Ingmar Bergman: Dialogue on Film

Cries and Whispers (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

The great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman held a seminar with the Fellows of the Center for Advanced Film Studies on October 31, 1975 in which he openly discussed his approach to writing, his preparations for shooting and his relations with his company of actors while filming. 

He had recently completed the masterly ‘Cries and Whispers’ – set in a manor house at the turn of the century where a spinster (Harriet Andersson) is dying, attended by her two sisters and devoted servant. 

Superbly photographed by Sven Nykvist in an elemental style with scarlet backgrounds which give a tremendous force to the anguish of the characters. Bergman was later to comment that ‘all my films can be thought in black and white, except for Cries and Whispers. In the screenplay, I say that I have thought of the colour red as the interior of the soul. When I was a child, I saw the soul as a shadowy dragon, blue as smoke, hovering like an enormous winged creature, half-bird, half-fish. But inside the dragon everything was red.’ 

The film is lustrous and hypnotic with the power of a dream. Light breaks in occasionally from beyond illuminating the characters and their dark lives until the final breakthrough into the exhilarating openness of the world outside.

The following interview is one of Bergman’s most revealing on the manner and process of his artistic work.

Please tell us how you work with actors.

BERGMAN: It can be a very complicated question, and it can be a very simple question. If you want to know exactly how I work together with my actors I can tell you in one minute: I just use my intuition. My only instrument in my profession is my intuition. When I work at the theatre or in the studio with my actors I just feel; I don’t know how to handle the situation, how to collaborate with the artists, with the actors. One thing is very important to me: that an actor is always a creative human being, and what your intuition has to find out is how to make free – do you understand what I mean? – to make free the power, the creative power in the actor or the actress.

I can’t explain how it works. It has nothing to do with magic; it has a lot to do with experience. But I think when I work together with the actors I try to be like a radar – I try to be wide open – because we have to create something together. I give them some stimulations and suggestions and they give me a lot of stimulations and suggestions, and if this fantastic wave of giving and taking is cut off for any reason I have to feel it and I have to look for the reason – good heavens, what has happened? – and I know if we try to work with those waves cut off it is terrifying; it is the hardest, toughest job that exists, both for me and the actors. Some directors work under aggression: the director is aggressive and the actors are aggressive, and they get marvelous results. But to me it is impossible. I have to be in contact, in touch with my actors the whole time. Because what we first of all create when we start a work together is an atmosphere of security around us. And it’s not only me who creates that atmosphere; we are together to create it.

But you know, all those situations, all those decisions, all those very difficult decisions, you have to make hundreds of them every day – I never think. It’s never an intellectual process, it’s just intuition. Afterward you can think it over – What was this? What was that? You can think over every step you have made.

Do you write in the same way?

BERGMAN: Yes, yes, yes. The best time in the writing, I think, is the time when I have no ideas about how to do it. I can lie down on the sofa and I can look into the fire and I can go to the seaside and I can just sit down and do nothing. I just play the game, you know, and it’s wonderful and I make some notes and I can go on for a year. Then, when I have made the plan, the difficult job starts: I have to sit down on my ass every morning at ten o’clock and write the screenplay. And then something very, very strange happens: often the personalities in my scripts don’t want the same thing I want. If I try to force them to do what I want them to do, it will always be an artistic catastrophe. But if I let them free to do what they want and what they tell me, it’s OK.

So I think that is the only way to handle it, because all intellectual decisions must come afterward. You have seen Cries and Whispers, yes? For half a year, I went around and I just had a picture inside about three women walking around in a red room in white clothes and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t understand these damned women – I tried to throw it away, I tried to write it down, I tried to find out what they said to each other, because they whispered. And suddenly it came out that they were watching another woman who was dying in the next room, and then it started. But it took about a year. It always starts with a picture with some kind of tension in it, and then slowly it comes up.

In your films you often confuse reality and dreams, and I wonder if you feel that they are of equal importance.

BERGMAN: You know, you can’t find in any other art, and you can’t create a situation that is so close to dreaming as cinematography when it is at its best. Think only of the time gap: you can make things as long as you want, exactly as in a dream; you can make things as short as you want, exactly as in a dream. As a director, a creator of the picture, you are like a dreamer: you can make what you want, you can construct everything. I think that is one of the most fascinating things that exists.

I think also the reception for the audience of a picture is very, very hypnotic. You sit there in a completely dark room, anonymous, and you look at a lightened spot in front of you and you don’t move. You sit and you don’t move and your eyes are concentrated on that white spot on the wall. That is some sort of magic. I think it’s also magic that two times every frame comes and stands still for twenty-four parts of a second and then it darkens two times; a half part of the time when you see a picture you sit in complete darkness. Isn’t that fascinating? That is magic. It’s quite different when you watch the television: you sit at home, you have light around you, you have people you know around you, the telephone is ringing, you can go out and have a cup of coffee, the children are making noise, I don’t know what – but it is absolutely another situation.

We are in the position to work with the most fascinating medium that exists in the world because like music we go straight to the feeling – not over the intellect – we go straight to the feeling, as in music. Afterward we can start to work with our intellect. If the picture is good, if the suggestions from the creator of the picture are strong enough, they’ll give you thoughts afterward; you’ll start to think; they are intellectually stimulating.

After you have written a script, do you continue to develop the characters during the shooting?

BERGMAN: No. You know, I have always worked with trained actors; I have never worked with amateurs. An amateur can be himself always and you can put him in situations that give the situation a third dimension, as Vittorio De Sica did inThe Bicycle Thief [a 1947 classic of Italian “neorealism"], but if you work with trained actors you must know exactly what you are going to do with the parts. We make all the discussions before and then we work in the studio, giving each other suggestions. But the whole time we must have in mind what we meant. And it’s very dangerous to go away and suddenly start to improvise. You can improvise, of course, in the studio, but if you improvise you have to be very prepared, because to improvise on an improvisation is always shit. If you are very prepared and know how to do it, you can go back if your improvisation suddenly one day fades away, which it does. Of course it does. Inspiration, enthusiasm, everything like that is beautiful, but I don’t like it. When we are in the studio we have to be very strict.

What is your relation to the camera? Do you feel you have to overcome the technical limitations of the camera?

BERGMAN: If intuition is our mental instrument, the camera is our physical instrument. I think the camera is erotic. It is the most exciting little machine that exists. To me, just to work together with my cameraman, Sven Nykvist, to see a human face with the camera and with a zoom to come closer, to see the scene, to see the face changing, it’s the most fascinating thing that exists. The choreography of the actors in relation to the camera is very important. If the actor feels that he is in a good position, in a logical position, he can be with his back to the camera; it doesn’t matter. The camera has to be the best friend of the actors, and the actors have to be secure with our handling of the camera. They must feel that we are taking care of them.

