Francis Ford Coppola: Into the Darkness

Francis Ford Coppola’s epic tale of the Vietnam war Apocalypse Now was released in 1979. The making of the film is the stuff of legend. Intended to be a 14-week shoot in the Philippines, starting in the spring of 1976, the production ran into immediate problems with logistics, weather and other mishaps conspiring against the filmmakers. 

In addition Coppola fired his leading actor, Harvey Keitel, after just two weeks, replacing him with Martin Sheen who was himself on the brink of an alcohol-fuelled breakdown. On Sheen’s arrival, chaos had overtaken the production. Coppola was still working on the script, firing people at will while crew members were succumbing to various tropical diseases. 

Meanwhile the helicopters used in the combat sequences were regularly recalled by President Marcos to fight in his own war against anti-government forces. Things got worse when Marlon Brando arrived for filming, overweight and unprepared. Then shortly after filming began, Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack. A traumatised Coppola subsequently had a mental breakdown, with the director apparently threatening to commit suicide on more than one occasion. 

The tale of the making of Apocalypse Now was chronicled in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse which drew on behind-the-scenes footage shot by the director’s wife Eleanor Coppola, which was intercut with new interviews with the original cast and crew. Looking back on events several years later, Coppola’s wife remarked:

‘It was a journey for him up the river I always felt. He went deeper and deeper into himself and deeper and deeper and deeper into the production. It just got out of control… The script was evolving and the scenes were changing – it just got larger and more complex. And little by little he got out there as far as his characters. That wasn’t the intention at all at the beginning.’

The  following exchange is taken from an interview with Francis Ford Coppola from 1979 for Rolling Stone magazine in which the director discusses the writing and strained production of Apocalypse Now:

Would you do it all again?

I’m tempted to say no. I really think there’s a limit to what you ought to give a project you’re working on. It’s not worth it, it’s really not worth it. I don’t know that I would be able to avoid doing it again, but I’m forty years old instead of thirty-six. My leg hurts, my back hurts, my front hurts, my head hurts. I’ve got nothing but problems. I mean, I could be the head of KQED [San Francisco’s public television station] and do interesting little experimental things and not be such a wreck.

There were times when I wished I was working for someone else so I could quit – but I don’t think I ever thought of cutting my losses and coming home. There were a lot of troubles. Marty’s [Martin Sheen] heart attack [which delayed filming even further] . . . severely traumatized my nervous system. We didn’t know if he was going to make it. If he’d gone home to the U.S. for treatment, he might not have come back – his family might not have let him. I was scared shitless. The shooting was three-quarters done; it was all him, what was left.

Firing my [original] lead actor [Harvey Keitel] – that was bad. It’s a terrible, terrible thing to do: sure, it jeopardizes the production, but it can also ruin an actor’s career, to be fired like that. It was a very, very hard decision. But I just pulled the plunger – I did that a lot on this movie. Still do it. I’ve done it before with people – but that’s another form of saying you're going to really try to get it right.

Did making this movie change your idea of what it means to be a filmmaker?

It changed every idea I have on anything I might not do or be. It enlarged my mind in terms of possibilities. It would be very hard for me to go and direct the new Paddy Chayefsky screenplay now. After Apocalypse Now and the Godfather pictures, especially the two of them together, I began to think in terms of the kind of movie that is impossible: movies that are . . . fourteen hours long, that really cover a piece of material in a way that justifies it, shown in some kind of format that makes sense.

Ten years ago, John Milius wrote a script: ‘Apocalypse Now.’ You still share script credit with him. How has the movie changed?

I think the script, as I remember it, took a more comic-strip Vietnam War and moved it through a series of events that were also comic strip: a political comic strip. The events had points to them – I don’t say comic strip to denigrate them. The film continued through comic-strip episode and comic-strip episode until it came to a comic-strip resolution. Attila the Hun [i.e., Kurtz] with two bands of machine-gun bullets around him, taking the hero [Willard] by the hand, saying, ‘Yes, yes, here! I have the power in my loins!’ Willard converts to Kurtz’ side; in the end, he’s firing up at the helicopters that are coming to get him, crying out crazily. A movie comic.

I’ve read the comic.

Have you?

Well, I’ve read comics like that one, sure.

That was the tone and the resolution. The first thing that happened, after my involvement, was the psychologization of Willard – which I worked on desperately. Willard in the original script was literally zero, nobody. I didn’t have a handle: that’s why I cast him with Steve McQueen at first. I thought, well, God, McQueen will give him a personality. But I began to delve more into Willard. I took Willard through many, many instances in which I tried to position him as a witness going on this trip – and yet give him some sort of personality you could feel comfortable with, and still believe he was there.

Marty approached an impossible character: he had to be an observer, a watcher. A lot of reading dossiers, a totally introspective character. In no way could he get in the way of the audience’s view of what was happening, of Vietnam. That wasn’t going to work for Keitel. His stock in trade is a series of tics – ways to make people look at him.

The first scene of the movie – Willard is in his Saigon hotel room, waiting for a mission, drunk, losing control, finally attacking a mirror and cutting his hand open – is described in your wife’s book (‘Notes’) almost as a breakdown on Sheen’s part, certainly not action that was planned.

Marty’s character is coming across as too bland; I tried to break through it. I always look for other levels, hidden levels, in the actor’s personality and in the personality of the character he plays. I conceived this all-night drunk; we’d see another side of that guy. So Marty got drunk. And I found that sometimes, when he gets drunk, a lot comes out. He began to dance, he took off his clothes – this was ten minutes of the most incredible stuff – and then I asked him to look in the mirror. It was a way of focusing him on himself – to bring out the personality by creating a sense of vanity. And that’s what he punched: his vanity. I didn’t tell him to smash his hand into the mirror.

Many of the best things in the movie – the helicopter attack, the surfing motifs – are from Milius. The Do Lung Bridge sequence – which came partly from one of Michael Herr’s Esquire articles – was from Milius. Many things were changed. The concept that the guys on the boat would get killed – that was new. From the bridge on, it’s pretty much Heart of Darkness and me.

Was the film based on ‘Heart of Darkness’ in Milius’ script?

Very vaguely, then: A man was going up a river to find a man called Kurtz. There were few specific references beyond that. I decided to take the script much more strongly in the direction of Heart of Darkness – which was, I know, opening a Pandora’s box.

Michael Herr was brought in after the shooting in the Philippines was completed. Did he write all of the narration?

He dominated it; he dominated the tone. The hipster voice Willard is given – that’s Michael.

Was it from ‘Dispatches,’ in which Herr makes such a point of Vietnam as ‘a rock & roll war,’ that the idea came to use the Doors’ ‘The End’?

No. I knew Jim Morrison, in film school; he came to my house once – this was before he’d had a record out – with some acetates, demos, asking if I could help. I tried; I didn’t get anywhere. But the idea of using the Doors came from ‘Light My Fire.’ That was from Milius: Kurtz’ people would play ‘Light My Fire’ through their loudspeakers, to jazz themselves up. In the end, there’s a battle, and the North Vietnamese regulars come charging in to ‘Light My Fire.’ I went to the Philippines with that ending!

How did the characterization of Kurtz evolve?

Marlon arrived; he was terribly fat. As my wife says in her book, he hadn’t read the copy of Heart of Darkness I’d sent him; I gave him another copy, he read it, and we began to talk. There were a lot of notes that we compiled together. I’d give him some – he’d write a lot himself. I shot Marlon in a couple of weeks and then he left; everything else was shot around that footage, and what we had shot with Marlon wasn’t like a scene. It was hours and hours of him talking.

