Plus the camera is constantly moving.
This scene, or sequence, illustrates another lesson I learned
from Hitchcock, who said: “You work hard to create an emotion,
and once the emotion is created, you should work even harder to
maintain it.”

Why did the Antoine Doinel cycle come to an end?

 TRUFFAUT 339

I guess because the ideas I get about Antoine Doinel, and the way
Léaud plays him, are closely tied to adolescence; there’s something in
the character that refuses to grow up. I’m like the silly father who
continues to treat his 23-year-old son like a child: “Blow your nose”;
“Say hello to the nice lady.” That’s the problem with parents who
won’t allow their children to grow up. People who do comic strips
have the same problem: they create a character who will be the same
age forever. But starting with Bed and Board, the character of
Antoine had actually reached adulthood, so there was no reason to
go on much beyond that. That’s why the cycle had to come to an end
with Love on the Run. It has a deliberately, boldly, even desperately
happy ending, unlike the endings of the previous four films in the
cycle, all of which were open-ended.

In Bed and Board you were examining the problems of romantic

relationships. How did you approach them?

Not really as problems. More as a chronicle, with some happy scenes

and some serious or dramatic scenes.

Shoot the Piano Player has similar changes of tone.

It does. They were planned in that film, since they were also in the
American David Goodis’ source novel–a Série noire from 1956
called Down There–but the changes of tone were reinforced during
the shooting because I realized I was faced with a film without a
theme. The same thing happened spontaneously in Stolen Kisses and
Bed and Board, themselves movies without clear subjects: some days
during the shooting I stressed the comical side, other days the
dramatic side. Compared to what I did in Stolen Kisses, though, in
Bed and Board I tried to be much funnier when something was
funny, and much more dramatic when something was dramatic. It’s
the same mixture in both films, but in Bed and Board I just tried, so
to speak, to increase the dosage. And I did this in part by showing
Antoine Doinel as a married man.
It was around ten years later that I made Love on the Run, which
included flashback sequences from the earlier Doinel films and had the
feeling of a conclusion for me. When the characters in Love on the
Run talk about a memory, I was able to show that memory, while still
340 ACTION!

telling a story happening in the present and with new characters. There
is a summing up in this film, since I had already decided that, once it
was finished, I would no longer use the character of Antoine Doinel.

I’d like to press you a bit more on why you used so much flashback
material in Love on the Run. In some instances in this film it almost
seems like padding.

Well, to begin with, there are only 18 minutes–in a film of 95

minutes–borrowed from the earlier works in the Doinel cycle. In
using these flashbacks, I felt I had to take advantage of an
opportunity never afforded any previous movie director. When
filming a story that involves the past, you always have the problem
of finding a young actor who looks like the adult protagonist. When
I made The Man Who Loved Women [1977], for example, I found,
on the streets of Montpelier, and by sheer luck, a little boy who
looked just like Charles Denner. We jumped at the opportunity to
use him and included in the film two or three flashbacks of the
Denner character as a child. But when you have the good fortune, as
I did in the Antoine Doinel cycle, to shoot someone at the ages of 14,
18, 24, and 26, then to pick him up again at 35, you have in your
hands material that is precious. And I wanted to take advantage of
having filmed this same boy at different stages of his life: by placing
him in a new story that allowed him to be seen–simultaneously, as it
were–as a man, an adolescent, and a child.

The editing of Love on the Run must have presented its share of
continuity problems.

Yes, it is obviously a film in which editing is much more important

than it was in such linear narratives of mine as The Green Room
[1978] and The Story of Adele H. [1975]. This must be the film where
I spent the most time–16 weeks, in fact–in the editing room since
Fahrenheit 451, where all the book-burning scenes were played as
flashbacks. The problem in Love on the Run was to homogenize very
unrelated materials, to retain the train of thought when we came back
to the present after a flashback. And the more the visual material is
unrelated, the more unity you have to preserve on the soundtrack: the
sound bridges the gaps. Let’s just say that when the image changes,
the sound cannot change, or has to change as little as possible.
 TRUFFAUT 341

So, in the end, you were happy with this film?

To tell the truth, I wasn’t happy with Love on the Run. This picture
was, and still is, troubling for me. People may well enjoy it, but I’m
not happy with it. It didn’t seem like a real film to me. For one thing,
the experimental elements in it are too pronounced. A movie often
has an experimental feel in the beginning, but by the end you hope
it feels like a real object, a real film, so that you forget it’s an
experiment.

But in defense of your own movie, it’s a kind of diary on film. You
watch a character through his evolution.

