John Huston: The Poetry of Failure

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Directed by John Huston)

John Huston directed 37 features during a near half-century career among the first-rank of American filmmakers. His work ranges from cult films to perennial favourites including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1951), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), Moby Dick (1956), The Misfits (1961), The Night of the Iguana (1964), Fat City (1972), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Wise Blood (1979), The Dead (1987) as well as two distinguished war documentaries — The Battle of San Pietro (1945) and Let There Be Light (1946). 

John Huston began working in the movies as a screenwriter. Among his credits are such renowned and commercially successful scripts as Jezebel (1938), Juarez (1939), Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940), High Sierra (1941), and Sergeant York (1941); and he worked with top directors at Warner Bros. including William Wyler, Anatole Litvak, William Dieterle, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks. 

As a filmmaker particularly identified with the literary masterworks he transformed into cinema, Huston has acknowledged the wide literary influences on his films. For Huston the act of writing is essential and he has commented on the intimate connection between writing and directing: ‘There’s really no difference between them, it’s an extension, one from the other. Ideally I think the writer should go on and direct the picture. I think of the director as an extension of the writer.’

Huston’s protagonists are often either independent professionals whose tough exteriors hide a dedication to principle, like the detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, or losers whose obsession with a doomed quest leads to their destruction, like the three gold-seekers in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. According to critic Gilles Jacob ‘the tragedy of rapacity and the poetry of failure are two essential themes of the Hustonian world. The desire to obtain what is coveted at any cost of blood, the taste of having more and more, set into motion a dark world that is hardened against pain…’

The following extract is taken from an interview with Gideon Bachmann during the shooting of the Noah’s ark sequence for The Bible: In the Beginning (1966), in which John Huston talks about his writing methods and approach to making films:

The Maltese Falcon (Directed by John Huston)

How does the script get written? Do you do it alone?  And how long does it take you?

There are no rules. I’ve written scripts and made pictures out of them in two weeks. At other times I’ve worked a year and a half just on a script. The Maltese Falcon was done in a very short time, because it was based on a very fine book and there was very little for me to invent. It was a matter of sticking to the ideas of the book, of making a film out of a book. On Treasure of the Sierra Madre, I wrote the script in about 3-4 months, but I had had quite a long time to think about it before. The actual making of the film didn’t take very long, but I had had the idea of making it since before the war. It was the first film I made after the war.

You wrote that one alone, and got an Oscar for writing it. But don’t you sometimes write together with other people? Or, when other people write for you, do you take a very active part or do you leave them pretty much alone?

When I do not write alone – and of course you must remember that I began my film career as a writer, not as a director – I work very closely with the writer. Almost always I share in the writing. The writer will do a scene and then I’ll work it over, or I’ll write a scene and then the other writer will make adjustments later. Often we trade scenes back and forth until we’re both satisfied.

The Maltese Falcon (Directed by John Huston)

You don’t like to work with more than one other writer?

Not really. But sometimes other people make additions. For example, the writer of a play or a book on which I  am basing a film. Tennessee Williams, for example, came and worked with Anthony Vay and myself on the script for Night of the Iguana. He didn’t come there to write, but once he was there he did do some writing, and actually he did some rather important writing for the film. But such cases are the exception.

Could you put into words some principles you employ in order to put ideas into film form? Do you feel there are any rules a writer for the cinema must follow?

Each idea calls for a different treatment, really. I am not aware of any ready formula, except the obvious one that films fall into a certain number of scenes, and that you have to pay attention to certain limitations that have to do with time, according to subject. Depending on what you are writing about, you have to decide the time balance between words and action. It seems to me, for example, that the word contains as much action as a purely visual scene, and that dialogue should have as much action in it as physical motion. The sense of activity that your audience gets is derived equally from what they see and from what they hear. The fascination, the attention of the man who looks at what you have put together, must be for the thoughts as much as for the happenings in your film. In fact, when I write I can’t really separate the words from the actions. The final action – the combined activity of the film, the sum of the words and the visuals – is really going on only in the mind of the beholder. So in writing I have to convey a sense of overall progression with all the means at my command: words and images and sounds and everything else that makes film.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Directed by John Huston)

This brings up one of the basic questions about films that adapt literary works: in a book there are many things that you can’t see or hear, but which in reading you translate directly into your own interior images and feelings. Emotions that are created in you neither through dialogue nor action. How do you get these into film? The monologues from ‘Moby Dick’, for example?

Well, first of all, I try to beware of literal transfers to film of what a writer has created initially for a different form. Instead I try to penetrate first to the basic idea of the book or the play, and then work with those ideas in cinematic terms. For example, to see what Melville wanted to say in the dialogues, what emotions he wanted to convey I always thought Moby Dick was a great blasphemy. Here was a man who shook his fist at God. The thematic line in Moby Dick seemed to me, always, to have been: who’s to judge when the judge himself is dragged before the bar? Who’s to condemn, but he, Ahab! This was, to me, the point at which I tried to aim the whole picture, because I think that’s what Melville was essentially concerned with, and this is, at the same time, the point that makes Moby Dick so extremely timely in our age. And if I may be allowed the side-observation: I don’t think any of the critics who wrote about the film ever mentioned this.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Directed by John Huston)

I suppose you are speaking about the problem of taking personal responsibility in an age where the group has largely attempted to make decisions for the individual. This is an interpretation of Melville, or perhaps I should say ONE interpretation of Melville. And so in the attempt to understand the basic idea of a work (in order to translate those ideas into film) you are really doing more than that: you add your own interpretation, you don’t just put into images what the original author wanted to say.

I don’t think we can avoid interpretation. Even just pointing a camera at a certain reality means an interpretation of that reality. By the same token, I don’t seek to interpret, to put my own stamp on the material. I try to be as faithful to the original material as I can. This applies equally to Melville as it applies to the Bible, for example. In fact, it’s the fascination that I feel for the original that makes me want to make it into a film.

What about original material, where you are not adapting a play or a book? Are there any ideas of yours, basic ideas, which you try to express in your work? Do you feel that there is a continuity in your work in terms of a consistent ideology? In short, do you feel you are trying to say something coherent to mankind?

There probably is. I am not consciously aware of anything. But even the choice of material indicates a preference, a turn of mind. You could draw a portrait of a mind through that mind’s preferences.

The Asphalt Jungle (Directed by John Huston)

Well, let me do that for a minute, and see if what I see as a unifying idea in your work is indeed a coherent feeling on your part. I see that in your films there is always a man pitched against odds, an individual who seeks to retain a sense of his own individuality in the face of a culture that surrounds and tends to submerge him. I would call the style of your films the style of the frontier, or what the frontier has come to symbolize in American culture: a sense of rebellion against being put into a system, into a form of life and into a mode of thinking rigidly decided by others.

Yes, I think there is something there. I do come from a frontier background. My people were that. And I always feel constrained in the presence of too many rules, severe rules; they distress me. I like the sense of freedom. I don’t particularly seek that ultimate freedom of the anarchist, but I’m impatient of rules that result from prejudice.

In any case, you believe that at the basis of every film of yours there is a basic idea, whether an idea of yours or one of another author. But how do you proceed to put that idea into film form? In writing, what do you do first, for example?

I don’t envisage the whole thing at the beginning. I go a little bit at a time, always asking myself whether I am on the track of the basic thought. Within that, I try to make each scene as good as I can. This applies both to the writing and to the directing – to the whole process of preparation and production, in fact – which are only extensions of the process of writing. It’s hard to break down into details.

The Asphalt Jungle (Directed by John Huston)

Do you mean to say that you do not write the whole script in the beginning?

Oh yes, oh sure. I am speaking about the making of the film. I try to make it in sequence as much as possible, to develop the making of the film along with the development of the story within the film. I try, for example, to give my actors a sense of development not only within the troupe, but also a sense of development within the story of the film. And I improvise if necessary. This is not a luxury; when one shoots as much on location as I do, improvisation is a necessity. Everything that happens in the process of making the film can contribute to the development of that film’s story. But of course one always tries to remain within the bounds of the controllable as much as one can, to stay within the bounds of the script. But one must be open to take advantage of the terrain, of the things that the setting can give you.