We had an idea: Kurtz as a Gauguin figure, with mangoes and babies, a guy who’d really gone all the way. It would have been great; Marlon wouldn’t go for it at all.

Marlon's first idea – which almost made me vomit – to play Kurtz as a Daniel Berrigan: in black pajamas, in VC clothes. It would be all about the guilt [Kurtz] felt at what we’d done. I said, “Hey, Marlon, I may not know everything about this movie – but one thing I know it’s not about is ‘our guilt’!” Yet Marlon has one of the finest minds around: Thinking is what he does. To sit and talk with him about life and death – he’ll think about that stuff all day long.

Finally, he shaved his head – and that did it. We’d go for it – we’d get there. That terrible face. I think it’s wonderful that in this movie, the most terrifying moment is that image: just his face.

There seems to be no conventional suspense in the movie. Even in the scene where Willard kills Kurtz; that’s an orchestrated scene, full of crosscutting and metaphors, like the killings that end ‘The Godfather.’ Is that the way you wanted to make the movie?

Maybe I’m stupid, but I always wanted the film to be graceful. My very first notion when I began to think of thestyle of the film – of course, style was going to be the whole movie – I wanted to sweep, not go chaaa! chaaa! I wanted it to have grace. I chose Vittorio Storaro [Bernardo Bertolucci’s cinematographer in The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris and 1900] because I wanted the camera to just float across the boat. That is always shot handheld, because there’s no building dolly tracks in the water. The music would be Tomita-like [a Japanese synthesizer composer] for that reason.

I don’t understand what you mean when you say that style was going to be the whole movie.

When I first thought of doing Apocalypse Now, and I read Milius’ script, I was looking for a clue as to what kind of movie this was going to be. I was very concerned about style, because I knew it wouldn’t be a realistic style – I knew it would have some sort of what I’ll call extension to it, but I didn’t know what. People used to ask me, well, what’s this movie gonna be like? I said, well, it’s gonna be very stylized. And they said, well, like what? Like what director? And I would say, like Ken Russell. I wanted the movie to go as far as it would go. I was prepared to have to make an unusual, surrealist movie, and I even wanted to.

But you didn’t.

Well, surrealist. What do you call or what do you not call surrealist?

Watching the movie, I never had the feeling that I was partner to a dream – and that’s how I would define the experience of surrealism.

Well, then, what would you call the desire to extend the action so that it had another, different reality –or an extended reality, from just pure reality – that made use of what was going on?

The emergence of a different reality is raised as something that could happen – that could take over Willard, suck him in. There’s an interesting shot in Kurtz’ temple, a copy of ‘The Golden Bough’– a book about ancient myth and practice of ritual regicide. A man became king; after a year, if anyone could kill him, he became king. After Willard kills Kurtz, he emerges from the temple. Kurtz’ whole community is gathered there, and Willard is carrying two symbols of kingship – this is how I saw it –the book, Kurtz’ memoirs, and the scepter, the weapon he throws down when he refuses the kingship. The community kneels before him, and it’s clear that if Willard wanted to take over, he could have. And then he consciously rejects that choice. If he had not, then he, and maybe we, would have been swallowed by the extended realities you’re talking about. But he rejects that. That seemed very clear. Is that not what you meant?

No . . . when I finally got there, the best I could come up with was this: I’ve got this guy who’s gone up the river, he’s gonna go kill this other guy who’s been the head of all this. Life and death. Well, I have a friend, Dennis Jakob, we were talking – what to do? – and he said to me, ‘What about the myth of the Fisher King?’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘It’s The Golden Bough.’ The Fisher King – I went and got the book, and I said, of course, that’s what I meant. That’s what was meant by the animal sacrifices [that occur among Kurtz’ people as Willard murders Kurtz]. I had seen a real animal sacrifice, by the headhunters we had hired. I looked at the blood shoot up in the air, and I’m thinking – this is about something very basic. I’ve gone up this whole river trying to figure out this movie, and I don’t know what’s the matter: What do I have to express, what do I have to show to really show this war? There are millions of things you have to show. But what it really all comes down to is some sort of acceptance of the truth, or the struggle to accept the truth. And the truth has to do with good and evil, and life and death – and don’t forget that we see these things as opposites, or we want to see them as opposites, but they are one. It’s not so easy to define them – as good or evil. You must accept that you have the whole.

Kurtz is consciously participating in the myth of the Golden Bough; he’s prepared that role for Willard, for him to take his place.

He wants Willard to kill him. So Willard thinks about this: he says, ‘Everyone wanted him dead. The army . . . and ultimately even the jungle; that’s where he took his orders from, anyway.’ The notion is that Willard is moved to do it, to go once more into that primitive state, to go and kill.

He goes into the temple, and he goes through a quasi-ritual experience, and he kills the king. The native people there were acting out in dance what was happening. They understood, and they were acting out, with their icons, the ritual of life and death. Willard goes in, and he kills Kurtz, and as he comes out he flirts with the notion of being king, but something . . . does not lure him. He goes, he takes the kid back, and then he goes away and there’s the image of the green stone face again [the face of an ancient Cambodian goddess from Kurtz’ temple complex]. He starts to go away, and then the moment when he flirted with being king is superimposed. And that’s the moment when we use ‘the horror, the horror.’

How do you see what Willard is going through at Kurtz’ compound?

I always tried to have it be implied in the movie that the notion of Willard going up the river to meet Kurtz was perhaps also a man looking at another aspect or projection of himself. I always had the idea of Willard and Kurtz being the same man – in terms of how I made my decisions as to do whatever we did. And I feel that Willard arriving at the compound to meet Kurtz is like coming to the place that you don’t want to go – because it’s all your ghosts and all your demons.

Willard’s a murderer, an assassin, and no doubt when he’s alone in the bathroom, he’s had some moral thoughts about whether that’s good: to go kill people you don’t even know. So I’m thinking Willard has been involved – as maybe Kurtz has – on a moral quest, which is to ‘Is what I have done, or what I am doing, moral? Is it okay?’ So when Willard gets to Kurtz’ place, it’s his nightmare. It’s his nightmare in that it’s the extreme of the issue that he has to deal with – bodies and heads – and Kurtz is the extreme of him, because Willard’s a killer. Here, now, Kurtz – who has gone mad – has become the horror, the whole thing, which is no more than an extension of the horror that we’re looking at on every level. Willard has to come to terms with this – and what Brando really tells him, the way I see it, is, I finally saw something so horrible . . . and then at the same time realized that the fact that it was so horrible was what made it wonderful . . . and I went to some other place in my mind, in which I became Kurtz, who is nuts.

And pathetic. One of the most beautiful lines in Michael Herr’s narration is when he says, ‘Kurtz had driven himself so far away from his people at home’ – the idea that you could go so far that you couldn’t get back, even if you wanted to get back.

That’s what I was trying to do with Willard in that last section. I always had this image, over and over again, of being able to stare at the something that was the truth and say, ‘Yes, that is the truth.’ Somehow a face was always important to me, and that’s why I liked just looking at Brando’s face for ten minutes or whatever. Remember Portrait of Dorian Gray? I mean, it was like ripping back the curtain – ahhhhh! There it is. And that’s the way I felt about Vietnam. You just look at it, you open your eyes and you look at it, and you accept it if it’s the truth. And then you get past it.

