Violence and Realism: An Interview with Arthur Penn

Bonnie and Clyde (Directed by Arthur Penn)

‘Bonnie and Clyde’ is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful. If it does not seem that those words should be strung together, perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life. (Roger Ebert, September 25, 1967).

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde is based on the real life escapades of a Depression-era gang of bank robbers. Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) undertakes an infamous spree of criminality after he meets the bored, small-town Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway). The two lovers eventually join forces with Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), his wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and a slow-witted henchman called C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard). The gang evade police attempts to apprehend them, carving a swathe of mayhem and violence through rural 1930s America, until the forces of law and order catch up with them on a remote road. 

Bonnie and Clyde was hugely controversial. Its glamorous pairing of Beatty and Dunaway, the recent lifting of the Hays Production Code's restrictions, the script’s evident sympathy for outsiders against the forces of order and convention, the portrayal of violence as liberating, led some to fear that Bonnie and Clyde would initiate a trend of cinematic degradation, while advocates of the film anticipated a  liberation from the constraints that had stifled creative expression. What cannot be contested is that the film struck a chord with audiences and became not just a box office success but also a significant influence on 1960s pop culture. Critics lauded the performances in particular and director Arthur Penn’s immersive direction.

Arthur Penn had directed four films prior to Bonnie and Clyde and acquired a significant reputation. He had become known as an actor’s director, had previously worked with both Paul Newman and Marlon Brando, while this was his second collaboration with emerging talent Warren Beatty. Beatty's portrayal of Clyde Barrow established him as a major star in Hollywood, and he went on to appear in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Parallax View, and Shampoo. The role of Bonnie Parker established the career of Faye Dunaway, launching her into Chinatown, Network, and Mommie Dearest. 

The screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton had initially attempted to persuade Francois Truffaut to direct Bonnie and Clyde, but he had just completed the English-language Fahrenheit 451, and declined. The influence of European cinema, in particular, the French new wave’s love of the American cinema of the outsider, is evident in the film, which allowed a kind of doubling in on itself, as Penn and his writers rediscovered the spirit of the American B movie as refracted by Truffaut and Godard. This led to contradictory responses. The esteemed critic Andrew Sarris was critical of the picture for being too "Europeanized," while another contemporary reviewer remarked that Penn was one of the "few filmmakers who are more completely American." 

The picture owes a great deal to its supporting cast, cinematographer Burnett Guffey (whose career includes several well known noir films), and editor Dede Allen (who would later become Penn's regular editor). The film critic Pauline Kael rose to prominence as a result of a lengthy and insightful article she wrote about Bonnie and Clyde. Kael acknowledged Penn's film's innovative character and compared it with 1930s Warner Brothers gangster pictures and previous Fritz Lang and Nicholas Ray interpretations of the Barrow/Parker narrative.

Arthur Penn went on to produce numerous highly-acclaimed films about America in the following decade including the cynical detective movie Night Moves with Gene Hackman, Alice's Restaurant, based on an Arlo Guthrie song, and the revisionist Westerns Little Big Man, and The Missouri Breaks. 

In the following interview with Cineaste magazine Arthur Penn discusses the making of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the social and mythical background to the film, and the famous final sequence.

Cineaste: ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ was an enormously popular film but also an enormously controversial film. How do you account for the absolutely vociferous critical response, at least from some critics, which condemned the film? Were you disappointed that your artistic intentions were so misunderstood?

Penn: No, I was delighted because they were misunderstood by people who should have misunderstood, like Bosley Crowther, an old wave New York Times critic who at that time was on a crusade against violence in films in general. When he saw Bonnie and Clyde at the Montreal Film Festival, where it was first shown, he is alleged to have said to somebody that he was going to blow that film out of the water. Which he did, in his review, but it was the best advertising we could have had because people wrote scores of letters to The New York Times, which published them. Then Crowther wrote another attack, a Sunday piece, and more letters poured in, and Crowther responded again, and the more he frothed at the mouth, the more it enlisted support for the film.

It was not a film about violence, it was a metaphorical film. Violence had so little to do with it that it didn’t even occur to me, particularly, that it was a violent film. Not given the times in which we were living, because every night on the news we saw kids in Vietnam being airlifted out in body bags, with blood all over the place. Why, suddenly, the cinema had to be immaculate, I’ll never know. Crowther had philosophically painted himself into a corner by arguing that art, and particularly the cinema, has a social responsibility for setting certain mores and standards of behavior, which is a terrible argument, it just collapses in ten seconds. He was in that corner and couldn’t get out of it and it cost him his job...

Cineaste: How do you account for the film’s enormous popularity, especially with young people?

Penn: I think it caught the spirit of the times and the true radical nature of the kids. It plugged into them, it just touched all the nerves, because here were these two who, instead of knuckling under to the system, resisted it. Yes, they killed some people, but they got killed in the end, so they were heroic and martyred in that respect. I must say, in our defense, we knew a little bit of what we were doing, because the studio asked us if we wanted to do it in black and white, and Warren and I said, ‘Absolutely not. It’s gotta be a film about now. This is not a re‑creation of Bonnie and Clyde, they were a couple of thugs. We’re talking about two kind of paradigmatic figures for our times.’

Cineaste: So historical accuracy was never really a concern of yours?

Penn: Never tried, never came near. Of course, they weren’t like that. We were flagrantly inaccurate and said, right off the bat, this is metaphoric.

Cineaste: So when critics wrote that the film romanticized ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, that’s exactly what you were trying to do.

Penn: Exactly. Far from trying to do anything accurate.

Cineaste: And yet the film is not without social commentary on the period. The screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman, who have readily acknowledged you as the true auteur of the film, commented that they were more concerned with the mythology and that you were more concerned with social context and commentary.

Penn: What caught my fancy about the script was what I remembered as a child from the Depression, which was people in New York neighborhoods being kicked out of their homes. When I was doing research by reading newspapers from the period, what struck me was the enormity of the banks’ naiveté in holding these mortgages and then foreclosing on farm after farm after farm. It was stupidity of a monumental, punitive nature. They created a nation of displaced people who essentially began heading to California.

These kind of bucolic figures like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde were called bank robbers by the FBI in order to aggrandize the agency when they tried to capture them. But they were really just bumpkins, who said, ‘The banks are foreclosing on the farms, so let’s go knock off the banks.’ It’s a very simple, retaliatory response, and on a small scale.

Cineaste: So the sequence with the dispossessed farmer was your contribution.

Penn: Yeah, that was a scene I built.

Cineaste: Robert Towne received a credit as ‘Special Consultant’. What was that for?

Penn: He wrote certain little scenes in the film as well as some additional dialog, but very telling dialog. In the family reunion scene, for example, when they go back to visit Bonnie’s mother, that scene was in the original script, but it didn’t include Clyde’s explanation to Bonnie’s mother about how as soon as everything blew over he and Bonnie were going to settle down and live right down the road from her. And she says, ‘You do that and you won’t live long.’ That’s Towne. He made some very salient contributions.

Cineaste: There is much made in the film of the media blowing the Barrow Gang’s exploits out of all proportion. Hoover was in office then...

Penn: Yes, but the FBI had not really been granted a national status, they were not able to go beyond state lines, and very few crimes were called national crimes. I think the Lindbergh kidnapping was one of them, so they began to call almost anything kidnapping and that gave them jurisdiction. It was an effort on Hoover’s part to build a national police force. But in this case, it was the local sheriff, Sheriff Hamer, who eventually did track them down to Louisiana – that part of it is accurate – and did blow them away. They fired something in excess of a thousand rounds of ammunition at them. It’s amazing, the pent up rage must have been enormous.