Are there many young directors here? Very good. We who are directors must never forget that we are behind the camera and the actor is in front of the camera; he is nude, his soul is nude. If he has confidence in us, we have enormous responsibility. We have something fantastic: we have somebody in our hands and we can destroy him or we can help him in his creative job. To be behind the camera is never difficult, but to be in front of the camera is always a challenge, a difficulty, to be there with your face and your body and all the limitations you have in your soul and all the limitations you feel of your face and your movements, I don’t know what. What is strange is that we must not lie to the actors; we have to be absolutely true to them. Better actors like the truth more.

When is the moment you stage the movement or position of camera? When I read the screenplays you write, they always say only what the actors are saying, a bit like a play. When is the moment you state, “The camera will be here"?

BERGMAN: The evening before. When I come home in the evening I just sit down with the script and I read the next day’s schedule very carefully. Then I make up my mind about it and I just note the choreography of the actors and the camera. And then in the early morning when I meet Sven – you know, we have worked so many years together – we just very shortly, in five minutes, go through the scene, and I tell him about my ideas for different positions of the camera and the different positions of the actors and the atmosphere of the whole scene. Then we can go on the whole day; it is not necessary to have any discussions. He is a marvelous man. He is very silent and very shy. He is nice. And suddenly everything is there – without any complications – and I can look in the camera and everything I wanted is there.

Do you rehearse with the actors on the set before you plan your shots?

BERGMAN: No, never. That is a very good question. Because if you rehearse with trained actors they go from the mood of intuition to what they are trained to, to stage acting every evening. It’s very difficult. If you go on rehearsing with the actors too much, more than just to learn their lessons, and if you rehearse with them several days, some new process in the actors’ minds starts. An intellectual process, I think, and that process can be very good, but it’s very dangerous for filming because you have something in his eyes suddenly, some sort of “Now I do that“ and "I do that" and “I do that." He’s conscious of what he’s doing. He has to do it intuitively.

Just before you start filming, when you get to the set, you said you know as little about the film as the actors do.

BERGMAN: But remember, I have written the script. I have lived with this script perhaps for one or two years. The preparation for the next day, in details, I wait with it as long as possible. Of course, when I made The Magic Flute [his film of Mozart’s opera] we had to prepare everything before.

You use women as your main characters quite a lot, and I was wondering how you relate to them, how you identify with them? Your male characters aren’t very much in the foreground.

BERGMAN: I like more to work with women. I have many good friends who are actors and I like tremendously to work together with them, but in filmmaking it’s a job for good nerves and I think the women have much better nerves than men have. It’s so. I think the problems very often are the common problems. They are not, on the first hand, women; they are human beings. And God forgive me, but I have the feeling that the prima donnas always are male. I think it has to do with our whole social life and the male part and the female part that they have to play, and it’s very difficult to be an actor; it’s not so difficult to be an actress in our society.

Would you just talk a little more about what you say to an actor? Do you do exercises with them?

BERGMAN: No, no, no, no. Good heavens, no. I say nothing. I promise.

Do you tell them the message of the film?

BERGMAN: No, good heavens, no. No, no, no, no. I don’t know anything about messages or symbols or things like that. Sometimes when I have the message everything goes wrong. So we don’t talk about those things. We just talk professionally: “Be careful. Be slower. Don’t be in a hurry. Listen." You know, the most important of all is the ear – the ear for the director and the ear for the actors. Listen to each other. Very often when I see a scene I just close my eyes and listen, because if it sounds right it also looks right. It’s very strange.

Now we have only a minute to conclude this, to me, wonderful meeting, but I wanted just to add something. Perhaps it sounds like an old uncle, but I am, so it doesn’t matter. May I give you an advice?

Yes, please.

BERGMAN: It is a relief to me to know that if I have an intention, if I have a passion and an obsession, if I want to tell somebody something and if I want to touch somebody, the film helps me. But if I have nothing to say and I just want to make a film, I don’t make the film. It’s so stimulating, the craftsmanship of filmmaking is so terribly stimulating, dangerous, and obsessing, so you can be very tempted...but if you have nothing to come with, try to be honest with yourself and don’t make the picture. If you have something to come with, if you have emotion and passion, a picture in your head, a tension – even if you aren’t very technical – the strange thing is that having worked on the script and having worked with the camera for days and days, suddenly when you have cut it together, the thing you wanted to tell is there.

I have a very good example, Antonioni’s L’Avventura (Italy, 1960). The picture is a mess – he had no idea where to put the camera; he had no money; the actors went away; I think he had enormous problems the whole time – but he wanted to tell us something about the loneliness of the human being, and I can see this picture time after time and I don’t know what touches me most: how he succeeds without knowing how to do it or what he wants to say. That is very important; that is the most important of all. You have to have something to come with, to give other people.

Picturemaking is some sort of responsibility, that is what I think.

– Originally published in American Film, January-February 1976

Billy Wilder: The Art of Collaboration

Sunset Boulevard (Directed by Billy Wilder)

Billy Wilder's big break came when Paramount chose to team him with the accomplished screenwriter Charles Brackett. Although they were completely unlike in almost every respect, the relationship worked well, resulting in a number of great pictures, including Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn, and others. Wilder had collaborated with other writers on projects in the past. Wilder created few scripts without a collaborator over his whole writing career. 

His work on Ninotchka (“Garbo laughs!”) also United director Ernst Lubitsch with writer Billy Wilder. Wilder idolised Lubitsch, and the sign on his office read: “How would Lubitsch have done it?” Soon, Billy Wilder decided he wanted to be a director, too. Because he felt filmmakers were botching his and Brackett's screenplays, he began to lose patience with them. When a journalist once asked him if he believed it was vital for a filmmaker to be able to write, his unimpressed view immediately apparent. “No, but knowing how to read is quite helpful.” 

Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland feature in Wilder's directorial debut, The Major and the Minor. It was such a hit that Wilder was able to keep directing, exceeding the studio's expectations. After filming Five Graves to Cairo (1943), he made Castle Keep (1944) with Erich von Stroheim and Franchot Tone, based on Rommel's North Africa campaign. 

Double Indemnity (1944) is unanimously regarded as one of the finest film noirs movies and was nominated for seven Academy Awards even though it was not all that succesful at the box office. Wilder worked with acclaimed crime author Raymond Chandler on the script for Double Indemnity, which was based on a novel by James M. Cain. Despite the fact that they disliked each other, their partnership resulted in a great script, as well as some of the most pithy lines to be found in any movie. A testament to Wilder's directorial skill is that he managed to get noteworthy performances out of his actors, such as Edward G. Robinson, for the film's harrowing story of desire and murder. 

Brackett and Wilder reunited for The Lost Weekend (1945), based on a novel that Wilder had read while on a train journey, and the result was a riveting, uncompromising drama about a writer struggling with his alcoholism. Ray Milland won an Oscar for his role as the alcoholic Don Birnam. Their greatest collaboration followed when they were paired once more to work on Billy Wilder’s masterly Sunset Boulevard. 

