Francois Truffaut: Day For Night

Day For Night (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

Francois Truffaut’s Academy Award-winning Day For Night (1973) celebrates the pleasures and creative tribulations inherent in filmmaking, and is one of Truffaut’s most admired works. Truffaut himself stars as the director of a frivolous melodrama whose production is hampered by the whims of a neurotic actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an ageing but still powerful Italian diva (Valentina Cortese), and a British newcomer tormented by personal scandal (Jacqueline Bisset). Day for Night is an irreverent ode to the art of filmmaking as well as a charming comedy about the perils of love and passion, supported by strong performances and an evocative score by Georges Delerue.

Truffaut revels in the series of mishaps that often create the spark for enhancements to the film: a phrase, a screenplay alteration, a new approach to a scene. Ultimately, this loose, lighthearted narrative serves as the backdrop for an affectionate portrayal of the artists both in front of, and behind the camera, who come together on a shoot via friendships, personal troubles, and love affairs, to form a joyful filmmaking family.

Even as the craft behind the smallest aspects of a feature film is exposed, nothing about it feels like the product of meticulous design. Day for Night appears effortless, as if this was the film Truffaut had been preparing for his entire life. 

The “story” revolves around impulsive young actor Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Leaud, evoking a decade of roles in French New Wave films) who wanders around the set asking “Are women magic?” While Truffaut orchestrates his actors around the magic of the film making process. Truffaut appears to be exploring that question by exposing the layers of performance and craft, the offscreen dramas, the plans gone awry, that still leave behind a sense of wonder.

Day For Night has the feel of a mock documentary in many respects. The renowned opening image, an extravagant crane shot floating through a town square, is more than just a typical twist in which the activity seen turns out to be a scene from a movie. Truffaut begins to make us aware of the artifice involved in every cinematic scenario by showing another take with the assistant director's voice bellowing over the top. The film also establishes its documentary style, with a behind-the-scenes film team obtaining quotes from key players, the stars discussing the plot from the perspective of their own characters.

Ferrand does not appear to be making a particularly good or profound picture, despite his earnest devotion to filmmaking. Due to the constraints imposed by the death of a celebrity, he is obliged to eliminate a key moment in the film, an elaborate costume ball. “Meet Pamela”, a melodrama with an international cast and sunny locations has the feel of a commercial obligation, perhaps Truffaut recalling some of his more lightweight endeavours.

Day For Night, appropriately called after a technical term for night scenes shot in daylight with a specific filter, provides a fascinating glimpse into the reality behind the artifice of filmmaking. Soap suds substitute for snow, electric lights for candles, and balconies dangle precariously in the air. Truffaut reveals the tricks of the filmmaker’s trade, much like a conjuror disclosing the secrets behind his magic, but rather than ruining the illusion, it actually adds to the pleasure as the audience get to see and participate in the filmmaking process. 

The characters and the actors who play them, as in most Truffaut pictures, are more important than the plot. Ferrand strives to maintain his composure while struggling to keep the production on track and under budget. But he’s dealing with a never-ending stream of catastrophes brought on by his emotionally fragile performers. Ferrand himself remains a mystery, and we never learn what troubles him personally, giving him an air of superiority, as if he is beyond his players’ mundane concerns. 

Perhaps the key lies in the fact that Truffaut was a noted film critic and passionate cinephile. His character says at one point, “People like us are only happy in our work.” A statement that certainly applies to Truffaut (one of the more memorable scenes in the film is a dream in which Ferrand recalls himself as a child stealing a publicity still of Citizen Kane from a cinema). 

Day for Night is a dense, self-reflexive film, replete with inside jokes and allusions to other films and filmmakers, full of humour and charm, it creates the impression that one has witnessed something much deeper and more realistic than the film’s lightweight tone would suggest.

The following edited excerpt is transcribed from a rare and extensive interview with Truffaut published in the December 1973 edition of Filmmakers Newsletter with journalist Suni Mallow. 

SUNI MALLOW: Why did you decide to make a film about filmmaking? 

FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT: I had every reason in the world to make a film like that. But I think your question should be, “Why did you, Francois Truffaut, wait thirteen years to make a film on filmmaking?" I cannot answer your first question the way I would for any ordinary film publication because your readers are filmmakers and they should know. To the readers of "Filmmakcrs Newsletter" it is obvious why I made this picture; so the only question is, why did I wait so long to do it. 

In my films I have always carefully avoided making any allusions to films and filmmaking, or at best made very indirect allusions to the cinema which could never really bother tne viewing public because they look at the films very naively. But I have thought about making a movie about filmmaking for many years. For instance, each time I make a film I think to myself that I must make a film about filmmaking, and I take notes in a little book I keep in my pocket. I especially took notes while I was shooting Two English Girls and Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me. 

SM: Then why did you finally find it necessary to let the audience in on the mystique of filmmaking? 

FT: Because I thought that, although it is a job just like any other, filmmaking is visually much more interesting than most other occupations. In French films they really do not know how to depict somcone's occupation; American directors are far better at that. For instance, when you have a scene with someone working in, for instance, a garage, you see the person working just the way it is in real life. On the other hand, in France they would have a shot of him just coming up from under a car and wiping his hands on a rag, throwing it down, and then the dialogue starts. 

You could say that I made Day For Night just as some American directors have made films about hunting or fishing. For instance, a film I like very much is Howard Hawks' HATARI. In that film there are many views of hunting, and although I saw it many times, each time I had the impression that it was exactly like a film about filmmaking. And I am quite convinced that Hawks felt the same way too. You would watch John Wayne leading the expedition into Kenya with his group around him, and in the evening they would stop and have a meal and there would be a little bit of dancing and they would discuss their plan for the next day — which was just like the working schedule for a film. For instance, they would say, "Tomorrow we will hunt giraffe," and then the next day there would be a scene of hunting a giraffe. So although it was indirect, I think that consciously it was very much a film about filmmaking. 