Cineaste: It’s a remarkable scene in the film, and even in film history. How was it conceived?

Penn: I had a kind of epiphany on this film where I saw the ending, literally frame by frame, before I even came near shooting it. In the earliest days, when Benton and Newman and I got together to discuss the script, I suddenly saw how that scene should look. I thought we had to launch into legend, we had to end the film with a kind of pole vault, you know, some kind of great leap into the future, as if to say, ‘They’re not Bonnie and Clyde, they’re two people who had a response to a social condition that was intolerable.’ So I thought, gee, the best way to do that is to be somewhat balletic, and, having seen enough Kurosawa by that point, I knew how to do it.

What I did do, which I think had not yet been done, was to vary the speeds of the slow motion so that I could get both the spastic and the balletic qualities at the same time. Technically, it was an enormous problem because we had to gang four cameras together, shooting simultaneously from the same vantage point. The cameras were literally joined side by side on a stand. The problem, because of the very fast speeds needed for the slowest slow motion, was that we were using up gigantic magazines and we didn’t even have time to say ‘action’ because the film would go through the camera so fast. So we said, ‘OK, when Warren squeezes the pear, that’s our cue, and everything goes.’

Cineaste: How were the bullet hits applied?

Penn: There were bundles of wires going up their legs and a special effects guy would trip them by making electrical contact with nails sticking up in a row connected to a battery. Meanwhile, as the bullets are going, someone else was pulling an invisible nylon line that took off a piece of Warren’s head, they were both going through contortions with their bodies, and all of this filmed in various slow motion speeds in four cameras.

Cineaste: How long did that scene take to shoot?

Penn: It took three or four days. We would get one take in the morning and one take in the afternoon, because it took that long to prepare. It was one of those insane moments where, as a director, you’re saying to yourself, ‘I see it this way, I see it no other way, so I’m not going to economize,’ and, meanwhile, you can see people whispering on the set, ‘This guy is nuts. What the fuck is he doing?’

I just had this vision. I knew what it would look like and, when I got into the editing room, it turned out to be a true one. Dede Allen edited the film but Jerry Greenberg, one of her assistants, edited that scene, and he was just shaking his head. I came in and I said, ‘Here’s how it goes – this shot, to this shot, then to that shot.’ It was as if I was reading it out of some other perception. I knew exactly what it would look like.

Cineaste: The various scenes of violence in the film escalate progressively in a very clear dramatic purpose. How would you describe your esthetic strategy?

Penn: The best example I can give, quoting from the film itself, is the sequence where Bonnie and Clyde, with C. W. Moss driving the car for the first time, go to rob a bank. They say ‘Wait here,’ and go into the bank, and C. W. proceeds to park the car. Now, everybody in the audience is titillated by that, and is meant to be. Then the bank alarm goes off, and out come Bonnie and Clyde who are asking, ‘Where’s the car?’ It’s wedged in between two cars, of course, because C. W. has parked it beautifully. So, into the car they go and scream, ‘Get out of here!,’ and this enormous comic tension is built up. We’ve got you laughing and laughing, and C. W. finally gets the car moving and, at that point, the guy comes out of the bank and jumps on the running board. Clyde, in a paroxysm of fear, turns and fires, and that first killing is the one that knocks you right out of the chair, because it’s a guy getting it right in the face. The intention was to disarm the audience to that point where, bam!, the shooting occurs, and then comes the scene in the movie theater where Clyde is hitting C. W. and saying, ‘You dummy,’ because he’s expressing his own remorse and panic about having killed somebody.

Cineaste: In that scene Bonnie seems relatively unaffected.

Penn: She doesn’t mind. In our choice of what we were doing, Bonnie had a more romantic view of danger. Once she’d made the determination, from the very first scene, that she was going to go downstairs and join up with this guy, she was on the qui vive.

Cineaste: Is that why you begin the film with her point of view?

Penn: Yes, it begins with a big close‑up of her lips, her hungry lips. I’m sorry it sounds so corny, but that’s what it is – a hunger for something more than her present existence.

Cineaste: Was the film’s visual style influenced by the work of Walker Evans?

Penn: Yeah, we used a lot of his photographs in the titles. The man who did them, Wayne Fitzgerald, kept saying, ‘God, there’s something not right here. I’m going to take the credits home tonight and I’ll bring them back tomorrow.’ What he put in was the sound of that box camera click and suddenly it evoked the memory we all had from our childhoods of that clicking noise of the Kodak camera shutter, and it just made the titles come alive.

– ‘The Importance of a Singular, Guiding Vision: An Interview with Arthur Penn by Gary Crowdus and Richard Porton’. First published in Cineaste, Vol. XX, No. 2/December 1993.

Antonioni on ‘Blow-Up’

Blow-Up (Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni)

In 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni transplanted his existentialist ennui to the streets of swinging London for the Italian filmmaker’s first English-language feature. Blow-Up takes the form of a psychological mystery, starring David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park.

In Blow-Up an established photojournalist (David Hemmings) is confronted by a beautiful young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) and an older gentleman (Ronan O'Casey) in a park and stealthily photographs them. According to Antonioni's plot outline and the released English script, Thomas and Jane are the only characters who have names in the film. The film was based on a story by Cortázar in which Michel, who is constantly described as having a propensity for creating fictions or making up fictions, and who is said to do this by projecting his own opinions and ideas onto what he sees, Antonioni's photographer only seeks to take photos of the scene in front of him and to frame the couple by manipulating the angle within the confines of the park.

The only time he notices specifics is when he adds on and edits the photos. It is only then that he sees the scene's meaning. And like a detective or forensic scientist, he creates what seems like a murder with a ruler and magnifying lens. 

In Blow-Up, it is the two sequences of the processing and study of the images that act as the structural focus of the plot. Antonioni broadened the scene where the discovery of the crime is discovered through pictures in order to "stir the reader's interest in the hunt for a mystery." This particular segment lasts eleven minutes and is driven by the absence of conversation, except for one brief telephone conversation, as well as the lack of music. 

To both the photographer and the viewer, the inspection of the images takes on an absorbing quality. Once the first set of enlargements is finished, the photographer feels his presence at the park kept someone from being murdered. After the second set, however, he realises this was not the case. This alteration in the story brings about a notable shift in the protagonist's situation, causing him to lose his bearings.

In the following extract Antonioni discusses the making of Blow-Up, the creative process and its inspirations.

My problem with Blow-Up was to recreate reality in an abstract form. I wanted to question ‘the reality of our experience.’ This is an essential point in the visual aspect of the film, considering that one of its main themes is to see or not to see the correct value of things.

Blow-Up is a performance without an epilogue, comparable to those stories from the twenties where F. Scott Fitzgerald showed his disgust with life. While I was filming, I was hoping that no one in seeing the finished film would say: ‘Blow-Up is a typically British film.’ At the same time, I was hoping that no one would define it exclusively as an Italian fIlm. Originally, Blow-Up’s story was to be set in Italy, but I real­ized from the very beginning that it would be impossible to do so. A character like Thomas doesn’t really exist in our country. At the time of the film’s narrative, the place where the famous photographers worked was London. Thomas, furthermore, finds himself at the center of a series of events which are more easily associated with life in London, rather than life in Rome or Milan. He has chosen the new mentality that took over in Great Britain with the 1960s’ revolution in lifestyle, behavior, and morality, above all among the young artists, publicists, stylists, or musicians that were part of the pop movement. Thomas leads a life as regulated as a ceremonial, and it is not by accident that he claims not to know any law other than that of anarchy.