Do you write your scripts with the idea of change and improvisation already in mind?

Improvisation is used more today than it used to be. Partly this is caused by a new, less rigid approach to filmmaking, and also partly by the decentralization of the production process. Actors have become producers, they have commitments of conflicting sorts, and it is no longer possible to prepare a script in great detail in a major studio set-up, and then call in your contract actors, whose time you control completely, and make the film in exact accordance to plan. It has simply become essential today to be more flexible, to adjust to new conditions, both practical and aesthetic.

Do you see this as a positive or a negative development?

It has certainly helped some directors to come into their own, people who could never have succeeded under the old, less independent system. Some French and Italian directors – Fellini in the vanguard – have found it possible to tell much more subjective stories, often their own, in a valid cinematographic way. Like 81/2 for example.

Moby Dick (Directed by John Huston)

What is the technical process of your scriptwriting?

Usually I write in longhand first, and then dictate a later version. I use a standard script form: action on the left and dialogue on the right. When it’s finished it’s mimeographed and distributed to the people who need to see it. I often change again later. Sometimes I finish the final version on the set itself, or change again something I’ve written as a final version the day before. Mostly these changes come to me when I hear the words first spoken by an actor. It’s always different once it comes out of a living person’s mouth. By this I do not mean that I try to adjust to an actor’s personality – I try to do that as little as possible. When I write, I don’t have in mind an actor, but a character. I don’t conceive this character with a specific star in my mind. I guess what I am trying to do with this constant changing, is to try to put to work more than my own imagination, or at least allow my imagination the liberty of play, the liberty of coming out of its cage – which is me, my body, when I am alone and writing – and in this way it begins to live and to flower and gives me better service than when I put it to work abstractly, alone, in a room with paper and pencil, without the living presence of the material. Then, when the character has been born out of this extended imagination, I have to look for someone to play the role, and this someone isn’t always necessarily the person who I thought could play it originally, because often it no longer is the same character. In fact, I’ve often – at least, sometimes – delayed the making of a film because I couldn’t find anybody to play the new and adjusted character that I had finally arrived at construing. Although in my experience you usually find someone; there are enough good actors if you are willing to wait a little.

Is it possible for you to tell how much of your writing comes from inside you, at the start, and how much is written in adjustment to a situation or to hearing your words spoken? And do you also adjust to location, for example? I mean, when you write about Sodom, do you write for Vesuvius, for the landscape where you decided to shoot those sequences?

It’s the same thing as trying to interpret Melville. You write for an ideal. Then when you make the film, you try to live up to that ideal. Casting, locating, shooting: you try to stick to what you start with. Sometimes there are problems when the material changes in my hands, sometimes I have even miscast my own films. But generally these adjustment problems can be overcome. I’ve been pretty lucky that way. In fact, I can usually do pretty much exactly what I set out to do. I’ve been lucky.

Moby Dick (Directed by John Huston)

Is that what gives you this tremendous peace that you seem to have on the set? I have watched perhaps a hundred directors shooting, and nobody is as calm. And you have this kooky set: this silly ark with all these animals, peacocks flying among the long necks of giraffe, hippos who refuse to act the scenes written for them, a hundred breakdowns a day with technical things caused by the animals, and you just stride through the whole thing in your Noah costume, feeding the giraffes, smiling and taking it easy...

I am astonished myself. And I marvel at the patience of everybody, especially the animals, who are among the best actors I’ve ever worked with ...

All typecast, too. . . . But, is that an answer?

In a way, yes. You see, in working with actors, I try to direct as little as possible. The more one directs, the more there is a tendency to monotony. If one is telling each person what to do, one ends up with a host of little replicas of oneself. So, when I start a scene, I always let the actor show me for the start how he imagines the scene himself. This applies not only to actors; as I tried to indicate before, I try to let the whole thing work on me, show me. The actors, the set, the location, the sounds, all help to show me what the correct movement could be. So what I said about the animals wasn’t only a joke. Because, you see, the animals have one great advantage as actors; they know exactly what they want to do, no self-doubts, no hesitations. If you watch them, quite extraordinary opportunities present themselves, but you must see them. Here in the Noah’s Ark sequence of The Bible this has happened a number of times. Animals do remarkable things. The hippo opened his mouth and let me pet him inside.

Is that when you wrote the line, which you say to Noah’s wife at that point: ‘There is no evil in him, wife. Do not fear him!’

Exactly. And very fine actors are as much themselves as animals are. I would rather have someone whose personality lends itself to the role than a good actor who can simulate the illusion of being the character. I do not like to see the mechanics of acting. The best you can get, of course, is when the personality lends itself exquisitely to the part and when that personality has the added attribute of being technically a fine actor so he can control his performance. That is the ideal.

Night of the Iguana (Directed by John Huston)

What do you consider to be the attributes of a fine actor?

The shading he can give a line, his timing, his control, his knowledge of the camera, his relationship to the camera – of course, I’m talking about film acting.

What should an actor’s relationship to the camera be?

He must have an awareness of the size of his gesture, his motion, in relation to the size that his image will be on the screen. It isn’t absolutely an essential quality, but it is very useful. I don’t mean that I tell him the focal length of the lens I’m using and expect him to adapt himself accordingly, but a good actor has an almost instinctual awareness of these things. When an actor comes from the stage, he usually has to make adjustments of this kind. He doesn’t need to project, he doesn’t need to make his voice heard over a distance. He can speak very quietly. He can be more economical in every way before the camera than he could be on the stage. And he can work with the small details of his face...

What else, besides controlling the actors, does your job of directing include? How much control do you exercise over the camera, the light, the, sets, the other mechanics?

Lighting is almost completely up to the cameraman, who of course must be in complete sympathy with the director. The set up is something else. There you’re telling the story, the composition will appear on the screen, also the movement of the camera. The variety of material to be included in the shot, and its displacement, those are things I try to control. Again, when I decide about these things, I go by the rules that are imposed upon me by the central idea, by what I’m trying to say, and how I’ve decided to say it. And I choose set-ups and camera angles that will tell my story as quickly and as strongly and as surely as possible.

The Bible: In the Beginning (Directed by John Huston)

Do you have the precise set-up in mind when you write the script?

No. I write first, then seek the set-up that demonstrates. And I find that if the set-up is chosen well, I hardly ever have to change a line for set-up or a set-up for a line. The fact that I write the words first, doesn’t mean the words have precedence. I find that dialogue and camera set-up are not at war. I don’t seek a set-up to carry a certain word: I seek a certain word and a certain set-up to carry a certain idea. Sometimes one single word is enough for this, or even complete silence, if the image is right.

Do you think the less words spoken in a film, the better a film it is? 

Depends on the film. Some films depend on words. Take Night of the Iguana. Take the spoken words out of that, and you won’t have very much.

Is that only because that particular script was based on a play? Or do you feel that scripts that are very word-oriented could also be read as literature like a play can?

I don’t think you can make rules. In the case of Iguana the words were important because they carried Tennessee Williams’ thoughts. But I think a good screenplay could be read as literature, too. It simply depends on the particular material.

You are not taking sides, then, in the perennial controversy over what’s more important in film, the word or the image?

I don’t see that they are in conflict. Depending on what is being said, they complement each other in the hands of a good craftsman.

– Gideon Bachmann and John Huston: How I Make Films: An Interview with John Huston. Film Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 1 (Autumn, 1965), pp. 3-13.

Ingmar Bergman Interviews Himself

Summer with Monika (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Summer with Monika, directed by Ingmar Bergman, has always inspired devoted admirers. In The 400 Blows, François Truffaut thought a press shot of Monika (Harriet Andersson) deserving of theft by his alter ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) (1959). Near the end of the 1950s, Jean-Luc Godard wrote numerous laudatory pieces about it. Recently, experts such as Alain Bergala and Antoine de Baecque have hailed it as a seminal achievement in the evolution of modern cinema. 

Bergman recalled it fondly throughout his life. He had a personal stake: when he fell in love with the film's lead, abandoning his wife and children for her.