SM: When you conceive of a film, do you work initially from a visual concept or from a dialogue/situation one? 

FT: That depends very much on the particular scene in the film. When I am writing a script for a film there are some scenes which I can see immediately and which arc very clear in the mind's eye, while other scenes are less clear and just come about as I am shooting them. 

It has been my experience in films that when I have had something visual I very strongly worked out beforehand, it's really been a disappointment. Whereas quite often the things that haven't been worked out visually beforehand, and which aren't fixed in my mind's eye, turn out to be some of the more interesting shots. 

SM: Do you ever work out shots or scenes very carefully and very precisely beforehand, the way Hitchcock does? 

FT: The only time I ever really worked out anything in great detail like that was in Fahrenheit 451. But I don't work like that for my French films. Obviously the form of the film and the script are there beforehand, but I like to work things out as I go. Or, for instance, I like to spend a Sunday working on the script for the next week's shooting. 

SM: Then how do you handle your actors? Do you allow them great freedom for portrayal and improvisation, or do you control their every move, perhaps even use them almost as props? 

FT: The treatment varies with each actor. For example, Valentina Cortese in Day For Night did some improvisation, but there was none at all with Jean Pierre Aumont. On the other hand, Jacqucline Bissett was the first actress I'd worked with that I hadn't met before. So in her case I kept her role very vague because I had to find out the kinds of words she could use and what she could sav correctly in French before I could put into her lines words which I felt she could use everyday as part of her vocabulary. 

SM: What about the scene where you make a dialogue change for her based on something she has said off the set of the film-within-a-film, "Meet Pamela"? Is that typical of your style as a director? That is, you change actors' dialogue as you get to know them better off the set — as, I believe, Rohmer does with his actors? 

FT: Yes, it happens sometimes. Particularly, for example, with Jeanne Moreau. 

SM: Why did you use Miss Bisset - that is, put yourself in a position of using an actress you didn't know, with whom you had never worked, and of whose French you were uncertain? 

FT: But there was really no problem, Had I fed all the details of what I wanted in the lead actress in Day For Night into a computer, the computer would have told me to take Jacqueline Bisset. For instance, I wanted her to be English and yet famous for having done films in America; she has members of her family who were French; and she has something mysterious about her face. So for all those reasons, I could not have used anyone but Jacqueline Bisset. 

In fact, I was so set on having her that I sent her a cable asking her to be in the film more than a year before I began shooting just to ensure that I could have her and she would be free. She brings Hollywood to the film: she brings that aspect of America into the film because she has made films here and people have associations of her with America in films and such actors as Steve McQuccn in Bullitt.

SM: What about the scene in Stolen Kisses where Leaud is in front of the mirror and he repeats names over and over and over. Did you plan that out very carefully for Leaud, or was that his own creation? 

FT: That was completely improvised during shooting. You see, I needed the scene because the character has nobody in the film in whom he can confide, yet there was a point in the film where he had to confide in somebody because he didn't know with whom he was in love. So this was his way of showing that he was torn between the two women. 

SM: In Day For Night did you use different filmic techniques to distinguish the film-within-the-film from the rest of the film? For instance, old-style Hollywood techniques when you were doing "Meet Pamela" and perhaps modern cinema-verite-type techniques for the rest of the film? 

FT: Very much so. For instance, part of the film is done with the camera handheld, whereas for "Meet Pamela" I never show this; that is, I never show a scene which is shot with a hand-held camera. 

SM: Was the fixed camera on that crane we see so often? 

FT: No, I rarely used the crane. 

SM: A 35mm camera is a heavy piece of equipment to put on a shoulder. What system did you use? FT: Well, first of all the cameraman was excellent and you could hardly see it move. And then we used the Panavision system, which I think is very fine. 

SM: How much direct involvement do you personally have in the technical aspects of a production? 

FT: I don't look at what I am shooting through the camera very much, however I do talk things over with the cameraman and discuss the lighting and the framing. But I would much rather keep my eye on the acting and the actors than deal with the camera. And I never cover myself when I shoot. I take it only from one angle and don't make extra shots from, say, the sides. I believe that every shot has only one angle, one lens. 

SM: Do you feel the same way about the editing? That there is only one way a scene can be edited? 

FT: There are often things that can be changed, and as you work you discover good ideas from what you see in the cutting room. 

SM: How closely do you supervise the cutting of a picture? 

FT: I work very closely with the editor and look at it continually with him until the end. 

SM: For some people the film is made in the camera, in the shooting; for others it is almost entirely worked out in the editing. In your work, do you emphasize one over the other? 

FT: No. I like every stage of the filmmaking process. But while I like to do the script, I detest all the pre-production work because it is full of anxiety. I love the actual shooting, and the cutting and the mixing are fascinating. 

SM: In the case of Day For Night you were working with your own script. When you use someone else's material as the basis for a film — say, the novel for Jules and Jim or Two English Girls — how true to the original do you feel you must be? 

FT: I am always changing as I go along. But sometimes I like the words or phrases too much and will stick too faithfully to the original. However, I definitely prefer to work on my own material, and I hope that in the future I will not do any more adaptations and will work only from my original screenplays. 

SM: What are your favorite shots in Day For Night? 