Before the production of the film, I had lived in London for some weeks during the shooting of Modesty Blaise, a film by Joseph Losey star­ ring Monica Vitti. In that period I realized that London would be the ideal setting for a story like the one I already planned to do. But I never had the idea of making a film about London.

The same story could certainly have been set in New York or in Paris. I knew, nevertheless, that I wanted a gray sky for my script, rather than a pas­tel-blue horizon. I was looking for realistic colors and I had already given up, for this film, on certain effects I had captured in Red Desert. At that time, I had worked hard to ensure flattened perspectives with the telephoto lens, to compress characters and things and to place them in juxtaposition with one another. In Blow-Up, I instead opened up the perspective, I tried to put air and space between people and things. The only time I made use of the telephoto lens in the film was when I had to – for example in the sequence when Thomas is caught in the middle of the crowd.

The greatest difficulty I encountered was in reproducing the violence of reality. Enhanced and ultra-soft colors often seem to be the hardest and most aggressive. In Blow-Up, eroticism occupies a very important place, although the focus is often placed on a cold, calculated sensuality. Exhibitionistic and voyeuristic trends are particularly underlined. The young woman in the park undresses and offers her body to the photogra­pher in exchange for the negatives she wants so much to retrieve. Thomas witnesses a sexual encounter between Patrizia and her husband, and his presence as spectator seems to increase the young woman’s excitement.

The risque aspect of the film would have made filming in Italy almost impossible. Italian censorship would never have tolerated some of those images. Let’s not forget that, even though censorship has become more tolerant in many countries in the world, Italy remains the country of the Holy See.

In the film, for example, there is a scene in the photographer’s studio where two twenty-year-old women behave in a very provocative way.

Both are completely naked, although this scene is neither erotic nor vul­gar. It is fresh, light, and, I dare hope, funny. Certainly I cannot prevent viewers from finding it risque. I needed those images in the context of the film, and I did not want to give them up only because they might not meet with the taste and morality of the audience.

As I have written other times in reference to my films, my narratives are documents built not on a suite of coherent ideas, but rather on flashes, ideas that come forth every other moment. I refuse, therefore, to speak about the intentions I place in the film that, at one moment, occupies all my time and attention. It is impossible for me to analyze any of my works before the work is completed. I am a creator of films, a man who has certain ideas and who hopes to express them with sincerity and clarity. I am always telling a story. As far as knowing whether it is a story with any correlation to the world we live in, I am always unable to decide before telling it.

When I began to think about this film, I often stayed awake at night, thinking and taking notes. Soon this story, with its thousands of possibil­ities, fascinated me, and I attempted to understand where its thousands of implications would take me. But at a certain point, I told myself: let’s start making the film – that is to say, let’s try, for better or for worse, to tell the story and, then.... Today I still find myself at this stage, even if I am near­ly finished filming Blow-Up. To be frank, I am still not completely sure of what I am doing, because I am still in the ‘secret’ of the film.

I believe my work depends on both thought and intuition. For example, just a few minutes ago, I was all by myself, thinking about the next scene, and I tried to put myself in the shoes of the main character at the time when he finds the body. I stopped in the shade of the English lawn; I paused in the park, in the mysterious clarity of the London neon bill­ boards. I approached this imaginary corpse and I totally identified with the photographer. I strongly felt his excitement, his emotion, the thousands of sensations that were released in my ‘hero’ by the corpse’s discov­ery. And then I experienced his way of coming back to his senses, of thinking, and reacting. All of which lasted only a few minutes, one or two. Then the rest of the cast joined me and my inspiration, my sensations, vanished.

–  ‘E nato a Londra ma non e un film inglese’, from Corriere della Sera, 12 February 1982. Translated by Allison Cooper.

Terry Southern on Easy Rider

Easy Rider (Directed by Dennis Hopper)

Terry Southern was an influential American short story writer, novelist and screenwriter noted for his distinctive satirical style. Southern collaborated on screenplays for several popular movies of the 1960s, including Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Loved One (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1966), Barbarella (1968), Easy Rider (1968), and End of the Road (1969). The success of these films helped define the 1960s youth counterculture.

Easy Rider, 1969, is a key film of the American counterculture movement, now considered a rebellious harbinger for its message of nonconformism and its reflection of late 1960s societal values and conflicts in the United States. It contributed to the birth of New Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a style of cinema centred on low budgets and avant-garde filmmakers emerged that was markedly different from the classic Hollywood studio approach. 

Wyatt (Peter Fonda, who also produced) and Billy (Dennis Hopper, who also directed) are purportedly on their way to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but in truth they are on a quest for freedom and purpose in life. They meet a colourful assortment of characters along the road, including George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), an establishment lawyer with a propensity for drink. The individuals they encounter and the circumstances that ensue mirror the best and worst of contemporary American society and reflect on subjects that were especially popular at the time, ranging from hippies and communes to racism, war, religious tolerance, and drug usage. 

Many of the scenes are raw and seemingly inconsequential—the film's original cut came in at nearly four hours. Although Easy Rider is now viewed as a period piece, albeit a significant one, that reflected simplistic, though widespread, beliefs of the day, with its dichotomy into the countercultural or mainstream, the film's bleak conclusion—in which Wyatt and Billy are violently attacked by guys in a pickup truck— still retains its power to shock. The popularity of low-budget films transformed filmmaking and accelerated the demise of Hollywood's studio system. Additionally, the film's usage of popular rock tunes in lieu of original music became a trend that other directors quickly copied. Easy Rider further established Nicholson as a star, earning him an Academy Award nomination in the process.

Peter Fonda is credited with the concept for Easy Rider while he was working with legendary low budget producer Roger Corman. Fonda pitched his proposal to his friend Dennis Hopper and they proceeded to bring in screenwriter Terry Southern, who had worked with Stanley Kubrick on the darkest of dark comedies, Doctor Strangelove. Southern brought his literary pedigree and a certain degree of legitimacy to the picture. By giving their protagonists the names of two legendary gunslingers (Wyatt and Billy), they created a type of reverse, updated Western: instead of two heroes travelling west on horseback, they had two motorbike antiheroes. Rip Torn was the leading contender for the supporting part of an alcoholic lawyer who joins them on the journey, but he withdrew from the movie after an alleged confrontation with the volatile Hopper in a restaurant, and Jack Nicholson was given the opportunity to take centre stage. Filming was done on location, mostly with natural light, with cinematographer László Kovács creating the visual spectacle.

Dennis Hopper spent several months editing the material down to two hours and forty-five minutes, only to find that against his desire and with the encouragement of Fonda and the production team, the film was reduced to its current length of 95 minutes. 

Easy Rider cost less than half a million dollars to produce but grossed an impressive sixty million worldwide, the vast bulk of which came from American domestic cinemas, such was its appeal to the nascent youth movement. Hopper received the Cannes award for best first film, while the Academy gave it two nominations (for Nicholson's supporting performance and Fonda, Hopper, and Southern's script). Unfortunately, the contentious authorship issue generated by the founders' egos, temperaments, and stubbornness produced a schism between Fonda and Hopper that they never overcame. Despite this tempestuous backdrop, Easy Rider is still viewed as a historically significant picture, as one of the first independent films to generate an impact that resonated across Hollywood in the years that followed. Fonda and Nicholson established themselves as major actors, Hopper established himself as a serious director and a model for independent filmmakers, while its cultural impact was widely felt. Easy Rider is a film of its time, a moment in American history that tapped into the zeitgeist of a divided, uncertain nation.

In the following excerpt from an interview conducted with Southern that appeared in the Paris Review in 1996 Terry Southern discusses making Easy Rider with Dennis Hopper.

