Charlie Kaufman: On Adaptation

Adaptation (Directed by Spike Jonze) 

Adaptation tells the story of a misunderstood and socially inept screenwriter called Charlie Kaufman struggling to adapt Susan Orlean’s dense book The Orchid Thief about John Laroche, a colorful character who was arrested in Florida for stealing rare orchids from a state-protected preserve. Facing severe writer’s block, Nicolas Cage (playing Charlie Kaufman) early on states his fateful goal of: ‘I just don’t want to ruin it by making it a ‘Hollywood’ thing. It’s like I don’t want to cram in sex, or guns, or car chases or characters overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end.’ While the film deliberately meanders through the first two acts, the appearance of screenwriting guru and seminar leader Robert McKee sends the third act into motion when he tells Kaufman, ‘You can have an uninvolving, tedious movie, but wow them at the end, and you’ve got a hit.’ The initial draft of Adaptation took this advice and the third act sent Kaufman and his brother, Donald, into the drug lair of Orlean and Laroche, who’ve kidnapped Charlie and plan to kill him in a Florida swamp. Donald bites the dust while trying to save Charlie, but just as the gun is turned on Charlie, an act-two throwaway joke about a mystic Swamp Ape manifests itself into the scene and saves Kaufman. The finished film ended up taking a different course, however...

The following extract is taken from an interview with Creative Screenwriting in which Charlie Kaufman discusses how he came to write the script of Adaptation and why the Swamp Ape never made it into the final cut of the film:

CS: When you began adapting The Orchid Thief were you given free rein to do what ever you wanted?


CK: They approached me with the book, and I liked it a lot. I was getting other kinds of offers, but this one just seemed more substantial to me. It seemed to be about something other than the usual stuff I get offered. So I took it. I kind of thought I would figure it out, and I guess this is how I figured it out. Or not. They certainly left me alone. I don’t think they imagined... I didn’t tell them what I had in mind because I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I took the job. And when I decided I wanted to take the material in this direction, I felt like I needed to write it before showing it to them. Because if I pitched it, I thought I’d be, you know, dismissed! I don’t think they expected this kind of script; they expected something a little more faithful.

CS: You essentially blew your assignment and handed in a script about yourself. Most writers would either be fired or sued for doing this – why weren’t you?


CK: I wasn’t fired when I turned it in for two reasons. First, my work was done. I guess they could’ve fired me and hired another writer to do it at that point, but I think the other reason is that they liked it. I didn’t know that they were going to like it, but I lucked out, and they liked it.

CS: What did your agent think?

CK: I don’t think my agent saw it until [Jonathan] Demme’s company saw it. I don’t remember the chronology exactly, but by the time my agent saw it, I think it was a good thing, not a bad thing. I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing, because by the time I came up with this idea to do it this way, I was pretty much out of ideas. I thought I’d better do it rather than pitch it because if I did, they would say no and I had no other ideas. I wanted to try it even though I thought it was going to be a disaster.

CS: Were you ever worried about the repercussions?

CK: Yeah, I thought I wasn’t going to work anymore. I thought it was gonna be like, ya know, like you said, they paid good money for this thing, they hired me, I took a very long time to write it, and this is what I finally gave them after they’d been waiting all this time. But at the same time, I’d been talking about the movie/script to people, and I got the sense that people thought it was a funny idea, so I had a little bit of confidence that it might not be so terrible.

CS: Do you have any sort of support group, close friends, etc., that reads your material before you go out with it?


CK: No. No one reads anything I write until I turn it in. I thought the mentions in the film of the Casablanca screenplay were a hilarious insider writer’s joke. Most in the industry know that Casablanca was rewritten continually on set, as opposed to being a screenplay that was simply written and then filmed. I’m actually just quoting verbatim Robert McKee. That’s all McKee always talks about, so I was doing a Robert McKee thing.

CS: Interesting. I assume you went to a McKee seminar?

CK: Yes, I didn’t go to it for the reason that Kaufman goes in the movie. I went for research on this film.

CS: Were there ever any plans to have the real McKee in Adaptation?


CK: We talked about it, but we weren’t putting anyone else real in there, so we thought it’d be weird.

CS: What’d he think about being a character in your film?

CK: Ultimately, he really liked the movie. He came to a screening recently and was very pleased.

CS: I was sad to see McKee’s one-page speech about how you can’t do a one-page speech in a movie go. Why was it cut?

CK: 
I think it was filmed but cut because the movie was so long... a lot of that stuff was filmed, and the assembly of the movie was so dense, so much stuff happened. Even as it is now it’s a little bit overwhelming. So, we’re trying to get the movie moving at that point, and that was obviously, intentionally a complete stop in everything, so I think that’s why it’s gone. I think we’re going to publish the script as we went into production with it, so that will be in there.