FT: I find particularly entertaining the scene in the film where Alexander (Aumont) and I are going up the stairs to the cutting room and as we are going up the crane is coming up at the same time. Then as we go behind the Moviola the camera zooms in on us and frames us very tightly. This pleased and amused me very much because the way it turns out shows how it was done and how Hollywood would do that sort of thing - with the crane coming up and then zooming dramatically in on this crummy little cutting room at the top of these rickety old stairs.

SM: Are there any scenes which are not in the final version of the film? And if so, why were they cut? For budget reasons? Length? They simply didn't work visually? 

FT: Yes. there are one or two scenes that are not there, but it was because I felt they weren't well enough acted. 

SM: What is your overall opinion of Day For Night? Does it match up to your expectations? 

FT: I think the film is twenty minutes too short because there was a lot to say. I was 90 per cent satisfied with the dialogue and probably 60 per cent satisfied with the visual. In the visual, I had the sun in certain scenes, and I hate bright sunlight in color films and have disliked it for several years now. But I didn't have the means to do the scene over another day. And there are probably some other faults here and there throughout the picture. 

SM: Is that usual with your pictures — that only 60 per cent pleases you? 

FT: Yes, about that. But in Fahrenheit 451 I think it was maybe better visually. 

SM: In the film the ending of "Meet Pamela" is changed because of the death of a member of the cast but also because of financial pressures from the backers. To what degree must you, Francois Truffaut, as a well-known artist and director, bend the content of your films to financial pressures? 

FT: Personally I do not often worry myself with this aspect… In the ending of Day For Night what I hoped to show was that the director of a film is not unhappy with accidents. The accident which occurs at the end and changes the shooting is a good thing; it is stimulating. The scene in the projection room where they are discussing Alexander's death in the picture begins on a sad note because of his death in real life, but as it progresses you can see that the director is excited — he realizes he doesn't need the scene that he had originally intended. When he comes up with the idea of shooting Alexander in the back, he is very excited about the idea and says, "Yes, we'll shoot him in the back. It will be even better that way because it's more cruel!" And the script girl, who is used to working with this director and who knows his character and what he likes in his films, says, "Yes, and we could shoot the scene in the snow!" And I think this excitement and pleasure comes over in the film. 

So on the one hand there is the anxiety of the director. For example, on weekends I am very afraid and I don’t like the actors to go skiing because they could break their legs. But on the other hand, when something happens which was not planned I simply accept it because the world just keeps going around and the film must keep going forward as if it were something alive. Accidents should be transformed into something good, something favorable and positive for the film, and I hope that I showed this. So it is for this reason that I don't like to make plans on the financial side because it is not in my character. One just has to adapt to all these problems. And I think that is the truest aspect of Day For Night because it shows how I react in the face of these sort of things. 

SM: Many directors enjoy that moment when something unaccounted for happens and they have to change the script, but it's different when you have to change it because the distributors or the backers feel that it will be more viable commercially if it is changed. 

FT: No, I don't like that either. But it so happens that this has never happened to me.

Transcribed and edited from A Portrait of Francois Truffaut. An Interview With Francois Truffaut by Suni Mallow. Filmmakers Newsletter, December 1973. 

Don Siegel: The Shootist

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (Directed by Don Siegel)

Don Siegel, born 1912 in Chicago, excelled in high-octane action films with tightly woven plots. He regularly collaborated with actor Clint Eastwood, including the classics Coogan’s Bluff (1968) and Dirty Harry (1969). 

As a student Don Siegel attended Jesus College, Cambridge, and went to RADA in London to study acting. On returning to America he initially worked as a librarian at Warner Brothers studios in Hollywood. He then worked as an editor before joining the studio’s montage department, where he contributed to a number of films, including Now, Voyager (1942), Casablanca (1942), and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). 

After working on a couple of uncredited short films he transitioned to feature films. His debut was The Verdict (1946), a police mystery drama that featured the on-screen pairing of Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre for the last time. Night into Night from 1947 starred Ronald Reagan as an epileptic scientist, while Viveca Lindfors portrayed a widow haunted by her late husband; Siegel then directed The Big Steal (1949), a crime caper that featured Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, and demonstrated Siegel’s aptitude for hard-boiled action, the genre in which he would later establish his reputation.

In 1954, Siegel had his first significant critical and financial success with Riot in Cell Block 11, a classic prison drama. The picture showcased Siegel’s trademark quick pace and crisp editing. Almost as intriguing was Private Hell 36 (1954), a film noir about the complications that ensue when two detectives decide to keep stolen money they retrieve; Ida Lupino starred as a nightclub singer and co-wrote the script.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was one of the decade’s memorable science fiction films, overcoming a shoestring budget to become a paranoid classic. It is set in a small community that is slowly being overrun by aliens that take over the citizens’ bodies. Widely seen as a rebuke to McCarthyism, the picture functions as both a psychological thriller and a political parable. Despite the studio’s attempt to alter the picture, the finale is nonetheless unsettling: “They’re here already! You’re next!” Despite the fact that Philip Kaufman and Abel Ferrera both produced excellent remakes, this is still the best version. 

Crime in the Streets (1956), an adaptation of Reginald Rose’s 1955 television drama, starred John Cassavetes and Mark Rydell as disgruntled adolescents. Siegel’s next film was 1957'’s Baby Face Nelson, a brutal depiction of the famed mobster played by Mickey Rooney.

Siegel achieved more success with The Lineup (1958), a film adaptation of a famous television series. It featured Eli Wallach as a professional assassin tasked with recovering heroin concealed in the luggage of unsuspecting tourists.

