Sam Peckinpah: Screening Violence

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

Sam Peckinpah died of heart failure at the age of 59 on December 28th, 1984, following years of hard living. The following day a brief obituary was published in The New York Times. It claimed that Peckinpah, ‘best known for his westerns and graphic use of violence attained notoriety for such films as The Wild Bunch, a brutal picture that was by several thousand red gallons the most graphically violent Western ever made and one of the most violent movies of all time.’ 

Following the release of The Wild Bunch in 1969, Peckinpah became known as ‘Bloody Sam’. In 1971, Peckinpah released Straw Dogs – a brutal tale of rape and revenge set in Cornwall, thus sealing his claim to notoriety as a director of violent films. 

Sam Peckinpah became a bankable, yet controversial director. Much in demand, he sought to justify his work in a series of interviews to a variety of newspapers and magazines while also writing missives to newspaper editors defending his films and rebutting his critics.

Some feminist writers criticised his films for their representation of women and their allegedly unbridled use of violence. The critical consensus coalesced around the idea of Peckinpah as a violent director and the debate that ensued centred not only around the apparently ‘violent films’ but also affected the response to his more meditative works. 

Prior to The Wild Bunch Peckinpah’s work was not particularly noted for its excessively violent themes or style. In his early career Peckinpah had been involved in the production of a number of television serials as well as three feature films including Ride the High Country (1962) and Major Dundee (1965) which were marked by an intelligent and original take on the Western genre. 

Following The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah made the elegaic The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) – ‘the story of two guys, a gal and a stretch of desert’. Following the controversial Straw Dogs, Peckinpah directed Junior Bonner (1972) starring Steve McQueen as an ageing rodeo rider. Made in between his forays into violent cinema both The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner are lyrical depictions of individuals in changing times – a theme found in much of Peckinpah’s work including his late masterpiece Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

In the following extract from John Cutts’ 1969 interview, Sam Peckinpah discusses his career up to that point and his hopes for the success of The Wild Bunch:

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

‘The following took place at Sam Peckinpah’s Malibu beach house. A charming, if somewhat crowded, hideaway on that particular Saturday afternoon. For in addition to Peckinpah and myself, there were at least eight children, nine adults, and a wandering python. It was a warm spring day and I felt even warmer due to a touch of flu. Ever the considerate host, Mr. Peckinpah insisted on mixing several personally guaranteed flu cures – all of them containing large amounts of whisky and gin. At the end of the afternoon Mr. Peckinpah presented me with a signed photo bearing the message ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way’ (a line taken directly from ‘The Wild Bunch’). A sentiment, Sam lad, that fits my viewpoint just as well. My thanks again for everything – good talk, the considerable pleasure of your company, the potency of your flu cures, and most important – for introducing me to that damn snake of yours before the gin and whisky began to take effect.’

Let’s begin with some background details. There’s a rumour that you’re part Indian – is that true?

Well, I had a great aunt Jane who was a full-blooded Paiute. Other than that, I’m a Californian, born and raised here – as were my parents and grandparents. My grandfather, Charles Peckinpah, started a sawmill up in Madera County outside Fresno in 1873. There’s a mountain there, the Peckinpah Mountain, where my father was born. My other grandfather, Denver Church ran cattle out of Crane Valley about ten miles away. Old Denver went broke thirteen times, not that it worried him any; cattleman, superior court judge, district attorney, congressman, he had quite a life. Lincoln Peckinpah, Rice Peckinpah, Mortimer Peckinpah – aren’t those great sounding names? It’s a very colourful family.

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

With your family roots so firm in the soil, how come you were attracted to the theatrical life?

I have no idea. I always wanted to raise cattle – though by temperament I’m completely unsuited, my ranch now is a disaster area. As a kid I used to read a lot (even when working on my grandfather’s pack station up in the high country), used to see as many movies as I could. Maybe the only thing I knew for certain was that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I took a directing class at Fresno State after leaving the Marines, and that led to enrolling at USC for a master’s degree in drama. After this I sorta drifted: I became producer/director for the Huntingdon Park Theatre, then I went to Alburquerque (wife and baby in tow) to do summer stock as an actor, then I came back to LA to work in TV as a stagehand. KLAC was the station and I stayed there two and a half years until I was fired as a floorsweep on The Liberace Show because I refused to wear a suit. It was at KLAC that I put together some experimental films making them on my own time and money (I started at twenty-five dollars a week, and graduated to eighty-seven fifty). Not that they were any good. More like homework, you might say.

Didn’t you get a job with Allied Artists about this time?

Right. A friend got me in to see Walter Wanger, who got me a job as fourth assistant casting director. A gopher really; you know, go for this, go for that. Then I got upped to dialogue director – with Don Siegel on Riot in Cell Block Eleven in fact.