What was the real story of Easy Rider? There are so many versions of how, and who created it.

If Den Hopper improvises a dozen lines and six of them survive the cutting-room floor, he’ll put in for screenplay credit. That’s the name of the game for Den Hopper. Now it would be almost impossible to exaggerate his contribution to the film – but, by George, he manages to do it every time. The precise way it came down was that Dennis and Peter (Fonda) came to me with an idea. Peter was under contract to A.I.P. for several motorcycle movies, and he still owed them one. Dennis persuaded him to let him (Denis) direct the next one, and, under the guise of making an ordinary A.I.P. potboiler they would make something interesting and worthwhile – which I would write. So they came to my place on Thirty-sixth Street in New York, with an idea for a story – a sort of hippy dope-caper. Peter was to be the actor-producer. Dennis the actor-director, and a certain yours truly, the writer.

I was able to put them up there – in a room, incidentally, later immortalized by the sojourn of Dr. W.S. Benway (Burroughs). So we began smoking dope in earnest and having a nonstop story conference. The initial idea had to do with a couple of young guys who are fed up with the system, want to make one big score and split. Use the money to buy a boat in Key West and sail into the sunset was the general notion, and indeed already salted to be the film’s final poetic sequence. We would occasionally dictate to an elderly woman typist who firmly believed in the arrival, and presence everywhere of the inhabitants of Venus; so she would talk about this. Finally I started taping her and then had her rap about it, how they were everywhere – Jack Nicholson’s thing with Easy Rider was based on that.

So you can see that during these conferences the hippy dope-caper premise went through quite a few changes. The first notion was that they not be bikers but a duo of daredevil car drivers barnstorming around the U.S. being exploited by a series of unscrupulous promoters until they were finally disgusted enough to quit. Then one day the dope smoke cleared long enough to remember that Peter’s commitment was for a motorcycle flick, and we switched over pronto. It wasn’t until the end that it took on a genuinely artistic dimension. . . when it suddenly evolved into an indictment of the American redneck, and his hatred for anything that is remotely different from himself… and then somewhat to the surprise of Den Hopper (imitates Hopper in Apocalypse Now): ‘You mean kill ‘em both? Hey, man, are you outta your gourd?!’ I think for a minute he was still hoping they would somehow beat the system. Sail into the sunset with a lot of loot and freedom. But of course, he was hip enough to realize, a minute later, that it (their death) was more or less mandatory.

Are you saying that there was no improvisation in the film?

No, no, I’m, saying that the improvisation was always within the framework of the obligations of the scene – a scene which already existed.

Then how did Dennis and Peter get included in the screenplay credits?

After they had seen a couple of screenings of it on the coast, I got a call from Peter. He said that he and Dennis liked the film so much they wanted to be in on the screenplay credits. Well, one of them was the producer and the other was the director so there was no way the Writers Guild was going to allow them to take a screenplay credit unless I insisted. Even then they said there was supposed to be a “compulsory arbitration” because too often producers and directors will muscle themselves into a screenplay credit through some under-the-table deal with the writer. They (the WGA) said I would be crazy to allow it and wanted to be assured that I wasn’t being coerced or bribed in any way, because they hate the idea of these “hyphenates” – you know, writer-producer, director-producer… because of that history of muscle. Anyway, we were great friends at the time, so I went along with it without much thought. I actually did it out of a sense of camaraderie. Recently, in Interview, Dennis pretty much claimed credit for the whole script.

Writers appear to be treated like the lowest of the breed in the film biz.

Yes. Except we still have persuasion.

Nicolas Roeg: On Truffaut, Words and Images

Fahrenheit 451 (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

There are things that Truffaut did in those early movies that left a lasting impression: the opening expository section of ‘Jules and Jim’, where time and space is abolished and the images flow like music across the screen; the series of shots from ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (another underrated picture) where the camera moves in close-closer-closest on a character in imminent danger, which I admit I've duplicated many times in my own films. And the character played by Charles Aznavour in ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ who keeps almost acting but never does until it’s too late, had a profound effect on me, and on many other filmmakers – Martin Scorsese.

Francois Truffaut’s underrated adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), was regarded by the director as his ‘saddest and most difficult’ filmmaking experience, mainly due to tension in the relationship between Truffaut and leading man Oskar Werner. 

Truffaut wrote the English-language script in collaboration with Jean-Louis Richard. Critics have assumed that Truffaut’s limited grasp of English accounts for the film’s awkwardness – its dialogue is often clumsy and its performances weirdly stilted. It’s a curious film, lively and surreal in tone, filmed in a pointedly modernist style that only underlines how uncomfortable the viewing experience is. Despite its flaws it’s a strangely compelling film that vividly engages with Bradbury’s themes of knowledge, control and the media.

The film’s cinematographer was Nicolas Roeg who went on to become a distinguished director in his own right. Roeg had previously worked on Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and later Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) before moving into direction in 1968 in collaboration with the painter and writer Donald Cammell on Performance.

The glacial, futuristic surface of Fahrenheit 451 later re-emerges in Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) which starred David Bowie, with its harsh, alien vision of the barrenness of modern life.

Shortly after Francois Truffaut died in 1984, Nicolas Roeg spoke to Richard Combs about working with Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451, for an article published in Sight & Sound magazine:

I’ve always felt that, although Truffaut was greatly revered and admired, at the same time, in terms of film and how much he loved film, he was underestimated. Because he was known to be a literary man, someone who was enormously fond of literature, he was adopted by a very literary set. But in fact his love of literature was separate from his love of film. I think that’s why, many times, he has been underestimated as an essentially visual person. I enjoyed working with him tremendously on Fahrenheit 451, which was a film very much to be ‘read’ in terms of images. I suppose he was the first director, the first film person, with whom I’d enjoyed having a conversation about film, or the hope of film. There weren’t many about in those days.

I remember there was a lot of criticism of Fahrenheit to do with François’ knowledge of English. The critics complained that it was so stilted. But that had all been quite deliberate. He hadn’t even wanted to place it as an English film, or to suggest that the language was necessarily English. The script was written first in French, deliberately, so that it could be translated into English, then translated back into French, because he wanted to lose the English idiom completely, then finally translated back into English. He wanted it set - and I thought this was a marvellously futuristic idea – in a time when people had lost the use of language. After all, the whole premise of the film was to do with losing a literary background. And that was completely missed by the critics.

There was even one little clue which Truffaut put inside the film, because he didn’t want this to be mistaken. There was a scene where Montag and Clarisse are sitting talking; they can see the fire station, and a man comes up and puts a note through the letter box. Montag explains why that is, people reporting on each other. Clarisse says, oh, he’s just a common informer; and Montag says, informant. Stilted things, stilted phrases: that was absolutely putting the dot on the ‘i’. We’ve even seen that sort of thing come to pass. Language is flattened slightly. You see it in films: in the 1930s and 40s in America they used words in films that they wouldn’t put in a script today. I don’t know whether it’s an apocryphal story, but apparently when George Cukor did a remake of Old Acquaintance as Rich and Famous, they did research into the title, and hardly anyone in America knew what an acquaintance was.

François was aware of that, and he realised that images were things to be read. Like the scene where Montag is sitting in bed with comics. Those comics were very carefully designed; they were a form of shorthand, so that the news could be read in pictures. The beauty of the language wasn’t what was important. It was like a rather intimate film where language means a lot, but we no longer have the language. So you virtually have to read the pictures. It implies there will come a time when people will still have all those emotions, but you have to read through other indications, other signs. It was a sign language once, and maybe we’ll go back to that.