Siegel then directed  Flaming Star (1960), a Western in which Elvis Presley delivered his best acting performance as a man torn between his white father and his Kiowa mother. Hell Is for Heroes (1962) was a tough World War II film starring Steve McQueen as a rebellious American soldier who eventually leads his exhausted fellow soldiers in an attack against a much larger German army. 

Siegel’s attention next shifted to television. He worked on a number of programmes prior to The Killers, a classic crime thriller based on a short novel by Ernest Hemingway about two hit men (Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager) who attempt to learn more about the man they are ordered to kill. Their investigation takes them to a mobster (played by Ronald Reagan in his final feature film) and his lover (Angie Dickinson). Originally intended for television, it was considered too violent for broadcast and instead received a theatrical distribution.

Siegel’s cop films became a standard, from Coogan’s Bluff through to his most renowned feature, Dirty Harry. But probably his most overlooked film is Madigan, a taut, realistic thriller that anticipates both the buddy cop film and Sidney Lumet’s police procedurals. It follows two cops, Madigan (Richard Widmark) and Whitmore (Harry Guardino), as they attempt to track down the killer who stole their guns, while their commissioner (Henry Fonda) struggles with police corruption, brutality, and his own personal life.

Siegel continued his collaboration with Clint Eastwood on Dirty Harry cast in the lead role of the tough, near-fascist cop tasked with apprehending a remorseless killer based on the real-life Zodiac killer. Siegel’s ambivalence with his hero is the film’s most controversial aspect. What is at stake is the extent to which the film is seen to align the viewer unequivocally with Dirty Harry and to present his behaviour as acceptable or even desirable. Eileen McGarry has argued eloquently for the mirroring between hero and villain, even whilst the viewer is encouraged to accept that “the young psychotic killer is portrayed as so exceedingly debased… that he deserves to be slaughtered without consideration” It’s a tense and atmospheric thriller, evocatively using its San Francisco locations and features one of Eastwood's most memorable performances.

Charley Varrick, Siegel's late-period masterwork, is one of the most overlooked crime films of the 1970s. The eponymous character played by Walter Matthau, in one of his most striking and untypical performances, is a crop duster who intends to rob a bank in New Mexico. Varrick's wife and two cops are killed in the process, but things get worse when Varrick and his partner discover that they’ve accidentally ripped off a mob money laundering operation, and they’re being pursued by a group of lurid underworld figures, including Molly (Joe Don Baker) and Boyle (John Vernon). Siegel creates a seedy, desolate world amongst the arid New Mexico landscape, with Baker in particular proving a formidable adversary.

The majority of Siegel’s films exhibit traits that transcend genre standards, such as a pessimistic view of humanity and its social structures. Yet the director’s greatest achievement may have been less in injecting his films with the  ‘personality’ of an auteur, than in deftly creating filmic vacuums into which spectator and critics’ views are drawn. As the writer Alan Lovell argues Siegel has “surpassed ordinary professionalism”. The fact that Siegel's best films continue to be both entertaining and a cause of debate long after their release underscores his standing as one of Hollywood’s most intriguing and successful filmmakers.

The renowned director Sam Peckinpah worked as Don Siegel’s assistant director on a number of films. The following account “Don Siegel and Me” is excerpted from the afterword to the 1974 book Don Siegel: Director, by Stuart Kaminsky. 

Some years ago, I was waiting in Walter Wanger’s office (the third of three shabby bungalows that used to flank Allied Artists) for the eighth hour in three days, until persistence, main strength, awkwardness, and a phone call from the attorney general of California got me an interview. By that time, I had memorized Wanger’s honorary degree from Dartmouth, which was interesting since I was reading Budd Schulberg’s The Disenchanted while I waited. In any case, two days later I met Don Siegel and was employed as the gopher (go for this, go for that) and walked into my first picture, Riot in Cell Block 11, and ended up learning how little I knew about pictures, human nature, and survival.

I did six pictures with Mr. Siegel as a dialogue director, and because of this and because of his patience (he couldn’t hire anyone cheaper), I learned.

Brutally honest, he would haul me to the office of a complaining production manager and then find the truth of the matter in question and proceed to chew ass—usually mine. Don has a great anger, a great sense of irony, and a great, warm sense of humor. (I know about the first—I have heard about the latter qualities.) But I must say that usually he was kind enough not to laugh openly while watching me run about with both of my feet in my mouth and my thumb up my ass. (This is not easy.)

In those days (Riot), he was full of anger at every aspect of the production, his personal life, and his associates. But he kept everyone moving with humor and kept us all together and made a superb motion picture (if you freak out on prisons).

I remember the time I was caught sitting down (Private Hell 36) and was told that dialogue directors were a dime a dozen, “and if I wanted to sit on my ass, I could drag it off the set,” and then some time later, he read the pages of a scene I had rewritten; he dragged me to Wanger’s home and fought until I got my first opportunity to work as a screen­writer (a week’s polish on Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

A dedicated, painstaking craftsman, Don was maniacal in his continuing battle against stupid studio authority. He was and is constantly amazed at the idiocy of our industry, while still being delighted by its competence and professionalism. I realized that I might be considered in the latter category when, upon seeing one of my earlier TV shows, he turned away muttering, “You’re not that good!”

When my Quonset hut burnt down in one of the earlier Malibu fires, I sent my kids back to Fresno and moved in with Don and his mother. I was in a complete state of shock. For three weeks, completely flat broke, I was provided with clothing, shelter, and warm understanding. Years later, when a similar tragedy happened to Don, I refused to accept the fact, or even acknowledge that it had even happened, or that it could. I still don’t believe it. He wouldn’t let it—not ever.

