John Milius: American Outsider

Apocalypse Now (Directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

A new documentary about the writer and filmmaker John Milius recently premiered at the SXSW in Texas (see trailer here). Made by debut directors Joey Figueroa and Zak Knutson, Milius (2013) explores the life and career of the maverick Hollywood filmmaker behind such works as Dirty Harry, Apocalypse Now and Conan the Barbarian. Featuring interviews with such Hollywood luminaries as Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Francis Ford Coppola, Milius promises to be a comprehensive take on the life of a unique storyteller.

John Milius’ early flamboyance led Paul Schrader to label Milius as the ‘Master of Flash’ – a contrarian in which the gesture of showmanship always took precedence over politics – and sometimes even over morality. Noted for his volatile personality and penchant for guns and machismo John Milius became something of an outsider in Hollywood in later years. A self-styled ‘zen anarchist’ Milius was also supposedly the inspiration for the fiery Walter Sobchak (played by John Goodman) in the Coen Brothers’ cult movie The Big Lebowski (1998).

Born in 1944, Milius turned his hand to writing after he was refused entry to the US marine corps due to a chronic asthma condition. Milius graduated from film school at the University of Southern California in 1967 along with fellow students George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. He found success relatively early, writing Apocalypse Now in 1969, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and co-writing Dirty Harry for director Don Siegel (1971). For Spielberg’s hugely successful Jaws (1975), Milius contributed Robert Shaw’s speech about the US Indianapolis sinking in shark-infested waters. 

John Milius directed his first film Dillinger in 1971. Starring Warren Oates as the eponymous outlaw it was described by writer and director Paul Schrader at the time as ‘the most manic, insane, unbalanced, immature film I have ever seen. It is also one of the best, most promising first films I have seen... The film is a total excess, an arrogant display of youthful talent.’ Milius went on to direct The Wind and the Lion (1975) which explored issues of US military intervention; Big Wednesday (1978) his homage to the surfing scene; and Conan the Barbarian (1982) his monument to camp heroism. In recent years his most notable screen credits have been Clear and Present Danger (1993) and Geronimo: An American Legend (1993). 

However, it is for the original screenplay of Apocalypse Now (1979) that Milius is best known. Based on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness director Francis Ford Coppola has gone out of his way in recent years to dispel the myth that Coppola completely rewrote Milius’ work (see article here). In the following extract from an interview with Creative Screenwriting, John Milius discusses the origin of his screenplay for Apocalypse Now, along with his approach to screenwriting: 

Apocalypse Now (Directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

Going back to the beginning, what did you learn about screenwriting in your two years of film school?

Well, I learned everything I need to know. I had a wonderful teacher, Irwin Blacker, and he was feared by everyone at the school because he took a very interesting position. He gave you the screenplay form, which I hated so much, and if you made one mistake on the form, you flunked the class. His attitude was that the least you can learn is the form. ‘I can’t grade you on the content. I can’t tell you whether this is a better story for you to write than that, you know? And I can’t teach you how to write the content, but I can certainly demand that you do it in the proper form.’ He never talked about character arcs or anything like that; he simply talked about telling a good yarn, telling a good story. He said, ‘Do whatever you need to do. Be as radical and as outrageous as you can be. Take any kind of approach you want to take. Feel free to flash back, feel free to flash forward, feel free to flash back in the middle of a flashback. Feel free to use narration, all the tools are there for you to use.’ I used to tell a screenwriting class, ‘I could teach you all the basic techniques in fifteen minutes. After that, it’s up to you.’

I used Moby Dick as an example because I think Moby Dick is the best work of art ever made. My favorite work of art. I used to point out the dramatic entrance of characters, how they were threaded through.... Moby Dick was a perfect screenplay, a perfect example of the kind of drama that I was interested in. Another great influence on me was Kerouac, and a novel like On the Road, which has no tight, linear narrative, but sprawls, following this character. Moby Dick and On the Road are completely different kinds of novels, yet they’re both extremely disciplined. Nothing happens by accident in either of those two books.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (Directed by John Huston)

Would you say that your original screenplay for ‘Apocalypse Now’ followed more of the Kerouac approach?

I don’t know. You could say it’s very much like Moby Dick, too. You start with this character who’s given up on life, and suddenly they haul him out of his shower and take him to the ship. They tell him you’re gonna hunt white whale at the end of the river. I don’t know. I never thought of it that way.

I was kind of thinking along the lines of its flowing with the character.

Yeah. It’s very influenced that way. But the basic idea is that this thing is out there that you’re going to have to deal with, you know, that somewhere there’s going to be Judgment Day, somewhere, you know, you’re gonna meet Moby Dick.

How far did you get on that script in film school?