One line that seems to be coming out, following the L.A. screening in May and the Cannes screenings – and I’m speaking of the American press, since that’s all I’ve seen – is ‘The movie is terrific for the first hour or so: it’s so exciting, it’s well done, spectacular, it looks as if it were worth the money that was spent, you can see the money on the screen.’  And then, ‘When the picture get to Kurtz, it becomes muddled and philosophical and pretentious – it falls apart.’ That line is remarkably consistent. (And has remained so in most of the reviews that have appeared since the film was officially released.)

Audiences, and therefore certain writers, really know the rules of the different kinds of movies – and whether they want to admit it, in the first hour and a half of this movie, they’re locked into a formula. It’s a formula movie; you just get locked into the slot and it’ll take you up the river. And then, at a certain point, it doesn’t develop into the action adventure that it had set you up for. In my mind, the movie had made a turn I wouldn’t alter – it curved up the river. I chose to go with a stylized treatment, up the river into primitive times – and I eliminated everything in the script that didn’t take you there. It now takes you into various difficult areas, which you have to engage with a little. They’re riding down a big sled on a very formula movie, and they want it to resolve, and kick ’em off, just like movies are supposed to do, and it doesn’t do it. It’s like someone takes them off the slide and says, okay, now walk up the steps, and they don’t want to do it.

I’m not saying they are wrong in feeling that. I think some do and some don’t. But they would have preferred that it just went easy, without any difficulties – let the movie do it all. And I couldn’t do it in the end.

Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?

I couldn’t, I don’t think – I tried. I mean, I couldn’t give them an ending better than I did. I tried, and I’ve been trying and trying and trying. And if I could ever imagine how to do it, I would get out the goddamn film and I’d do it.

I think we live our lives hoping – impatient – for a time when things are resolved. I think that time will never come for any of us – and that’s part of the irony, even in this movie. Although there seems to be a resolution of some kind: that the healthy devour the sickly, and there is some sort of life/death, night-becomes-morning cycle taking place – to me the irony is that we stand on the edge, on the razor blade, all the time, and that’s why Willard looks to the left, looks to the right, and you hear, ‘The horror, the horror.’ ‘The horror, the horror’ is precisely that we are never really comfortable understanding what we should do, what is right and what is wrong, what is rational behavior, what is irrational: that we’re always on the brink.

‘The horror, the horror’ at the end, the fact that I wanted to end it on choice, because I think that’s the truthful ending – We hope for some sort of moral resolution about Vietnam and about our part in it, our participation in it. At the [true] end, you don’t have a resolution. You’re in a choice, still, between deciding to be powerful or to be weak. In a way, that’s how wars start. The United States chose: It wanted to be powerful, wanted to be Kurtz, in Southeast Asia. It chose not to stay home. But choice was just the only way I thought it could end.

Heart of Darkness ends with a lie. After Kurtz’ death, Marlow goes to Kurtz’ girlfriend, the intended, and she says, ‘What did he say before he died?’ And Marlow says, ‘He mentioned your name,’ when in fact what Kurtz said was, ‘The horror, the horror.’ So I feel all lousy because I think the ending I had on the movie was the truth, but this ending that I’m going to put on it now is a lie – and I justify it to myself because Conrad would have ended with a lie, too.

- Francis Ford Coppola interviewed by Greil Marcus.  Rolling Stone,  November 1, 1979

Paul Schrader: On Bresson’s ‘Pickpocket’

The above video is taken from Paul Schrader’s excellent introduction to the Criterion Collection edition of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket: ‘the most influential film in my creative life’.

Bresson’s consummate tale of crime and redemption follows Michel, a lonely young pickpocket whose days are spent working the streets, metros and train stations of Paris. His devotion to the art of pickpocketing becomes a compulsion. As his obsession grows he experiences fear, elation, a world of feeling. He takes lessons from a master and works with a criminal gang. This underworld milieux brings him into contact with his interlocutor and confessor, a police detective who resolves to apprehend him.

Schrader draws intriguing parallels between the character of Michel in Pickpocket and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, tracing Bresson’s film back to Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (Bresson’s inspiration for the film) and how the idea of a ‘soul in transit’ then became the inspiration for the screenplay of Taxi Driver. 

Schrader first saw Pickpocket in Los Angeles in 1969, ten years after it was made, and wrote a celebrated two-part review which he later refined in his seminal book Transcendental Style in Film. 

Schrader calls Bresson a ‘perverse’ director, in that Bresson’s style works in ways that run counter to traditional narrative filmmaking. Instead of adding elements and flourishes to underscore the story, Bresson strips things away, leaving the audience off-balance, paring the story down to its fundamental aspects. Bresson uses a rigid and austere style to ward off superficial emotional responses, intent instead on creating a ‘transformation’ – from the material to the spiritual realm. For Bresson this transition is key: ‘There must, at a certain moment, be a transformation; if not, there is no art.’ 

John Cassavetes: On Being Independent

Faces (Directed by John Cassavetes)

John Cassavetes’s fourth feature, “Faces,” from 1968, is a classic independent production made before such things were in vogue. He financed the film himself from his paychecks for acting gigs and even with a mortgage on his home; the star is his wife, the actress Gena Rowlands; he filmed in their house and edited in their garage; and when the film was completed, he distributed it himself. Then it received three Oscar nominations (Cassavetes, for Best Original Screenplay, and the film’s co-stars, Lynn Carlin and Seymour Cassel, for Best Supporting Actress and Actor). Even more important than its acclaim is its artistry: “Faces” is the core of Cassavetes’s work. He started his career as an independent, with “Shadows” (1959), which he financed with a precursor to Kickstarter, an appeal on a radio show. He then directed two Hollywood features, “Too Late Blues” and “A Child Is Waiting,” and chafed under studio restrictions. The freedom with which he made “Faces” bore aesthetic fruit. With this story of marriage on the rocks and the desperate quest for love, Cassavetes conjured an air of tragic exuberance that’s as original as it is thrilling. The liberated actors blend impulsive comedy, intense physicality, and agonized tenderness; the spontaneous camera work offers soul-baring closeups and sculptural compositions. With its unsparing confessional drama, “Faces” set the themes, the moods, and the styles for the rest of his career. It also inaugurated a new era in the history of cinema, opening possibilities that most directors have yet to confront or even admit.

– Richard Brody

In the following extract John Cassavetes discusses his approach to independent filmmaking.

It’s hard to explain what ‘independence’ means – but to those who have it, film is still a mystery, not a way out. There are other independents, of course, but they haven’t really hit the limelight yet, so not enough is at stake. To still do what you want after ten years, twenty years, is some- thing. I’ve known a lot of filmmakers who started out with enormous talents and lost momentum. I don’t say they’re selling out, but somehow if you fight the system you’re going to lose to it. That is basically the point. I don’t care whether you’re a painter or an architect, you can’t fight the system. In my mind, if you fight the system it only means you want to join it. So it is very important that you do something you like, that you’re involved in enough to hold your interest no matter how long it takes. If the film doesn’t involve you, it’s what we call a ‘stepping- stone’ picture, you know, a stepping-stone to art, and that’s all right too. Take a guy like Polanski who did pictures in Poland, Knife in the Water and later Repulsion. You could see in those works a pulse that was meaningful and creative and intense. You can’t dispute the fact that he’s an artist, but yet you have to say that Rosemary’s Baby is not art. It is a dictated design – boom, boom, boom, boom. People are used within that design to make a commercial product to sell to people. I’m not saying that is bad. I was in it. I’m fine. I’m happy. But it isn’t art. I think Dirty Dozen in its way is more artistic because it’s compulsively going forward, trying to make something out of the moment without preordaining the way the outcome is going to be.