If this is beginning to sound like an accolade to a talented filmmaker and close friend, it is and is not. He was my “patron,” and he made me work and made me mad and made me think. Finally, he asked me what his next setup should be on a picture, and for once I was ready, and he used it. I guess that was the beginning.

I was lucky.

Werner Herzog Goes to New Orleans

Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans (Directed by Werner Herzog) 

Werner Herzog’s remake of Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans is indebted to Abel Ferrara’s notorious 1992 original in name and subject matter only. The screenwriter William Finkelstein, a veteran of TV police dramas Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, has taken the character of a dishonest, drug-addicted detective, changed the setting to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and constructed a new story. Eschewing the original’s overt Catholic symbolism, Ferrara’s uncompromising portrait of self-destruction is still fertile ground for the German director whose doomed tales of excess this recalls. Herzog however injects the story with his own sly touches of surreal humour, surrealist imagery and an unexpected tone of optimism amid the brutality and seediness.

Nicolas Cage relishes the role of drug-fuelled cop Terence McDonagh, a part suited to his on-screen histrionics. He strides through the increasingly tortuous plot recalling the great driven monsters of Herzog’s early years: Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo and Nosferatu as played by the great Klaus Kinski. Herzog gives Cage enough freedom to indulge his excesses without the film veering into parody.

The film opens in the aftermath of Katrina with McDonagh attempting to free a prisoner from a water-filled basement only to injure his back in the process. We jump six months forward, to discover he’s been promoted to lieutenant, only the pain medications to deal with his now chronic back pain have led to a full-blown coke and crack addiction, which he obtains by exploiting his status as a cop to steal, get sex and keep his girlfriend provided with dope.

The story revolves around  an investigation into the drug-related killing of a family of Senegalese illegal immigrants, as he searches down a reluctant witness who can identify the perpetrators. 

Meanwhile, he is in debt due to gambling, is forced to steal narcotics from the police evidence room to support his habit, and begins pitting one gang of criminals against another. He is fiercely protective of his erratic partner and alcoholic father, even as he sinks into a hallucinatory daze as a result of the alcohol and drugs. He sees iguanas in an apartment and alligators beside the road. Not merely the products of a mind reeling out of control; they are reminders, animals of the Louisiana swamp, the primeval origins of the city itself.

McDonagh's behaviour grows more outlandish and hysterical, unable to sleep, threatening witnesses, teaming up with criminals, seemingly hurtling towards his own doom. As the local mob, debt collectors, internal affairs, and a state senator circle around McDonagh, respite arrives in the sudden and inexplicable form of grace.

Such an unexpected turn of events is in keeping with Herzog’s ironical view of the moral codes of the police procedural, and give the film a playful and open feel, taking the film in a direction quite different to the redemptive arc of Ferrara’s original. Herzog’s updated version has a completely different tone, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and although Herzog's film had its origins in commercial expediency, Herzog imbues the uncompromising script with his own unique strange, erratic, and delightful touches that make the film a genuine work of wonder.

The film belongs to Cage, he takes centre stage, his mania grounded in a solid supporting cast. It’s his best role since Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, a similarly hallucinogenic account of a man at the end of his tether. 

In the following article Werner Herzog discusses the making of the film, his relationship with Nicolas Cage, and it’s indebtedness, or lack thereof, to the original film. 

It does not bespeak great wisdom to call the film The Bad Lieutenant, and I only agreed to make the film after William (Billy) Finkelstein, the screenwriter, who had seen a film of the same name from the early nineties, had given me a solemn oath that this was not a remake at all. But the film industry has its own rationale, which in this case was the speculation of starting some sort of a franchise. I have no problem with this. Nevertheless, the pedantic branch of academia, the so called “film-studies,” in its attempt to do damage to cinema, will be ecstatic to find a small reference to that earlier film here and there, though it will fail to do the same damage that academia — in the name of literary theory — has done to poetry, which it has pushed to the brink of extinction. Cinema, so far, is more robust. I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers.

What the producers accepted was my suggestion to make the title more specific—Port of Call: New Orleans, and now the film’s title combines both elements. Originally, the screenplay was written with New York as a backdrop, and again the rationale of the producers set in by moving it to New Orleans, since shooting there would mean a substantial tax benefit. It was a move I immediately welcomed. In New Orleans it was not only the levees that breeched, but it was civility itself: there was a highly visible breakdown of good citizenship and order. Looting was rampant, and quite a number of policemen did not report for duty; some of them took brand new Cadillacs from their abandoned dealerships and vanished onto dry ground in neighboring states. Less fancy cars disappeared only a few days later. This collapse of morality was matched by the neglect of the government in Washington, and it is hard to figure out whether this was just a form of stupidity or outright cynicism. I am deeply grateful that the police department in New Orleans had the magnanimity and calibre to support the shooting of the film without any reservation. They know — as we all do — that the overwhelming majority of their force performed in a way that deserves nothing but admiration.

This was fertile ground to stage a film noir, or rather a new form of film noir where evil was not just the most natural occurrence. It was the bliss of evil which pervades everything in this film. Nicolas Cage followed me in this regard with blind faith. We had met only once at Francis Ford Coppola’s, his uncle’s, winery in Napa Valley almost three decades ago when Nicolas was an adolescent, and I was about to set out for the Peruvian jungle in order to move a ship over a mountain. Now, we wondered why and how we had eluded each other ever since, why we had never worked together, and it became instantly clear that we would do this film together, or neither one of us would do it. There was an urge in both of us to join forces.