François thought the stranglehold of the written word was going to be equalled, if not superseded, by the idea of images. I guess it takes a long time; he thought it was coming quicker. But in some ways one forgets how quickly things have changed. For instance, he wanted no written signs, and in the fire station there was nothing written. It was very difficult to work those signs out. But think about how road signs have changed. Once when you drove down the road you’d have to read dozens of things – road bears to the left, school ahead – but now they’re just children with a stripe through them, so we can drive anywhere in Europe. At the same time that was a very filmic thought: the essence of film. I’m sure that was why he was attracted to the story.

I’d hate it to be forgotten just how much of that kind of a filmmaker he was. Not just charming stories and enchanting acting. For instance, he wanted to make a film with small children, babies, just to get their expression at the point when words aren’t quite understandable. We had a scene in Fahrenheit with a baby lying in his pram in the park, and the fire chief turns him over and finds a book underneath. Another aspect of that is the scene at the end with the book people – who are all wrong. The veneration of literature – which he loved – is all wrong. The boy who is reciting from Stevenson, reciting after the old man, has got it wrong. And there are twins who announce themselves as Pride and Prejudice, Part One and Part Two, but of course there isn’t a Part One and Part Two in Pride and Prejudice. All these things were missed by the very people who had revered him as a literary filmmaker.

It’s the same thing with acting. Oskar Werner – who tragically also died a few weeks ago – was at the time, as I remember, just starting to enter a successful, commercial stage of his life. And he was rather concerned about his image. It appeared to be, or I surmise, that Oskar thought this was a film he was doing for François, because he owed him something or he liked him. But at that stage of his career he just wanted to get it over with. To play the part of Montag, you have to be completely dedicated to the thing. So he didn’t enter fully into the film. But François won in the end; he had to, again by the use of film, by juxtaposing one thing with another. Whatever meaning you tell me you are putting into that performance, I shall change it by making you look at a rubber duck. If you look seriously at this man when I want you to be smiling, because I want you not to understand what is happening, I shall use that serious look. I shall make you be looking at a rubber duck while he is talking. So that you will look seriously as if you don’t understand.

Every single piece in the construction of the film was visual. I remember when the art department brought a beautifully made model of a fire engine into the office of Cyril Cusack, who played the fire chief. It was like the model that a ship’s captain would traditionally have had in his cabin. But François said, no, no, go to a toy shop and get me a toy. Because that sort of skill is already gone from the world. It was a toy world in which all the skills had been lost. When we discussed the look of the film, he said, I don’t want it to have a reality, I want it as a Doris Day film, with little shining colours. We had great trouble, because at that time people were going for a tremendous realism. I was ordering huge brutes, to make it high key, glossy, like Technicolor.

He also wanted a certain sense of awkwardness in behaviour patterns. After all, things change subtly. I’ve always noticed that films set in any sort of future very rarely draw on the present. But just imagine someone a hundred years ago trying to predict the present. I live in a house that’s a hundred years old. Its internal functions are different, the carriages outside are different – but it’s a mixture. Things don’t all go away. That’s why we began Fahrenheit with those aerials and things on top of suburban houses, although inside the houses are sliding doors – which don’t work… Changes are so subtle: relationships, manners, our behaviour. I thought it was quite a frightening film in that respect. But it’s very difficult to read that. It’s easier to see something you can be totally in awe of. Something which is part of your life and has taken on another aspect is much more difficult to believe in.

François was rather sanguine about the failure of Fahrenheit, critically and commercially. One time when we were having dinner he said, it must have been a bad film. I asked why? He said, nobody went to see it. In terms of his filmmaking, I don’t think he pulled back after that at all. But Fahrenheit might have been a stretch which he was not given the chance to do again. And he wasn’t a man to explain himself. He’d rather go on: a futuristic present-day person. He was wonderful about the past. He told me how he hated costume pictures where they tell you these were the clothes they wore from 1490 to 1498, and then these clothes were worn from 1498 to 1502. He said, I like to have a lot of clothes, sort of turn of the century, and just put them in a basket and have the artists try some of them on. After all, the jacket I am wearing is 15 years old. I am not always in fashion.

– ‘Looking at the rubber duck: Nic Roeg on Truffaut and the making of Fahrenheit 451’ (Sight & Sound, Winter 1984/85). For original article go here

Andrei Tarkovsky: Into the Zone

Stalker (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Stalker (1979), Tarkovsky's fifth feature film and the final one he shot in the Soviet Union before defecting to the West. Following his voluntary exile, only two more fiction works were planned: Nostalghia, shot in Italy and released in 1983, and The Sacrifice, shot in Sweden (1986). The director died of cancer in 1986, just outside Paris, at the age of fifty-four. 

Stalker was his second attempt at science-fiction subject matter, following the space adventure Solaris (1972), though it is nearly indistinguishable from both that earlier film and The Mirror. The film is an adaptation of the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady (1925–91) and Boris (1933–2012) Strugatsky, which Tarkovsky read shortly after it was published in the literary magazine Avrora in 1972. The casual observer may wonder why he was drawn to this particular tale. Unlike high-art sources such as Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, it is firmly rooted in the hard-boiled end of the literary spectrum; it is rife with slang and violence, as well as characterization and sentiment to match. Yet beneath the surface, and more specifically in the psychology of the character who would become the film's eponymous protagonist (in relation to his wife and their mysteriously damaged daughter, Monkey), there is a difficult-to-define tenderness of outlook more in keeping with the director's usual preoccupations: a humanistic belief (if one can put it that strongly) in the sacrament of marriage. Although the book's central vision is dystopian, this may have contributed to its appeal. Certainly, there were numerous reasons to be dystopian about the Soviet Union at the time. 

Having said that, the film is a loose adaptation of the novel. The Zone's basic premise—that it was created years ago by an alien incursion and is full of mysterious dangers that have been explored illegally over the years by freelance agents known as stalkers (who occasionally offered themselves as guides to gullible tourists)—is common to both book and film. However, the book contains numerous additional incidents, characters, and digressions, and, unlike the film, it unfolds over an extended period of time. Tarkovsky's work necessitated a rigorous simplification of the story line. For example, the book's multiple incursions into the Zone are reduced to a single encounter, while the Stalker's companions, the Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and the Professor (Nikolai Grinko), are director inventions (though they contain composite elements from the original). At the heart of the Zone, and only accessible to those who have survived the invisible terrors of the "Grinder" (a seemingly endless tunnel filled with jagged stalagmites and stalactites), is the legendary Room, entry into which is said to grant the wayfarer the fulfilment of his deepest desires. (In the novel, magic is associated with an object—a "Golden Sphere"—rather than with a destination, but the two concepts are otherwise identical.) Viewers of the film, as well as readers of the book, may have varying perspectives on how "deep" a concept we are confronted with here, when viewed through the lofty lens of philosophy or religion. Yet "innermost desire" is saved from glibness by the sheer complexity of its distribution throughout the film: what those deepest desires are (whether altruistic or cynically selfish) is never finally pin-pointed to any of the three characters in a coherent manner.

Tarkovsky creates an immersive world that is rich in material detail and has an organic feel to it. As a religious allegory, a reflection of contemporary political anxieties, and a meditation on film itself, Stalker surrounds the viewer in a series of possible interpretations.

“Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1980) came second, behind Blade Runner, in a recent BFI poll of its members’ top movies. In outline, it’s one of the simplest films ever made: a guide, or Stalker, takes two people, Writer and Professor, into a forbidden area called the Zone, at the heart of which is the Room, where your deepest wish will come true. It is this simplicity that gives the film its fathomless resonance. If Tarkovsky’s previous film, Solaris, seemed like a Soviet 2001, was Stalker Tarkovsky’s take on The Wizard of Oz?