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (Directed by Don Siegel)

Aren’t you supposed to have acted as well during this period? There’s a story that you can be seen in Siegel’s ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’.  

I played four different parts in Body Snatchers. Peckinpah, man of a thousand faces. I was also stunt man on the picture. Let me think, I was a meter reader, a pod man, and a member of the posse. In addition, Don also had me on it as a writer for two weeks. My best performance, though, is in Wichita (directed by Jacques Tourneur). There’s this great scene I have with Joel McCrea. He comes into the bank and I’m behind the counter. He looks at me. I look at him, and then I say ‘Forty dollars.’ Great stuff. I’m also in The Annapolis Story as a helicopter pilot if you look close enough.

What came next?

I sorta drifted into television writing. While at Allied I met Charles Marquis Warren, and when he became producer of Gunsmoke he asked me to do a script for him. As I remember, it took me five months of day and night writing to get the first one finished. But once the first one was behind me, I breezed ahead writing, I think, at least a dozen Gunsmokes. From this I turned full-time writer, working on The 20th Century Fox Hour, then I created two series of my own in The Rifleman and The Westerner. The first time I was allowed to direct anything was on the Broken Arrow series. I’d written about four segments, so as a gift they let me direct the final show before it came off the air. It really went to my head. There was one scene I must have photographed from at least eighteen different angles. I was never so frightened in my life. Don’t let anyone kid you, it’s bloody murder learning how to direct.

Wichita (Directed by Jacques Tourneur)

How did you make the switch from TV to movies?

Well, I’d developed such a marvellous relationship with Brian Keith on The Westerner series that he kinda took me along with him on The Deadly Companions. Anyway, the producer of the picture, Charlie Fitzsimmonds – Maureen O’Hara’s brother – took me on as a hired hand director. It wasn’t the best deal in the world for either of us. He wanted someone he could push about. I wanted to make a picture as best I could. I offered my services as scriptwriter, which he promptly refused. Every time I’d volunteer for anything. he’d tell me to go back in the corner.

Brian had sense enough to know we were in trouble with the script, so between us we tried to give the thing some dramatic sense. Consequently, all of his scenes have a certain strength. while those with Miss O’Hara (with whom I was forbidden to talk) come off not at all well. At the end of the picture, Mr. Fitzsimmonds took over the editing, scrapping my original cut. He then got into such a mess that he had to return to my original pattern – although I defy anyone to make sense of the ending. If it hadn’t been for Brian and old Bill Clothier, the cameraman, it would have been unbearable.

Ride the High Country (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

Was it because of ‘The Deadly Companions’ that you were invited to do ‘Ride The High Country’?

I think it helped. Though I think The Westerner series helped more. By the time I came to the pictures, they had a story by N.B. Stone, and Bill Roberts was working on a screenplay. They also had two agreements from Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea to play the leads (though not to play the parts they eventually played: one lunch-time they switehed roles – Scott going from good guy to bad guy, McCrea from bad guy to good guy).

It was a small picture by MGM standards at least, but there was a great excitement about it. We had a good crew – Lucien Ballard as cameraman, Leroy Coleman as art director (he was marvellous: at one point he stole the sails used on the Bounty to make the tents in the mining camp scene), and Frank Santillo as chief cutter. The shooting schedule was tight – we had twenty-four days. I think I went over by two days owing to being snowed out of two locations.

It’s funny to remember, but during the shooting Sol Siegel, the then-head of MGM production, called me and said ‘Stop shooting like John Ford. Learn to behave.’ Well, not knowing what the hell he meant, I kept shooting the way I had from the start. Later, on putting together a first assembly, he called me up again and said ‘You gambled with that funny style of yours - and you’ve won. I like it. Go ahead and make the final cut.’ All of which cheered me enormously.

Ride the High Country (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

But then MGM underwent a management change – Sol Siegel being replaced by Joe Vogel. Well, the new management took a look at the picture and they hated it – no if’s or but’s. They loathed it. I think it was the wedding scene in the miner’s camp that did it. All those raddled whores. Anyway, Vogel told me that it was the worst film ever made and that he would not release it – unless he was forced to. I was then kicked off the lot, not being allowed to work on the dubbing or the scoring. Though the version that came out was mostly mine – except for twenty-eight feet cut from the brothel scene.

Then, when MGM had to release the picture owing to some overseas booking commitments, a miracle happened – it began to find its audience. The critics were kind – especially in Europe and pretty soon the film began to get the playdates it deserved all along. It was a delayed victory for all of us.

What had you been doing while waiting for ‘High Country’ to come out? 

What I always do in moments of despair – I head back to TV and write westerns. While waiting for High Country to emerge, I did two hour-long features that Dick Powell produced: Pericles on 34th Street and The Losers. The first was a drama, the second a rowdy comedy with Lee Marvin and Keenan Wynn as a couple of conmen on the run. Keenan and Lee had a ball, and the whole thing was a joy to do. I had a good time.