Summer with Monika continues to be a film of extraordinary vibrancy and vigour – tempered with a sad, even painful perspective. We can see more clearly now how the dream of youthful passion carried out by Monika and Harry (Lars Ekborg) in their temporary rejection of a dreary Swedish society is constantly contradicted by the practical realities of money, ageing, inevitable disillusionment, and everyday mundanity. 

One of the film's continuing appeals is its portrayal of protracted island idyll in which the social world never completely disappears – but where the young lovers manage to escape far and deep enough into nature to live out their shared dream for a valuable time. 

This is what Godard responded to in 1958 when he claimed that Bergman's camera "seeks just one thing: to grasp the present moment at its most fugitive and delve deeply into it in order to endow it with the quality of eternity." Naturally, once Monika becomes pregnant, the reality-principle kicks in: marriage, work, and the event of childbirth.

For commentators both past and present, Andersson as Monika embodied the New Woman in 1950s and early 1960s European cinema. 

Laura Hubner's perceptive essay in the Criterion booklet draws a connection between the Italian neo-realism that the film recalls (in its often squalid detail) and the French Nouvelle Vague that the film anticipated in so many ways – most notably, in the withering look into camera that Monika/Andersson performs, which Doinel/Léaud recreates in the final shot of The 400 Blows.

When Godard lauded the film, he made another set of connections: Bergman retained, rather anachronistically, "devices dear to avant-gardists of the 1930s" (such as Louis Delluc, Dimitri Kirsanoff, and Jean Epstein), ranging from double exposures and water reflections to backlighting and montages devoted to the surrounding environment (city or island). And it is in these depopulated montages that Summer with Monika stakes a claim to a legacy much more recent than the Nouvelle Vague: here is the germ of contemporary contemplative cinema.

This self-interview by Ingmar Bergman first appeared in Filmnyheter, a publicity magazine issued by the Swedish production company Svensk Filmindustri, to coincide with the opening of Summer with Monika. It was translated by Birgitta Steene, author of several books on Ingmar Bergman.

What was it like making Monika?

I didn’t make Monika. [Source novel author and coscreenwriter Per Anders] Fogelström bred her in me and then, like an elephant, I was pregnant for three years, and last summer she was born with a big ballyhoo. Today, she is a beautiful and naughty child. I hope she will cause an emotional uproar and all sorts of reactions. I shall challenge any indifferent person to a duel!

A wild paternal love, indeed!

For most people, a film is a short-lived product, like soap, matches, or polished false teeth. But not for the film director. He lives with his opus (like the devil, he does) until opening night, when he unwillingly surrenders it to the public.

Does it have to be like that?

For me it does. A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it.

There are also sensible directors.

Of course, sir. I have heard of several such individuals who are both wise and reasonable and who also behave almost like decent people, even when making a film.

And you despise them?

I don’t envy them. They have a tougher time than those of us who have lost or have never owned a pair of decency’s long underwear or the gold-rimmed glasses of critical reason or the rustling starched shirt of wise afterthought.

Poor film, poor actors, poor etc.!

Not at all. If you look carefully, you’ll see a little thing sticking out of my head.

Do you mean, sir, the tip on your beret?

Beret! What you, sir, call the tip on my beret is not a tip on a beret but a radar. With this radar, I make my movies, and it has never been inferior to the aforementioned underwear, glasses, or starched shirt.

A few strandings . . . in foggy waters . . . treacherous hidden rocks. Hmm!

Remember that technique improves over the years. Also, radar has its childhood diseases. But let’s talk about Monika!

From what I’ve heard, it includes the obligatory Swedish nude swimming.

I haven’t heard that nude swimming has become obligatory in Swedish filmmaking. But I think it should be.

Aha!

In a country where the climate seldom gives you an opportunity for anything but a tub bath, ice bath, or Finnish sauna—except possibly once or twice a year—we ought to be given, through the cinema, the illusion of some idyllic region where well-shaped young girls splash about as God created them, without getting goose bumps all the way down to their toes.

And so, Mr. Bergman, the nude swimming in your film has not provoked the production management?

Dr. Dymling [Carl Anders Dymling, Bergman’s producer at Svensk Filmindustri] has not raised any objections to those scenes. Per Anders Fogelström has found them to be in the spirit of his book. We actually thought it was fun to make them (except perhaps Harriet Andersson, who was freezing cold the whole time and had to be sawed or thawed loose, but who sacrificed herself for art).

So do you want to say anything with this film?

If we have to bore the readers with the so-called message of a film, then let’s make it brief. In four words and in Fogelströmian . . .

?

Get out! But return!

Mr. Bergman, you seem to believe that film and literature shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. But Monika is a novel! Isn’t it?

Now, if I feel like being inconsistent, that’s my own business and not meant to annoy people. In this case, the novel was actually a film synopsis long before it became a novel. Besides, Fogelström has been an understanding, loyal, and in all respects great colleague. He may not write with an ambition to achieve immortality, but whoever says anything depreciative about Fogelström [a popular writer] I’ll challenge to a du—

Any beautiful moment from the shooting of the film?

As always, one forgets the hard work and remembers the fun. In this case, the skerries. We—

Make it short!

One morning at six o’clock, we were on our way to location, the engine of our little boat, the Viola of Ornö, thumping across the still waters. The horizon at sea fused with the sky, the islets stood like floating octopuses in all that soft white. Up above, the fiery button of the sun was burning. It was warm and unusually still; there wasn’t even a swell, not a ripple. It was like eternity itself. It was like being in eternity. The smell of the sea, the quivering in the hull, the murmur around the stem, and the high silence—the summer of eternity.

And then what happened?

Nothing. That was it.

A Conversation with Volker Schlöndorff

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Directed by Volker Schlöndorff)

Volker Schlöndorff (born March 31, 1939 in Wiesbaden, Germany) initially worked as an assistant to directors Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Melville while studying filmmaking in Paris. In the early 1960s, he returned to Germany and became involved in the emerging Junger Deutscher (Young German) cinema movement. His debut feature film, Der junge Törless (1966; Young Törless), was an instant success, adapting the Robert Musil novella. This examination of a sensitive youngster in a cruel German military academy exemplified Schlöndorff's cool, unpretentious directing style, which would eventually distinguish him from his more eccentric peers Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

Schlöndorff founded his own film business in 1970, with Baal (1970) starring Fassbinder in an adaptation of the Bertolt Brecht play. Schlöndorff married Margarethe von Trotta, an actress who appeared in the film and with whom he collaborated professionally into the mid-1970s and who eventually directed her own films, the following year. Among their collaborative works is Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1973; The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum), an adaptation of the book by Heinrich Böll. 

Schlöndorff earned critical and financial success in Europe and the United States in the late 1970s with Die Blechtrommel (1979; The Tin Drum), his adaptation of the Günter Grass novel. He won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award for best foreign film. The episodic format and expressionist tone of the picture represented a break from his previous work. Schlöndorff's other works include the 1981 film Die Fälschung (Circle of Deceit), which was shot on location in war-torn Beirut; a 1985 television adaptation of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman starring Dustin Hoffman; and well-received adaptations of Marcel Proust's Swann in Love (1984) and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1990). 

Schlöndorff's later films evoke recollections of Nazi-occupied Germany: Der Unhold (1996; The Ogre), about a Nazi prisoner of war assigned to teach young boys for future government service, and Der neunte Tag (2004; The Ninth Day), a terrifying account of a priest's time in a Nazi concentration camp.

On the occasion of Volker Schlöndorff’s being selected for a Silver Medallion award by the Telluride Film Festival, Criterion’s Peter Becker talked with the German filmmaker about his long career. 

Peter Becker: Let’s start right at the beginning. You were a film watcher before you were a filmmaker, right? Didn’t your career begin in the Cinémathèque française?

Volker Schlöndorff: Well, that is absolutely true. Though first I watched from the projection booth. But that was still way back in Germany, where I knew a guy who was running the machines, you know, those heavy projectors at the time, with the carbon light. And when I came to France, it was precisely to learn about filmmaking, because I had the feeling in Germany there was no place where I could go. This was in the midfifties. And so when I arrived in France, I pretended to study other things—the baccalaureate and later, at the Sorbonne, sociology and politics and whatnot. But the real reason I was there was to go every night at six to the Cinémathèque to see the three movies that were screened. So that was really my school of filmmaking.