In 1996 James Linville conducted an interview for The Paris Review with screenwriter-director Billy Wilder on his extensive career. Published as Billy Wilder, The Art of Screenwriting No. 1 it remains one of the most celebrated accounts of the screenwriter's craft. In the following extract Billy Wilder discusses working with the writers Charles Brackett on Sunset Boulevard, I.A.L. Diamond on Some Like it Hot and Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity.

WILDER
For a long time I wanted to do a comedy about Hollywood. God forgive me, I wanted to have Mae West and Marlon Brando. Look what became of that idea! Instead it became a tragedy of a silent-picture actress, still rich, but fallen down into the abyss after talkies. ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’ I had that line early on. Someplace else I had the idea for a writer who is down on his luck. It didn’t quite fall into place until we got Gloria Swanson.

We had gone to Pola Negri first. We called her on the phone, and there was too much Polish accent. You see why some of these people didn’t make the transition to sound. We went to Pickfair and visited Mary Pickford. Brackett began to tell her the story, because he was the more serious one. I stopped him: No, don’t do it. I waved him off. She was going to be insulted if we told her she was to play a woman who begins a love affair with a man half her age. I said to her, We’re very sorry, but it’s no use. The story gets very vulgar.

Gloria Swanson had been a big star, in command of an entire studio. She worked with DeMille. Once she was dressed, her hair done to perfection, they placed her on a sedan and two strong men would carry her onto the set so no curl would be displaced. But later she did a couple of sound pictures that were terrible. When I gave her the script, she said, I must do this, and she turned out to be an absolute angel.

I used stars wherever I could in Sunset Boulevard. I used Cecil B. DeMille to play the big important studio director. I used Erich von Stroheim to play the director who directed the first pictures with Swanson, which he in fact did. I thought, Now, if there is a bridge game at the house of a silent star, and if I am to show that our hero, the writer, has been degraded to being the butler who cleans ashtrays, who would be there? I got Harry B. Warner, who played Jesus in DeMille’s biblical pictures, Anna Q. Nilsson, and Buster Keaton, who was an excellent bridge player, a tournament player. The picture industry was only fifty or sixty years old, so some of the original people were still around. Because old Hollywood was dead, these people weren’t exactly busy. They had the time, got some money, a little recognition. They were delighted to do it...

Sunset Boulevard (Directed by Billy Wilder)

You’re never quite sure how your work will be received or the course your career will take. We knew we’d gotten a strong reaction at the first big preview of Sunset Boulevard. After the screening, Barbara Stanwyck went up and kissed the hem of Gloria Swanson’s robe, or dress, or whatever she was wearing that night. Gloria had given such an incredible performance. Then in the big Paramount screening room, Louis B. Mayer said loudly, We need to kick Wilder out of America if he’s going to bite the hand that feeds him. He was with his contingent from MGM, the king then, but in front of all his department heads, I told him just what he could do. I walked out just as the reception was starting.

Although the movie was a great success, it was about Hollywood, exaggerated and dramatized, and it really hit a nerve. So on the way down the steps I had to pass all those people from MGM, the class studio . . . all those people who thought this picture would soil the taste of Hollywood.

After Sunset Boulevard, Brackett and I parted friends. Twelve years together, but the split had been coming. It’s like a box of matches: you pick up the match and strike it against the box, and there’s always fire, but then one day there is just one small corner of that abrasive paper left for you to strike the match on. It was not there anymore. The match wasn’t striking. One of us said, Look, whatever I have to give and whatever you have to offer, it’s just not enough. We can end on the good note of Sunset Boulevard. A picture that was revolutionary for its day.

INTERVIEWER
How do collaborators work together?

WILDER
Brackett and I used to share two offices together with a secretary in between. When we were writing he always laid down on the couch in my office while I would walk around with a stick in my hand.

INTERVIEWER
Why the stick?

WILDER
I don’t know. I just needed something to keep my hands busy and a pencil wasn’t long enough. He always had the yellow legal tablet, and he wrote in longhand, then we’d hand it to the secretary. Brackett and I would discuss everything, the picture as a whole, the curtain situations—first act, second act and then the end of the picture—and the curtain lines. Then we would break it down and go to a specific scene and discuss the mood and so forth, then we’d figure out what bit of the story we’d tell in those ten pages of the scene.

Some Like It Hot (Directed by Billy Wilder)

INTERVIEWER
Was it the same working with I. A. L. Diamond?

WILDER
Pretty much the same as with Brackett. Discuss the story, break it down into scenes, and then I would dictate and he would type. Or he would sit there thinking, and I would write on a yellow tablet and show it to him.

How’s this? I’d say.

No. No good, he’d say. Never in an insistent way, however.

Or he might suggest something to me, and I’d shake my head. He’d just take it, tear it up, and put it in the wastebasket, and we’d never come back to it.

We had a great deal of trust in each other. But sometimes with writing you just can’t tell, especially if you’re writing under pressure. Diamond and I were writing the final scene of Some Like It Hot the week before we shot it. We’d come to the situation where Lemmon tries to convince Joe E. Brown that he cannot marry him.

‘Why?’ Brown says.

‘Because I smoke!’

‘That’s all right as far as I’m concerned.’

Finally Lemmon rips his wig off and yells at him, ‘I’m a boy! Because I’m a boy!’

Diamond and I were in our room working together, waiting for the next line—Joe B. Brown’s response, the final line, the curtain line of the film—to come to us. Then I heard Diamond say, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ I thought about it and I said, Well, let’s put in ‘Nobody’s perfect’ for now. But only for the time being. We have a whole week to think about it. We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied. When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn’t trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn’t see it. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ The line had come too easily, just popped out.

Double Indemnity (Directed by Billy Wilder)

INTERVIEWER
I understand your collaboration with Raymond Chandler was more difficult?

WILDER
Yes. Chandler had never been inside a studio. He was writing for one of the hard-boiled serial magazines, The Black Mask—the original pulp fiction—and he’d been stringing tennis rackets to make ends meet. Just before then, James M. Cain had written The Postman Always Rings Twice, and then a similar story, Double Indemnity, which was serialized in three or four installments in the late Liberty magazine.

Paramount bought Double Indemnity, and I was eager to work with Cain, but he was tied up working on a picture at Fox called Western Union. A producer-friend brought me some Chandler stories from The Black Mask. You could see the man had a wonderful eye. I remember two lines from those stories especially: ‘Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool.’ The other is when Marlowe goes to Pasadena in the middle of the summer and drops in on a very old man who is sitting in a greenhouse covered in three blankets. He says, ‘Out of his ears grew hair long enough to catch a moth.’ A great eye . . . but then you don’t know if that will work in pictures because the details in writing have to be photographable.

I said to Joe Sistrom, Let’s give him a try. Chandler came into the studio, and we gave him the Cain story Double Indemnity to read. He came back the next day: I read that story. It’s absolute shit! He hated Cain because of Cain’s big success with The Postman Always Rings Twice.

He said, Well, I’ll do it anyway. Give me a screenplay so I can familiarize myself with the format. This is Friday. Do you want it a week from Monday?