“The starkness of its conception did not prevent the production traumas that seem integral to the creation myths of other favourites: the likes of Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo. Plans to shoot in Tajikistan had to be abandoned because of an earthquake. Having relocated to an abandoned hydroelectric power station in Estonia, Tarkovsky was dissatisfied with the cinematography and decided to shoot a pared-down version of the script all over again – in the same place. The price paid for this pursuit of an ideal is incalculable. Sound recordist Vladimir Sharun believes the deaths from cancer of Tarkovsky (in 1986), his wife Larissa and Anatoly Solonitsyn (who plays the Writer) were all due to contamination from a chemical plant upstream from the set.

“The film itself has become synonymous both with cinema’s claims to high art and a test of the viewer’s ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett’s enthusiasm for it – "every single frame of the film is burned into my retina" – attests not just to the director’s lofty purity of purpose, but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement. So a certain amount of blowback is inevitable. David Thomson included Stalker in his pantheon of 1,000 memorable movies, but was dubious about the notion of the Room. Perhaps it’s "an infinite, if dank enclosure in which an uncertain number of strangers are watching the works of Tarkovsky. Equally, it may be that as malfunction of one kind or another covers the world, we may have a hard time distinguishing the Room, the Zone, and the local multiplex.”

– Geoff Dyer.

The following interview with Andrei Tarkovsky was conducted by the renowned Italian scriptwriter Tonino Guerra in 1979.

TG: What does "Stalker" mean?

AT: It’s a made-up word that comes from the English verb "to stalk": to approach furtively. In this film this word indicates the profession of one who crosses the borders and penetrates a forbidden Zone with a specific objective , a bit like a bootlegger or a smuggler. The stalker’s craft is passed on from one generation to the next. In my film, the forbidden Zone represents the places where desires can be satisfied. The spectator may doubt its existence or see it merely as a myth or a joke . . . or even as the fantasy of our hero. For the viewer this remains a mystery. The existence in the zone of a room where dreams come true serves solely as pretext to revealing the personalities of the three protagonists.

TG: What kind of person is the Stalker?

AT: He’s a very honest man, clean, and intellectually innocent. His wife describes him as "cheerful." He leads men into the Zone to, he says, make them happy. He gives himself completely to this task, with total lack of self-interest. He believes that it’s the only way to make people happy. In the end his is the story of the last of the idealists. It’s the story of a man who believes in the possibility of happiness independent of the will and the capacity of man. His job gives meaning to his life.

As if he were a priest of the Zone, the Stalker leads men there to make them happy. In reality, no one can say for sure if anyone there is happy.

At the end of his journey in the Zone, under the influence of the people he is leading, he loses faith in the possibility of making all of mankind happy. He can no longer find anyone who believes in this Zone or in the happiness to be found in this room. In the end he finds himself alone with his idea of human happiness achieved by a pure faith.

TG: When did the idea of this film come to you?

AT: I had recommended a short novel, Picnic on the Roadside, to my friend, the filmmaker Giorgi Kalatozishvili, thinking he might adapt it to film. Afterwards, I don’t know why, Giorgi could not obtain the rights from the authors of the novel, the Strugatsky brothers, and he abandoned the idea of this film. The idea began to turn in my head, at first from time to time and then more and more often. It seemed to me that this novel could be made into a film with a unity of location, time, and action. This classic unity -Aristotelian in my view - permits us to approach truly authentic filmmaking, which for me is not action film, outwardly dynamic.

I must say, too, that the script of Stalker has nothing in common with the novel, Picnic on the Roadside, except for the two words, "Stalker" and "Zone." So you see the history of the origins of my film is deceptive.

TG: : Do the images that you’ve shot suggest specific musical accompaniment?

AT: When I saw the rushes for the first time, I thought the film wouldn’t need any music. It seemed to me that it could-that it must even - rely solely on sounds. Now I would like to try muted music, barely audible, behind the noise of trains that pass beneath the windows of the Stalker’s home. For instance, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony ("Ode to Joy"), Wagner, or even the Marseillaise’ In any case music that is more or less popular, that expresses the movement of the masses’ the theme of humanity’s social destiny. But this music must be barely heard beneath the noise, in a way that the spectator is not aware of it. Moreover, I would like most of the noise and sound to be composed by a composer. In the film, for example, the three people undertake a long journey in a railway car. I’d like that the noise of the wheels on the rails not be the natural sound but elaborated upon by the composer with electronic music. At the same time, one mustn’t be aware of music, nor of natural sounds.

TG: But will there be a central theme?

AT: I think the theme will be Far Eastern, a kind of Zen music, where the principle is concentration rather than description’ The main musical theme wiII have to be, on the one hand, purged of all emotion, and on the other, of all thought or programmatic intent. It must express its truth about the world around us in an autonomous way. It must be self-contained.

TG: Can you describe to me, image by image, the end of the film, as if I were blind?

AT: It would probably be great not to make films, but instead to simply describe them to blind people. A wonderful idea! One would only need to buy a tape recorder. "Thought expressed is a lie," said the poet.

TG: So, I can’t see. Tell.

AT: In the foreground, a sick little girl, Stalker’s daughter’ She holds a large book in front of her face. She is wearing a scarf’ She is in profile against an illuminated window. Slowly, the camera pulls back and frames a part of the table. The table in the foreground with dirty dishes on it: two glasses and a teapot. The little girl puts the book down on her knees, and we hear her voice repeating what she has just read’ She looks at one of the glasses. The glass, under the force of her look’ moves towards the camera. The child looks at the other glass and the other glass also begins to move forward. And then the child looks at the glass at the edge of the table and it falls to the floor without breaking. We then hear a train passing very close by, making a strange sound. The walls shake more and more. The camera goes back to the girl in the foreground and in the midst of this crashing noise the film ends.

TG: Are you thinking about another film right away after Stalker?

AT: I would like to make the film that we decided to make together: Italian journey. But you can talk about that better than I can. I would like to make a film that would lose some viewers and gain others, new ones. I would like our film to be seen by different people than those we call film viewers.

 TG: I was told that you would like to change your style completely. Is this true?

AT: Yes, only I don’t know how yet . . . It would be great for me to make a film with the freedom of a beginner. To turn down big financing. To have the possibility to observe nature and men at my leisure, without haste. And the subject would emerge of itself, as the result of these observations and not necessarily planned down to the smallest detail.

Such a film would have to be made in complete freedom, independent of inspiration, of actors, of camera angles and shots. And with a discreet camera . . . It seems to me that making a film in this way would push me to go much further.

TG: What images do you think you’ve "stolen" from someone else, even though you’ve obviously transformed them into your own style?

AT: I’m generally very wary of this and I try to avoid it. I don’t like the suggestion that I may not have acted in such or such a situation with complete independence. Yet, lately, these references begin to interest me. In The Mirror for instance, there are two or three shots that are very clearly inspired by Brueghel: the boy, the small silhouettes of then, the snow, the bare trees, and the river in the distance. I created these shots very consciously and deliberately, not with the idea of copying or to show culture but to bear witness to my love for Brueghel, of my dependence on him, of the deep impression that he has made on my life.

In Andrei Roublev, there was a scene that might have been from Mizoguchi, the great departedJapanese director. I wasn’t aware of it until it was projected. It’s the one where the Russian prince gallops across the countryside on a white horse, and the Tatar is on a black horse. The quality of the image in black and white, the landscape, the opacity of the overcast sky had a strange resemblance to an ink-drawn Chinese landscape.