PB: And it wasn’t just cinema, it was also a community, right?

VS: It was a very strong community, and actually, I wrote quite a funny chapter about it in my autobiography. I am now talking of ’57, ’58, the beginning of the nouvelle vague. I had advanced under Lotte Eisner’s guiding to be the simultaneous translator for the movies that were either in German or had German subtitles, sitting with a mic in the front row of the Cinémathèque and putting it into the best French I could muster. And so next to me in the first row, you had really the hard-core Cahiers du cinèma assembly, like Godard—always in a dark coat, held together with his hands, collar up and shoulders forward as if to hide either his face or his entire persona. And next to him you had Chabrol and Truffaut, who were much more fun to watch in their livelihood. And behind them you had what later became Positif. These guys came to the movies not for whatever structuralist, analytical aspect but for the sheer womanhood of the stars. So they would be raving about Gardner or Louise Brooks or whoever it was. The minimum adjective would be divine out of this realm. It was a totally exuberant thing, the gang leader being Ado Kyrou, a surrealist. It was the same community of people you met every night, and you couldn’t help befriending them, which was later very helpful as a network.

PB: That’s a natural progression to what for many cinephiles would be a dream entry into the world of film, working with Jean-Pierre Melville, Louis Malle, and Alain Resnais on incredibly iconic films like Last Year at Marienbad. How was that experience?

VS: Let me just come back to the Cinémathèque. I mean, we were starved for pictures without knowing it. We simply knew the weekly new openings. There was no rerun of films in regular theaters. There was no VHS or DVD or, of course, Internet. Television never screened old movies. So you literally had two or three places in all of Europe, one being Paris, the others being Moscow and Rome. And maybe Copenhagen, I don’t know. These were the only places where you could see what the previous sixty years of filmmaking had produced.

Once you joined the group that was watching these films, it was like early Christians in the catacombs, but at least you became part of a brotherhood. And so that is how my connections were made. I met Louis Malle through a writer who was a friend of Bertrand Tavernier’s father, Bertrand being in the same school as me in Paris.

I met Melville at a cine club, which was appropriately called Cine Qua Non, after a screening of Johnny Guitar—which he found horrible, and he warned us against such degenerated American films and told us we should stick with William Wyler and Robert Wise and forget about this Nicholas Ray. Invariably, we had sectarian feelings about filmmakers, and the disputes were very open and mostly right after the screening on some boulevard in Paris, rain or shine. Melville took sort of a liking to me and had me work on a film then, when I had almost no experience, Léon Morin, Priest [1961], with Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva. Well, actually, I’m getting confused about this. That was my third movie as AD. Before that there had been Zazie dans le métro [1960] and Marienbad [1961], as you just mentioned. It’s exceptional, these three movies within my first year in the profession. Well, I guess I’m a lucky guy.

PB: It also wasn’t very long before you made your own first film, Young Törless [1966], right?

VS: First I tried my hand at a short film, because besides the filmmaking, I was among those who were politically very engaged. This was the height of the Algerian Independence War, and it was the end of the Indochina, meaning the French-Vietnam, War, and these wars took place in the streets of Paris partly, because of all the immigrants, the Algerians, and the different factions within French society. So the short I made, in between I think Zazie and Marienbad, was about some Algerian freedom fighters.

PB: If we think about that first short and then Törless next to each other, in a way you have a picture of two strains that have always been very important in your career. There’s been the strain of political engagement in the present or in the near past, and then there are the adaptations, collaborations over time, experiences of different texts, filming of unfilmable novels.

VS: I felt very much at ease with literature. Let’s say it came out of an accidental reading of Robert Musil’s [The Confusions of] Young Törless, where I thought I’d find my own years in French boarding school somehow reflected. There’s always a power struggle, within every institution and especially within boarding schools, when you get all these strong-headed young men together. They’re like young dogs fighting with each other. It’s rites of initiation, in a sense. And so I found that very personal experience in Musil, while at the same time there was an amazing parallel to what had happened in Germany and how the Nazis had taken over an entire society. But frankly, I thought this was going to be my only movie based on literature.

And the next one, Degree of Murder [1967], was different. But Törless had been a success, I mean a critical success—meaning it seemed to be a decent picture. That’s my definition of success. And Degree of Murder was not clear. I didn’t come to any special point. Even today, I wouldn’t know exactly what it was about.

So for the next one, I returned to literature, and very soon I discovered that I was, somehow, good at translating literature. And even though it was at the time considered a minor genre, I thought, It’s better to do what I’m good at than what I really like to do. And I must say, literature has been good to me.

PB: Well, you have not made it easy on yourself. It’s not as if you’ve been picking boys’ adventure stories.

VS: I would love to do Mark Twain, but that was too far away!

PB: Here in Telluride, we’re going to have another surprising literary adaptation with Baal [1970]. But it’s not even adaptation, in a sense, right?

VS: Well, actually, it’s word by word, more or less, the first draft of Bertolt Brecht’s first play, which at the time he didn’t want to show to anybody. He first showed his second play, Drums in the Night, and only after that had been a certain success did he come out with Baal, which was something he had written when he was nineteen, still in the Bavarian city of Augsburg, where he actually met this strange character, a drunkard with a guitar who was hanging out in the beer halls and chasing women and trying to get other people to pay for his drinks. This man was indeed called Baal, his family name. And Brecht was somehow looking to the wilderness of his passions and of his behavior. He himself was no Baal at all.

When I first came upon this work, it seemed to express so much of the feeling we had in ’68, ’69, and it had been written fifty years earlier, unbelievably, right after the First World War. Like to throw all civilization overboard, looking for the instincts, for the original passion of our genes, when we were still closer to Mother Nature. And here it was expressed, coming out of the First World War, like the German painters Otto Dix and George Grosz, indeed, in a very, let’s say, antibourgeois way. Not only the morals but the aesthetics were so antibourgeois. And then as I was looking for the character to play this part, I came upon Fassbinder, who was still doing theater. And it seemed to, again, be such a correspondence. We shot this fifty-year-old piece of literature as if it were social reportage, contemporary to us.

PB: That’s an interesting way to put it, taking this piece of literature, really poetry, and treating it as reportage. And Fassbinder himself in the film has that animal nature that you’re talking about—you feel it so much.

VS: Yes, and I found out very fast that his so-called animal nature, well, it was sheltering an extremely sensitive soul. We did a lot of rehearsal before we shot, for about three weeks, and he was extremely careful with everybody around him.

Later it was said that he was so abusive with parts of his company and actors. But that was not it at all. He had a high self-esteem, in a sense, but at the same time he was vulnerable, and he was aware of the vulnerability of others. And he acted accordingly, the way he treated everybody. Besides, he treated me with great respect.

PB: That’s important for a young director, too.

VS: Well, for him I was sort of a filmmaker already, and actually he loved very much Degree of Murder. It was his favorite picture, he told me, the one I didn’t like. The one I considered a failure, he considered my best, at the time. So we had a good relationship, and I don’t think we ever, ever spoke about Bertolt Brecht.

We spoke about the characters and how they were related to us. It was a very lively thing. Also, I’d cast Margarethe von Trotta, whom I didn’t know before the casting, and not knowing that this was going to be a lifelong relationship. So there were lots of things going on. And I think it was the first, in a sense, professional shoot Rainer ever saw. Now mind you, we tried to do everything as if it were not professional, the small crew and so on. But, I mean, I had learned my trade, and he was extremely attentive—not only himself but he had his whole theater group partaking, or at least assisting in the aisles, so that they all would be involved, because he knew he was training them to be his production team.

PB: So this film really has an unknown historical importance, for having brought you and Margarethe von Trotta together and for having introduced Fassbinder to a film crew and giving him a training ground.

VS: Yes, but I had also taken things from Rainer, like the DP [Dietrich Lohmann], who had just finished with Rainer on Love Is Colder Than Death. So they had started filmmaking together. I saw the first cut of that film before we started shooting. And the interesting thing is this young cameraman, whom I had taken an immediate liking to, had done this film with Rainer in very static black-and-white shots, and I asked him for wild colors and everything handheld. Well, he immediately adapted to it, and he was equally at his beginning, and we had a great summer together.