Holy shit, we said. We usually took five to six months on a script.

Don’t worry, he said. He had no idea that I was not only the director but was supposed to write it with him.

Double Indemnity (Directed by Billy Wilder)

He came back in ten days with eighty pages of absolute bullshit. He had some good phrases of dialogue, but they must have given him a script written by someone who wanted to be a director. He’d put in directions for fade-ins, dissolves, all kinds of camera moves to show he’d grasped the technique.

I sat him down and explained we’d have to work together. We always met at nine o’clock, and would quit at about four-thirty. I had to explain a lot to him as we went along, but he was very helpful to me. What we were doing together had real electricity. He was a very, very good writer—but not of scripts.
One morning, I’m sitting there in the office, ten o’clock and no Chandler. Eleven o’clock. At eleven-thirty, I called Joe Sistrom, the producer of Double Indemnity, and asked, What happened to Chandler?

I was going to call you. I just got a letter from him in which he resigns.

Apparently he had resigned because, while we were sitting in the office with the sun shining through, I had asked him to close the curtains and I had not said please. He accused me of having as many as three martinis at lunch. Furthermore, he wrote that he found it very disconcerting that Mr. Wilder gets two, three, sometimes even four calls from obviously young girls.

Naturally. I would take a phone call, three or four minutes, to say, Let’s meet at that restaurant there, or, Let’s go for a drink here. He was about twenty years older than I was, and his wife was older than him, elderly. And I was on the phone with girls! Sex was rampant then, but I was just looking out for myself. Later, in a biography he said all sorts of nasty things about me—that I was a Nazi, that I was uncooperative and rude, and God knows what. Maybe the antagonism even helped. He was a peculiar guy, but I was very glad to have worked with him.

- ‘Billy Wilder: The Art of Screenwriting No. 1’. Interviewed by James Linville. The Paris Review, 1996. Full interview here.

Clint Eastwood: Straight Shooter

Unforgiven (Directed by Clint Eastwood)

Clint Eastwood has directed over 35 feature films, frequently starring in them and composing original music for nearly a dozen, amassing in the process several Oscar nominations, two Oscar wins and two DGA Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. Revered as the last ‘classical’ director working in Hollywood – a tribute to the restraint of his storytelling and the effectiveness of his working method – Eastwood has never been afraid of taking risks, balancing accessible mainstream success with darker edgier projects. 

Eastwood as a figure of the brooding anti-establishment was first solidified by his portrayal as a protagonist in A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964), For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965) and The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966). He was in the early 1970s looking for more challenging roles which he found in films like The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971), which allowed him to go beyond the roles he had become associated with.

Eastwood began directing with Play Misty For Me in which a radio presenter is stalked by an obsessive fan. His presence as an actor in most of these early ventures tended to overshadow his film's successes, most notably in the remarkable The Outlaw Josey Wales. Yet he was recognised as a capable filmmaker with a consistent and distinct style by the mid-1970s. He also began to show an increasing inclination for less marketable ventures like Bird (1988) and White Hunter, Black Heart (1990). His standing as one of America's most distinguished filmmakers was reinforced by his award of the Oscar for Unforgiven (1992), which was widely praised and is now recognised as his masterpiece.

The following extract is from an interview with Scott Foundas in which Eastwood discusses his approach to directing, his attitude to commercialism and the significance of the script:

Q: You have a reputation for working fast on the set, and [Don] Siegel had a similar reputation. Was that something you picked up from him?

A: Speed is just up to the individual. Some people think things over more; others work more instinctively. I’ve worked with some other fast directors – Bill Wellman wasn’t slow. He knew what he wanted, shot it and moved on. I came up through television, and in television you had to move fast. The important thing, of course, is what comes out on the screen. I like to move fast only because I think it works well for the actors and the crew to feel like we’re progressing forward. But I think the reputation that I have for speed is not necessarily a good one – you don’t want to do Plan 9 from Outer Space, where the gravestones fall over and you say, ‘I can’t do another take. We’re too busy. Move on.’ You’re still making a film that you want to be right. But I find, as an actor, that I worked better when the directors were working fast. That’s why I guess Don and I got along so well. You sustain the character for shorter periods. You’re not having to ask yourself, ‘Now where was I three days ago? What the hell is this scene all about? What are we doing here?’

Q: Is the filmmaking process significantly different for you when you’re acting in and directing a picture as opposed to just directing?

A: It is. You definitely split your concentration. Most actors who’ve turned to directing – William S. Hart, Stan Laurel, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier – have had to be in the picture in order to get the directing job, and that’s what happened with me. Once in a while an actor comes along and gets a project going that he’s not also starring in – Redford with Ordinary People, for example – and that’s certainly the more ideal thing, to do one job and concentrate on that one job. I always expected to withdraw from acting at some point and just stay behind the camera, and in recent years, I’ve done that. Even when I think back on Unforgiven – I had a major role in it, but there’s also a lot of the picture that I’m not in. Being out of Mystic River was great. But then Million Dollar Baby comes along and there’s a great role in there for an older guy. Well, I’m an older guy. So, there you go. Never say never.

Q: Did directing your own pictures then make it harder to go back and act for other directors?

A: I don’t think so. I actually think every actor should direct at some point to learn the hurdles and the obstacles the director faces and the concentration it takes – a concentration equal to that of the actor, just in a different way. I felt that directing made me much more sympathetic to what directors have to do. I think I was easier to work with as an actor after I’d directed a few times. When the director wanted another take for reasons other than performance, I didn’t bog down and say, ‘Come on, what do you need that for?’

Q: When you start a film do you always have a sense of what you want, what it’s going to look like?

A: I always wanted to try something different. A lot goes into a film. But first you have to have a great story, a foundation; then you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to frame that story, how’s it going to look, how’s it going to sound. It’s hard to express it, because I don’t sit around and intellectualize it. A lot of times when I go to work, I have a picture in my mind of how things should be, but I don’t know why I have that picture. I just know that I want to get there and I’ve got to explain to people how we’re going to get there, or have people explain that to me.

Q: Unforgiven is frequently cited as the film that caused American critics and audiences to finally accept you as a serious artist, whereas that recognition had come considerably earlier from some foreign circles, notably France.

A: I’ve never thought about what other people think. I’ve always just thought – and I still think this way – that you make a film, you present it to the public and then it’s out there and it’s up to them to judge it. I just kept grinding them out, like a machinist, and I guess some people might go back and, in hindsight, say, ‘Well, this wasn’t so bad.’ The Outlaw Josey Wales, for example – I would say that, judging from the man on the street, that’s the most popular Western I’ve ever done. But Unforgiven did break through in a way.

Q: You’ve been directing films for thirty-five years, does it feel like you’re doing anything different now than when you started out?