The real tragedy is that other poor young filmmakers are coming along who will go out and conform before they’ve even opened their mouths. This whole culture – there is only one art in America, and that’s money. Raising money, and business. That’s what everyone is interested in: screwing somebody and making profit. We went to the Pratt Institute the other night and one of the kids said, ‘16mm is not for me.’ You know? ‘It’s not for me! We want to get out of this student stuff! We want to get into the real thing!!!’ I make films for the big studios, but I’ve never told them the truth. I’ve never been nice to them, and the understanding is there that I go my way and they go their way. If I can’t do what I want with them, I’ll go 16mm, and if I can’t do it there, I’ll go to 8mm.

Los Angeles is a movie town. Most of the people who work there are connected in one way or another with the entertainment industry. All of them are filled with ambition and ideas. To be an individual in Los Angeles is like being an individual in the Army. To retain a personality that comes out of a lifetime of hard work is a virtual impossibility. It is not because there is no talent and that people don’t come with the same vitality to Hollywood, but rather because the rules stress low-profile, subdued voices, mellowness, polite fear and vicious hypocrisy. The expression ‘to fit in’ is used in Hollywood. ‘To fit in’ is to give up your mind in favor of your position. Occasionally a character escapes. A single-minded fanatic, obsessed with separate visions of family, pain, driving the straight ones crazy while trying to transfer those feelings into a slick medium – a medium so regulated, so intoxicated with profits, so violently and quietly competitive that its boundaries make the Berlin Wall seem like something out of Disney.

I work with a group of people who tell me to go screw myself all the time and who disagree and say, ‘I don’t like the picture,’ and who are honest, and who work hard, and who are disciplined by themselves. And that keeps me alive. It’s staying with people that you’re comfortable with. Not that agree with you, but are comfortable with and not assuming a posture of being somebody, because you’re never going to be anybody! You just enjoy the work. It’s like somebody says, ‘When we have some money we’re going to really be happy,’ or ‘When we get this car, then things are going to change.’ They never change. The only time they ever change is when you have good times. So if you can work with people and enjoy yourself and talk only about what’s at hand, only about your movie and going into your movie and getting deeper into it and getting laughs out of it and abusing it, and treating it like a person. Because listen, that love affair’s going to last, what – a couple of months or a year? – and then you’re going to leave that movie and that’s the end of it. I haven’t seen Shadows since the day we finished it. It’s really a brutal thing, but I have no further interest once a picture has been finalized. I don’t think I will ever see Faces again. It’s like a love affair that’s gone.

We always try to think about what was the very best time of our lives. Usually it’s college or something like that. Making Faces was the very best time of my life – because of the people. I’d never met people like that, and I’m talking about every single member of that company and cast, people who made my life really worth living. I never thought once during the whole time we were making that film that there was anything else in the world except those people; they were that devoted and pure. There is a certain desire to making a film, when you really put it in and put it up and you know no limit and you’re really willing to die for the film you’re making. Now that sounds crazy. If you die for your country, it’s not so good, but in film if it’s the last thing you ever do, you want your picture to be done. With that attitude, making it that way, a man moves through life really using himself, really making something of his life.

John Cassavetes – excerpted from Cassavetes on Cassavetes, ed. R. Carney.

Sam Peckinpah: ‘Dying is not fun and games’

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

From its stark opening sequence, in which children observe a swarm of ants devour scorpions, through to its violent bullet-riddled ending, The Wild Bunch (1969) is an unrelenting journey into a world of nihilistic violence.

Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads an ageing gang of criminals on one final assignment in 1913: robbing a railroad store. Unfortunately, Bishop's former comrade Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who was blackmailed into chasing down his old friend for sleazy railroad tycoon Harrigan, is waiting in ambush with a gang of bounty hunters. The group becomes aware of the ambush and mayhem ensues. A deafening chorus of gunfire, shattering glass, and whinnying horses serves as the music to an epic gunfight that would serve as the focal point of a lesser western, but serves as simple prelude to the rest of Sam Peckinpah's cruel, elegiac tour de force. 

The remaining members of the group pass the laughing youngsters again on their way out of town, who are now burning the ants and scorpions alive. 

After establishing his stall early on with the inhumanity of cackling infants and slow-motion deaths, Peckinpah spends the next two hours thrilling us. A riveting, beautifully filmed train robbery, an exploding bridge, and a final machine-gun massacre all figure in this storey of hardened criminals caught up in the attempt to sell stolen weaponry to the dissolute General Mapache (Emilio Fernández) during the Mexican revolution. Repeated sequences of scotch consumption and hilarity hammer home the film's overall tone of cheerful submission in the face of a terrible conclusion. Any viewer who downs a shot each time the gang drinks will find themselves slurring long before the end credits, while the grizzled felons' combined laughing is almost as prevalent as gunfire.

The following article by Roger Ebert, from 1969, following a press screening of The Wild Bunch, gives an idea of the contemporary response to the film’s notorious depiction of violence and the director Sam Peckinpah’s defence of it.

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which is possibly the most violent film ever made, stirred up a bitter controversy. Film critics split into many camps at an extraordinary press conference, and even co-stars William Holden and Ernest Borgnine seemed slightly squeamish about the movie. But just about everyone agreed that The Wild Bunch will be this summer’s top box-office draw, for better or worse.

The film was screened for some 350 film critics during the weeklong Warner Bros. 7-Arts international film festival, festival, a showcase for six new Warners’ films. The audience reaction was extreme. Some people walked out. Others closed their eyes. When the lights went up, the applause was matched by boos and hisses. And then the arguments started. They are likely to continue all summer, providing fodder for countless articles and talk shows.

Peckinpah’s film is set in the Southwest and Mexico, circa 1913. The bunch of the title are a group of professional killers and bank robbers who have nearly reached the end of the line. They’re anachonisms, 25 years too late for the wild West, hoping to pull off one more good job and retire. A life of violence has unsuited them for anything else. They’re crude, filthy, bloodthirsty, raunchy and stupid. But they have a kind of honor and loyalty to each other.

The film opens with an extraordinary bloodbath of about seven minutes in length: a temperance parade is caught in the cross-fire between the Wild Bunch and a group of scurvy railroad gunmen led by Robert Ryan. Several civilians are gunned down just for the hell of it. The opening scene is the most violent I’ve ever seen on the screen – except for the closing scene.

By the films end, the bunch has escaped into Mexico and gotten involved in a scheme to steal U.S. army rifles for an ersatz rebel general. They’re double-crossed, caught between the general, Ryan’s men, and the Army. And in a final incredible bloodbath, some 200 men, women and horses die in an orgy of violence. You have never seen anything like it.

Having said this much, let me say that I admire The Wild Bunch and consider it an important act of filmmaking. It is easy enough to protest against the automatic violence of the Italian Westerns; it is legitimate to worry whether movie violence is somehow connected to the violence in American life. But The Wild Bunch, it seems to me presents death and violence in such definitive (indeed, even excessive) terms that it becomes, paradoxically, a statement against violence, and a reaction to it.

Peckinpah (previous credits: Ride the High Country, Major Dundee) has, first of all, made a magnificently directed and acted film. Holden, Borgnine, Ryan and Edmond O’Brien are particularly effective in roles that make their previous tough-guy characterizations look transparent. Peckinpah has marshaled an army of stuntmen and special effects men for his battle scenes and for a tremendous scene of the destruction of a bridge.

And the final bloodbath is the most effectively photographed battle since Orson Welles’ Fallstaff. Dying behind a machine gun, Holden maniacally mows down dozens of soldiers, civilians, anyone within range. I never thought, a lady in the audience complained, that I’d live long enough to see William Holden shoot a woman.