PB: This might be a good moment to shift to a subject that I think is probably one of the first things people associate with you: the New German Cinema. You mentioned that when you were young, there really were no films to watch of the kinds you wanted to see. What kinds of films were showing in Germany in the ’50s? Why did the New German Cinema need to come along and shake things up?

VS: Well, certainly the feeling that there had been nothing was my feeling, but it was probably very subjective, because, in the late ’40s, in the early ’50s, again and again there had been people trying to renew somehow world cinema—let’s put it as simple as that—but they failed. They were rejected by what was then a flourishing industry. This was before television, you know. Movies had millions of spectators.

And there were no German films except The Bridge, by Bernhard Wicki, we could relate to. And on the other hand, there were the French and the American movies. My revelation to become a filmmaker, among others, was On the Waterfront. Even right now, I’m reading the letters of Elia Kazan, so as a role model, he’s still looming there, much more than the French directors, certainly more than the French directors I worked with. But also, we had seen in Germany the French movies before the nouvelle vague, their film noir, like the Rififi series or Casque d’or. So we had a complex of deficiency.

We knew everybody—not to mention the Italian films—so we knew all that and we were wondering, with what you might call hurt pride, why no one was doing this here. Are we incapable of this, or is our culture really dead? The exodus of the Fritz Langs and Billy Wilders and so on, did it really finish off Germany filmmaking once and forever? So it was a challenge on our side, I must say almost a patriotic challenge, to say, “Yes, we can.”

PB: Sometimes we talk about things as movements that just happen to be coincidences of effort, people doing things at the same time, and sometimes we see really coordinated movements. When we think of New German Cinema, we might think of the Oberhausen Manifesto, which makes it feel very much like a real movement. And on the other hand, your work seems fundamentally independent and not part of any specific ideologically or even aesthetically guided mission. To what degree did you have a feeling that, with Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders and Fassbinder and the others, you were really forging a new movement?

VS: Well, Peter, it came out sort of in one season. And not the year of the manifesto [1962]. It was really in the summer of ’65, when all of a sudden there were these filmmakers who had written this manifesto, like Alexander Kluge and Ulrich Schamoni. And filmmakers who were absolutely total autodidacts, like Werner Herzog, who just bought a camera and started filming without ever asking anybody anything.

And the third current was myself, coming from Paris, having had extremely intensive training for five years—sort of the professional one. And these three currents merged in the same summer, with our first pictures coming out, and it was obvious—I mean, we didn’t know each other before, we knew each other through these first films, or let’s say during the prepping of the movies—but it was obvious that we were a movement, whether we wanted it or not, different as we were. An intellectual like Alexander Kluge, or Werner in his own way, then me, and when later Wim and Fassbinder joined, again, they joined this group in a very coherent way. I mean, it was a very open group. It was not sectarian. We were still, including Fassbinder and Wenders and a few others, not much more than a dozen. And for years, we considered ourselves as a solidarity, a community.

PB: Let’s now touch on what was the breakthrough film for New German Cinema, into the mainstream, or at least that’s the way I remember it: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum [1975].

VS: Yes, and not only for myself. One reviewer wrote at the time that this was the breakthrough, and he didn’t mean the breakthrough of Volker Schlöndorff the filmmaker, but the breakthrough of German filmmaking, of our New German Cinema. I mean, so far, we had more or less honest results in art-house theaters, and this was the first movie that really got through to the major audience. And maybe not even for its cinematic merits, I’d say. It was because it became the expression of the credo of a whole generation, toward what had become of ’68, of what had become of the student movement, the relation between violence and protest, around the Baader-Meinhof Group, of course.

And this somehow was the merit of the movie, that it seemed to find common ground for lots of people where you would not have expected that an audience would go for that, would be politically so engaged. That was the real surprise.

PB: Well, first of all, it’s an amazing film, just as a piece of moviegoing. I think it appeals first because it works so well as a film. But I think it also has a really timeless way of capturing an anxiety that we all should feel about state power, and our distrust of the way it’s used. And how fragile our situation is.

VS: That’s exactly what was the big surprise. You know, Margarethe was codirector on the film, so we toured the world with it later on, and we were surprised—whether it was in Quebec, where there was a lot of unrest and student revolt at the time, or in Argentina or even in Russia—that people thought the movie was made about their situation.

That was especially striking in Russia but, of course, comprehensible, because she’s fighting a bureaucracy, she’s fighting a police machine that controls in the name of state everything. So you’re absolutely right. This was Berkeley, this was Chicago. It was everywhere at the time.

PB: From Katharina Blum through The Tin Drum [1979] in many ways must have been a very heavy period of your career. Let’s talk about bringing The Tin Drum to the screen. That adaptation by itself requires so many decisions to be made. The book is so huge, and Günter Grass, the author, unlike Bertolt Brecht, is there.

VS: I was at first intimidated by him, but somehow I liked the challenge, and to this day, by the way, we remain friends. What’s so interesting is I didn’t want to make this movie. I thought it was a huge challenge whether one could make a movie at all about it, but that certainly it wouldn’t be me. I thought it needed more anarchy or somehow a different type of director. I don’t know, Polanski would have come to mind.

So sometimes when you feel that a thing can’t be done or it’s not for you, you put more rigor into making it than in certain pieces where you’re passionately convinced that this is going to be the one and only, and then you get self-indulgent and the results will punish you terribly.

I think at the beginning of The Tin Drum, I was really looking around for advice. I asked Günter Grass how he came to write it. It was a very interesting process. I asked Jean-Claude Carrière [who worked with Schlöndorff on the script] a lot about his early work with Tati, as well as with Buñuel. And so the gestation took at least a year before we actually started writing. I was extremely insecure, and that’s the way it goes. Sometimes it’s when you’re really challenged that the best in you comes out.

PB: The Tin Drum would certainly go in the category of books that some people would say were unfilmable, too big. And then you turn around, not so long later, and take on Swann in Love [1984]—again, not what most people would say was an easy rendering to the screen.

VS: The difference was, at the beginning I didn’t really like Günter Grass’s literature or his novels. Ever since I came to France at age sixteen, I was in love with everything Proust ever wrote. So The Tin Drum had somehow been imposed upon me by my German heritage. Swann was really a labor of love for me.

PB: Later, when you were working in New York, was that a significantly different experience or was it just a change of language, a change of scenery, but the same independent filmmaking that you were always doing?

VS: Well, funny enough, I felt like I was coming home. Meaning, before coming to France, I fed on American films and on American culture, and I grew up in the heart of the American zone of Germany, which was Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, and so on. There were more American men, certainly, than Germans around us. I was totally Americanized, between age six and twelve, including by Mark Twain and later Hemingway and Faulkner. We lived in a little American suburb, with the families of the officers who came to Germany, and by some geographical accident, I was right in the middle of all that. So in that sense, coming to New York was like I finally got to the place where it all started.

And right for the first film, Death of a Salesman [1985], Michael Ballhaus was there, so we knew how we were going to shape our crew. Our producers were Arthur Miller and Dustin Hoffman, and they let us be, because they had the feeling we knew how to do it. And even in the later films, you felt that this independent film scene in New York was very much shaped on what the French nouvelle vague, what the European films since the early ’60s, had imported. So I had absolutely no problem whatsoever.

PB: What possessed you to sit down with Billy Wilder [for the 1988 conversations that became Billy, How Did You Do It?]?

VS: It was really part of this invitation to do Death of a Salesman, and I felt so much at ease, bathing in American culture and to be in New York. I would never have gone back to Germany if it hadn’t been for the fall of the Wall, five years later.

I was curious, of course, to see how others had done it before me. How the immigrants had done it. And Billy Wilder, who was a fan of Katharina Blum, wrote me a letter at the time. We became friends. And I was above all curious to know how, while still being such a European, he could be such a totally American filmmaker, how he could achieve that incredible feat.

PB: But you did end up going back, after the fall of the Wall . . .

VS: Yes. I’m not a religious person, but I felt like it was a calling. What are you doing here? You should be in Berlin. So that’s what I did, and I never regretted it. These last twenty years were very fascinating, to see how things change.