Major Dundee (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

What came next – ‘Major Dundee’?

Yes. Columbia wanted a picture to be made under three million dollars to fulfil a commitment they had with Chuck Heston. They had a script of sorts – something that Chuck and I both saw potential in providing I could do some re-writing. The producer assigned to the picture, Jerry Bressler, gave his blessing to what we wanted to do – though when it came time to shoot, he double-crossed us by ordering fifteen days cut from the schedule.

Was this when you were actually shooting the picture? 

No, two days prior to starting. I said what he was asking was impossible, that I would rather leave the picture there and then. To which he replied: ‘Look, I’m acting under instructions from New York. Leave it to me, I’ll take care of it.’ But he never did. When I saw the final release print, which is to say Columbia’s final release print, not mine, I was sick to my stomach. I tried to have my name taken off it, but by this time the machinery was too far along. What I had worked so hard to achieve – all of Dundee’s motivation (what it was that made him the man he was) – was gone. This was material I’d both written and shot and cared very much about, but which Bressler or Columbia had thought unnecessary to the total effect of the film.

It’s hard to say who the villain was – maybe Jerry, though he was under tremendous pressure from the studio at that time because he was involved in another picture that wasn’t turning out well... something with Lana Turner, Love Has Many Faces. Major Dundee. It gives me the shivers thinking back on the arguments I had with Bressler and the studio. Maybe I should have argued more strongly going in, telling them in no uncertain terms as to what sort of film I was after rather than taking it for granted that they would let me have my own way once I’d shot the material.

Major Dundee (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

It’s an odd picture. Marvellous in parts, plain bewildering in others. But from the moment Heston gets involved with Miss Berger it never plays as a whole. That whole Durango episode; Dundee finding degradation in the arms of a whore and that fly-by-night escape, just baffles the hell out of me. 

Well, Berger was wrong, totally wrong. She’s a nice lady, but I should have fought her casting from the start. She was wrong and it hurt the picture. As for Dundee’s degradation, that’s all mine. But where it fails, where it refuses to make sense, lies in the fact that all of Dundee’s motivation, the why behind it all, is all gone. I shot a series of progressive incidents in which Dundee kept failing in what he was doing – punching up the difference between what he set out to achieve and what he achieved. I looked at him very closely, zeroing right in on his locked-in approach to his own ego. All of which was cut and junked. I figure I must have shot about forty-five minutes of Dundee under the microscope. The picture ran beautifully at two hours and forty-one minutes by my cut. Heston was superb. The release print was chopped to two hours and fourteen minutes.

In order to gain some extra shooting time, didn’t Heston offer to return his salary to the studio?

Yes, he made the offer, and they accepted it – they took back their money. It was a very gallant gesture. And you know something, Columbia never had the grace to even have a public preview on the picture. There was a showing for some exhibitors, and that was it, all the final cuts came from that.

Major Dundee (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

What came next, ‘The Cincinnati Kid’? 

Yes, I prepared the production, spending about four months on it. None of it pleasant, I might add. Marty Ransohoff was the producer, and to put it politely, we did not see eye-to-eye. There was a time when it no longer made sense even to meet with him on story conferences. Steve McQueen too. Steve and I used to meet, talk, then we’d type up a memo for Marty. It was a very strange relationship. I only started to shoot with the agreement that Marty wouldn’t come on the set. Anyway, I started it, shot for four days, then got bounced. Then they hired a new director and made the picture they wanted to make all along.

Rumour hath it that you set out to provoke Ransohoff by shooting take after take of Ann-Margret in the nude.

Untrue. I did a damn good riot scene, then another long scene between Rip Torn and a Negro prostitute in bed, and that was it. Oh, I was also shooting in black and white. They had wanted colour, but I didn’t.

Coming so close on ‘Dundee’, it was obviously a bad time to get fired. 

God protect me from you English – the world’s greatest understaters! But you’re right, I couldn’t get a job anywhere, couldn’t even get into a studio. It was a long, hard period. Then some TV things came along – including the opportunity to write and direct a version of Noon Wine.

Major Dundee (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

What about the script to ‘The Glory Guys’? 

That had come earlier, about five years previous. Did you ever see it? How about that casting! The same people who made it did another favourite movie of mine – Geronimo, with Chuck Connors in the title role. One of the funniest movies ever made. A positive riot.

What about ‘Villa Rides’? 

Well, the success of Noon Wine sorta took the curse off me. Villa Rides was a straight writing job with little chance of me directing it. I was flown to London to meet Yul Brynner, but he hated the script so much I came home by the next plane. Bob Towne was later hired to do a rewrite on it.