The two riders gallop after each other. Suddenly the Tatar cries out, whistles, whips his horse, and overtakes the prince. The Russian goes after him but cannot catch up. In the next shot, they have stopped’ There is nothing else. Just the memory of the Russian prince on his white horse trying to catch the Tatar and unable to do it’

It’s a scene that has nothing to do with the plot of the story. It attempts to express the state of a soul and to throw light on the nature of the relationship between the two men. It’s like a game that two boys play. One runs ahead and says, "You can’t catch me!" The other one takes off after him running as fast he can, but he can’t catch him’ Then right afterwards, they forget their game and stop running.

– Stalker, Smuggler of Happiness. Andrei Tarkovsky interviewed by Tonino Guerra, 1979

Approaching the Sequel: Syd Field Interviews James Cameron

(Terminator 2: Directed by James Cameron)

James Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada. He started out pursuing a career in physics but ultimately chose to follow his ambition of becoming a filmmaker. While working as a truck driver he wrote scripts in his spare time.

Xenogenesis was Cameron's debut short film. On the back of its science fiction premise, he was able to land a position with New World Pictures, the production company owned by acclaimed B-movie director Roger Corman. While at New World, Cameron worked on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and Piranha II: The Spawning (1987).  

In 1984, Cameron scored a huge success as the director of The Terminator (1984), a compelling story of a time-traveling robot from the future (memorably played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) hunting down the resistance leader in a conflict between human beings and machines. This was followed by Aliens, the sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), starring Sigourney Weaver, which became a critical and commercial success for Cameron.

While working on The Abyss (1989), Cameron encountered a number of setbacks. It was an arduous process to get to the set for the film. It took its toll on the actors and crew, who spent days filming on an enormous underwater set. Although audiences and reviewers were underwhelmed by the premise of scuba divers who discover aliens while retrieving a U.S. Navy submarine, the film did surprisingly well at the box office. Although the visual effects were outstanding, the film didn't win an anticipated Oscar. 

After helping create Kathryn Bigelow's action thriller, Point Break, Cameron got back on track by directing another blockbuster, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The picture broke new records with its visual effects, bringing in more than $200 million at the box office. 

Cameron also wrote and directed the 1994 movie True Lies, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, grossing over $378 million globally and winning two Oscars for its visual effects. 

Cameron next conceived the idea for Titanic, a movie about star-crossed lovers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) stranded onboard the doomed Titanic ocean liner. The film received critical praise and went on to make over $1 billion dollars at the box office, and was nominated for 14 Academy Awards. During his work on the film, Cameron won three Oscars for his work as director, for the editing of the film, and for best picture.

In 1992, screenwriting teacher and author Syd Field approached writer-director James Cameron for an interview. The following excerpt is from the discussion on the origins of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 

He paused for a moment, took a sip of coffee, and said that ‘from a writing standpoint, the things that interested me the most were the characters. When I was writing Ripley for Aliens there were certain things known about her and her experience, but then we lost track of her. In the sequel I was picking her up at a later point and seeing what the effects of those earlier traumas were. With Ripley there was a discontinuity of time, but experientially it was continuous for her because she just went to sleep, and when she woke up, time had gone by.

‘It was much different, much more interesting with Sarah. I had to backfill those intervening nine years, so I had to find efficient ways of dramatically evoking what had happened to her. The tricky part was having it all make sense to a member of the audience who didn’t remember or hadn’t seen the first film. Basically, I had a character popping onto the screen in a certain way, and therefore had to create a back story for that character. I told myself I had to write the script just like there had never been a first film. The sequel had to be a story about someone who encountered something nobody else believes, like the opening scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where Kevin McCarthy swears he’s seen something shocking, and nobody believes him; then he starts telling the story.

‘In Terminator 2, the first time we meet Sarah, she’s locked up in a mental institution, but the real question is, is she crazy? The advantage of a sequel is that you can play games you can’t play in the original. For example, I know the audience knows the Terminator is real. So they’re not going to think she’s crazy. But the question still remains: Is she crazy? Has the past ordeal made her nuts? I wanted to push her character very far.

‘The strange thing that happened in the wake of the film is that a lot of people made the mistake of thinking I was presenting Sarah Connor as a role model for women. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I wanted people to invest in her emotionally, to feel sorry for her, because she had been through such hell. And people made a straight-line extrapolation from Ripley to Sarah.

‘They’re very different characters. Ripley’s been through a trauma, but she has certain innate characteristics of leadership and wisdom under fire; she’s a true hero. Sarah’s not really a hero. She’s an ordinary person who’s been put under extreme pressure, and that makes her warped and twisted, yet strengthened, in a sad way. It’s like you don’t want this to happen to her. The initial image of her had a big scar running down the side of her face, and we actually did makeup tests with scars, but it would have been a real nightmare to deal with a scar like that in production on a day-to-day basis. I really wanted her to look like Tom Beringer in Platoon (Oliver Stone). And Linda was up for it, because the last thing she had done was play Beauty in Beauty and the Beast for three years. It’s a tribute to her as an actor that she was able to pull off that severity without the help of any makeup whatsoever.’

In theater the main ingredient of modern tragedy is an ordinary person who is in an extraordinary circumstance; the situation creates the potential for tragedy. Sarah Connor is no hero; she’s an ordinary person who just happens to be placed in extraordinary circumstances. The situation has the potential for tragedy, but in this case, the Terminator, the Schwarzenegger ‘character,’ becomes the hero.

That was another major problem Cameron had to confront in the sequel. ‘There’s a strange history that happened with the first film,’ he explains. ‘A year or two after The Terminator came out, people remembered the film fondly. They remembered Schwarzenegger from the other roles he had played, like Commando or Predator (Jim Thomas, John Thomas), where he was running around with a machine gun in his hand, spraying bullets everywhere, like he had in The Terminator. But there was this curious blurring of distinction that he was the bad guy in The Terminator.

‘That made me very nervous,’ he says. ‘I knew the ‘bad guy being the hero’ could get me into some pretty dangerous territory, morally and ethically. I absolutely refused to do another film where Arnold Schwarzenegger kicks in the door and shoots everybody in sight and then walks away,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. ‘I thought there must be a way to deflect this image of bad guy as hero, and use what’s great about the character. I didn’t know exactly what to do, but I thought the only way to deal with it would be to address the moral issues head-on.’

For the screenwriter, the challenge is to find a way to deal with this situation so it springs out of the story context and is based on the reaction of character. The dramatic need, the dramatic function of the Terminator is to terminate, to kill anybody or anything that gets in its way. Because he is a cyborg, a computer, he cannot change his nature; only a human or another robot can change the program. So to change the bad guy into a good guy requires changing the dramatic situation, the circumstances surrounding the action. Cameron had to find a way to change the context yet keep Terminator’s dramatic need intact.

‘The key was the kid,’ Cameron explains. ‘Because it’s never really explained why John Connor has such a strong moral template.

‘For me, John was pushed by the situation where he sees the Terminator almost shoot the guy in the parking lot. I think everybody invents their own moral code for themselves, and it usually happens in your teens based on what you’ve been taught, what you’ve seen in the world, what you’ve read, and your own inherent makeup.’

John Connor intuitively knows what’s right ‘but can’t articulate it,’ Cameron continued. ‘John says, ‘You can’t go around killing people,’ and the Terminator says, ‘Why not?’ And the kid can’t answer the question. He gets into a kind of ethical, philosophical question that could go on and on. But all he says is, ‘You just can’t.’

‘I thought the best way to deal with this was not be coy about it and hope it slides by, but to tackle it head-on, make this a story about why you can’t kill people,’ continued Cameron.