I came back to make movies, because I thought these two societies coming together, with such opposite departures, could only produce very, very good stories. I had not foreseen that I would get involved with the studio where Wilder and Fritz Lang and others had worked, that I would end up spending seven or eight years running a studio. But that was part of the reunification. It was part of what was happening in Berlin.

PB: If we look back over the last ten years and compare it to when you started out, what’s changed in you as a filmmaker? And what’s changed, as you look around, in the industry itself?

VS: Well, certainly the industry changed totally. I didn’t change too much, let’s put it that way. What became more important is the work with the actors, because we are so freed through digital technology. As a director, you don’t have to get involved a lot with the pure technical craft, which used to be a good part of our job. So you can spend so much more time with the actors and focus on just that.

I feel the progress also as a liberation. It is much easier to work in a free and even improvising way than it ever was before. You can catch the moment better, and even in the editing, to finally have overcome all the old syntax and grammar of filmmaking. Because now, in a sense, everything goes, but at the same time, the storyline becomes so much more important because the only way to hook people is through a story and characters—which has been true forever. So that didn’t change.

The industry, the way producers and people come together, has certainly changed a lot. It has exploded into millions or thousands of participants, whereas it used to be, as I said, we were a dozen when we started. In all of France, I don’t know, there were maybe a dozen producers. You knew them. You’d say this project might be for him and that other for somebody else. In the late ’60s, early ’70s, you could still have the feeling that you knew every movie made in the world in the last ten or twenty years. This is lost. We’re in an atomized universe, so I suppose young filmmakers are much more lost than we used to be.

PB: It’s very exciting to have a new film from you here, especially one that’s been so anticipated. If you were introducing Diplomacy to an audience, what would you say, in your few words?

VS: Well, I’d say this is about the power of the word and of convincing somebody to do the right thing. It’s literally the title; it’s about diplomacy. It’s not about Germans and French, or a German general. It’s not even about morals—should we destroy a city or not? It literally is what the conviction of one man, through talking and through tricking and through lying and through being honest and everything combined, can achieve, and that there could be words to finish wars. That is really what I’m passionate about in this film, and, of course, on the side to celebrate Paris, which for me was not difficult.

The dedication of the movie at the end to Richard Holbrook is not just a gesture. That is the whole deeper meaning, that wherever you look in the world, you have a feeling that most conflicts are totally stupid and unnecessary. They’re not even about territorial conquests. It’s all about things that people have in their minds, the idea of an enemy, the way to fight them. And so, words . . . I think words can change reality.

A Conversation with Volker Schlöndorff

By Peter Becker

ON FILM / INTERVIEWS — OCT 16, 2014

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3328-a-conversation-with-volker-schl-ndorff

Michael Haneke: The Author’s Signature

Happy End (Directed by Michael Haneke)

Born in Germany in 1942, Haneke was raised in Austria, by actor-director father and his mother who also acted. He graduated from the University of Vienna, then found work as a film critic and a tv director. He took up filmmaking in the late 1980s, drawing on his interests in philosophy and psychology from his time at college. “In all of my work I’m trying to create a dialogue, in which I want to provoke the recipients, stimulate them to use their own imaginations,” the writer-director said in an interview in The New York Times. “I don’t just say things recipients want to hear, flatter their egos or comfort them by agreeing with them. I have to provoke them, to take them as seriously as I take myself. When I see a film or read a book, that’s what I’m expecting, to be taken seriously. I want to be led to question myself, to question things I assume I know.”

His first feature film. Der siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent) (1989) tells the story of a young family and their dreams of moving to Australia. It’s violent ending was a precursor of themes he was going to develop in later films. Since then Haneke has built up a consistency in his choice of topics and in the cold, resolute visual approach of his films. Although his films are considered violent, nearly all the actual violence, as in Greek tragedy, occurs off camera, avoiding the violent excesses and clichés of mainstream Hollywood. His eye focuses, instead, on the everyday harshness and cruelties of modern life: the small-minded acts of victimisation, the inability to pay attention, the deceptions of class and wealth. 

Haneke’s early films, such as Benny’s Video (1992) and 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) (1994), were modest successes on the European film circuit. It wasn’t until, in 2001, La Pianiste, that Haneke came to  wider attention and was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes, affording Haneke worldwide exposure. The next few years saw the release of Caché (2005) and the American remake of Funny Games (2007), Haneke’s most ­cynical work, whose Austrian precursor had been released in 1997. For both Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon) (2009) and Amour (2012), he received the Palme d’Or at Cannes; the latter also won him the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In addition to his work in cinema, Haneke ­occasionally directs opera and teaches film. 

The following interview with writer-director Michael Haneke was conducted by Hillary Weston for Criterion during the release of Happy End. In her introduction to the interview she observes: 

‘Master of the austere, Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has spent his career unnerving audiences with his meticulously constructed, relentlessly provocative commentaries on modern Europe. And as with all his best work, his latest, Happy End, is both intellectually probing and utterly engrossing. Reuniting him with two of his greatest collaborators, Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, this bone-dry satire infuses the story of a dysfunctional family with the director’s longstanding thematic preoccupations with technology, surveillance, and the sins of the bourgeoisie. While at the Toronto International Film Festival for the North American premiere of Happy End, which opens this week in New York, Haneke sat down with me to talk about his early experiences falling in love with cinema and the films that have shaped his singular aesthetic.’

I’m curious if you remember your first experience in a cinema.

The first film I did and didn’t see was Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet. My grandma took me to see it. The film opens with very dark, gloomy shots of the castle and very disturbing music. I was so frightened that I started crying and disturbing the whole audience, so my grandmother had to take me out.

That must have unconsciously influenced you in some way. Is there a particular filmmaker who turned you on to the idea of pursuing cinema later on?

When I was young, there were so many things I wanted to do. First, I wanted to be a concert pianist, but I didn’t have the talent for it. Then I wanted to be an actor, because both of my parents were actors as well, but then I failed the admissions test for acting school—I had to do a performance and I was not accepted. So then I started to write. I became a critic and saw a lot of things, which led me to imagine that I might be able to do it myself. If I had to name one specific person who led me to reflect on that, I would have to say it was Robert Bresson.

What was it about Bresson’s work that spoke to you?

What strikes me about Bresson is the seriousness he brings to the medium itself and to the viewer. I also like his gaze. The fact that he had the ability to invent a personal, unique language that reproduces his way of perceiving the world—that’s something very difficult to do. Most filmmakers take cinematic clichés and use them as building blocks for their movies. But finding an individual voice, a signature for your work, is extremely difficult, and there are only a few filmmakers who have been able to do that. I see those filmmakers as beacons in cinema. I’m thinking of such directors as Tarkovsky and Cassavetes.

You’ve had such enduring collaborations with actors like Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant. I’d love to know more about how you work with them.

There isn’t a specific approach, and I don’t have a theory for this. But what I can say is that I love actors and I love working with them. It’s all about creating a sense of trust, so that the actors know that you’re there to support them, which leads them to be able to give their best. It’s when actors feel the director doesn’t understand them or is an idiot that they’re going to clam up. My students are constantly asking me, “How do you work with actors? What’s the secret?” And I have to tell them that there’s no method. Each actor is different, and you have to work with them differently. I’ve worked with the same actors frequently because I know them and I’m able to write to their strengths and weaknesses. There starts to be continuity in the collaboration, which increases the likelihood of getting good results. When I’m working with Isabelle Huppert, for instance, she reads the script and understands it, and we don’t have to prepare for a long time discussing the character’s intentions.

What part of the filmmaking process do you take the most pleasure in?

Re-recording and sound mixing. By that point you’re in a situation without stress and all the parts have come together and you can make things better. I’m a freak about sound, so we mix for two months—it’s very luxurious, but it’s very satisfying for me. I’ve had a very good mixer for years and years. I’m an auditory person, not a visual person. For many years I worked as a stage director, and I would sit below the stage while my actors were rehearsing with my gaze down. The actors would say, “But you’re not even looking at me!” and I would answer, “But I can see you better that way. If I’m concentrating on your voice, then I can hear the slightest error, whereas if I’m looking at you I might overlook it.”