A: A lot of people say, ‘Well, how come you’re doing better now than when you were 45 or 50?’ The answer is I don’t know. Maybe I’m not. Maybe 45 or 50 just wasn’t looked at in the same way. Or maybe I know more and I’m thinking more, doing better things, being more selective. Probably because I’m older now, I don’t feel compelled to do a lot of work. I’ll do a lot of work if it’s there, like in the last two years I’ve done two pictures back-to-back – Million Dollar Baby and Flags of Our Fathers. But these things just all came about. If they hadn’t come about, I’d probably be a much better golfer. Whereas back in the 1970s and ’80s, I was doing more stuff. Some things you read and you say, ‘I love this script!’ Others you read and you go, ‘I like the script and I’ll do it.’ Now, I’m inclined to wait until I love the script.

Q: So many filmmakers complain about the time it takes to raise money and set projects up. But you’ve been fortunate in having a major studio–first Universal and then Warner Bros. – that was more or less willing to support whatever you wanted to do over the years.

A: Sure. A project like Bird (1988) was going nowhere when I grabbed it. It had been hanging around for a long time. It was owned by another studio and I talked Warner Bros. into trading something for it. Now, Warners might not have done that for someone else. So I’ve gotten a few films made that probably wouldn’t have been made otherwise. That goes for the last two, especially. They ended up successful despite the apprehension of the studio – so sometimes that studio thing works for you and sometimes against you. Warner Bros. wasn’t excited about doing Mystic River – they thought it was too dark. And they weren’t excited about doing Million Dollar Baby, because it was a woman’s boxing movie. But I didn’t see it like that; I saw it as a great love story. So it’s all about the way you look at it. But we got it made; that’s the main thing.

Q: Is the difficulty you had making those two films representative of any larger changes you’ve observed in the industry over the last four decades?

A: We live right now in an era where the fad is to remake a television show or a movie that’s already been remade five other times. It’s tough for a lot of studios to say, ‘Let’s start from scratch.’ In the 1940s, they had writers on tap all the time who would pitch ideas to the studio personnel. But can you imagine pitching Sunset Boulevard or some of these classic films now? A picture like that would have to be done as an independent, just as Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby had to be done semi-independently. The good thing is that it’s come full circle in a way, with the studios forming independent divisions to finance smaller films, to take on projects that wouldn’t get made otherwise. George Clooney’s film, Good Night, and Good Luck, is another example of a film that probably wouldn’t be high on a studio’s list of things to do. I’ve always tried to influence the studio to not be afraid to do things that might not make a lot of money, but which they’ll be proud of thirty or forty years from now. That’s what I told [former Warner Bros. chairman and CEO] Bob Daly when I was doing Bird. I said, ‘I don’t know if this thing will make any money – it’s about jazz, it’s not very commercial, it’s a tragic story. But I can guarantee you that I’ll try to make a film you’ll be proud to have your logo on.’ That’s about all I can offer. That’s about all I can offer on any of these films.

Q: The writer of Unforgiven, David Webb Peoples, has said that you filmed what was basically the first draft of his script, which is certainly a departure from the Hollywood norm of ‘developing’ and rewriting things ad infinitum and calling in four or five writers. You seem to have enormous respect for the written word.

A: Some scripts come in and they’re just great to start with; I’ll use Unforgiven as the example. It was a good script. I got it in the early 1980s and waited until ’92 to make it. I called up the writer, David Peoples, and said, ‘I’m going to make your movie, but I want to change a few things. Can I run these ideas by you as I get them?’ He said, ‘Go ahead.’ But the more I fiddled with it, the more I realized I was screwing it up. It goes back to something Don Siegel used to say: So many times you get a great project and people want to kill it with improvements. And that’s exactly what I was doing with Unforgiven. So finally, I called David back and said, ‘Forget what I said about making those changes. I’m not doing anything except changing the title.’ It was originally called The William Munny Killings. Of course, once you get into a project, there are always some things that live up to or exceed your expectations, and certain other things that will be disappointing. So you have to be able to re-write on your feet as you’re working. But once in a while projects come along where everything fits together like a jigsaw puzzle – as it went together in your mind, it comes together on film.

- Interview extract from ‘Scott Foundas: The Straight Shooter’. DGA Quarterly, Spring 2006.

Richard Linklater: Young Mr. Welles

In 1990, the movie, Slacker, was released by Richard Linklater in Austin, Texas, coinciding with a newly developed cultural zeitgeist led by the publication of the major novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland. Suddenly and unwittingly Linklater became one of the foremost voices for a generation, and was rocketed into prominence. However, Linklater quickly played down his role as a cultural observer. 

His later films, though, typically continued to chronicle Slacker's youthful subjects, notably Dazed and Confused, a perennially popular 70s-set coming-of-age comedy about the exploits of several groups of students on the last day of school, as well as the lesser-known SubUrbia (1996), about one night in the life of a group of disaffected teenagers. The latter ranks among Linklater’s best work.

Richard Linklater's films, influenced by literature and philosophy, have a strong predilection for the spoken word, and the filmmaker has confessed to purposefully disregarding the renowned screenwriting precept of "show, don't tell", emphasising delicate characterization rather than traditional narration. 

Me and Orson Welles was set in late-1930s New York, and is a nuanced, entertaining look at Orson Welles’s early career as founder of the Mercury Theater and a charming coming-of-age comedy about a stagestruck teen (played by Zac Efron) who ends up cast in Welles’s groundbreaking production of Julius Caesar. 

Michael Koresky posed some questions to Linklater regarding this somewhat unexpected new film, about his take on the genius at its center and the amazing acting discovery who inhabited him.

What led you to make a film about Orson Welles, and specifically about his early years with the Mercury Theater?

It’s become a fairly obscure moment in his career, given the ephemeral nature of the theater and the more notorious work in radio and film that was just around the corner for him. In that way, I always referred to this as a sort of Young Mr. Welles: everyone knows what’s coming in his future, but it’s interesting to see the seeds of all the greatness, as well as the traits that might cause him some trouble in the future—it’s all there to be reflected on. He’s only twenty-two years old here, and you can feel he is pushing his own boundaries, and maybe discovering he really doesn’t have any, both artistically and personally. More than anything else, though, I saw it as a wonderful story about youthful ambition and creating art in a collaborative environment. I don’t know if I’ll ever do a film about making a film, but making a film about a theatrical production is pretty close to home.

You have a very different filmmaking style from Welles. Your films often have a casual, almost real-time feel, whereas Welles is known for grandness, even ostentation. Yet I feel there are certain shots—during the staging of ‘Caesar’ and the last shot—that go for a certain Wellesian flourish. Were you consciously trying to achieve this?