Wasn’t there a time, probably before all this, when there seemed a possibility of you and Disney getting together? 

He called me over to write a Shane-type picture called Little Britches. And I finally came up with the best script I’ve ever written. Walt read it and said ‘too much violence and not enough dogs.’ Well, the violence I plead guilty to, but as for not enough dogs... End of project, though like most things I work on it’ll turn up someday. Did you know I wrote the first script on Brando’s One Eyed Jacks? I worked with Brando for about a month. Very strange man, Marlon. Always doing a number about his screen image, about how audiences would not accept him as a thief, how audiences would only accept him as a fallen sinner – someone they could love. As it was released, I think I’ve only one scene left in the film – the one where Marlon knocks the shit out of Timothy Carey. The rest is all Marlon’s.

The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

Let’s come smack up to date. You’ve now made two films back-to-back for Warners-Seven Arts. How did this come about? 

Through the courage and wisdom of one man – Kenny Hyman. When he took over as production chief of Warners-Seven Arts, one of the first people he sent for was me. Kenny had seen Guns and loved it. He’s that sort of person; if he digs you, the studio is yours. Now, Kenny had a project of his own called The Diamond Story he wanted me to do, but when that fell through because of some casting problems, he agreed to let me go ahead on The Wild Bunch.

It’s a western about the betrayal of friendship. An all-guy western with Bill Holden, Bob Ryan, Ernie Borgnine, Eddie O’Brien, Albert Dekker, Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones and Warren Oates. It’s about a gang of American bandits who steal a US ammunition train and attempt to sell it to some Mexican revolutionaries. It’s about a convict (Robert Ryan) on parole who is ordered to track down all his former friends and gangmates. And it’s very, very violent. During the first preview, thirty-two people walked out during the first ten minutes.

This was during the bank hold-up scene? 

Yeah, the picture begins with a bank hold-up that goes wrong, that ends in slaughter. Wild Bunch is not a pretty picture. It’s the story of violent people in violent times. Violence to the people in the movie is not just a means to an end, it’s the end itself. I make that point very clear. The preview cards were wild: at least thirty per cent said ‘Outstanding. The best picture I’ve ever seen’; and the rest said ‘Disgusting. The most violent picture ever made’; then they’d say ‘Highpoints: the battle scenes, the best ever seen.’ I think a lot of people are going to be shocked – least I hope so. I hate an audience that just sits there.

The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

Tell me about the picture that followed ‘The Wild Bunch’. 

It’s a comedy of sorts called The Ballad of Cable Hogue. The story of two guys, a gal and a stretch of desert. Jason Robards and David Warner are the guys, Stella Stevens plays the gal. At the moment we’re still editing, still trying to sort out what we have. I’m trying to figure out a way to use a split-screen technique in it. Not fussy like in Thomas Crown. More like it was done in The Boston Strangler.

A couple of quick, final questions. You’re supposed to be a tough man to work with. 

I work very hard, if that’s what you mean. Or maybe you heard how I fired two dozen people off Cable Hogue? Well, did you see that trade ad the cast and crew took out for me? There’s a difference between the things heard here in Hollywood and the way things happen on location you know.

How fast do you work? Do you overshoot? 

I shoot about 22 to 1, and I cover very well. I have a low take ratio – about two to one. I like to use more than one camera – sometimes as many as three or four.

Any ambition you want to fulfil? 

An awful lot is going to rest on how The Wild Bunch makes out. The studio seem to share my enthusiasm. Whether it’s too violent or not, I simply don’t know. I tried to make it as tough as I know how. As tough, and as honest as I know how. And as far as I’m concerned, the two are quite compatible.

– John Cutts: ‘Shoot! Sam Peckinpah talks to John Cutts’, Films and Filmmaking. 16:1, October 1969, pp. 4-9. Reprinted in ‘Sam Peckinpah: Interviews edited by Kevin J. Hayes, University of Mississippi Press (2008).

Walon Green: The Man Who Wrote The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

The Wild Bunch, directed by Sam Peckinpah, is considered one of the most significant films in the history of American popular culture. It established a new standard for its portrayal of violent action on screen and the director's creative use of multiple cameras, editing, and slow motion, which intensified the visceral impact of the action scenes, was hugely influential. Peckinpah’s intention was to immerse the audience in violence, and attract and repel the audience by bringing to the fore the reality that lay behind the romanticised notion of violence in the traditional Western. 

Peckinpah weaves throughout the picture an underlying theme of the western era coming to an end, that these men are out of time, not just their time, but ours as well. The Wild Bunch had a huge effect most noticeably on the Western genre, provocatively moving it into more disturbing territory than it had previously occupied. It further demonstrated to filmmakers the narrative power of irony as an effective tool for exploring and expressing brutality.