When you’re writing a script, is your mind also working as a director and conceiving how the film will be told visually? I imagine that was of particular importance with ‘Happy End’, where numerous scenes take place on cell phones and computer screens.

The films that have motivated me, impressed me, and left a mark on me are films made by authors—directors who also write their own scripts. When they’re writing, they know who is going to be directing their script, and they have in mind what the final product will be. They’re dealing with the subject matter, the dialogue, and the way it’s going to be filmed, all at the same time. For example, in Code Unknown, there is a scene that consists of a series of very long takes that last about ten minutes. It’s a very complicated scene to set up, and it would have been impossible for me to write it if I wasn’t directing it, just as it would have been impossible to direct it if I hadn’t written it. When I was writing I was thinking about how I was going to stage it, how I would direct that scene. If the person directing isn’t the person writing the script, then you’re in a situation where you’re creating something that’s more conventional, where you’re not taking risks. The story may be very well told and technically very well done—that’s the case in Hollywood studio productions, where movies are made by professional technicians and experts in their field—but it’s very impersonal. The form can never be treated separately from the subject matter. But that kind of approach is only possible with a writer-director.

Are there literary authors whose work you find yourself returning to or feel you have a kinship with?

There are many—I have more than six thousand books in my home! One of my desert island books is Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. I feel a strong kinship with German literature. I also think of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, but also Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the greatest of the great. Among contemporary authors, I like Michel Houellebecq. Every week I read at least one book, so it’s very difficult to answer!

So are you reading more than you’re watching?

Yes. But I rewatch certain films again and again, because if a film is really good, even if you have seen it twenty times, you can learn more from it. I’m also forced to rewatch because I teach cinema, so every year, when the new students come, we have one course where I show different classic films. I start every year with The Mirror, and then Au hasard Balthazar and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach and A Woman Under the Influence—the great classic films.

Though you’re not regularly watching new films, are there contemporary filmmakers whose work you admire?

I like Asghar Farhadi. I think he’s really a great writer. His screenplays are amazing and on the level of Chekhov. I also like Yorgos Lanthimos, Ruben Östlund . . . There are new people who are very interesting. Also, they’re all writer-directors.

– The Author’s Signature: A Conversation with Michael Haneke. By Hillary Weston

Full article here

Rudy Wurlitzer: Infinite West

Two-Lane Blacktop (Directed by Monte Hellman)

A descendant of the Wurlitzer family of jukebox/organ fame, Rudy Wurlitzer came to prominence with the publication of two short novels Nog (1969) and Flats (1970). Praised by Thomas Pynchon and a key text of the countercultural movement, Nog follows a lone narrator on an endless journey through an American West filled with ‘obsessive monologues, disintegrating memories, hoped-for horizons, buried myths, paranoid plans.’ 

Wurlitzer became a screenwriter around the same time, first collaborating with Jim McBride on the post-apocalyptic Glen and Randa (1971), before being approached by director Monte Hellman, an admirer of Nog, to rewrite a script called Two-Lane Blacktop – an existential road movie that is a logical outcome of the elliptical and filmic aspects of Wurlitzer’s fiction.

Two-Lane Blacktop stars singer-songwriter James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson alongside frequent Sam Peckinpah collaborator Warren Oates. Heavily publicised prior to its release (Esquire dubbed it ‘the Movie of the Year’ and published the screenplay in its entirety) but then ignored and dumped by distributors, Two-Lane’s reputation has grown over the years to become a canonical ’70s film. Wurlitzer went on to write Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) for Sam Peckinpah; Walker (1987) for Alex Cox; also working on Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), Volker Schlöndorff’s Voyager (1991) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993). 

Wurlitzer was working on a screenplay with Michelangelo Antonioni at the time of the director’s death. He wrote the libretto for the Philip Glass’ opera In The Penal Colony, and has also written scripts for the television courthouse drama 100 Centre Street, directed by Sidney Lumet.

The following is an edited extract of an interview with Rudy Wulitzer for the A.V. Club in 2011 in which he discusses his early screenwriting career:

Two-Lane Blacktop (Directed by Monte Hellman)

AVC: How did Monte Hellman approach you about writing ‘Two-Lane Blacktop?’ You were best known then for your experimental novel ‘Nog’, which doesn’t exactly seem like Hollywood material.

RW: I know! That was like, ‘Wow!’ [Laughs.]

AVC: Had you given any thought to writing for film before that?

RW: I was writing these books one after the other – Nog, Flats, and Quake – and I didn’t see it at that time, but it was sort of a trilogy. So, I was broke, because those books weren’t exactly going to be on Oprah. I didn’t want to teach. I was a bartender for a while and I didn’t want to do that. So it was great. It was a real adventure, and I really liked L.A. in those days. I’m totally alienated from it now, but it was sort of a dreamy place. And I didn’t know that many people there, which was a great benefit. I was left alone, you know? I had written some of Nog there, and that was great, because there was a certain kind of freedom involved.

AVC: How did you go from writing ‘Nog’ to writing screenplays?

RW: Well, I have a visual imagination, so it was not an awkward jump into the form. In fact, I liked the form a lot. Especially when I was left alone. In those days, I didn’t feel sublimated to the director as much – at least, at first. With Monte, he just shot what I wrote. And I can remember an old, grizzled producer saying, ‘Well, son, enjoy it, because that ain’t gonna ever happen again.’ [Laughs.] And yeah, he was right. I mean, sort of. Although Sam pretty much shot what I wrote. And Hal [Ashby]would’ve. I worked a little bit on Coming Home for him. I did the last draft, and he was wonderful. I would’ve gone on to work with him anytime.

Two-Lane Blacktop (Directed by Monte Hellman)

 AVC: Was the raft scene in ‘Pat Garrett’ in your script? It’s a purely visual moment, and seems to be much of a piece with Peckinpah’s oeuvre.

RW: Yes, I wrote that and MGM hated it. And Sam, when his final cut reemerged some time later, he put it back in. It was an important scene for me, because it worked as a metaphor for the whole Western myths of origins. It just worked on a poetic level.

AVC: Which is not the kind of thing you can say to a studio executive.

RW: No! [Laughs.] Are you crazy? ‘There’s the door!’ But in terms of the whole myth of the West and the frontier – which also mirrored my own sense of internal frontiers, the myth of freedom and all that – in this last book I wrote, a lot of those scripts and research and filmic ideas I was left with found their way into that book, called The Drop Edge Of Yonder. It seemed to complete something for me, because I used the best of that.

AVC: The visual quality of the writing in Nog is so important. It’s almost the only thing that allows you to keep your bearings. You can see how Monte Hellman would latch onto that.

RW: Monte is unlike any director I’ve ever known. He’s very innocent, in his way. What he liked – and, I think, he had in his earlier films that he did with Jack Nicholson – what really turns him on is to be surprised. I think he thought, ‘This guy will give me something new.’ It’s the way he casts, too, for better or for worse. They’re mostly people who’ve never acted before. So, there’s a mixture. With Two-Lane, what’s so interesting about it now, in retrospect, is the non-actors, like James Taylor, and the girl, Laurie [Bird], mixing in with the real old pros, like Warren Oates and Harry Dean [Stanton]. It gives it a strange energy, which, at the time, people were sort of freaked by. But now, I find it all quite lovable, don’t you? [Laughs.]

Two-Lane Blacktop (Directed by Monte Hellman)

AVC: Absolutely. I love James Taylor’s performance.

RW: Yeah, and he was totally out of his mind. [Laughs.]

AVC: I think it’s, by far, the best thing he’s done in any medium.

RW: Yeah, that’s because he didn’t know what he was doing. And none of us did. It was a process that – more than any other film that I’ve been involved with, except maybe when I worked with Robert Frank – existed in the present. Films are such a linear medium, and they depend so much on the overloaded cost of things, and how it’s set up before, and where it’s gonna go after, so you’re locked into this linear process. But Monte, with his extraordinary openness and innocence, didn’t play by those rules. He didn’t know that he wasn’t playing by them. It never occurred to him.

AVC: You mentioned the juxtaposition of the road movie and the internal journey, as well, which is something that very much plays into the books and the films. It seems to be pretty consistent.