First off, you’d have to say that almost every filmmaker before or since has a very different style from Welles, not just me. Just watch Othello or Touch of Evil again, and you’ll always be reminded. One of the greatest joys and biggest challenges on this was the reimagining of the production itself. It was a lot of fun to attempt to re-create his very dramatic stage lighting. As I tend to bend toward the realistic, I doubt it will ever be appropriate for me to have such dramatic lighting in a movie of mine, but we were just taking our cues from what Welles had done in this production. There was the upward lighting from a series of holes in the stage, where he was trying to capture the feeling of a fascist rally, like something you might see in Triumph of the Will, or the way he flooded the audience with light from behind the conspirators as they each stabbed Caesar—very cinematic. We had some pictures and descriptions to go off of, but a big rule was to avoid any specific references to shots in any of his films—that was in his future, and wouldn’t have been appropriate. If you think about it, this movie is closer to a screwball comedy in its pacing and banter than a film Welles himself would have made or even appeared in as an actor. I don’t think he saw himself as comedic, but the largeness of his personality and the energy whirlwind around him actually lend themselves quite naturally to a more upbeat tone and tempo. On a historical side note, the story goes that Greg Toland saw this particular Mercury production of Caesar, and when he heard Welles was off to Hollywood to make a movie, he set up a meeting with him. He was so impressed with what Welles had done with his lighting that he said he wanted to work with him, so the greatest director-DP collaboration in film history really starts here.

The actors employed as Welles’s Mercury crew are each note perfect, but Christian McKay as Welles indeed towers over them. His embodiment of Welles is uncanny, even effortless. How did you find him?

It’s ironic that Christian was the actor with the least amount of film experience, and here he is lording over everyone else with such authority. Christian’s performance, when you think of what’s required and the degree of difficulty, is an utter wonder. You mention effortless, which in my book is the ultimate compliment to a performance, but Christian was pulling off a hell of a transformation. First off, if you saw him walking down the street just now, I assure you you wouldn’t say, “There goes Orson Welles.” When you’re looking for it, you see a resemblance, but every cast and crew member can tell you about the first time they witnessed this incredible transformation. Here’s this upbeat British gentleman at one moment; then the voice deepens and changes accent, the eyebrows narrow just a bit, the head turns at a slight angle to make a point, there’s a subtle, all-knowing, self-satisfied smirk. He really becomes this other person, and it goes so much further than mere technical imitation—it’s a full embodiment, which on paper seems nearly impossible when it’s Welles you’re trying to be. I mean, who the hell can believably be like that?

I think the key to Christian’s performance is that he brings himself to it, which any actor would try to do naturally, but what Christian possesses that so few have is the absolute self-confidence and elevated air of someone who has lived their entire life with an extraordinary gift. In Welles’s case, he was famously identified as a genius at a very young age and could never think of himself as anything else. Christian’s gift is musical—he’s a world-class pianist, traveling the globe, playing with various orchestras . . . He’s that good and always has been. He came to acting a little later professionally, and has been primarily a stage actor up until now. He’s an incredible talent, truly one of the most remarkable people you’ll ever meet, and I hope he gets his due for this performance...

Is there a particular film in the Welles catalog you feel the strongest affinity for—and why?

No one particular film, though if I could watch one right this minute, it would have to be Chimes at Midnight. It’s a CRIME that it’s not more readily available. Welles’s daughter Chris talks about how his performance as Falstaff brings tears to her eyes. In Me and Orson Welles, he’s Prince Hal—one wonders if he knew he would age into Falstaff. Anyway, there should be a cinematic mandate that this film be fully restored and available to all.

– Young Mr. Welles: An Interview with Richard Linklater

Full article here

The Discreet Charm of Luis Buñuel

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Directed by Luis Buñuel)

In Luis Buñuel’s satiric comedy, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a group of middle-class diners sit down to dinner but never manage to start their meal, their attempts continually frustrated by a surreal sequence of events both real and imagined. The film remains one of Buñuel’s more popular and identifiable works. Buñuel's memorable set-pieces propel a hallucinatory narrative that moves with relentless comic drive. In some ways the film is a companion piece to The Exterminating Angel, Bunuel’s complex and dark 1962 masterpiece about bourgeois diners who can’t leave a dinner party after they’ve finished their meal.

Discreet Charm features an intricate structure designed by Bunuel in collaboration with scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who has worked with Bunuel since 1964's Diary of a Chambermaid and through to his final movie, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). The film is episodic, moving freely from one vignette to the next, similar to his 1969 film The Milky Way and 1974 feature The Phantom of Liberty, however Buuel also keeps a somewhat narrower focus this time, limiting the film's scope to the comings and goings of its six key protagonists. There is always potential for bizarre, meandering digressions within this storyline structure. Anyone who enters a scene has the potential to change the course of the story.

Bunuel's obsession with these bourgeois folks' discrete graces is twofold. On the one hand, ultrapolite, aesthetically pleasing civilisation conceals, if not actively fosters, astounding acts of barbarism and criminality. A bishop murders, high-ranking government officials traffic drugs while remaining above the law, and dissidents are subjected to horrific torture. Bunuel accepts this intricate interplay of normalcy and violation as the status quo—the way things are in the corrupt modern world.

In Discreet Charm, the dream state is not merely social, but also historical and political. A recurrent gag plays on the idea of the film being censored. More specifically, the film depicts a great deal of political violence. In the 1970s, Bunuel became fascinated by the growing phenomenon of global terrorism, both for its romantic anarchist gestures (Bunuel’s preferred rhetoric in his youth) and for its disturbing ambiguity: too frequently a mirror of state violence, corrupted from within by sabotage or plain human whimsy. Thus, the bourgeoisie's visions and nightmares naturally contain kidnappings, assassinations, and torture—a veritable theatre of mass death. Indeed, death appears in some form or another in each and every vignette of Discreet Charm. Death seems to obsess Bunuel. 

Bulle Ogier recalls the joy of shooting the film in her autobiography J'ai oublié (I've forgotten)—while also noting that, like Jacques Rivette or Manoel de Oliveira, Don Luis ("no one ever addressed him as Luis") could easily suspend filming for a day or two to mull over and work on a scene with the actors. Ogier described the passage in which the six primary characters walk ceaselessly "down a flat, country road" as an idea that came to him during production. Bunuel strategically placed these shots throughout the film, evoking a mininarrative that mirrors the larger structure: at the beginning the characters stroll calmly in the sunshine; later, the light is darker and the group behaviour is harried, distracted; and at the very end, just before the camera switches to a distant view and the credits roll, the characters stroll calmly in the sunshine.

Soon after the release of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in 1972 the Mexican novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes wrote the following celebrated article on Buñuel, who was a close friend. The piece was originally published in The New York Times:

SEEING: In his sixties, Buñuel finally achieved the choice of subject matter, the means, the creative freedom so long denied him. But Buñuel has always proved hardier than the minimal or optimal conditions of production offered him; he constantly remarks that, given a $5-million budget, he would still film a $500,000 movie. An obsessive artist, Buñuel cares about what he wants to say; or rather, what he wants to see. A really important director makes only one film; his work is a sum, a totality of perfectly related parts that illuminate each other. In Buñuel’s films, from Un Chien Andalou to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the essential unifying factor is sight. His first image is that of a woman’s eye slit by a razor and throughout the body of his work there is this pervading sense of sight menaced, sight lost as virginity is lost; sight as a wound that will not heal, wounded sight as an interstice through which dreams and desires can flow. Catherine Deneuve’s absent regard in Belle de jour is calculated. She is constantly looking outside the confines of the screen, enlarging the space of the screen, looking at something beyond that isn’t there, that probably connects the two halves of her life.