Peckinpah introduces a new technology of violence in those scenes. Blood actually spurts from gunshot wounds; we are shown the face of violence rather than the comic-strip substitute supplied by most Westerns.

All of this held little weight with most of the critics here, I gather. They considered the film to be an exploitation of violence – and they let Peckinpah and his co-stars have it with both barrels at a press conference the next morning.

I have only one question, said the lady from the Reader’s Digest. Why was this film ever made?

We wanted to show violence in real terms, Peckinpah said. Dying is not fun and games. Movies make it look so detached. With The Wild Bunch people get involved whether they like it or not. They do not have the mild reactions to it.

Why did everyone bleed so much? another lady asked.

Lady, Borgnine said, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?

But both Borgnine and Holden seemed to be rather dazed by the film themselves. Holden reportedly doesn’t like it much; he feels it’s too violent and needs additional cutting. Borgnine told the press conference: When I was handed the script, to be quite honest with you, I did not read into it all the controversy it seems to have stirred up. I had made violent films before, of course; Westerns and war pictures. Ths is a script about people who have outlived their time, who have anachronisms. I accepted it on those terms.

When we were actually shooting, we were all repulsed at times. There were nights when we’d finish shooting and I’d say, My God, my God! But I was always back the next morning, because I sincerely believed we were achieving something.

What about the rumors, one critic asked, that there was a near-mutiny on the set in reaction to Peckinpah’s overkill?

No mutiny, Peckinpah said.

Another critic asked: Don’t you think you may have occasionally passed over that thin line between what an audience is willing to accept, and what it isn’t? We felt that when the general slits the kid’s throat, that was the point beyond which we really had difficulty...

I know what you mean, Peckinpah said. There is a very, very thin line, and I think we operated as close to it as we dared. We hope that, for most audience, we stayed on this side of the line. But I am willing to admit that we may have passed over it at some point. We feel the violence is a catharsis, a release, but sometimes the line is hard to find.

To tell you the truth, Peckinpah added after a short pause, I really cannot stand to see the film myself anymore. It is too much an emotional thing. I saw it last night, but I do not want to see it again for perhaps five years.

– Sam Peckinpah: Dying is not fun and games, by Roger Ebert, June 1969.

Article here

Michael Winterbottom: On Adapting Jim Thompson

The Killer Inside Me (Directed by Michael Winterbottom)

The pulp writer Jim Thompson, wrote over 30 novels and is  known for writing some of the bleakest noir ever put to page. Stephen King, who claims Thompson among his favorite authors, wrote with a kind of wonder of Thompson’s desolate stories. “There are three brave lets” in Thompson’s writing, King explained in the introduction to Thompson’s Now and On Earth: “he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.” 

The director Stephen Frears, who adapted Jim Thompson’s The Grifters for film, was struck by the relationship between Thompson’s work and certain aspects of classical Greek tragedy. Thompson’s uncompromising noir informs and feeds back into these tragic aspects to create a vision of a hell in earth; an a stark but recognizable—vision of present day life. This relationship is particularly evident in Thompson’s 1952 masterpiece The Killer Inside Me.

Killer Inside owes much to traditional noir tropes. The principle character, small-town sheriff Lou Ford, is obsessed with setting right a wrong. His brother, he believes, was killed by a corrupt local industrialist. Ford devises a strategy to bring the man down, beyond the law, by setting his son up with a prostitute. Ford however falls in love with the woman himself, but continues with the scheme: to murder both the prostitute and the son and make it look like a murder-suicide. The plan falls apart in the best noir tradition, leading Ford to kill further to cover up his initial crime. The crimes become increasingly savage as Ford’s recklessness grows, but Ford continues to remain convinced right until the end that he’s in control of events and can, ultimately, not face the consequences. By the novel’s end, Ford is in jail and reflecting, in his typically calculated manner, on his crimes, his reasons, and his own state of mind.

British director Michael Winterbottom’s faithful recent adaptation divided critics and audiences. Here he discusses his approach to the book and adaptation in general.

Q: Your method of adapting novels—Tristram Shandy, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge—is not to be strictly faithful to the story or methodology of the source text. How did that play out here?

A: Well, it was the opposite, really. When I read the book, I thought that you could almost film it. The book tells its story through dialogue. Jim Thompson is a brilliant dialogue writer and plotter. And then I approached the people who had the rights, and they already had a version of the screenplay which they’d sent me. In terms of individual scenes, it was very close to the book anyway, but the order had been changed. So my approach was to go back to the original story of the book and really keep the film as accurate and as faithful to the text as possible.

Q: What themes in the novel captivated you, and which of your own did you want to incorporate?

A: I think one of the great things about the book is the pace of the narrative. Within a few pages, the story’s being set up. Lou’s gone to meet Joyce Lakeland, there’s been a moment of violence and sex, and really from that point on, Thompson keeps the story moving so new things are constantly happening. The story unfolds incredibly fast and it was that, I think, that made me feel it would be kind of interesting to make into a film.

Q: The Killer Inside Me is structured as a first-person narrative told by a deranged personality. Was there something about the psychology of Lou Ford that especially intrigued you?

A: Obviously, if you read a book and want to make it into a film, there have to be lots of things you like about it. There’s something about the way Lou narrates his own story that makes you feel sort of close to him, and makes you feel as well that’s something going to happen to redeem him. And what’s brilliant about the way Jim Thompson tells the story is you’re constantly feeling that you’re going to come to this moment of knowledge—and then the book ends! [Laughs] There’s a great story in the middle of the [narrative] that Lou Ford tells. He’s read somewhere that there was a guy who was happily married, who had a wife and a couple of children, and then he got a girlfriend in the neighboring town, and he’s happy with the girlfriend. And one day they discover the girlfriend had been killed and that the wife and children had been killed as well. And as he’s telling the story, he wonders, Why does someone do that? People do these things for no apparent reason, without any explanation. Newspapers are still full of stories like that, about people who seem to live normal lives, love their children and wives, and then they decide to destroy everything, to tear everything up. Lou is that sort of character. The people who he kills are quite close to him. A lot of people in the story love him, a lot of people love him despite the fact that he’s been violent towards them. So there’s a sense of the kind of waste that violence creates, which [anchors] the movie, rather than the psychology of why he does it. There are psychological explanations in the book, but it’s more the sense of that pointlessness and waste, and the tenderness of the situation that attracted me.

Q: A lot of readers of Thompson’s novels have seen aspects of Greek tragedy at play in his work.

A: For me, it’s Shakespearean as well. There’s a sense of this person who people do love, he does have this ability to inspire trust and faith. And yet, whether because of what happened in his childhood or what his father did to him, he feels worthless in a sense. When he’s destroying other people, he’s trying to destroy himself. He feels like he’s not worthy of being happy or being loved. So you have all this kind of stuff going on. Obviously, there’s a big play on fathers in the novel: the relation- ship between Lou and his father, but also between Lou and Sheriff Bob Maples, who’s a sort of alternative father figure, and between Chester Conway and Elmer Conway, who’s another bad father. There’s a pattern of relationships with fathers and surrogate fathers that runs through it. So it’s an incredibly rich book, you know, it’s not necessarily a naturalistic novel. But it’s full of human emotions.

Q: I’m just wondering if Thompson’s connections to cinema interested you at all.

A: In terms of his own writing?

Q: Yeah, his writing for Kubrick, for instance.