Sam Peckinpah had been in the creative wilderness since the commercial and personal failure of Major Dundee, when in late 1967 he was approached by producer Phil Feldman with the script of The Wild Bunch. The screenplay was ultimately credited as having been written by Walon Green and the director himself, developed from a story by Green and Roy N. Sickner. 

Walon Green was born and raised in Los Angeles, and attended university in Mexico and Germany. His early film work was as a documentarian for David L. Wolper Productions. He had also worked as a dialogue coach on numerous Hollywood films in the mid-sixties. The Wild Bunch was his first produced screenplay, and was nominated for an Academy Award. The Hellstrom Chronicle, a documentary he produced and filmed in 1971, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary that year. Afterwards, he authored two films for director William Friedkin: Sorcerer starring Roy Scheider, and The Brink's Job which featured Peter Falk. Other scripting credits include Tony Richardson's The Border, which stars Jack Nicholson and was co-written with Deric Washburn and David Freeman, and Stephen Frears' The Hi Lo Country, which stars Woody Harrelson. Walon Green also had considerable success as a writer-producer for television shows such as Hill Street Blues, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, among others.

In the mid 1960s Walon Green, while still a documentary filmmaker, was eager to break into writing features. Green had met Roy Sickner, an aspiring director who had pitched his idea for The Wild Bunch to the producer Reno Carrell, with Sickner himself as director. With the producer's interest Sickner offered Green $1,500 to write a treatment. 

From a rough sketch Walon Green wrote a treatment, then the screenplay. When the budget breakdown came in at $4 million, Carrell passed and Sickner shopped it around elsewhere, meeting with some interest but no firm offers. Meanwhile, Green went back to directing documentaries and soon lost track of his script. It eventually found its way to Sam Peckinpah who set about revising it in anticipation for production.

Sickner’s initial idea was to set the story in Mexico in the 1880s, but Green had moved it to Mexico during 1911-13 (which made possible the twin themes of the end of an era and the West in transition that Peckinpah responded to so powerfully). Peckinpah had also admired Green’s elaborate plotting and the complex delineation of relationships between disparate characters and groups. 

“The main genesis of the screenplay comes from several things” Green recalled. “I lived in Mexico and worked there for about a year and a half. The Wild Bunch was partly written as my love letter to Mexico”, (interestingly, this was the same reason that Sam Peckinpah gave for wanting to make it). 

Green continues: “I had just read Barbara Tuchman's book The Zimmerman Telegram, which is about the Germans' efforts to get the Americans into a war with Mexico to keep them out of Europe. I wanted to allude to some of that, so I gave Mapache German advisors whose commander says that line about how useful it would be if they knew of some Americans who didn't share their government's naive sentiments. I had also seen this amazing documentary, Memorias de Un Mexicano, that was shot while the revolution was actually happening – it's three hours of film taken during the revolution itself. That film had a big influence on the look of The Wild Bunch. I didn't know Sam at this time, but I had Roy see it, and he told me that he made Sam watch it.”

The most obvious historical antecedent for the outlaws themselves is Butch Cassidy’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, whom the newspapers nicknamed “the Wild Bunch” and who were chased out of the United States by a posse of Pinkerton detectives.

Though writer and director had never met or spoken before production of the film, both men had a shared vision based on their fascination with Mexican culture and history. Another common factor is that they had an admiration for certain filmmakers, most notably John Huston and the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa.

By the time he finished the editing, Walon Green’s tough, gritty screenplay about a band of ruthless outlaws had been transformed by Peckinpah’s vision into a deeply personal, violent epic of elegiac sweep, built on themes of betrayal, revenge, and redemption. The Wild Bunch made Peckinpah’s reputation and still remains to this day a milestone in the history of American cinema, and arguably a masterpiece of the director’s art.

The following is an edited extract from A Conversation with Walon Green, from Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s.

I’d like to ask you about a few of Peckinpah’s script changes. Mostly, he sharpened dialogue, but he also made some plot changes. In general, how did Peckinpah’s changes look to you now?

GREEN: Excellent. From beginning to end. It was one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of a writer taking another writer’s script and making it better. After all this time, I could really look at it with a detached eye, and it was quite an experience. The Wild Bunch was the second script I ever wrote and, as I read it through, I thought, ‘‘Boy, if all of them could only be like this!’’ I was also surprised to discover that a number of lines that I always thought I’d written, Sam actually wrote, and vice versa.

How about the flashbacks that Peckinpah added? Especially the ones that show Pike’s abandonment of his best friend, Deke Thornton, and Pike’s ill fated romance with a married woman? Did these events come from the dialogue in the original script, or did Peckinpah originate them?

GREEN: They were only touched on in the dialogue, and when I went to Mexico Sam said, I want some new scenes where this happens and that happens, and I wrote them in a day.