But Buñuel’s violent aggressions against sight actually force us back to his particular way of seeing. His world is seen first as a grey, hazy, distant jumble of undetermined things; no other director shoots a scene from quite that neutral, passive distance. Then the eye of the camera suddenly picks out an object that has been there all the time, or a revealing gesture, zooms into them, makes them come violently alive before again retiring to the indifferent point of view.

This particular way of seeing, of making the opaque backdrop shine instantly by selecting an object or gesture, assures the freedom and fluid elegance of a Buñuel film. Sight determines montage; what is seen flows into what is unseen. The camera fixes on a woman’s ankle or the buzzing box a Korean takes to a brothel; the woman’s shoes lead to desire or the Korean’s stare to mystery, mystery and desire to dream, dream to a dream within it and the following cut back to everyday normality has already compounded reality with the fabulous; the meanest, most violent or weakest character has achieved a plurality of dimensions that straight realism would never reveal. The brutal gang leader in Los Olvidados is redeemed by his dream of fright and solitude: A black dog silently races down a rainy street at night. And you cannot altogether hate the stupid, avaricious people in The Discreet Charm; their dreams are too funny; they are endowed with a reluctantly charming dimension; they are doomed, yet they survive.

Cruel and destructive: Such were the adjectives reserved for his early films; now they are elegant and comical. Has the dynamite-flinging miner of Asturias, as Henry Miller called him, mellowed so much? On the contrary: I believe his technique has simply become more finely honed, his sense of inclusiveness through sight wider. More things are seen, understood, laughed at and perhaps forgiven. Besides, the author is debating himself. Is that a Buñuel stand-in who drones in The Milky Way: ‘My hatred towards science and technology will surely drive me back to the despicable belief in God?’

Sight connects. Buñuel has filmed the story of the first capitalist hero, Robinson Crusoe, and Crusoe is saved from loneliness by his slave, but the price he must pay is fraternity, seeing Friday as a human being. He has also filmed the story of Robinson’s descendants in The Discreet Charm, and these greedy, deceptive people can only flee their overpopulated, polluted, promiscuous island into the comic loneliness of their dreams. Sight and survival, desires and dreams, seeing others in order to see oneself. This parabola of sight is essential to Buñuel’s art. Nazarin will not see God unless he sees his fellow men; Viridiana will not see herself unless she sees outside herself and accepts the world. The characters in The Discreet Charm can never see themselves or others. They may be funny, but they are already in hell. Elegant humor only cloaks despair.

So in Buñuel sight determines content or, rather, content is a way of looking, content is sight at all possible levels. And this multitude of levels—social, political, psychological, historical, esthetic, philosophic, is not predetermined, but flows from vision. His constant tension is between obsessive opposites: pilgrimage and confinement, solitude and fraternity, sight and blindness, social rules and personal cravings, rational conduct and oneiric behavior. His intimate legacies, often conflicting, are always there: Spain, Catholicism, surrealism, left anarchism. But, above all, what is always present is the liberating thrust that could only come from such a blend of heritages. Certainly no other filmmaker could have so gracefully and violently humanized and brought into the fold of freedom, rebellion and understanding so many figures, so many passions, so many desires that the conventional code judges as monstrous, criminal and worthy of persecution and, even, extermination. The poor are not forcibly good and the rich are not forcibly evil; Buñuel incriminates all social orders while liberating our awareness of the outcast, the deformed, the maimed, the necrophiles, the lesbians, the homosexuals, the fetishists, the incestuous, the whorish, the cruel children, the madmen, the poets, the forbidden dreamers. He never exploits this marginality, because he makes it central to his vision. He has set the highest standards for true cinematic freedom.

The Exterminating Angel (Directed by Luis Buñuel)

And finally, this respect for freedom of his characters is translated into respect for the freedom of his audience. As they end, his films remain open, the spectator remains free. A flock of sheep enters the church of The Exterminating Angel as civil strife explodes in the streets. An empty carriage rolls down a wooded lane while the horses’ bells jingle in Belle de jour. Nazarin accepts a gift of a pineapple from a humble woman as the drums of Calanda start pounding and the whole structure of the priest’s mind turns and opens toward the future. Viridiana sits down and plays cards with her cousin and the cook as they listen to rock recordings. A bell with the face of her victim and victimizer telescopes Tristana back to the very beginning of her story. The mad husband in El zigzags his way down a monastery garden where he thinks he has achieved peace of mind. The six listless characters in The Discreet Charm, driven by an irrational urge, trudge down an unending highway.

If the end in a Buñuel film can mean exactly the contrary, the beginnings of his films can be terrifying. L’Age d’Or starts with a scorpion and that scorpion, encircled by fire, is committing suicide with its own poisonous tail. It is the center of a flaming eye. Buñuel has written: ‘The camera is the eye of the marvelous. When the eye of the cinema really sees, the whole world goes up in flames.’

DYING: We walk in silence down a wintry Parisian boulevard. Buñuel is a friend, a warm, humorous, magnificent friend, and one can be with him without having to say anything.

We reach his hotel and go up to his room. He always reserves the same one; the windows open on the black and grey tombstones, the naked trees of the Montparnasse cemetery. It has rained all day, but at this hour of the afternoon a very pure, diaphanous light seems to drip from the fast moving clouds. Buñuel starts packing for the flight back to Mexico City.

Every now and then, he gazes at the trees and murmurs: ‘I’m not afraid of death. I’m afraid of dying alone in a hotel room, with my bags open and a shooting script on the night table. I must know whose fingers will close my eyes.’

– Excerpted from ‘The Discreet Charm of Luis Buñuel’, originally published in The New York Times Magazine, March 11, 1973. ©1973 by The New York Times Company.

The Violent World of Fritz Lang

M (Directed by Fritz Lang)

Fritz Lang was born in fin-de-siècle Vienna in 1890, the son of a construction magnate. He abandoned art school to serve in the Austrian army during WWI, after which he joined the burgeoning German film industry. He thrived in silent film creating a sensation with ‘Dr Mabuse, the Gambler’ (Doktor Mabuse, Der Spieler) in 1922 – a pulpy gangster serial inspired by Al Capone and presaging the rise of Adolph Hitler. He went on to direct the dystopian ‘Metropolis’ in 1927 - a disastrous flop at the time which bankrupted Ufa, the nationally financed film studio of the Weimar Republic. Adjusting to the coming of sound, Lang created probably his finest work ‘M’ (1931) with Peter Lorre in the role of the hunted killer. Allegedly inspired by the tale of an actual child murderer, it explored the typical Langian theme of empathy for compulsive criminal behaviour.