CS: Do you think the film remained true to the tone of the screenplay?


CK: Adaptation is an interesting thing because it’s an extremely modular structure. The order is completely open. It isn’t arbitrary. I mean it’s all intention al on my part, but at the same time when you’re cutting any movie, you’re moving stuff around because you have to, or because you’ve cut out scenes and you need to make things work again. Inevitably, you do move things, and with a more linear story there are certain constrictions; it leaves you options but not as many. There are infinite number of options to Adaptation. It’s sort of a godsend, but it’s also daunting because you never really know how to ultimately structure it. You say to yourself, ‘Oh, you could do this.’ Or, ‘Wait, we could do this. Move this here.’ And it goes on and on. So it’s been tricky. We’re probably about two-thirds of the way through at this point, and we still have to shoot. So we’ll see what kind of shape it takes...

CS: Do you ever take rewrite assignments?

CK: No. I’ve thought about taking rewrite work or production polish stuff, but I haven’t yet. I’ve been busy with my own stuff; it’s what I prefer to do. But I guess at some point maybe I will.

CS: Do you plan to direct?

CK: I’ve been writing something now. I’ve cleaned my plate a bit; I’ve been dealing with stuff that I had to do for a long time now. I finished a draft of another script which Michel [Gondry] is going to direct, and that was something that’s been haunting me for quite a while. So there’s a draft in, and there’s more work to do, but it frees me up to start a new spec. My intention is to direct it.

CS: Tell me about your new project, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s set to star Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, right?


CK: Yes. What initially happened was Michel Gondry had a friend in France who had an idea – he’s kind of a conceptual artist – and the thought was, ‘What if you got a card in the mail one day that said you’d been erased from someone’s memory?’ So, Michel came to me with that idea, and we kind of worked it into a bit of story. And we pitched it –

CS: Don’t say ‘pitched’; that’s what Donald Kaufman would say.


CK: [Laughs] Yep, Kaufman’s dialogue in Adaptation. I hated when Donald would say that. Anyway, it was my one sort of pitching experience, and I went around to a bunch of different studios with Michel and ended up selling it. I started writing it probably in 1998, and because there was all this other stuff happening with Adaptation and Human Nature, it kind of took a while. It was also very complicated for me to write. The conceit is sort of tricky, because not only is it going backward, but the memory is being erased while the character is going through it, and there are a lot of technical problems there.

CS: I really liked the screenplay. I heard you cut out the sci-fi beginning and ending from your first draft in order to keep things more rooted in reality?

CK: 
Yeah, I like starting it this way because it doesn’t tell the audience anything about what they’re going to see. I like the idea of taking the audience in one direction and then jerking them in another direction and having them have to catch up to figure out what’s going on, and I think this does that.

CS: Okay, now for the question I’ve been waiting to ask. I loved the Swamp Ape from the first draft of Adaptation and was sad to see it go –


CK: Oh, no...

CS: I’m curious about the decision to leave that and a lot of the other surrealistic scenes from the first draft behind.

CK: It’s a discussion and an argument that Spike [Jonze] and I had for a long time. I think that was Spike’s decision or insistence. The difference in the last part of the movie that we shot and the last part of the movie as I originally wrote it is that it’s less broad. Spike felt it was important that there be no demarcation between the first part of the movie and the last part of the movie – that they blend together so that you could watch the whole thing and be emotionally engaged and then afterward think about it and go, ‘Oh, wait a minute, isn’t that what he said he wasn’t going to do?’ So, that’s the reasoning why it’s not there, and I think ultimately I agree with it, especially in the form that the movie has taken – even though I had an affection for the Swamp Ape too. But I think looking at the movie the way it is, it would have been very out of place.

CS: Were you worried about changing an ending that so many of your various executives and producers loved?


CK: Even Malkovich got changed. Malkovich was a lot sillier than it ended up being as a movie. The last third of Malkovich is completely changed from my original draft. It was very much more comedic, less angst-ridden...

– Extracted From: ‘Charlie Kaufman Interviewed By David F. Goldsmith & Jeff Goldsmith. Creative Screenwriting, Volume 9, #2 (March/April 2002) & Volume 9, #6 (November/December 2002)’.

 

Oliver Stone: On Film Biography

Nixon (Directed by Oliver Stone)

Despite the remarkable impact that Oliver Stone's filmography has had on the general public's perception of American history, notably the tumult surrounding the Vietnam War and the killing of John F. Kennedy, he remains controversial among critics. His unique approach has been defined as subjectively and vividly imaginative, uncompromising, fearless, emotional, and unapologetically male. The way in which Stone employs his own storytelling technique is most effective when employed within the context of a particular storyline and historical milieu. Western male characters are his strongest areas of expertise, and so are plots in which the action centres on matters he is passionately invested in, as is the case with the films Platoon, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. 