Film noir always is a consequence of the Climate of Time; it needs a growing sense of insecurity, of depression. The literature of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett is a child of the Great Depression, with film noir as its sibling. I sensed something coming in the months leading up to the making of the film: a breakdown which was so obvious in New Orleans, and half a year before finances and the economy collapsed, the signs were written on the wall. Even films like Batman turned out to be much darker than anyone expected. What finally woke me up was a banality: when attempting to lease a car I was confronted by the dealership with the unpleasant news that my credit score was abysmal, and hence I had to pay a much higher monthly rate. Why is that, I asked — I had always paid my bills, I had never owed money to anyone. That was exactly my problem: I had never borrowed money, had hardly ever used a credit card, and my bank account was not in the red. But the system punished you for not owing money, and rewarded those who did. I realized that the entire system was sick, that this could not go well, and I instantly withdrew money I had invested in stock of Lehman Brothers while a bank manager, ecstatic, with shuddering urgency, was trying to persuade me to buy even more of it. I love cinema for moments like this.

The screenplay is William Finkelstein’s text, but as usual during my work as a director it kept shifting, demanding its own life, and I invented new scenes such as a new beginning and a new end, the iguanas, the “dancing” soul (actually this is Finkelstein’s, who plays a very convincing gangster in the film), the childhood story of pirate’s treasure, and a spoon of sterling silver. I also deleted quite a number of scenes where the protagonist takes drugs, simply because I personally dislike the culture of drugs. Sometimes changes entered to everyone’s surprise. To give one example: Nicolas knew that sometimes after a scene was shot I would not shut down the camera if I sensed there was more to it, a gesture, an odd laughter, or an “afterthought” from a man left alone with all the weight of a rolling camera, the lights, the sound recording, the expectant eyes of a crew upon him. I simply would not call “cut” and leave him exposed and suspended under the pressure of the moment. He, the Bad Lieutenant, after restless deeds of evil, takes refuge in a cheap hotel room, and has an unexpected encounter with the former prisoner whom he had rescued from drowning in a flooded prison tract at the beginning of the film. The young man, now a waiter delivering room service, notices there is something wrong with the Lieutenant, and offers to get him out of there. I kept the camera rolling, but nothing more came from Nicolas. “What, for Heaven’s sake, could I have added,” he asked. And without thinking for a second I said, “Do fish have dreams?” We shot the scene once more with this line, and it looked good and strange and dark. But it required being anchored in yet an additional scene at the very end of the film, with both men, distant in dreams leaning against the glass of a huge aquarium where sharks and rays and large fish move slowly as if they indeed were caught in the dreams of a distant and incomprehensible world.

From Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans. By Werner Herzog. Courtesy of Emmanuel Levy. 

Jacques Rivette: the Story of Films

 Celine and Julie Go Boating (Directed by Jacques Rivette)

Jacques Rivette came to the fore with the French New Wave movement in post-war Paris, starting out as a journalist and film critic before pursuing a career in filmmaking. Rivette, along with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, wrote for the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, with Rivette eventually becoming editor in chief. Their writings focused on the director as an auteur who expresses a strong personal vision. Further, there was an emphasis on authenticity, emphasising location shooting, natural lighting, and improvisation. Rivette’s criticism focused on American cinema of the 1940s and 50s, and he was an advocate of the films of Howard Hawks, John Ford and Nicholas Ray. 

Rivette’s first film, Coup du Berger, 1956, was a short comedy about the destiny of a coat as it passes through a series of unfaithful lovers. It was co-scripted by Chabrol, in whose flat it was shot, and had brief appearances by Godard and Truffaut. His first feature Paris Nous Appartient was a rambling paranoid thriller set amongst bohemian Paris of the 1950s. Rivette’s next film La Religieuse (The Nun, 1965) was more successful, riding the controversy of a ban owing to its portrayal of the Roman Catholic Church. The film, based on a book by French philosopher and novelist Denis Diderot, told the story of a young girl who is forced to become a nun as a result of her familial circumstances. It was arguably Rivette's most traditional picture. 

Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating, 1974) arguably his most accessible and successful film to date, is a charming, witty, groundbreaking meditation on the nature of fiction. Two young women, a magician and a librarian, meet and become entangled in a seemingly endless theatrical drama unfolding in a suburban house. The film launched a series of projects by Rivette characterised by improvisation and narrative experimentation. 

Celine et Julie was shot without a screenplay, allowing Rivette to develop the narrative with his two actresses, Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, during the production. Rivette constructs, in the words of David Thomson, "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane. Whereas Citizen Kane was the first film to suggest that the world of the imagination was as powerful as reality, Celine and Julie is the first film in which everything is invented."

La Belle Noiseuse (1991; "The Beautiful Troublemaker"), Rivette's most acclaimed film, was nominated for five César Awards and won the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. It stars Michel Piccoli as a painter and Emmanuelle Beart and Jane Birkin as the two women in his life. Frenhofer, a painter, has lost his creative spark, eventually finding inspiration in Beart. The film delves deeply into its subject, focusing carefully on the painting process, to the small failures and advancements of creativity. 

La Belle Noiseuse is a contemplation on the artist's relationship to his or her environment and the difficulties of artistic inspiration. Rivette also creates a fully rounded portrayal of two spouses and two lifestyles merging, with unforeseen and life-altering consequences. La Belle Noiseuse is the first completely formed work of Rivette’s mature period, following the passionate, drawn social depictions of his early films with something poised and more thoroughly apprehended. La Belle Noiseuse can be considered a semi-autobiographical work, with echoes of Rivette in Frenhofer, the elder artist urgently searching for some lost source of inspiration and rediscovery of the joys of creation.