He paused a moment, stared at the blinking light on the telephone. ‘What is it that makes us human?’ he asked. ‘Part of what makes us human is our moral code. But what is it that distinguishes us from a hypothetical machine that looks and acts like a human being but is not?

‘Essentially you’ve got a character associated with being the quintessential killing machine; that is his purpose in life. Devoid of any emotion, remorse, or any kind of human social code, he suddenly finds himself in the strangest dilemma of his career. He can’t kill anybody, and he doesn’t even know why. He’s got to figure it out. He’s got to, because he’s half human. And he figures it out at the end. The Tin Man gets his heart. ‘Once I clicked into that, I saw what the whole movie was going to be about.’

Every screenwriter knows that there are four major elements that make up the visual dynamics of screen character. One, the main character or characters must embody a strong dramatic need.

Dramatic need is what your main character wants to win, gain, get, or achieve during the screenplay. What drives your character through the obstacles of the story line, through the conflicts of plot? In the case of Sarah Connor, John Connor, and the Terminator, the dramatic need is to destroy the future by destroying the one vital computer chip that will determine that future. To destroy that computer chip they will have to destroy the creator of that chip, Miles Dyson, along with the manufacturing entity, Cyberdyne. They will also have to destroy the Terminator 1000, sent back from the past to protect the future. It is this dramatic need that pushes the entire story line through to its completion.

In some screenplays a character’s dramatic need will remain constant throughout the entire story, as it does in Terminator 2. In other screenplays, the dramatic need will change based on the function of the story. In Witness, for example, the dramatic need of John Book changes after Plot Point I. The same thing happens in Thelma and Louise. If the dramatic need of the character changes, it usually will occur after the Plot Point at the end of Act I.

The second element that makes good character is a strong point of view, the way your character views the world. Point of view is really a belief system. ‘I believe in God,’ for example, is a point of view. So is ‘I don’t believe in God.’ So is ‘I don’t know whether there is a God.’ All these are belief systems.

What we believe to be true is true. For Sarah, nothing can alter her belief that the future is already here. On August 29, 1997, the nuclear holocaust will be unleashed and sweep across the planet like some wild wind destroying everything in its path. That we know from The Terminator. This inevitability defines Sarah’s point of view and motivates everything she does.

The third thing that makes good character is attitude – a manner, or an opinion. People express their attitudes, or their opinions, and then act on them: Dr. Silberman has the opinion that Sarah Connor is loony and acts on that. And he’s not ready to change that opinion, no matter what she says or does, at least not for another six months of her incarceration.

The fourth component that makes good character is change: Does the character change during the course of the screenplay? If so, how does he or she change, and what is the change? Can you trace this character arc from beginning to end?

In discussing Terminator 2, Sarah ‘does not change that much,’ Cameron said, ‘although she goes through a kind of epiphany after she experiences her character crisis [the moment when she cannot kill Miles Dyson]. But her crisis happens relatively early in the story.’

But what if your character is a robot? If you consider the prospect of an emotional change occurring within a robot, you find there’s an immediate contradiction. A robot cannot change unless it has been reprogrammed by someone or something outside itself. In this case, as Cameron has mentioned, there will be a major change within the Terminator. At the beginning of the screenplay, Schwarzenegger’s dramatic need is simple: to protect and save John Connor. That is the first directive of the warrior machine, to preserve itself so it can function.

During the story there is a change in the Terminator’s ‘character,’ and his dramatic need changes to fit the moral beliefs of John Connor. And we know the Terminator cannot change his need, he ‘cannot self-terminate’; he needs John Connor to do that for him. This means that the Terminator has to disobey his own built-in program.

To do that, Cameron said, ‘he must make a command decision, and it is the only true act of free will that he has in the entire film.’

Wait a minute. A robot with free will? Even though that’s a contradiction, it’s the basic issue that concerned Cameron in approaching the sequel. If you look at the two films you’ll see there’s a thematic continuity that runs between them, because both deal with the conflict between destiny versus free will.

If these films are about anything, Cameron maintained, it’s an exploration of the eternal conflict between destiny and free will. How do you get that to work? I asked him.

Cameron took another sip of coffee, put down the cup, and asked, ‘At what point is everything we do in life preordained in some way?’ In other words, if we can go forward in time and look back on it, if we can jump around in time, then isn’t everything we do in our life already part of a movie that’s already been shot? Or is there a way you can change it? Can you get it to a certain point on the decision tree and then go the other way?

He paused for a moment, thinking. ‘Basically, what I did in Terminator 2 is say that everything is meant to be a certain way. At least to that point in time where they’re sending somebody back from that future. But can you grab that line of history like it’s a rope stretched between two points, and pull it out of the way? If you can pull it just a little bit before it rebounds, and cut it exactly at that moment, then you can change it and go in a different direction. Like catastrophe theory. If you do that you get a future that no longer exists at all, except in the memories of the people that are here now. They have a memory of a future that will never happen, which is curious, because it defies our Newtonian view of the world. But it is possible.

‘That became my point of departure,’ he said, smiling slightly. ‘It’s like the Terminator’s been born from the forehead of Zeus but he’s an anomaly in our time because he’s the only one who has memories of a time that will never exist. He becomes an integral part of the ongoing fabric of the world, and it’s his existence here that prevents that particular future from ever popping into existence. In a spiritual sense, it would be like a manifestation of God changing the path.’

I took a sip of coffee, and as I put down the cup I casually mentioned that there seemed to be a spiritual awareness creeping into the American screenplay. As we study the forces of destruction to our environment; sense the wanton violence raging throughout the land; experience the decay of the cities, the dissatisfaction with politics and politicians, the failure of the American Dream, the helplessness of the homeless, it seems we’re becoming more and more aware that a spiritual aspect is missing from our lives. There’s a longing to incorporate into our lives some kind of spiritual perspective about the moral order of the universe.

Cameron agreed, then continued, ‘There’s a million ways to look at all these different paradoxes and ellipses. As a matter of fact, in the first script I wrote a scene where Sarah is driving along, talking to herself on the tape machine, and she says, ‘But if you had done this then this would have happened, and if you did that then that would have happened and then you wouldn’t have even existed, and I could go crazy thinking about it. I just have to deal with what’s in front of me.’

‘Ultimately, it gets back to morality,’ Cameron concluded. ‘Because if the universe can’t be explained, if everything can’t be known, then we’ll never know what’s right or what’s wrong. We can only know what we feel is right and wrong, which is why I like the idea of the kid spontaneously creating a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s the same way in River’s Edge (Neal Jimenez) when the little kid is about to shoot his brother, and he suddenly realizes he can’t, you don’t do something like that. Even if nobody’s ever told him, he knows it.

‘As I got ready to write the screenplay,’ Cameron said, ‘I kept asking myself, What’s the real goal of this movie? Are we going to blow people away and get them all excited? Is that it? Or is there a way we can get them to really feel something? I thought it would be a real coup if we could get people to cry for a machine. If we could get people to cry for Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a robot, that would be terrific.

‘That was the fun of the whole thing. It wasn’t all the chases and special effects and all that stuff, though I get off on that on a day-to-day basis. I love sitting at the KEM [the editing machine] and making cuts and getting the action working, but when I look back I feel the real thrill was being able to contour a response that was totally opposite from what we got the first time. And to just have fun with that. To play against the expectations. You’ve got to do that in a sequel.’

And that’s where we begin.

– ‘Approaching the Sequel’ by Syd Field. From Four Screenplays (New York: Dell Publishing, 1994), 90–97.