In the beginning of Oliver Stone's Nixon, we are first introduced to gloomy imagery, accompanied by television news coverage of the Watergate affair, all set to a compelling theme song by composer John Williams. But as the movie begins, the aftermath of Watergate is not the main interest of Stone. 

In the movie, the Biblical quote, “What benefit comes to a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?” is evident, and the remarkable lead performance from Anthony Hopkins, who plays the 37th president, clearly lays out the film’s concern with the man himself. Hopkins enters the character's nervousness, intellect, and fears, together with his physical challenges, in a portrayal that goes beyond his actual physical limits. 

Stone is compelled by a fascination with the president's ability to overcome adversity and sadness over his failures. The film presents events that span decades of the subject's life in around three hours of running time (the director's cut gives a rough estimate of three and a half hours). 

Using alternating tilted perspectives, black-and-white stock film, and false newsreel video, he was able to use all of those aspects to his advantage in his creation of the muddled paranoia in JFK, and inescapable sensory overload in Natural Born Killers. Nixon's collage takes an unexpected turn, moving towards elegance. The cast of characters is extensive and includes Dan Hedaya, who went on to play Nixon in Dick. But the president, tarnished by his failings, stands aloof and ultimately alone.

Writer-director Oliver Stone was in the final weeks of postproduction on Nixon when he conducted an interview with writer and critic Ric Gentry. Gentry comments:

“Under unavoidable pressure, appearing a bit weary, Stone was nevertheless spirited, buoyant, and often jovial, prone to laughing frequently and heartily, including at some of his own foibles. In retrospect, I have the impression that he welcomed the opportunity to emerge from prolonged, intense work on the film to begin reflecting on its processes as well as preparing himself for how Nixon [1995] would be received. Stone was also very generous with his time, despite several necessary interruptions.

“While projecting twentieth-century U.S. history through the biography of the thirty-seventh president, Stone also projects a veritable history of the film medium through a profusion of techniques—from the associative metaphors of Griffith to the high-tech digital matting of Industrial Light and Magic; Soviet con- struction to the deep focus of Welles; the experimentation of the 1950s and 1960s to the Saturday afternoon newsreels of the pretelevision era. Though a “calm, thoughtful” film, as Stone describes it, the freewheeling incorporation of techniques and formal devices works to hypercharge, indeed transcend what is usually one of the most staid of genres, the solemn historical biography.

“Nixon also enables Stone to amplify themes at the crux of several of his other films: the ascent and influence of the military industrial complex, the Vietnam War, the CIA-organized crime coalition, the JFK assassination, how power and avarice corrupt, how mass media pollutes American culture and society, how the 1960s were a turning point in our historical destiny, how individuals must struggle for their own redemption. The issues in Nixon, however, are viewed from the apex of power, which in part shades the steep, abrupt fall of the protagonist.

“Nixon begins with the beam of a 16mm projector cutting through the confines of a dark room to show a cheerfully ingenuous 1950s-style sales training film, then moves to Nixon in the firelit gloom of the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House pondering his own involvement in the Watergate quagmire. Stone once remarked that what each of his characters had in common was the fight for identity, integrity, and the fate of their soul—sometimes losing it, sometimes regaining it—and that he felt the highest virtue was the Socratic one: to know thyself. The juxtaposition between a lesson in self-promotion and the psycho- logical disability of the uncomprehending and unrepentant chief executive indi- cates that, by this criterion, Nixon committed the ultimate error. The confusion and doubt at the core of Nixon’s success is Death of a Salesman raised to something like the tenth power.”

The following extract from Ric Gentry’s interview with writer-director Oliver Stone revolves around the idea of cinematic biography, its limitations and possibilities.

Nixon (Directed by Oliver Stone)

RG: How do you prepare for your shot?

OS: Basically it’s a changing process. It’s somewhere in between improvisation and planning. In writing, or cowriting the material, I absorb every single line, totally, as a writer. So it’s set, in my head. It’s visualized. It’s seen. I come to the set. I’m not Hitchcock. I wouldn’t be able to function under that tedium, of shooting something prearranged. So I’m always trying to refine it in my head. So as the day goes, perception happens, enlightenment occurs. That’s what makes it interesting.
Let’s say you come to a scene and you think it out in twelve to fifteen shots and all of a sudden—it clicks. You can do it in seven. Or nine. Or four. That’s when it’s interesting because suddenly you thought you had it preconceived, you thought you had it figured out and you were wrong. So you’re obviously testing yourself and it’s a game you play, a warrior-athlete kind of thing. It’s interesting. It’s fun.