Rivette directed Jeanne la Pucelle in 1994, a two-part, six-hour adaptation of the Joan of Arc story. Starring Sandrine Bonnaire the film was strongly grounded in reality, emphasising the political and social above the spiritual. 

Following that, Haut/bas/fragile (1995), a musical set in Paris, was a delightful romantic comedy, while Secret Défense, was an intriguing update of the Electra myth to modern Paris. Both films set the scene for one of Rivette’s best films Va Savoir which continues Rivette’s interest with the theatrical: the protagonists are an actor and a director who are preparing to stage a play by Pirandello. Rivette skilfully employs the play’s themes to parallel the characters’ intricate lives. 

Rivette’s capacity for experimenting with new techniques of self-expression and reflection maintained him as a vital and current filmmaker throughout his distinguished career, his remarkable oeuvre remaining as innovative, fresh and impressive as the day they were produced.

In 1997, Hélène Frappat contacted Jacques Rivette, who was about to finish editing his modern thriller Secret Defense, in order to propose a conversation intended for publication in a new quarterly magazine called La Lettre du Cinéma. What resulted was a collaborative open ‘dialogue’ in which Rivette reflected on criticism and its relation to the history and practice of cinema. The following is extracted from the larger two-part text and offers a glimpse into Rivette’s thoughts on aspects of his creative outlook.

Hélène Frappat: One of the things that interest you, as Serge Daney said, is to film work.

Jacques Rivette: Yes, yes, yes, well… I try to. The idea of work. Because I think it’s impossible to really film it.

HF: You work towards filming this idea of work…

Yes, it leads to the idea that films are the story of films. You may say that it’s tautological, but I think it isn’t just that… or rather, there is a truth in tautology. Forty-five years later, I want to go back to the lines at the beginning and the end of my old article on Hawks: “That which is, is”, but the second “is”, if done right, doesn’t have the same meaning as the first! So the work of filming work isn’t purely tautological, and at the same time, I think we shouldn’t shun tautology. For example, one of the tautologies we must assert is that films are films. It means a lot of things, it means that a film should be a film, i.e., something that exists in space and time, on screen, before our eyes, but it’s also celluloid that is printed upon, sensitized by both optical and chemical processes that should be taken into account. Light isn’t something magical, but it is part of the work, and there are individuals whose profession it is to work with light.

HF: In the idea of mise en scène, there is both this evidence that you speak about in your article on Hawks and, to get to this evidence, quite a detour?

Yes, in cinema, you take a detour through this machine that is the camera. Even if it was initially a very simple machine—the admirable Lumière camera which is a small wooden box you can hold in the palm of your hand—it was a machine all the same. Not to mention today’s cameras, which are much more sophisticated than those from thirty years ago, like today’s film rolls that are infinitely more complex than Lumière’s film roll. But with Lumière’s celluloid, the photographic process intervenes between what the eyes see and what will be on screen: so there’s an activity here that you can’t deny by saying “it’s magic”… And if I feel like repeating “a film is a film”, it’s also in relation to most critics who are, very often, concerned with a film’s story, possibly its characters, at times the actors, and that only rarely. But it seldom matters to them that it’s a film, i.e., something that should have the truth of film, in the sense that Cézanne spoke of the truth of painting, a material truth, which should hold up on the screen just like a painting should hold up on the wall, on the canvas. I admit that it’s very hard to speak about it in words, it’s something on the level of intuition. You get the feeling that it’s either there or not, and this feeling is quite arbitrary. It’s very hard to justify it, and you are tempted to say “that’s how it is”, following the method of Mr. Alain, for instance, who, in his writing on works he admired, refused arguments and discussions, preferred examples and said: “Well, that’s how this one is, and that’s how that one is, and you either agree or don’t.”. The principle is that opinions, like works, should be stated as clearly as possible: take it or leave it. I still think that it’s at the heart of Hawks’ aesthetic, as it is in Ford’s or DeMille’s…

HF: Do you feel like you’ve returned to Hawks with Secret Defense?

I hope I haven’t completely lost sight of him in the meantime! Hawks was one of our rare references for Joan the Maiden: we’d quickly adopted the Western in general, i.e., Hawks and Ford, and of course Rossellini, as our model for the construction of episodes, the tone of the dialogue and the relation between characters. Those were our references. We’d also thought of Renoir at the beginning, but I think he disappeared along the way: what remained were Hawks’ and Ford’s Westerns, and Rossellini.

HF: At the beginning of Battles, there is a tracking shot on Joan who walks along a wall. Then the camera pans to reveal an opening in the wall. It’s The Searchers!

I agree, it’s a Western shot in any case; on top of that, she is looking westward at that moment… Now, how could one say that such a film exists and such a film doesn’t? I cited Alain, but ultimately, my main reference (I’m speaking of writers I know well, whom I’ve often read; Rohmer was the one who made me read Alain) is [Jean] Paulhan, whom I read by myself, if I may say so, when I was a teenager in Rouen. There are whole books by Paulhan on this question; not on cinema, but it amounts to the same thing. A Short Preface to All Criticism is Paulhan’s fundamental book on the subject, except that he asks the question, but doesn’t answer it: how is it that we speak of a particular work because we think it’s important, and how is it that we know that all the others, full of good things they may be, aren’t of any importance whatsoever? That’s the most important point; it’s what comes first. We can comment all we want after this, but why do we speak of this work and not that? Why is it that even those who find a work “terrible, monstrous” pick this one out for consideration, and not those around it? How is it that such and such painting, book, music or film exists, that they have an existence as a painting, as a novel, as a poem, as a symphony, as a film? That’s the fundamental question that everyone dodges. For Baudelaire’s contemporaries, why was it soon evident that Baudelaire was someone to fight over, and that others weren’t? It is especially clear from the nineteenth century onwards, where the idea of conflict is more pronounced, but it was true even before: when we read, for example, Madame de Sévigné on Racine, we can see there was a relentless discussion; with Corneille, it was the Quarrel of Le Cid… I’m not saying that the only criterion for a work’s “existence” is conflict, conflict at the moment of its reception, but it’s one of the criteria; admittedly, works that are embraced by everyone right away, in general, don’t interest anyone ten years later. At the same time, if you work towards provoking a conflict, you go wrong grossly… Baudelaire and Flaubert were incidentally the first ones to be sorry about what happened and thought, understandably, that it was all a terrible misunderstanding.