At the very end of the film, Peckinpah decided to let Deke Thornton stay in Mexico with Sykes to help Pancho Villa.

GREEN: Yes, he changed the ending, and I think it was a great idea. Perfect for the film.

Another small but telling addition by Peckinpah was the ants killing the scorpions, which he got from Emilio Fernandez, the Mexican film director who played the role of General Mapache.

GREEN: Yes, and Emilio got it from The Wages of Fear, which opens with a close-up of a small kid torturing cockroaches.

Apparently, Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai also affected your writing of The Wild Bunch and was even responsible for your inclusion of the slow motion violence in the screenplay.

GREEN: Up to that time, The Seven Samurai was the best film that I’d ever seen, and, even today, it’s still in my top ten. I can still remember seeing it for the first time and discussing it endlessly with all my friends, like Jack Nicholson and other people my age. We were all young nobodies back then, and we’d go watch the foreign films, and we’d talk about them all night, and I still remember how the slow motion in the movie just blew us away. So I started thinking, ‘‘Hmm, I wonder what a whole sequence in slow motion would be like? That would really be something!’’ So I told Sickner my idea, and he agreed immediately. He was originally a stuntman, and he thought it could really highlight the key moments of action. So we got all excited about it, and I put it in the script. And one of the first things Sickner told me, when he told me that Peckinpah liked the script, was that Sam wanted to do the action in slow motion…

I wonder if your experience as a documentarian had any affect on the film?

GREEN: Well, except for my love of Mexico and my knowledge of useful historical footage from the Revolution period, I don’t think it had very much effect on the film. I was just getting my documentary career going at the time, but I did see The Wild Bunch as a kind of love letter to Mexico. When I was younger, I went to college in Mexico for a year, and when I finished school, I worked down there for two years for a construction company. I was a site manager on various jobs—building small pumping stations and setting up irrigation projects—and I traveled everywhere, all over the country.

So you knew some of the isolation that the gang felt in the film.

GREEN: I did, but I still loved it down there—the country, the culture, the people, the music, everything. And Sam felt the same way. It was a very strong connection between us.

When you finally saw the film, what was your reaction?

GREEN: I saw it at Warner Bros. in a screening room, and it was very exciting, and I enjoyed it very much. But I saw it with a very rough dub, and I remember complaining about the sound effects. Eventually, I got them to bring in the guy who did the effects on my reptile and insect documentaries.

They redid it?

GREEN: They did. I explained that the sound effects, as they were, were just ‘‘real,’’ and that what we needed was a more impressionistic approach. They had all these amazing visuals, but they were using the same old gun-shot sounds that had been in the Warners library for sixty years.

Peckinpah apparently felt the same way, and he said that he wanted every gunshot to sound different and to be appropriate to the person who was shooting.

GREEN: That’s right.

What did you think of the zooms and the swish pans?

GREEN: It looked all right to me at the time. It was kind of a new look, and it was very interesting to me as a filmmaker. I was amazed that Lucien Ballard, who did True Grit the same year in the old forties Hollywood-style, could make the adjustment so easily. But he did. So I liked all those swish pans and zooms in The Wild Bunch; it made it look, from my point of view, like they were trying to ‘grab’ the story as it happened, and it created a nice feel.

Well, Peckinpah and Ballard didn’t overdo it, like some of the films from that period.

GREEN: Right, and they worked the shots into the context.

How did you feel about the cutting. One critic has claimed that there were 3,642 individual cuts in the film more than any color picture ever made. Some have claimed that it has more cuts than any other picture in film history.

GREEN: I liked it. It didn’t look much different to me from the way I’d originally conceived it. Kurosawa cut a lot. At the beginning of Rashomon, when the woodcutter’s walking through the forest, we see his feet moving along, and his ax, and the trees, and so on. So, yes, it was a stylistic departure from the typical Hollywood film—very much so—but, to my mind, that was the whole idea. There was definitely a whole new sensibility in the air, and The Wild Bunch was part of it.

Were you at the disastrous preview in Kansas City where a number of people walked out, and, supposedly, some actually got sick in the alley outside the theater?

GREEN: No, I wasn’t there, but I certainly heard about it.

Apparently, Warner Bros. didn’t mind the violence, but Peckinpah felt that there was too much, and he cut out six minutes. Later he claimed, ‘‘If I drive people out of the theater, then I’ve failed.’’ What’s your opinion about that controversial aspect of the film? Clearly, both you and Peckinpah intended The Wild Bunch to be an examination of the seduction, even attractiveness of violence, and Stanley Kaufman claimed in The New Republic, ‘‘The violence is the film.’’