Yes, but did he really evolve? I felt that the cycle as a whole wasn’t
successful in making him evolve. The character started out
somewhat autobiographical, but over time it drew further and
further away from me. I never wanted to give him ambition, for
example. I wonder if he’s not too frozen in the end, like a cartoon
character. You know, Mickey Mouse can’t grow old. Perhaps the
Doinel cycle is the story of a failure, even if each film on its own is
enjoyable and a lot of fun to watch.
That said, Antoine Doinel’s life is just a life–not an exhilarating or
prodigious one, but the life of a person with his own contradictions
and faults. When I have a man like this as the main character on
screen, I focus on his weaknesses. I also did this outside the Doinel
cycle: Charles Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player, Jean Desailly in
The Soft Skin, and Charles Denner in The Man Who Loved Women
are not heroes, either. American cinema is great at depicting
“heroes,” but the vocation of European cinema may be to express
the truth about people, which means to show their weaknesses, their
contradictions, and even their lies.

The character of Antoine Doinel aside, it must have been an

advantage to work with the same actor on five different occasions.

Yes, that’s true. It’s always nice to work with an actor more than
once, because shooting goes by so fast that you really only get to
know the actors in the editing room, after they’ve gone off to work
on other films. There you watch them in slow motion, backwards
and forwards, taking your time to look closely at everything. I think
342 ACTION!

a first film is like being introduced to an actor. It’s only later that you
get to know the actor better and enjoy writing for him.

Jean-Pierre Léaud is certainly the actor you know best. You’ve

watched him grow, into a man as well as a film artist.

Yes, but I don’t want him to be too closely linked with me or Antoine
Doinel. As you know, he’s made other films, like Jean-Luc Godard’s
Masculine-Feminine [1966]. And he has worked not only with me
and Godard, but also with Julien Duvivier, Jean Eustache, Jean
Cocteau, Jerzy Skolimowski and many other directors. I used him
myself outside the Doinel cycle, in Two English Girls [1971] and Day
for Night [1973]. But, obviously, the character of Antoine Doinel fit
Léaud like a glove, because I wrote the character with him in mind.
Indeed, I created some scenes just because I knew he would be funny
in them–at least I laughed during the writing as I thought of him.
The problem is, I got a kick out of putting him in situations that
were, if not degrading, then not to his advantage. The characters
around him look strong, and Antoine therefore looks too weak. It’s
a high price to pay for the fun I had when writing or filming the
cycle, and that Léaud had while acting in it–because he loved to play
the part. But sometimes the public gets confused. They forget it’s
fiction and can form an inaccurate opinion of the actor. That
happened in Day for Night, which is about shooting a film. I had
this fabulous Italian actress, Valentina Cortese, who portrays an
alcoholic prone to dramatic outbursts because her son is dying or for
whatever reason. Now, no one thought that Valentina Cortese was
an alcoholic in real life. Léaud himself plays a young actor in Day
for Night. At some point he jeopardizes the whole shoot because of
a romantic problem he is having. And do you know what? People
thought from this that Jean-Pierre Léaud was capable of walking off
the set, of abandoning a film before the shooting is completed. This
hurt Léaud a bit, this public reaction: he told me so.

There was a process of identification of the man with his character,

going all the way back to The 400 Blows.

Yes, more with him than with Jacqueline Bisset or Valentina Cortese
or Jean-Pierre Aumont in the same film: a director’s perverse triumph,
you could call it.
 TRUFFAUT 343

You once told a tale about going into a café the day after they
showed one of the Antoine Doinel films on television. The waiter in
the bistro said to you, “I saw you on TV last night.” He had
identified you with the character of Doinel.

He came to pour my coffee and said, “You must have made that
picture some time ago.” He saw the age discrepancy, at least.

But he saw a resemblance, too. When you think about it, is this
amazing, disconcerting or both?

There was a scene in Day for Night where Léaud and I were face-to-
face, together for the first time in front of the camera. That was a
strange feeling, for both of us, and for more than just a moment.

In 1957, you wrote the following: “The films of the future will be
more personal than autobiography, like a confession or diary. Young
filmmakers will speak in the first person in order to tell what
happened to them: their first love, a political awakening, a trip, an
illness and so on. Tomorrow’s film will be an act of love.” If
someone wanted to make movies today, would you tell that person,
“Tell us about your life. There’s nothing more important or more
interesting.” Or would you say, “The industry is tougher now.
Conform to it and don’t listen to what I said.”

Very tactfully put, M. Cardullo. Yes, well done. My prediction was

fulfilled beyond my wildest dreams–you know that. So I wouldn’t
say the opposite today. But I would say, “Talk about what interests
you, but make sure it interests others, too.”

What does that mean? How can you know your film will interest
others?

I know the type of film I was reacting against when I wrote those
sentences in 1957. I was thinking of films like–no, I don’t really want
to give negative examples. I’m not a critic anymore. Suffice it to say
that I was thinking of films where you could put the following in the
opening credits: “Any resemblance to real life is purely
coincidental.” These are films where everything is false: male/female
relationships, the way people meet, everything. I’m not talking about
344 ACTION!

Robert Bresson, Jacques Becker and Max Ophüls. There were some
filmmakers, like these, that we liked. But I am talking about the kind
of movie in which the script was written by five or six people, who
had been given the royal treatment for a month at the Trianon in
Versailles.