A: That would not be a reason for me to make a film of this book. The reason is because it’s a great book and when I read it, I felt it would be a really interesting film to make, and completely different from the films I normally write. In the end, when you choose a film, it’s for that reason. The material is interesting. It’s not that surprising that Jim Thompson had a connection to cinema because he’s brilliant at dialogue, he’s brilliant at stories, and the worlds he writes about in his novels seem like worlds that would be interesting for cinema. I think with Kubrick—I’m not sure what kind of credits he got on the two collaborations [The Killing and Paths of Glory]—I think he got an “additional dialogue” credit on one. I was talking to his daughter, who came onto the set, and she was saying that, you know, he did a lot more work on it than that. So that’s kind of fascinating, but it wasn’t the reason for making the film, obviously...

Q: In general, you invoke genre—road movies, for example—without retaining all the expected codes. Did you see yourself trying to steer clear of certain noir conventions with this film?

A: Only in the sense that from the beginning we didn’t want to do a pastiche of the 1950s. We didn’t want to shoot it in a particular style because of genre or the content of the story. So it’s not a particularly noir-looking film. Jim Thompson is a great writer, but he’s a very simple, direct writer. He’s very focused on the story and the character and what’s happening and why are they doing that. Really, he’s writing very lean and kind of spare. So it was trying to be true to that more than [make it] look or feel like a noir fifties’ film. So in that sense, perhaps, we got away from generic convention, I’m not sure. But basically, it’s okay, this is how the book works, and [we said] let’s find an approach to the film that will be in keeping with that...

Q: In the past, when you’ve made period dramas like Jude or The Claim, you always manage to retain a very contemporary language and feel to the way you dramatize things. Is that something you’ve continued here, with The Killer Inside Me?

A: Well, I think Jim Thompson’s stories are actually very contemporary, and one of the things is that it’s someone writing in the early fifties about small-town Midwest America, talking about the sex and violence that goes on behind closed doors. The dialogue we’re using in the film is very much taken from the book. Even so, it feels very contemporary because when you read the novel, it’s very fresh. You really don’t feel you’re reading a creaky old period piece.

– Excerpted from Michael Winterbottom. Interviews. Edited by Damon Smith, 2009.

John Cassavetes: On Writing ‘Husbands’

Husbands (Directed by John Cassavetes)

In 1970s Husbands the film's opening subtitle describes it as a "comedy about life, death, and freedom," and these are indeed the film's principal themes. Shaken by the loss of a close friend, three friends embark on a persistently raucous study of what may have been and what might come next. Their introspection results in a profound sense of self-evaluation, but the men are primarily living for the moment as they confront unpleasant truths about themselves, their mortality, and their relationships.

Husbands is an emotional experience, one that is difficult to pin down or easily digest. Filmed and acted with a gruelling directness, with certain sequences proceeding without narrative progression and little character revelation. It emanates unceasing activity and conversation, and Cassavetes' probing camera, which remains subjective and observational, captures with an unrestrained, almost random reality. “ Like life, it’s also very slow and depressing in areas,” writes Tom Charity. “The one thing it’s not is a shorthand film.” Private macho bravado seeps into the public realm, signifying a self-centeredness and recklessness regardless of the context. The men's interactions with women are clumsy, inarticulate. Cassavetes continued to edit the picture seemingly searching for a satisfactory version. Despite its brilliant exuberance, humour, despair, darkness and indulgences, or perhaps because of it, the final result was a critical and commercial failure.

Perhaps Geoff Andrew comes closest to best describing the great achievement of Husbands:

“But Cassavetes no more condoned the men’s boozily boisterous behaviour than he condemned it. He wasn’t interested in judging his characters as they embark on their binge, first in New York, then in London, following a friend’s funeral. Rather, his concern was always to represent human behaviour, in all its flawed, self-contradictory perversity, as honestly as he could. And if that meant showing a trio of middle-aged New York commuters being irresponsible, selfish, petulant, boorish, even boringly repetitive at times, so be it. The truth isn’t always attractive.

“The truth is fascinating, however, and it’s important. More to the point here, it’s also rare in American cinema, since film has usually been primarily regarded – by the Hollywood studios, at any rate – not as art but as a) a means of making money, and b) a source of entertainment, pure and simple. So endings should be clear, closed and happy, characters should be easily categorisable as good or bad, and stories should adhere to conventions already known to be popular.

“Husbands is a marvellous example of his methods. With its ultra-naturalistic performances, its simple, meandering narrative (‘story’ is far too strong a word for what happens) and its long takes, it makes for a warts-and-all study of male pride, self-pity, frustration and friendship that is at once properly serious and sharply funny.

“It’s the kind of brave, devil-may-care film that shows up the artistic timidity – and, indeed, the dishonesty (be it emotional, social, political or psychological) – of so much mainstream cinema. Small wonder Cassavetes remains one of the most important influences on filmmakers keen to preserve their independence. He understood, and repeatedly proved, that one didn’t have to tell lies in order to be entertaining. After all, what could be more interesting than life as it’s lived by recognisably real human beings?”

In the following excerpts John Cassavetes discusses his approach to writing a screenplay, how it relates to his life and how artistic freedom determines the path the script takes.

Before Husbands was a screenplay, I must have done about 400 pages of notes. I thought about it for several years. Then there was a screenplay. My first draft was abominable – all the pitfalls of that first-told tale – a slick farce predicated on men running away from their wives to the lure of the will. There are certain catchphrases that people are attracted to made famous by Time magazine, such as ‘Swinging London’ – and there’s always someone standing around behind you who says, ‘That sounds funny,’ but when you look into the eyes of two artists who want the best for themselves and want to be associated with something that has some meaning that’s not good enough. The characters were empty. During the second half of 1968, Ben, Peter and I passed dozens of revisions of the script around everywhere we went. From Rome [where most of the interiors of Machine Gun McCain were filmed] we had been to Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco [where the exteriors for Machine Gun McCain were filmed], Los Angeles and back to New York [where Gazzara lived and Cassavetes was supervising the release of Faces]. We had followed each other around using every spare moment we could find to assess the values of three men – three New Yorkers with jobs, who had passed the plateau of youth, who were married and happy and living in Port Washington, Long Island, the commuters’ paradise. That’s as far as we got in one year. Long conversations until five o’clock in the morning. Back and forth the story went.

The characters in Husbands are quite different from those in Faces. I mean Faces was about people who were just getting by. These guys don’t want to just get by in life. They want to live. I don’t really know what Husbands is about at this point. You could say it’s about three married guys who want something for themselves. They don’t know what they want, but they get scared when their best friend dies. Or you could say it is about three men that are in search of love and don’t know how to attain it. Or you could say it is about a person of sentiment. Every scene in the picture will be our opinions about sentiment. I try to talk to the actors and try to find out what I really think about sentiment. It may turn harsh or bitter; but I can allow anything as long as I know we are honest. We worked with no story, basically no story except what I mentioned, and worked for a year to try to solve it and to gain, to get something out of it.

When you make a film whose interest is to take an extremely difficult subject, deal with it in depth and see if you can find something in yourself, and if other people can find other things within themselves that they will be able to develop in their personal life, it’s great. After being an actor for a few years you really don’t care about money, fame or glory anymore; those things are good, but you need something more.

Cassavetes’ elusiveness about the subject of his film was neither modesty nor coyness. He believed that to lock himself into a predetermined story or a preconceived conception of his characters’ identities was too limiting. To play a ‘character’ in a ‘narrative’ was to reduce the sliding, shifting complexity of life to cartoon clichés.