His next film ‘The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse’ (Das Testament des Doktor Mabuse) (1933) was pulled from circulation by Joseph Goebbels due to parallels with the thuggish rise to power of the Nazis. His admiration for the director undiminished, Lang was called into the Reichsminister’s office and offered the position of studio head of the new production company the Nazis were planning to establish. Lang immediately resolved to leave Germany, in part because of his Jewish heritage.

Lang settled in America, where in the late 1930s, he made several films including ‘Fury’ (1936) and ‘You only Live Once’ (1937) dealing with outcasts scapegoated by society. In the 1940s Lang directed two significant film noirs with Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett in the leading roles: ‘Woman in the Window’ (1944) and ‘Scarlet Street’ (1945) in which Robinson played a respectable man driven to murder through desire for a femme fatale. His next notable achievements were a series of late film noir classics, ‘The Blue Gardenia’ (1953), ‘The Big Heat’ (1953) and ‘Human Desire’ (1954), marked by expressionist visuals and tortured protagonists.

Lauded by the French new wave for his versatility, thematic focus and technical mastery, Fritz Lang was a legend by the time he was interviewed about his life and work in a 1967 BBC interview with film critic Alexander Walker:

You Only Live Once (Directed by Fritz Lang)

Fritz Lang: The director, in my opinion, is the one who keeps everything together. Primarily, the basic element for the film in my opinion is the script, and the director has to be the servant to the script – he shouldn’t make too many detours. In the last years, the part of the producer has taken over certain things that I think a director should do. I think a producer could be a very good friend of a director if he keeps away from him things which hamper him in his tasks, but usually, as it is now in most studios, the producer tells him what he must do. In this case I call the director a ‘traffic cop’.

Alexander Walker: Is it correct that you took the story of M from the newspapers about the story of the Dusseldorf murders?

So many things have been written about M (1932), it has become so to speak the motion picture. I made it 37 years ago, and it plays constantly in Switzerland, France and even the States. If a film survives so long then there may be a right to call it a piece of art.

The story came out of the fact that I originally wanted to make a story about a very, very nasty crime. I was married in those days and my wife, Thea Von Harbou, was the writer. We talked about the most hideous crime and decided that it would be writing anonymous letters and then one day I had an idea and I came home and said ‘how would it be if I made a picture about a child murderer?’ and so we switched. At the same time in Dusseldorf a series of murders of young and old people happened, but as much as I remember the script was ready and finished before they caught that murderer.

I had Peter Lorre in mind when I was writing the script. He was an upcoming actor, and he had played in two or three things in the theatre in Berlin, but never before on the screen. I did not give him a screen test, I was just absolutely convinced that he was right for the part. It was very hard to know how to direct him; I think a good director is not the one who puts his personality on top of the personality of the actor, I think a good director is one who gets the best out of his actor.

So we talked it over very, very carefully with him and then we did it. It was my first sound film anyway, so we were experimenting a lot.

Metropolis (Directed by Fritz Lang)

How did you come to leave Germany at the height of your career and seek refuge outside the country?

I had made two Mabuse films and the theatre had asked me if I could make another one because they made so much money. So I made one which was called The Last Will of Dr Mabuse (1932).

I have to admit that up to two or three years before the Nazis came I was very apolitical; I was not very much interested and then I became very much interested. I think the London Times wrote about the fact that I used this film as a political weapon against the Nazis – I put Nazi slogans into the mouth of the criminal.

I remember very clearly one day, I was in the office and some SA men came in and talked very haughtily that they would confiscate the picture. I said if you think they could confiscate a picture of Fritz Lang in Germany then do it, and they did. I was ordered to go and see Goebbels, and they were not very sympathetic to me, but I had to go, maybe to get the picture freed, so I went.

I will never forget it – Goebbels was a very clever man, he was indescribably charming when I entered the room, he never spoke at the beginning of the picture. He told me a lot of things, among other things that the ‘Fuhrer’ had seen Metropolis (1927) and another film that I had made – Die Niebelungen (1924) – and the ‘Fuhrer’ had said ‘this is the man who will give us the Nazi film.’ I was perspiring very much at this moment, I could see a clock through the window and the hands were moving, and at the moment I heard that I was expected to make the Nazi movie I was wet all over and my only thought was ‘how do I get out of here!’ I had my money in the bank and I was immediately thinking ‘how do I get it out?’ But Goebbels talked and talked and finally it was too late for me to get my money out! I left and told him that I was very honoured and whatever you can say. I then went home and decided the same evening that I would leave Berlin that I loved very much.

Mirrors and their reflections are always ominous features of Lang's movies; the mirror image is his dramatic metaphor. In ‘M’ the criminal underworld is clearly a reverse image of bourgeois society. In his films the individual wages a fight on the side of goodness and order against the very act of forces of evil and chaos as embodied in the diabolical ‘Dr. Mabuse’ (1922), or the lynch mob in ‘Fury’ (1936) or the gangland boss in ‘The Big Heat’ (1953).

Scarlet Street (Directed by Fritz Lang) 

But the fight is psychological too: each Lang hero is a prey to forces inside himself that he cannot control. Forces that may drive him to murder in spite of himself, like Peter Lorre in ‘M’ (1931), or Edward G Robinson in ‘Woman In the Window’ (1944) and ‘Scarlet Street’ (1945). The fight is one that is fixed in advance by fate, the director looks literally down on his actors like an ironical Greek god, his characters are like rats in a maze driven along by his set ups, by his camera movements and by the relentless logic of his editing to a destiny which is pre-ordained and from which even Lang can’t save them.

The theme of theme of man and his destiny and of man trapped in an inimical kind of fate runs right through your work?

I am quite sure that this is correct. It would be very interesting if a psycho-analyst could tell me why I am so interested in these things.

I think from the beginning, one of my first films, the fight of man against his destiny or how he faces his destiny has interested me very much. I remember that I once said that it is not so much that he reaches a goal, or that he conquers this goal – what is important is his fight against it.

It must be very difficult to make films about destiny and God in that sense today, when people don’t believe in heaven or hell in the vast majority. Do you substitute violence or pain?

Naturally I don’t believe in God as the man with a white beard or such a thing, but I believe in something which you can call God in some kind of an eternal law or eternal mathematical conception of the universe. When they said in the States that God is dead, I considered it wrong. I said to them ‘God has only changed his address – he is not really dead.’ That seems for me to be the crux: naturally we cannot believe in certain things that have been told us over the centuries.

The Big Heat (Directed by Fritz Lang)

When you talk about violence, this has become in my opinion a definite point in the script, it has a dramatogical reason to be there. After the Second World War, the close structure of family started to crumble. It started naturally already with the first one. There is really very, very little in family life today. I don’t think people believe anymore in symbols of their country – for example, I remember the flag burning in the States. I definitely don’t think they believe in the devil with the horns and the forked tail and therefore they do not believe in punishment after they are dead. So, my question was: what are people feeling? And the answer is physical pain. Physical pain comes from violence and I think today that is the only fact that people really fear and it has become a definite part of life and naturally also of scripts.

– Fritz Lang interviewed by Alexander Walker, BBC Online.