I don’t use storyboards unless it’s ultra complicated and something involving armies and a lot of money. (Where there’s) a lot of money (involved), you might have to do that. But if you can shoot it—within my confines, it’s in my head—I come up with it, my shot list, shot for shot, and that’s the one that’s ready. That’s my fallback position. Rehearsal occurs. Actors bring enormous contributions and changes. This is the second set of rehearsals by the way (on the set). The first set’s already occurred before the production. This is organized. We’re very organized. We improvise off preparation...

Nixon (Directed by Oliver Stone)

RG: How is Nixon structured?

OS: The film is the most complex structure I’ve done. More so than JFK. Natural Born Killers, if you study the structure, is also complicated. Because there are things that happen inside time, and inside of that. In Nixon, we’re outside time, inside time, outside time, inside time, it goes back and forth. I love it. It’s like going into an architecturally modern building and being surprised at every corner. Because we do things . . . there’s a newsreel in the middle of the picture [laughs] which retraces his steps. We retrace his steps two to three to four times in the movie. It is extremely complex.

RG: So you might want to go back over the same event, looking at it from a separate perspective?

OS: Yes.

RG: Like Citizen Kane in a way?

OS: Yes. It’s the totality of his life. It’s an interpretation of his life. It’s a myth about his life. [Laughs.] It’s what we choose to see Nixon as. Nixon is a prism for us, too, and looking at him we can only judge ourselves. Each person can stand in a different position and look and see and reflect and be reflected on.

RG: A man who was elected president and reelected by the most decisive margin in our history has to be a reflection of his country.

Nixon (Directed by Oliver Stone)

OS: That would be an indication. And just his years as a politician. A great many years in public life. One person described it nicely to me in saying, in each scene you never know which Richard Nixon you’re going to meet. So, in other words, sometimes you think he’s contemptible and sometimes you think he’s magnifi- cent. And you go to the things between. So I would say, it’s purpose is character study. When I was pitching it at Warner Brothers and they turned us down, I said it was a character piece, a portrait. And I implied that they could look at examples like Patton [1970] or Gandhi [1982], and consider it that way. That’s why it was called Nixon, as opposed to JFK. JFK was not a biography. JFK’s a code. I imagined it like Z. A code for something else. JFK is not featured. I’ve done biography, with [Jim] Morrison [The Doors] and Kovic and lately [Le Ly] Hayslip [Heaven & Earth, 1993]. And Boyle, Richard Boyle, to some degree [in Salvador, 1986].

RG: And the Midnight Express [1978] character.

OS: Yes.

RG: The Tony Montana character in Scarface [1983, which Stone wrote] is situated in the context of real events. I think one of the great things about your films is how they impinge on or parallel things that have occurred, often examining political situations or cultural institutions through drama. Even the style sometimes strives to make that political or cultural situation more deeply felt with a documentary kind of camera.

OS: I’ve been fracturing biography for years. And now with Nixon, I think the first hour and a half of the movie is the antecedents of the man. It’s all the threads that lead to him. At the halfway point, you come up to the Republican convention, national convention (in 1968). Halfway, and that is when he gets the power, so we enter into another arena now. What does he do now, now that we’ve seen the antecedents of the man? What are going to be the consequences? And the second part is more linear. And proceeds in more linear fashion for that reason.

JFK (Directed by Oliver Stone)

RG: So that’s his administration.

OS: Yeah, but I feel the antecedents are complex. And I’m not sure that we even got them all. I think there’s more stuff we could’ve done. But given the limitations of my mind and the script—the opening is intended as antecedent.

RG: What are some of the features of the antecedents?

OS: The threads of his life: loss, death, class warfare, bitterness, Quakerism. These are some of the antecedents. Also great idealism. We must not forget. Great idealism. Invoked by his mother. But, an idealism that is more image than reality.

RG: Is the movie too complex, too confusing to an audience?

OS: I don’t know. Maybe it is. This is a gamble again. I was afraid on Natural Born Killers. That was one of the few movies I ever took out and previewed. I had time to. But I took it out quietly to Seattle and showed it two different nights to younger people, admittedly a music audience, so it was favorable in our direction, but I was enormously relieved that they understood the effect of the film, because it was extremely fast, at that point.

This was probably the first film with that amount of imagery that quick. And I thought, maybe the synapses were just going to collapse. [Laughs.] It was scary. But—it worked. I mean, we pulled back on a lot of the chaos. There was more chaos in that cut. And we pulled back on the chaos a bit.

Natural Born Killers (Directed by Oliver Stone)

RG: In a sense, pacing it out a little less intensely or dynamically?