Each moment was found as we went along – not off the cuff, not without reason – but without a preconceived notion that forbids people from behaving like people and tells a ‘story’ that is predictable – and untrue. I hate knowing my theme and my story before I really start. I like to discover it as I work. In Husbands the off-the-set relationship between Gazzara, Falk and myself determined a lot of the scenes we created as we went along. It was a process of discovering the story and the theme. When you know in advance what the story is going to be, it gets boring really fast. At one point we decided that we weren’t even going to shoot in London; Peter broke into laughter and so did I. What a ter- rific thrill to tell the truth – to not protect some stupid idea that doesn’t work. From then on, it didn’t matter if it was London, Paris, Hamburg – or Duluth!

I believe that if an actor creates a character out of his emotions and experiences, he should do with that character what he wants. If what he is doing comes out of that, then it has to be meaningful. If Peter and Ben and I have three characters, why should a director come in and impose a fourth will? If the feelings are true and the relationship is pure, the story will come out of that. If you don’t have a script, you don’t have a commitment to just saying lines. If you don’t have a script, then you take the essence of what you really feel and say that. You can behave more as yourself than you would ordinarily with someone else’s lines. Most directors make a big mystery of their work; they tell you about your character and your responsibility to the overall thing. Bullshit. With people like Ben and Peter you don’t give directions. You give freedom and ideas.

An actor can’t suddenly deny or reject a part of himself under the pretext of playing a particular character, even if that’s what he would like to do. You can’t ask someone to forget themselves and become another person. If you were asked to play Napoleon in a picture, for example, you can’t really have his emotions and thoughts, only yours. You could never actually be Napoleon, only yourself playing him. I’ve never wanted to play a role. Honestly, I never have! That indicates to me that you want to step forward and show someone something, and that terrifies me, really. What you want to do is be invisible as that character, so that there’s no pressure on you worrying about the outside world.

You made a role yours not by ‘acting’, but by believing in it, by adding something of yourself to it, by playing it personally.

I get bored seeing two people that are supposed to be in love, who kiss, screw or whatever they do. I get bored by that because they’re only supposed to do those things. I don’t really believe that they’re doing that, and I couldn’t care less. It always struck me when I used to go see pictures as a kid at Times Square that when it came to the love scenes everybody used to boo. But once in a while you’d see a picture like Red Shoes, and no matter how tough the audience was, they would root for the love story because these people didn’t pretend to be in love with each other – they were in love with each other.

All the people I meet make up my films. I make movies not about somebody else’s, but my life!
But the deepest connection between the actor and the character is their shared sense that it is critical to seize the moment and not let life pass you by.

Some people can’t wait. That’s the only reason I’m attracted to people. Because we don’t want to let the moments go by. Those are the ones I am attracted to. We might not be here tomorrow. I make every picture like it’s the last day of my life. You got anything to say, you put it in there now. Don’t hold back. What are you waiting for?

I make my films out of my problems. You know, I have problems, you have problems. You won’t admit it. I will admit it because I’m an artist. My job is to put emotions out on the surface. Not to report on other people’s emotions, but to put your own emotions out on the surface. My brother had died at thirty and I loved him and my life changed. That’s all. Simple as that. It was over so quickly, and I just had no room in my life. When someone dies that young there is no time to say good- bye. I was young and working and everything else and I couldn’t do anything except stagger around for a while, then try to reevaluate where I was. So I made a picture. I didn’t make a picture about my dead brother; I made a picture that was affected by the death of a best friend and these three men. I dedicated Husbands to him. You ask me why I do these things? I don’t know why I do them. I hope it means something to certain people that have suffered loss and don’t know how to express it.

– Excerpts from Raymond Carney: Cassavetes on Cassavetes.

Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later – Part Two

All discussions of Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise begin with the miracle of its making. Named at Cannes as the greatest French film of all time, costing more than any French film before it, Les Enfants du Paradis was shot in Paris and Nice during the Nazi occupation and released in 1945. Its sets sometimes had to be moved between the two cities. Its designer and composer, Jews sought by the Nazis, worked from hiding. Carne was forced to hire pro-Nazi collaborators as extras; they did not suspect they were working next to resistance fighters. The Nazis banned all films over about 90 minutes in length, so Carne simply made two films, confident he could show them together after the war was over. The film opened in Paris right after the liberation, and ran for 54 weeks. It is said to play somewhere in Paris every day.

That this film, wicked, worldly, flamboyant, set in Paris in 1828, could have been imagined under those circumstances is astonishing. That the production, with all of its costumes, carriages, theaters, mansions, crowded streets and rude rooming houses, could have been mounted at that time seems logistically impossible (It is said, wrote Pauline Kael, that the starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed). Carne was the leading French director of the decade 1935-1945, but to make this ambitious costume film during wartime required more than clout; it required reckless courage.

– Roger Ebert

The following is the second part from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and the author of the 1998 book The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon. Translation by Bona Flecchia and Alexandre Mabilon.

BS: Forty-five years after its original release, Children of Paradise is still playing in Paris and New York. People say the film is timeless and tireless. Why do you think this is the case?

MC: I have no idea. I can’t pretend I know. When we made the film, we thought it was an important one. It was very long, expensive, with lots of sets and characters, so we knew it would stand out that year, if only because of the production values. We looked at the rushes; we were satisfied with them. But I didn’t like to talk about my films anymore, because I’d had so much fun with Drôle de drame, but when it was released, it received a violently negative critique. People didn’t laugh, while I had enjoyed making it so much.

BS: People, both critics and general audiences, often speak of a sense of richness in Children of Paradise, and of how the film communicates an intense, complex feeling, like life itself. Could you explain how you created that feeling?

MC: First of all, it has to do with the number of characters. It’s a pretty straightforward story. Three men are in love with the same woman in different ways . . . Maybe there are four of them. Anyway, there’s the mime, Frédérick Lemaître, and the count. The important ones are three, at least. Lacenaire loves her as well, in his own way. And she loves each one of them too. I mean . . . There’s a critic who tried to explain it, created a metaphor. He said this story is like a photo developer that would react differently to four different chemicals being dropped into different baths. It’s kind of like that, and that’s what makes for its richness and length. It’s not two men loving the same woman, or two women loving the same man. It’s a lot more complicated than that. The first one, the mime, is shy. The second one is a lady-killer who can’t love and who will discover true love. Lacenaire is the intelligent one who wants to impress her. He finds her very intelligent. She’s not very well educated, but she certainly is intelligent. The count wants to appear with a beautiful lady at his side. He begins to love her when he feels her slipping away. So this plot makes for a complex film. Especially when you consider all the supporting roles. When you have to choose forty, forty-two, fifty-three, or however many people are necessary, you say to yourself, “I can’t make any mistakes.” Because you’re like the conductor—and this is the same for the crew—who has to audition everyone in order to form his orchestra.

BS: Do you lose sleep over picking out your crew?

MC: Of course. When you’re shooting, you’re a bundle of nerves. I am not the same man. I mean, I’m less nervous now because I’m older, but when you think of the amount of pressure you’re under . . . It’s not that I’m proud or cocky, but beforehand, I never fully realize what my expectations of the crew are. When I shot Drôle de drame, all I had made was a little film that was a study in style, and I wasn’t afraid of asking [Louis] Jouvet, [Françoise] Rosay, Michel Simon, Barrault. It was a fantastic crew for a quasi-beginner. I asked them to work with me without thinking about it. Port of Shadows was the same. [Jean] Gabin is the one who wanted me to make it; he wanted to do a movie with me.