Or during filming on the Côte d’Azur.

Yes. This process produced really awful movies, which we still

occasionally see on television. Time has lent them a sort of harmless
homogeneity that they did not have at the time they were made. So
back then it was only natural to call for more personal films. Films
like Bonjour Tristesse [1958], from the novel by Françoise Sagan,
who was a teenager when she wrote this book. Basically we wanted
films like that, or at least closer to that, and I think this is what
happened, but to such a point that films eventually became more
than personal: they became narcissistic. The makers of such films
spoke very personally, but sometimes they could have benefitted
from having had a friend read their scripts first.
Many such films, for example, followed a single, often
autobiographical character. In the Antoine Doinel cycle, of course,
I followed just such a character. But at some point I felt that I had
evolved–when I made Stolen Kisses, to be exact–because there
I made myself add several substantial supporting roles. So I, and
others, were gradually returning to a narrative tradition based more
on observation and synthesis than subjectivity and self-exploration.
Now we have both kinds of films. It’s true there are no more
powerful producers who send writers to St Paul de Vence or the
Trianon in Versailles, and this is probably a good thing. Nowadays
you write a script all by yourself, in your own little apartment–and
this is perhaps not so good a thing as one might at first think.

Thank you so much for your time today, M. Truffaut. I know this
was not easy for you. You have been a most gracious and giving host.

You’re quite welcome; I enjoyed our talk. And I wish you luck in
your own critical career. Do you want to remain a critic?

For now, yes.

 TRUFFAUT 345

Then at least stay as close to filmmaking as you can, if you do not

become a director yourself. I mean through set visits, script advising,
television commentary and interviews like this one–which was
nothing like the academic kind I am often called upon to give. Such
activity will make you a better, or more complete, critic, and,
especially if others follow your lead, it could ultimately make the
cinema less self-directed, which is to say more honest. Plût à Dieu!
 Contributor Biographies

Karin Luisa Badt is associate professor of cinema at the University

of Paris VIII. She has written for Tikkun, the Boston Globe, and
other publications.

A. K. Bierman is a philosopher, playwright, university professor and

ex-naval aviator. A frequent translator of Italian literature, he has
written Philosophy of Urban Existence, Life, and Morals and a
musical based on the life of Walt Whitman.

Bert Cardullo is professor of film studies in the Department of Media

and Communication at the Izmir University of Economics in Izmir,
Turkey. He has written, edited, or translated more than 25 books.

Andrew Grossman is the editor of Queer Asian Cinema (Harrington

Park Press, 2001). His writings have appeared in numerous books
and magazines, including The New Korean Cinema and Chinese
Connections.

Robert Mark Grossman is a doctoral student at the University of

Virginia, specializing in the fields of German Studies, 18th-century
comparative literature & culture, aesthetic & genre theory, intellectual
history and film & media criticism.

Dorna Khazeni’s writings have appeared in The Believer and The

Iranian. She has translated numerous books including Michel
Houllebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life.

C. Jerry Kutner is a writer, filmmaker, photographer and attorney

who practices in Los Angeles. A featured blogger on Bright Lights
348 CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

After Dark, he has written for Los Angeles Free Press, Delirious,
Alternative Press Review and Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine.

Damien Love is the author of Solid Dad Crazy and heads Kingly-
Reprieve Books, dedicated to reviving neglected literature with a
cinema connection. His writing has appeared in The Guardian,
Uncut, The Scotsman and The Sunday Herald.

Tony Macklin founded and edited the respected magazine Film

Heritage (1965–1978). His publications include two novels, Palestra
and Little Boy Blue and the Golden Reunion, and Voices from the
Set, a collection of interviews with film personalities.

Howard Mandelbaum has headed one of the world’s premier

photographic archives, Photofest, for 25 years. He is the author of
Screen Deco and Forties Screen Style, and the coauthor of Flesh and
Fantasy.

Toni Maraini is a poet, writer and art historian. She studied in Italy,
France and the States, and has been a university teacher in North
Africa. She has published many essays and books including Imago,
appunti di un visionario (1994) and Sealed in Stone (2002). She met
Fellini in 1990.

Gary Morris founded Bright Lights Film Journal as a print

publication in 1974; it became a web-only magazine in 1996. He is
the author of the monograph Roger Corman (1985) and has written
extensively on film and culture for American and Italian publications.

Peter Rinaldi is a filmmaker based in New York City.

Damon Smith is a New York-based film journalist and contributing

editor at FilmCatcher.com. He has written features, profiles and
reviews for The Boston Globe, Time Out New York, Filmmaker,
Senses of Cinema and other publications.

Michael Stern is the author of the highly acclaimed critical study

Douglas Sirk (1979). With his collaborator Jane Stern, he has written
more than 40 books on pop culture, food, and other subjects including
the best-sellers Elvis World and The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.