OS: Yeah, yeah. And pulling out some of the wild cutting, the juxtaposition of imagery is pretty insane. And we pulled back. And we pulled back even a little more with the MPAA. So by the time it came out and everyone was saying it was such a radical film, I was shocked because we made 150 cuts for the MPAA. And on top of that we’d peeled it back a bit for Warners.

I’m glad to say the director’s cut will come out now. It was a struggle for awhile to get it out, but we’re going to get out this director’s cut of NBK. Nobody has seen that film. Those are my rhythms with my editors. That’s the way the film was submitted to the MPAA. And we‘re going to add another twenty minutes of scenes on the back of the video, scenes that were never even submitted that were shot. Some of them—crazy. [Laughs.]

With Nixon, I guess I would say that although the plot is complex, the camera is quieter. More classical. Containing Nixon. And being contained by Nixon. You understand the duality. And Nixon controls much of it. Although, there are overlays, I think, of good air. You need a breather in a word film, a film about the word. This is a dialogue movie. And character movie. Character and dialogue movie. But you need air in these things. I never liked the kinds of movies that go for Academy Award performances by putting the camera on the actor and letting the actor just like run with the ball.

Natural Born Killers (Directed by Oliver Stone)

RG: Just follow the actor.

OS: Yeah, it becomes to me—they say that’s nondistracting. I find that distracting. [Laughs.] Scent of a Woman [1992] is a case in point. It’s made by a very good director but because it’s Al [Pacino], he just puts the camera on Al and that’s it. There’s no judiciousness in that. So I think that attitude is important.

Directors are faced with a tremendous temptation, and choice, each moment of each day. Directors are tested in a sense—their souls are being bought and sold every day. Are they going to sell out or not? The power resides with the actor because he’s being paid more money by the system. The actor therefore dominates or can dominate. And the director ultimately must keep him happy and sometimes suit his style; he cuts his own style to fit that of the nature of the producer, or the nature of the actor, or the nature of the studio, or the nature of the story.

And then other directors maintain their own style but it takes enormous strength to do that. Because you have to resist the power. You know, directors have limited power. They do. I mean, all this nonsense about the megalomania of the Hollywood director, it’s just bullshit because the director is very vulnera- ble. It takes a long time to make a film. Each time a film comes out you’re judged and cut to shreds, or it’s dismissed, it’s nothing. An actor can do three films a year, if he has to. A director, no way. Plus the whole process is mentally exhausting. It really drains you. It takes your body and soul.

– Oliver Stone Interviewed by Ric Gentry in ed. Gerald Duchovny. Film Voices.

Violence and Realism: An Interview with Arthur Penn

Bonnie and Clyde (Directed by Arthur Penn)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penn: Yeah, that was a scene I built.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cineaste: How were the bullet hits applied?

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

Cineaste: How long did that scene take to shoot?

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

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

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

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

Cineaste: In that scene Bonnie seems relatively unaffected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antonioni on ‘Blow-Up’

Blow-Up (Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terry Southern on Easy Rider

Easy Rider (Directed by Dennis Hopper)

Terry Southern was an influential American short story writer, novelist and screenwriter noted for his distinctive satirical style. Southern collaborated on screenplays for several popular movies of the 1960s, including Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Loved One (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1966), Barbarella (1968), Easy Rider (1968), and End of the Road (1969). The success of these films helped define the 1960s youth counterculture.

Easy Rider, 1969, is a key film of the American counterculture movement, now considered a rebellious harbinger for its message of nonconformism and its reflection of late 1960s societal values and conflicts in the United States. It contributed to the birth of New Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a style of cinema centred on low budgets and avant-garde filmmakers emerged that was markedly different from the classic Hollywood studio approach. 

Wyatt (Peter Fonda, who also produced) and Billy (Dennis Hopper, who also directed) are purportedly on their way to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but in truth they are on a quest for freedom and purpose in life. They meet a colourful assortment of characters along the road, including George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), an establishment lawyer with a propensity for drink. The individuals they encounter and the circumstances that ensue mirror the best and worst of contemporary American society and reflect on subjects that were especially popular at the time, ranging from hippies and communes to racism, war, religious tolerance, and drug usage. 

Many of the scenes are raw and seemingly inconsequential—the film's original cut came in at nearly four hours. Although Easy Rider is now viewed as a period piece, albeit a significant one, that reflected simplistic, though widespread, beliefs of the day, with its dichotomy into the countercultural or mainstream, the film's bleak conclusion—in which Wyatt and Billy are violently attacked by guys in a pickup truck— still retains its power to shock. The popularity of low-budget films transformed filmmaking and accelerated the demise of Hollywood's studio system. Additionally, the film's usage of popular rock tunes in lieu of original music became a trend that other directors quickly copied. Easy Rider further established Nicholson as a star, earning him an Academy Award nomination in the process.

