Thursday 12 November 2020

Violence and Realism: An Interview with Arthur Penn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Penn: Yeah, that was a scene I built.


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


Cineaste: How were the bullet hits applied?

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

Cineaste: How long did that scene take to shoot?

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

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


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

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

Cineaste: In that scene Bonnie seems relatively unaffected.

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


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

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

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

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

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

Monday 9 November 2020

Antonioni on ‘Blow-Up’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

Thursday 5 November 2020

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.