GREEN: Absolutely, that was the intention. I don’t know where it came from for Sam, but I know exactly where it came from for me. When I wrote the script, I was hanging around with a bunch of tough guys that I liked very much… their idea of fun was to hit the bars on a Saturday night and start a fight. And sometimes things would get worse, like the time one of the guys robbed an unemployment office and shot two people, and all the other guys went into court and perjured themselves, saying that he was with them all night. I noticed that in all of our conversations, everything always came back to some aspect of violence. If we’re talking about dogs, we’d end up talking about which was the most badass dog there ever was. And if we were talking about people, we’d always end up talking about who was the meanest, toughest guy that ever kicked the shit out of everybody. It was always like that. So I’m sitting there listening to all this, and I’m kind of enjoying myself. I wasn’t doing the bad stuff, per se, although I got in a couple of fights alongside them, which was a necessity. And it started me thinking about this bizarre appeal that violence has for us all—that excites us, that fascinates us, and that runs through all our classical literature. Even in the most controlled of ages, like the Victorian era, there’s always an undercurrent of violence. I can remember Margaret Mead once telling me about the Balinese and pointing out that beneath the soft, rather ephemeral tranquility of their society, there was an extreme of violence, and that all of their legends are about people tearing each other apart and devouring each other, stuff like that. So I was thinking a lot about the disturbing appeal of violence when I got the chance to write The Wild Bunch. And I thought, ‘‘If I can write a movie showing that when these guys start shooting up the town, a young kid will pick up a gun and start shooting back—with a smile on his face—then that’ll get the point across.’’

But that raises a problem because anyone can claim that the violence in his film is just an exploration of human nature?

GREEN: That is a problem, and a danger, but you have to remember that, at the time, no one was making films like The Wild Bunch. It was pre- Clockwork Orange, and the only movies that explored that level of violence on the screen were the Japanese films. In American films, like the Westerns, there was always a ‘‘justified’’ violence. If Indians or outlaws were behaving badly, then they could be shot down with a sense of justice. But I wanted to do a film where it would be very hard to say exactly who’s bad and who’s good in the story. In The Wild Bunch, there are definitely people who are innocent and people who are guilty—the townspeople, for example, are essentially innocent—but who’s really good and who’s really bad? The truth is, most people are generally rounded in such a way that even if you explore the bad people, you’ll sometimes find good in them, and if you examine the good people, you’ll often find bad stuff. Now, of course, there are monsters in this world who are totally evil, but I’m not talking about them, I’m talking in a more general sense…

Now that the dust has settled, The Wild Bunch is considered a landmark, classic Western extolling the virtues of loyalty and obligation, and the film’s even been compared to Sophocles and Camus. What’s your reaction to the film after all these years? 

GREEN: I think it’s a terrific film. It was one of those rare times when the chemistry of the script, the directing, the performances, and everything else magically coalesced and created something totally unique. It certainly doesn’t happen very often in this business.

Sam Peckinpah: ‘Dying is not fun and games’

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

From its stark opening sequence, in which children observe a swarm of ants devour scorpions, through to its violent bullet-riddled ending, The Wild Bunch (1969) is an unrelenting journey into a world of nihilistic violence.

Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads an ageing gang of criminals on one final assignment in 1913: robbing a railroad store. Unfortunately, Bishop's former comrade Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who was blackmailed into chasing down his old friend for sleazy railroad tycoon Harrigan, is waiting in ambush with a gang of bounty hunters. The group becomes aware of the ambush and mayhem ensues. A deafening chorus of gunfire, shattering glass, and whinnying horses serves as the music to an epic gunfight that would serve as the focal point of a lesser western, but serves as simple prelude to the rest of Sam Peckinpah's cruel, elegiac tour de force. 

The remaining members of the group pass the laughing youngsters again on their way out of town, who are now burning the ants and scorpions alive. 

After establishing his stall early on with the inhumanity of cackling infants and slow-motion deaths, Peckinpah spends the next two hours thrilling us. A riveting, beautifully filmed train robbery, an exploding bridge, and a final machine-gun massacre all figure in this storey of hardened criminals caught up in the attempt to sell stolen weaponry to the dissolute General Mapache (Emilio Fernández) during the Mexican revolution. Repeated sequences of scotch consumption and hilarity hammer home the film's overall tone of cheerful submission in the face of a terrible conclusion. Any viewer who downs a shot each time the gang drinks will find themselves slurring long before the end credits, while the grizzled felons' combined laughing is almost as prevalent as gunfire.

The following article by Roger Ebert, from 1969, following a press screening of The Wild Bunch, gives an idea of the contemporary response to the film’s notorious depiction of violence and the director Sam Peckinpah’s defence of it.

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which is possibly the most violent film ever made, stirred up a bitter controversy. Film critics split into many camps at an extraordinary press conference, and even co-stars William Holden and Ernest Borgnine seemed slightly squeamish about the movie. But just about everyone agreed that The Wild Bunch will be this summer’s top box-office draw, for better or worse.