Peter Fonda is credited with the concept for Easy Rider while he was working with legendary low budget producer Roger Corman. Fonda pitched his proposal to his friend Dennis Hopper and they proceeded to bring in screenwriter Terry Southern, who had worked with Stanley Kubrick on the darkest of dark comedies, Doctor Strangelove. Southern brought his literary pedigree and a certain degree of legitimacy to the picture. By giving their protagonists the names of two legendary gunslingers (Wyatt and Billy), they created a type of reverse, updated Western: instead of two heroes travelling west on horseback, they had two motorbike antiheroes. Rip Torn was the leading contender for the supporting part of an alcoholic lawyer who joins them on the journey, but he withdrew from the movie after an alleged confrontation with the volatile Hopper in a restaurant, and Jack Nicholson was given the opportunity to take centre stage. Filming was done on location, mostly with natural light, with cinematographer László Kovács creating the visual spectacle.

Dennis Hopper spent several months editing the material down to two hours and forty-five minutes, only to find that against his desire and with the encouragement of Fonda and the production team, the film was reduced to its current length of 95 minutes. 

Easy Rider cost less than half a million dollars to produce but grossed an impressive sixty million worldwide, the vast bulk of which came from American domestic cinemas, such was its appeal to the nascent youth movement. Hopper received the Cannes award for best first film, while the Academy gave it two nominations (for Nicholson's supporting performance and Fonda, Hopper, and Southern's script). Unfortunately, the contentious authorship issue generated by the founders' egos, temperaments, and stubbornness produced a schism between Fonda and Hopper that they never overcame. Despite this tempestuous backdrop, Easy Rider is still viewed as a historically significant picture, as one of the first independent films to generate an impact that resonated across Hollywood in the years that followed. Fonda and Nicholson established themselves as major actors, Hopper established himself as a serious director and a model for independent filmmakers, while its cultural impact was widely felt. Easy Rider is a film of its time, a moment in American history that tapped into the zeitgeist of a divided, uncertain nation.

In the following excerpt from an interview conducted with Southern that appeared in the Paris Review in 1996 Terry Southern discusses making Easy Rider with Dennis Hopper.

What was the real story of Easy Rider? There are so many versions of how, and who created it.

If Den Hopper improvises a dozen lines and six of them survive the cutting-room floor, he’ll put in for screenplay credit. That’s the name of the game for Den Hopper. Now it would be almost impossible to exaggerate his contribution to the film – but, by George, he manages to do it every time. The precise way it came down was that Dennis and Peter (Fonda) came to me with an idea. Peter was under contract to A.I.P. for several motorcycle movies, and he still owed them one. Dennis persuaded him to let him (Denis) direct the next one, and, under the guise of making an ordinary A.I.P. potboiler they would make something interesting and worthwhile – which I would write. So they came to my place on Thirty-sixth Street in New York, with an idea for a story – a sort of hippy dope-caper. Peter was to be the actor-producer. Dennis the actor-director, and a certain yours truly, the writer.

I was able to put them up there – in a room, incidentally, later immortalized by the sojourn of Dr. W.S. Benway (Burroughs). So we began smoking dope in earnest and having a nonstop story conference. The initial idea had to do with a couple of young guys who are fed up with the system, want to make one big score and split. Use the money to buy a boat in Key West and sail into the sunset was the general notion, and indeed already salted to be the film’s final poetic sequence. We would occasionally dictate to an elderly woman typist who firmly believed in the arrival, and presence everywhere of the inhabitants of Venus; so she would talk about this. Finally I started taping her and then had her rap about it, how they were everywhere – Jack Nicholson’s thing with Easy Rider was based on that.

So you can see that during these conferences the hippy dope-caper premise went through quite a few changes. The first notion was that they not be bikers but a duo of daredevil car drivers barnstorming around the U.S. being exploited by a series of unscrupulous promoters until they were finally disgusted enough to quit. Then one day the dope smoke cleared long enough to remember that Peter’s commitment was for a motorcycle flick, and we switched over pronto. It wasn’t until the end that it took on a genuinely artistic dimension. . . when it suddenly evolved into an indictment of the American redneck, and his hatred for anything that is remotely different from himself… and then somewhat to the surprise of Den Hopper (imitates Hopper in Apocalypse Now): ‘You mean kill ‘em both? Hey, man, are you outta your gourd?!’ I think for a minute he was still hoping they would somehow beat the system. Sail into the sunset with a lot of loot and freedom. But of course, he was hip enough to realize, a minute later, that it (their death) was more or less mandatory.

Are you saying that there was no improvisation in the film?

No, no, I’m, saying that the improvisation was always within the framework of the obligations of the scene – a scene which already existed.