RW: To go back to what you were saying about why Monte chose me, for all the strangeness of Nog, it does represent a very eccentric road movie. So, I think that’s what appealed to him, one of the things.

Two-Lane Blacktop (Directed by Monte Hellman)

AVC: There’s something truly subversive about ‘Two-Lane Blacktop’, which is a movie about a road race that never ends and no one wins.

RW: It didn’t start that way. When I came into the situation, the only thing I kept from the original script was the idea of these race people, the Driver, the Mechanic, and the Girl, and this cross-country race. But nothing else. So I was very free. I hung out with car freaks in the San Fernando Valley and read all the magazines. I didn’t know a car from a cow before that. It was like a great new language. And the way Monte cast it, with these non-actors like James Taylor and Laurie and Dennis Wilson, and then with these old, great character actors; the balance was really interesting in terms of language and energy, this sort of innocence compared to this high-powered professionalism of Warren Oates. As far as the ending goes, we didn’t know how to end it, and it seemed wrong to end it with them winning or losing; that wasn’t where it was at. The whole thing was about the process of being on the move, the road to nowhere. Of course, when the film opened, people really thought it was nuts. They were expecting a classic story of winners and losers and races, all that stuff. And it didn’t happen.

AVC: Was there a model for the character of GTO, played by Warren Oates?

RW: Not really. A lot of it was just Warren. I just went for it, because I was working against the one-dimensional innocence of the non-actors. They didn’t have that range. They had one note. I wanted to write something that involved a lot of notes that would help balance it. So that’s what I was trying to do. Make it over the top and with humor. The non-actors’ parts didn’t have any humor.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: There’s also, in both ‘Two-Lane’ and ‘Pat Garrett’, a sense of men wrestling with the roles available to them. Pat Garrett and the Driver want to be tough guys, but in a sense, pushing toward that archetype destroys them.

RW: Some of it probably had to do with my own relationship to the film world. One of the things I saw looking at these early films once again was how sublimated the screenwriter is to the powers that be: director and stars. It’s something that I can’t do any more. Although, that said, with those scripts I was freer and looser and more connected to my own instincts than afterwards. So that’s the irony of it. But it was certainly a subject even before the film business, that one has as a writer, and also where I came from – in other words, a complicated relationship with authority.

AVC: You’re dealing with this foundational American myth of the frontier and the road movie, the idea that you find yourself by leaving home. Other countries don’t have that in the same way.

RW: You could say that represents our myths of origins. I’ve always been attracted to that in a lot of different ways, because I’ve always been a kind of nomadic character.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: Did you move around a lot as a kid? When did the wanderlust kick in for you?

RW: The wanderlust kicked in when I was about 16 or 17. I got a job on an oil tanker as a wiper in the engine room. We went from Philadelphia to Spanish Morocco to Kuwait. And then after that, I spent a lot of time in Europe. Paris.

AVC: And that was in the ’50s or the ’60s?

RW: The ’60s. I was influenced a lot by an old poet that I knew, Robert Graves. So I hung out with him. New York in the ’60s was a very exciting place for me, because the first little film I did was with Claes Oldenburg, and it was kind of a happening film. So, I was influenced by Claes and [Robert] Rauschenberg, and the whole art scene, [Jackson] Pollock. And the freedom. The whole jazz scene in New York was great, Ornette Coleman and those kind of people. And the poets: [William S.] Burroughs, I knew, and [Allen] Ginsberg, and Phil Glass was a very good friend of mine. He was working as a plumber then. I had a job at the Five Spot. It was just a kind of extraordinary time of complete permission. The cliché about the ’60s really seemed to be true in the Lower East Side in those days.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: The movies don’t celebrate that kind of freedom, though. They’re about the dangers of freedom, more than its possibility. It seems significant that the race in ‘Two-Lane’ goes from west to east, which is the opposite of the great westward expansion.

RW: Yes. There’s the myth of that. And also, in a literary sense, as I look back on it, what I was questioning was the whole naturalism of the narrative throughline. That was, in a literary sense, what I was trying to do in the books, but also in Two-Lane. Two-Lane related to those three early books more than any other film or book, except perhaps for Drop Edge. That’s an interesting way to think about it.

AVC: There are little bits of Western mythology that thread through them as well, but in ‘Pat Garrett’ you deal with it directly. As with a lot of Peckinpah’s movies, it’s about the seduction of those myths, and also the incredibly destructive power of them.

RW: I was talking about this the other day to this friend of mine, the director Alex Cox, who’s a big fan of that film. And we were saying what’s really interesting, a few people have pointed out about that film, is the politics of it. The Santa Fe ring, and how they were controlling things. That sort of mirrored in Peckinpah’s mind the whole thing he was going through with MGM – being controlled by these other forces where you aren’t quite sure what they’re thinking, you’re at the mercy of. So independence is a loaded thing, and you pay a big price for it at times. But it’s worth it.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: There’s an idea of being in love with self-destruction or nothingness.

RW: That’s an interesting point, because as I look back on that time, I was always sort of skating on the edge of nihilism, but always hoping or trying to find a way to transcend it. To not let it just be nihilism, but to go for a bigger metaphor, and bigger view. Not always successfully, but that was in the room as well, for me, anyway…

AVC: ‘Pat Garrett’ never made it out in its proper form.

RW: I know, I know. There was all that stuff with MGM and – oh man, it was a nightmare. Peckinpah was on the warpath. But those days, now I realize, ‘My God, that was an amazing time.’ When you could just proceed with a certain degree of autonomy and adventure. It was amazing. I would write one of these crazy books and then go out and make a film, and I didn’t know what all the complaints were about. I thought, ‘Wow, this is great.’ [Laughs.] And then of course, the big, steel doors shut down and it was bad from then on. But the people I worked with, like Monte [Hellman] and Peckinpah, Hal Ashby I worked with awhile, they were all great. And individuals. The whole corporate envelope hadn’t gathered. There were storm clouds on the horizon, but I was so stuck in my own fun, I never saw it coming.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: ‘Pat Garrett’ and ‘Two-Lane Blacktop’, even more so ‘Glen And Randa’, it’s a little hard to believe they got made in the first place.

RW: They couldn’t get made now, that’s for sure. [Laughs.] It’s amazing they were made. Then in the ’80s, of course, it all shifted and changed and became more corporate. The people you were dealing with more were salespeople. Back then, you’d write a script and Monte would say, ‘Yeah, gee, I read this crazy book by you. I’d like to see what you could do.’ So I completely threw everything out and did my own thing, and no one questioned anything. [Laughs.] There were no salespeople in the room. You didn’t have to pitch; you just did your thing. So you were free to go on your own journey, and it was more of a collaboration in that way.

AVC: How did ‘Esquire’ get the idea that ‘Two-Lane Blacktop’ was the ‘movie of the year’ and end up publishing the script?

RW: I don’t know. Somebody must’ve sent them the script, and the script had a certain kind of, I guess, cachet they liked. It was the only script they’d ever published. I think they felt, after the first returns were in, ‘My God, what an insane thing. We’ll never do that one again.’

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: Do you feel like ‘Two-Lane’ and ‘Pat Garrett’ reflect what you had in mind? Or improved on it?

RW: In retrospect, I’m stunned by how they turned out better than I thought they would. At the time, once you’re involved in the whole drama of production and this and that and the personalities, you just don’t know. You’re more aware of the problems and the various cuts. And then when it’s released, and the reviews are mixed at best, you think, ‘Ugh.’ But now, I’m amazed at how good those films are. And it’s not just – well, it is, in a way – that they couldn’t be made now, but the degree of freedom and exploration and spontaneity involved just doesn’t happen now. First of all, films are a hundred times more expensive now, and they’re hooked into a global audience, and it’s all a kind of corporate sell. There’s a sort of magic sense when you’re making a film that you’re just in your own world and trying to work for its own sake. These directors, like Peckinpah, he was amazing. He was crazy and confrontational and inspired and generous, and all these things that now get sublimated. That whole photo-artistic temperament was given full range. So now, I’m fond of those films…

– Interview: Rudy Wurlitzer. By Sam Adams. The A.V. Club, August 26, 2011. Full article here