BS: What has happened to French cinema since?

MC: I wouldn’t know. When I’m on a television show abroad, somebody inevitably asks me, “Marcel Carné, you belonged to the golden age of French cinema . . .” and so on. It saddens me. And unfortunately, I can’t say they’re wrong. Thanks to the war, we had a certain advantage, since the cinema industry was in full swing. So we could more readily get money to make movies. Nowadays, it’s harder. You have to be a businessman.

BS: How do you feel, from where you’re standing, about the aversion of critics in the so-called New Wave to the cinéma de qualité and the studio system?

MC: It could quite simply be called ambition. To say, “Fine, here I go.” That’s what it is. What was serious was when critics followed suit. But then they became afraid of appearing old-fashioned by defending the cinéma de papa, as we call it. And they made fun of its French quality, which is there. They didn’t do anything—nothing important, anyway. They never made a Carnival in Flanders, a Grand Illusion, or a Children of Paradise, forgive my saying so. They made “intimate” films with some kind of elevator music—like Truffaut. I’m not criticizing Truffaut, but one day we inaugurated a movie theater in the suburbs where there were two theaters: a Truffaut Theater and a Carné Theater. And we went up on the stage together. Truffaut had dragged my name through the mud, mind you, but I was very honored to have my name together with Truffaut’s. I’m not sure he felt the same way. He said so many nasty things about me . . . Anyway, he had no comment, which was easy to do after ten years. He finished his speech by saying, “I’ve made twenty-three movies, and I’d give them all up to have done Children of Paradise.” What could I say after that? Nothing. He said it in front of three or four hundred people, but it was never written down . . . I am not upset with him anymore. At that time, if I was in a studio or whatever, and Mr. Godard came in, he said nothing to me, not even hello. It’s almost as if he turned his back on me. I mean, I didn’t like many of his movies, but I found some things interesting once in a while, like in Weekend and Pierrot le fou. Those movies were quite sassy. Well, sassy may be a bit slangy, so let’s say they were bold. When they said, “At least we can shoot on location, something the old filmmakers couldn’t do”—they shot on location, fine, but they owe that to the talents of the photochemists and engineers, not to their own. Negatives now are sensitive even to the light of small fixtures. Where we needed huge ones that weighed twenty to thirty pounds, they have little ones the size of lightbulbs. The same can be said about sound. When I started, we had a truck on the set with a whole system and three technicians, including a boom guy who made shadows on the walls of the set. If they didn’t have the photosensitivity of the new negative, if they didn’t have engineers, and if they had kept the cameras and projectors we used to have, they could have never shot their films on location. It wasn’t easy. I remember I wanted to shoot I forget which film at Paul-Louis Veller’s palace in the Marais. He said, “No way. You’re a good friend, and if you want to organize a dinner for the release, I’ll be glad to help you. But I’ll never let you put your equipment on my antique wooden floor. Even if you were my own son, I would not allow it.”

BS: In Children of Paradise, which character do you identify with the most, in terms of your own sensibility; which one do you admire?

MC: You can’t admire them. They’re all different. I admire Barrault’s sensibility, Brasseur’s ease of speech, and the breeding of the count. Never has an actor seemed so noble as [Louis] Salou. He had so much class . . . I can’t say. The one I feel most akin to is Barrault/Deburau. When all is said and done, I am a big sentimentalist, even if I don’t seem that way. In terms of my private and intimate life, I’m very vulnerable.

MC: No! I don’t think so. There are . . . let me think . . . other unhappy lovers. I don’t know. They did a biography on Molière. He was unlucky in love. What’s funny is that all great men had wives who cheated on them, almost all of them. Even kings—which was dangerous for the one who cheated, but it’s a fact . . . I don’t think so. It may be that, because he communicates more, he is more expressive through his face and gestures than the others.

BS: Is that side of Deburau’s character, his using images as a means of expression, something you feel close to?

MC: Maybe, maybe. Pantomime was not my forte, at least not consciously. But there were some things I showed Jean-Louis by miming them. It wasn’t easy to shoot.

BS: We spoke about the shooting of Children as a series of successes, with very few problems. Didn’t you have any difficulties or friction during the shoot.

MC: No friction at all. When we shot the carnival scene, though, something horrible happened for which I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive myself . . . We shot the carnival scene, and the assistant director told me there were two guys asking for one of the extras in the office. “Do they look French?” I asked. “Yes, they have Nice accents. The extra’s wife is very sick, and she wants to see her husband before she dies.” You understand, we were living in fear back then, so I asked him what they looked like. “They look French. They don’t look like Gestapo . . .” We still didn’t know then. We learned all those things a little at a time. I said, “Did they look at the list of those present?” All the extras usually sign in when they get in, so if someone gets here late or goes for a walk . . . He said no. I said, “Tell them he’s not here.” We continued to shoot, and he came back, saying, “Mr. Carné, I am sorry to insist, but the wife got hit by a tram and had both her legs cut off. She’s going to die without seeing her husband unless he’s at the hospital in one hour.” I wasn’t sure what to do. I had given them an answer, so I sent the assistant director to get the extra. They went into the office, and the assistant director came back five minutes later, haggard. It was two Gestapo agents. I never forgave myself for that.

Remember I told you about a leader of the Resistance in my crew? That was him. I grabbed him and said, “How could you not tell they were Gestapo? They have suits and a certain look. Even I can recognize them. How could you, a leader of the Resistance, not be able to tell?” He told me I couldn’t have told either. They had Nice accents; they looked French. The Gestapo was very influential in Nice.

BS: During the shoot, you had people working clandestinely on the film.

MC: We had [Alexandre] Trauner and [Joseph] Kosma . . . Trauner did the models of the sets, not the sets themselves, for Les visiteurs du soir, and I had to go and get them past Nice, in a faraway town. And there was [Georges] Wakhevitch for Les visiteurs du soir, and [Léon] Barsacq for Children, who accepted the work. It was brave because I risked going to the camps, whereas Prévert, who didn’t choose the crew, didn’t. It was my responsibility. Once, I went over there to see the models, and Trauner wanted to come to Nice to see how the set of the castle had turned out. Prévert talked him out of it and told me he’d almost decked him. After that, he hid in a cabin in the middle of the forest. Kosma was in a little hotel hidden in the trees right outside Cannes. He gave me the lyrics for two songs for Les visiteurs, and he thanked me, the guy who gave him work, by saying that he was the one who had composed the music for Les visiteurs, when it was actually Maurice Thiriet. He did the hunt, the tournament, the entire orchestration. Kosma asked for the rights to it in court and lost. They both did their part. He only gave me two pages. After that, Trauner always tried to brush me aside, almost pretending he was the filmmaker. So I let it go for a while, but finally I told everyone the truth. Furthermore, those two are far from having worked on all my movies. Same with Schüfftan, who made three films with me, out of twenty-three. It’s not many.

BS: What dedication do you want to put on the film when it goes to home video and gets viewed by the entire world?

MC: What I’d do . . . I’ll tell you what moves me the most. When they stop me in the street, if they recognize me, they never tell me I am really talented or that my films are great. They always, always say: “Thank you for the joy you have given me.” So I hope that this disc will provide them with equal joy. It doesn’t move me because I am a very sensitive person but because it makes me happy to hear it. I’ll always remember the first time I went into a theater to see people’s reactions to Hôtel du Nord. I saw them laughing—everybody was laughing. And it made me happy.

For the first part of this interview see here.

– Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later. For further resources on Marcel Carné and Children of Paradise, visit www.marcel-carne.com.