Then how did Dennis and Peter get included in the screenplay credits?

After they had seen a couple of screenings of it on the coast, I got a call from Peter. He said that he and Dennis liked the film so much they wanted to be in on the screenplay credits. Well, one of them was the producer and the other was the director so there was no way the Writers Guild was going to allow them to take a screenplay credit unless I insisted. Even then they said there was supposed to be a “compulsory arbitration” because too often producers and directors will muscle themselves into a screenplay credit through some under-the-table deal with the writer. They (the WGA) said I would be crazy to allow it and wanted to be assured that I wasn’t being coerced or bribed in any way, because they hate the idea of these “hyphenates” – you know, writer-producer, director-producer… because of that history of muscle. Anyway, we were great friends at the time, so I went along with it without much thought. I actually did it out of a sense of camaraderie. Recently, in Interview, Dennis pretty much claimed credit for the whole script.

Writers appear to be treated like the lowest of the breed in the film biz.

Yes. Except we still have persuasion.

Nicolas Roeg: On Truffaut, Words and Images

Fahrenheit 451 (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

There are things that Truffaut did in those early movies that left a lasting impression: the opening expository section of ‘Jules and Jim’, where time and space is abolished and the images flow like music across the screen; the series of shots from ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (another underrated picture) where the camera moves in close-closer-closest on a character in imminent danger, which I admit I've duplicated many times in my own films. And the character played by Charles Aznavour in ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ who keeps almost acting but never does until it’s too late, had a profound effect on me, and on many other filmmakers – Martin Scorsese.

Francois Truffaut’s underrated adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), was regarded by the director as his ‘saddest and most difficult’ filmmaking experience, mainly due to tension in the relationship between Truffaut and leading man Oskar Werner. 

Truffaut wrote the English-language script in collaboration with Jean-Louis Richard. Critics have assumed that Truffaut’s limited grasp of English accounts for the film’s awkwardness – its dialogue is often clumsy and its performances weirdly stilted. It’s a curious film, lively and surreal in tone, filmed in a pointedly modernist style that only underlines how uncomfortable the viewing experience is. Despite its flaws it’s a strangely compelling film that vividly engages with Bradbury’s themes of knowledge, control and the media.

The film’s cinematographer was Nicolas Roeg who went on to become a distinguished director in his own right. Roeg had previously worked on Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and later Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) before moving into direction in 1968 in collaboration with the painter and writer Donald Cammell on Performance.

The glacial, futuristic surface of Fahrenheit 451 later re-emerges in Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) which starred David Bowie, with its harsh, alien vision of the barrenness of modern life.

Shortly after Francois Truffaut died in 1984, Nicolas Roeg spoke to Richard Combs about working with Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451, for an article published in Sight & Sound magazine:

I’ve always felt that, although Truffaut was greatly revered and admired, at the same time, in terms of film and how much he loved film, he was underestimated. Because he was known to be a literary man, someone who was enormously fond of literature, he was adopted by a very literary set. But in fact his love of literature was separate from his love of film. I think that’s why, many times, he has been underestimated as an essentially visual person. I enjoyed working with him tremendously on Fahrenheit 451, which was a film very much to be ‘read’ in terms of images. I suppose he was the first director, the first film person, with whom I’d enjoyed having a conversation about film, or the hope of film. There weren’t many about in those days.

I remember there was a lot of criticism of Fahrenheit to do with François’ knowledge of English. The critics complained that it was so stilted. But that had all been quite deliberate. He hadn’t even wanted to place it as an English film, or to suggest that the language was necessarily English. The script was written first in French, deliberately, so that it could be translated into English, then translated back into French, because he wanted to lose the English idiom completely, then finally translated back into English. He wanted it set - and I thought this was a marvellously futuristic idea – in a time when people had lost the use of language. After all, the whole premise of the film was to do with losing a literary background. And that was completely missed by the critics.

There was even one little clue which Truffaut put inside the film, because he didn’t want this to be mistaken. There was a scene where Montag and Clarisse are sitting talking; they can see the fire station, and a man comes up and puts a note through the letter box. Montag explains why that is, people reporting on each other. Clarisse says, oh, he’s just a common informer; and Montag says, informant. Stilted things, stilted phrases: that was absolutely putting the dot on the ‘i’. We’ve even seen that sort of thing come to pass. Language is flattened slightly. You see it in films: in the 1930s and 40s in America they used words in films that they wouldn’t put in a script today. I don’t know whether it’s an apocryphal story, but apparently when George Cukor did a remake of Old Acquaintance as Rich and Famous, they did research into the title, and hardly anyone in America knew what an acquaintance was.