HF: But does cinema have the same status? One of the problems facing film critics is that they don’t really know what they are talking about. At times, they aren’t really writing on cinema, they might as well be writing on literature…

Ah yes, of course! That’s why I often feel like repeating: where is the film in what you’re writing?

HF: Does cinema need different criteria of judgment than the ones traditionally used?

Yes, I think so.

HF: That brings us back to the question of “mise en scène”.

But saying “mise en scène” is replacing one problem with another! That’s actually what we did at Cahiers, and I am one of those responsible for putting this term mise en scène on a pedestal. It allows us to put a word on the mystery, but once we have said “mise en scène”, what do we mean by it? The problem is simply displaced, let’s say it is named, but it isn’t resolved. Sure, it does revolve around mise en scène, but what is mise en scène? A vast question!

HF: It revolves around what you call “the idea”…

It revolves around the fact that mise en scène is a very precise activity, and even if everyone does it in their own way—which is different from the next person’s, thankfully, because it wouldn’t be interesting otherwise; everyone has their own technique—they all seem to talk about the same thing. That’s what surprised our first readers at Cahiers—there are probably other examples, but I’m speaking of what I know best, hence Cahiers in the fifties. Here’s Bazin, for example, who was both intrigued and, at times, taken aback by us, even if he loved us and even if we respected him deeply: “What makes it possible for you to defend Renoir, Rossellini and Hitchcock at once?” And the big question: “How can you reconcile Rossellini with Hitchcock?” It’s clear that, for Rossellini, Hitchcock was the devil himself… For his part, Hitchcock knew well that Rossellini existed (since he had “taken” Ingrid Bergman), but whether he saw even one film by Rossellini in his life, I don’t know, but it was perhaps the least of his worries. Well, yes, there was something that made it possible for us to admire Rossellini and Hitchcock at once and on the same level—not in the same way, but equally strongly. That’s what must be resolved.

HF: We come back to what you called the “politique des auteurs”.

Yes, but the politique des auteurs quickly became an evasion, because it meant saying: they are really very different, but they have the commonality of being “auteurs”. Sure, but then, everyone becomes an auteur after that! Now, it’s true for Rossellini and Hitchcock, it’s still true for Ford and Renoir, it’s true again for Hawks, it’s still true, naturally, for Lubitsch or Dreyer, but is it still true for Minnelli, or even for Richard Fleischer? And then, you come to Positif, where they start talking about Pollack or I don’t know who, or some random director, since when you talk about Pollack, you’re not far from some random director! So the politique des auteurs is a poor response, and above all, it doesn’t explain why, in the work of “great” auteurs, as in the work of great novelists, great painters and great musicians, everything is interesting, because their failures deserve more attention than a hack’s accomplishment: that’s indeed what the politique des auteurs originally wanted to say. Why is a commission executed by Abel Gance infinitely more interesting (for, if I recall correctly, it was for Gance’s film Tower of Lust, a purely made-to-order product that Gance spoke about with great modesty, that François [Truffaut] coined this expression in Cahiers) than Delannoy’s masterpiece? That’s the first question. That one is an open-and-shut case, but what was never resolved, and still remains unanswered, is the question of how one can admire on the same level—because of their consistency, because of their logic, let’s say, but that isn’t enough—filmmakers as different as—let’s retain the same names—Rossellini and Hitchcock.

HF: “Consistency” is a partially satisfying answer, but it also goes round in circles.

Yes, because what do you say to justify it? You talk about scripts, you talk about themes and the recurrence of themes, and you’re trapped there. Sure, it does happen that there are favourite themes in the work of great filmmakers: it’s evident in Ozu, less so in Mizoguchi, but in the work of other filmmakers like Hawks, it requires a work of “clarification”; and it’s very fuzzy in Renoir: what’s common between La Chienne and Night at the Crossroads? There are seventeen years and many kilometres between them! Not to mention indisputable “auteurs” like René Clair or Mankiewicz, who aren’t for all that great filmmakers. These are real questions. There are others too, which still remain unanswered; it’s as if people dodged them because it obliges them to ask what a film is (I’m not going to answer that! Don’t count on me!) What do we expect from a film? Why do we sit in front of a white screen, the same way that we pick a book and begin reading it with the intention of going all the way to page 363? What do we really expect at that moment?

HF: That’s kind of the question at the heart of Secret Defense: what can I expect? It’s a question of exigence, in a way, and if the film was received coolly, it is perhaps because it was faced with people who had no desire to ask that question.  

They were afraid of being bored, that’s all. Did they know what it was about? Maybe not, but it’s certain that they were afraid of being bored. Admittedly, when I think a film may be boring, I’m not too keen to go see it either. It’s simply that the films I’m bored at aren’t the same…

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.