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