François was aware of that, and he realised that images were things to be read. Like the scene where Montag is sitting in bed with comics. Those comics were very carefully designed; they were a form of shorthand, so that the news could be read in pictures. The beauty of the language wasn’t what was important. It was like a rather intimate film where language means a lot, but we no longer have the language. So you virtually have to read the pictures. It implies there will come a time when people will still have all those emotions, but you have to read through other indications, other signs. It was a sign language once, and maybe we’ll go back to that.

François thought the stranglehold of the written word was going to be equalled, if not superseded, by the idea of images. I guess it takes a long time; he thought it was coming quicker. But in some ways one forgets how quickly things have changed. For instance, he wanted no written signs, and in the fire station there was nothing written. It was very difficult to work those signs out. But think about how road signs have changed. Once when you drove down the road you’d have to read dozens of things – road bears to the left, school ahead – but now they’re just children with a stripe through them, so we can drive anywhere in Europe. At the same time that was a very filmic thought: the essence of film. I’m sure that was why he was attracted to the story.

I’d hate it to be forgotten just how much of that kind of a filmmaker he was. Not just charming stories and enchanting acting. For instance, he wanted to make a film with small children, babies, just to get their expression at the point when words aren’t quite understandable. We had a scene in Fahrenheit with a baby lying in his pram in the park, and the fire chief turns him over and finds a book underneath. Another aspect of that is the scene at the end with the book people – who are all wrong. The veneration of literature – which he loved – is all wrong. The boy who is reciting from Stevenson, reciting after the old man, has got it wrong. And there are twins who announce themselves as Pride and Prejudice, Part One and Part Two, but of course there isn’t a Part One and Part Two in Pride and Prejudice. All these things were missed by the very people who had revered him as a literary filmmaker.

It’s the same thing with acting. Oskar Werner – who tragically also died a few weeks ago – was at the time, as I remember, just starting to enter a successful, commercial stage of his life. And he was rather concerned about his image. It appeared to be, or I surmise, that Oskar thought this was a film he was doing for François, because he owed him something or he liked him. But at that stage of his career he just wanted to get it over with. To play the part of Montag, you have to be completely dedicated to the thing. So he didn’t enter fully into the film. But François won in the end; he had to, again by the use of film, by juxtaposing one thing with another. Whatever meaning you tell me you are putting into that performance, I shall change it by making you look at a rubber duck. If you look seriously at this man when I want you to be smiling, because I want you not to understand what is happening, I shall use that serious look. I shall make you be looking at a rubber duck while he is talking. So that you will look seriously as if you don’t understand.

Every single piece in the construction of the film was visual. I remember when the art department brought a beautifully made model of a fire engine into the office of Cyril Cusack, who played the fire chief. It was like the model that a ship’s captain would traditionally have had in his cabin. But François said, no, no, go to a toy shop and get me a toy. Because that sort of skill is already gone from the world. It was a toy world in which all the skills had been lost. When we discussed the look of the film, he said, I don’t want it to have a reality, I want it as a Doris Day film, with little shining colours. We had great trouble, because at that time people were going for a tremendous realism. I was ordering huge brutes, to make it high key, glossy, like Technicolor.

He also wanted a certain sense of awkwardness in behaviour patterns. After all, things change subtly. I’ve always noticed that films set in any sort of future very rarely draw on the present. But just imagine someone a hundred years ago trying to predict the present. I live in a house that’s a hundred years old. Its internal functions are different, the carriages outside are different – but it’s a mixture. Things don’t all go away. That’s why we began Fahrenheit with those aerials and things on top of suburban houses, although inside the houses are sliding doors – which don’t work… Changes are so subtle: relationships, manners, our behaviour. I thought it was quite a frightening film in that respect. But it’s very difficult to read that. It’s easier to see something you can be totally in awe of. Something which is part of your life and has taken on another aspect is much more difficult to believe in.

François was rather sanguine about the failure of Fahrenheit, critically and commercially. One time when we were having dinner he said, it must have been a bad film. I asked why? He said, nobody went to see it. In terms of his filmmaking, I don’t think he pulled back after that at all. But Fahrenheit might have been a stretch which he was not given the chance to do again. And he wasn’t a man to explain himself. He’d rather go on: a futuristic present-day person. He was wonderful about the past. He told me how he hated costume pictures where they tell you these were the clothes they wore from 1490 to 1498, and then these clothes were worn from 1498 to 1502. He said, I like to have a lot of clothes, sort of turn of the century, and just put them in a basket and have the artists try some of them on. After all, the jacket I am wearing is 15 years old. I am not always in fashion.

– ‘Looking at the rubber duck: Nic Roeg on Truffaut and the making of Fahrenheit 451’ (Sight & Sound, Winter 1984/85). For original article go here