The film was screened for some 350 film critics during the weeklong Warner Bros. 7-Arts international film festival, festival, a showcase for six new Warners’ films. The audience reaction was extreme. Some people walked out. Others closed their eyes. When the lights went up, the applause was matched by boos and hisses. And then the arguments started. They are likely to continue all summer, providing fodder for countless articles and talk shows.

Peckinpah’s film is set in the Southwest and Mexico, circa 1913. The bunch of the title are a group of professional killers and bank robbers who have nearly reached the end of the line. They’re anachonisms, 25 years too late for the wild West, hoping to pull off one more good job and retire. A life of violence has unsuited them for anything else. They’re crude, filthy, bloodthirsty, raunchy and stupid. But they have a kind of honor and loyalty to each other.

The film opens with an extraordinary bloodbath of about seven minutes in length: a temperance parade is caught in the cross-fire between the Wild Bunch and a group of scurvy railroad gunmen led by Robert Ryan. Several civilians are gunned down just for the hell of it. The opening scene is the most violent I’ve ever seen on the screen – except for the closing scene.

By the films end, the bunch has escaped into Mexico and gotten involved in a scheme to steal U.S. army rifles for an ersatz rebel general. They’re double-crossed, caught between the general, Ryan’s men, and the Army. And in a final incredible bloodbath, some 200 men, women and horses die in an orgy of violence. You have never seen anything like it.

Having said this much, let me say that I admire The Wild Bunch and consider it an important act of filmmaking. It is easy enough to protest against the automatic violence of the Italian Westerns; it is legitimate to worry whether movie violence is somehow connected to the violence in American life. But The Wild Bunch, it seems to me presents death and violence in such definitive (indeed, even excessive) terms that it becomes, paradoxically, a statement against violence, and a reaction to it.

Peckinpah (previous credits: Ride the High Country, Major Dundee) has, first of all, made a magnificently directed and acted film. Holden, Borgnine, Ryan and Edmond O’Brien are particularly effective in roles that make their previous tough-guy characterizations look transparent. Peckinpah has marshaled an army of stuntmen and special effects men for his battle scenes and for a tremendous scene of the destruction of a bridge.

And the final bloodbath is the most effectively photographed battle since Orson Welles’ Fallstaff. Dying behind a machine gun, Holden maniacally mows down dozens of soldiers, civilians, anyone within range. I never thought, a lady in the audience complained, that I’d live long enough to see William Holden shoot a woman.

Peckinpah introduces a new technology of violence in those scenes. Blood actually spurts from gunshot wounds; we are shown the face of violence rather than the comic-strip substitute supplied by most Westerns.

All of this held little weight with most of the critics here, I gather. They considered the film to be an exploitation of violence – and they let Peckinpah and his co-stars have it with both barrels at a press conference the next morning.

I have only one question, said the lady from the Reader’s Digest. Why was this film ever made?

We wanted to show violence in real terms, Peckinpah said. Dying is not fun and games. Movies make it look so detached. With The Wild Bunch people get involved whether they like it or not. They do not have the mild reactions to it.

Why did everyone bleed so much? another lady asked.

Lady, Borgnine said, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?

But both Borgnine and Holden seemed to be rather dazed by the film themselves. Holden reportedly doesn’t like it much; he feels it’s too violent and needs additional cutting. Borgnine told the press conference: When I was handed the script, to be quite honest with you, I did not read into it all the controversy it seems to have stirred up. I had made violent films before, of course; Westerns and war pictures. Ths is a script about people who have outlived their time, who have anachronisms. I accepted it on those terms.

When we were actually shooting, we were all repulsed at times. There were nights when we’d finish shooting and I’d say, My God, my God! But I was always back the next morning, because I sincerely believed we were achieving something.

What about the rumors, one critic asked, that there was a near-mutiny on the set in reaction to Peckinpah’s overkill?

No mutiny, Peckinpah said.

Another critic asked: Don’t you think you may have occasionally passed over that thin line between what an audience is willing to accept, and what it isn’t? We felt that when the general slits the kid’s throat, that was the point beyond which we really had difficulty...

I know what you mean, Peckinpah said. There is a very, very thin line, and I think we operated as close to it as we dared. We hope that, for most audience, we stayed on this side of the line. But I am willing to admit that we may have passed over it at some point. We feel the violence is a catharsis, a release, but sometimes the line is hard to find.

To tell you the truth, Peckinpah added after a short pause, I really cannot stand to see the film myself anymore. It is too much an emotional thing. I saw it last night, but I do not want to see it again for perhaps five years.

– Sam Peckinpah: Dying is not fun and games, by Roger Ebert, June 1969.

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