Not very far. I wrote two real scripts in film school, but when I came here and really started writing, I rewrote every bit of them. Neither of them were ever made, but I was able to option them. I had them rented out for like $5,000 a year.

You left film school with a new wife. How did you work at getting into the industry?

Well, I was just happy having any job at all. I was very lucky. I did very, very well from the beginning. I went to the first job I had, working for AIP for Larry Gordon, and I was amazed that I actually got paid to do this, I mean for something other than lifeguarding. Then I worked for Al Ruddy over at Paramount and I wrote a script called The Texans, which never got made and wasn’t very good.

Dillinger (Directed by John Milius)

Was that an assignment?

No, I just thought it up.

But you got paid to write it.

Yeah, not very well. But it was enough. I didn’t need a lot. And then after that I wrote another bad script. I didn’t do a good job and I realized the reason I didn’t do a good job was because in both cases I was influenced by the people who had hired me. They said put this in and put that in, and I went along with it. Every time I went along with something in my whole career it usually didn’t work. Usually there’s a price to pay. You think of selling out, but there is a price to pay. Usually what people want you to do is make it current. They want you to make it relate to people in 2000.

To have ‘cultural resonance.’

Yeah, ‘cultural resonance.’ And of course, that’s always the worst shit. Cultural resonance is dated instantly. When I did Big Wednesday my first impresions were that I was going to do this coming-of-age story with Arthurian overtones about surfers that nobody took seriously, their troubled lives made larger than life by their experience with the sea. And that’s what the movie is. It never strayed from that. There was a lot of pressure to make it more like Animal House, but the movie has a huge following now because it did have loftier ambitions. It wasn’t just a story about somebody trying to ride the biggest wave or something. That’s not enough.

Dillinger (Directed by John Milius)

What place does the use of myth have in screenwriting?

Well, people talk about it all the time...you know George Lucas talks about it all the time. He doesn’t know how to use it at all. He doesn’t understand myth at all. As illustrated by Phantom Menace. Writers who really understand myth don’t use it consciously. There are very few things that are truly mythical. There’s a lot of stuff that’s famous, but very few things that are the stuff of myth and legend.

I’m thinking more of classical mythology. Do you think that can empower a script in a way?

Yeah, I think there’s something there. See, myth is something where you feel an importance. The writer is relating something to an important story. If the hero has the heel of Achilles or something, then you might create a slight resonance to The Iliad – then in your gut you feel that this is important. I think the reason that The Iliad works is because nothing’s real clear. You know, it’s a story about war in which nobody is really sure what they’re fighting for, which makes it like all wars. Therefore it becomes myth.

The Mafia is myth. The Mafia is one of the great American myths. There are two truly great American myths, the myth of the Old West and the myth of the Mafia, and they’re both the same story. They’re about promise, about coming here with nothing, and the promise over the next horizon. They’re the same story, told in different ways. One’s told in the city, one’s told in the country. That’s why we love the Mafia. We never tire of the Mafia.

Are there any rituals that you put yourself through in your writing?

No, I just like to write at the end of the day because I like to think about it all day. And usually, I’ll try to avoid thinking about it, I’ll bullshit and talk to people all day long. I’ll do various acts of procrastination and then as the sun starts to get low and the shadows lengthen, guilt wells up.

Dillinger (Directed by John Milius)

Do you still try to write six pages a day?

Yeah, at least six. If I feel like going for more, I go for more. But I write no less than six – in longhand.

Keep away from the computer.

Yeah, it’s too easy to change things on the computer. You don’t have to handfit it, you know. And basically, this is hand work. There is no way to make precision parts and put them together. Every screenplay is different so it must be made by hand.

Now, you were able to option two scripts right out of film school.

Yeah. I lived pretty well on $15,000 a year back then, so $5,000 was a third of my income. If I went up to Malibu and shot a deer that cut the income down even further. I think the first year I made about $25,000. The second year I made about $40,000 or $50,000. I mean, I was as rich as a rajah.

So, the early scripts that you wrote attracted attention in the industry, they got you some small assignments and decent options.

I never got any assignments. I never got assignments from them. I had an agent sending me to their offices – I guess what they call ‘pitching’ today. I hate ‘pitch’ because it’s such an ugly term. It really describes the demeaning of the writer. Writers are treated like garbage, just stepped on and spit on. In my day, when I was hired as a young punk writer to write Apocalypse Now at Warner Bros., no one would dare think of hiring another writer. John Calley said, ‘This guy’s a genius. Leave him alone. He’s going to do this brilliant screenplay and most of all, he’s cheap.’ Nobody knew what it was going to be. He didn’t know whether I would turn out to be a good writer. But that’s the way they treated writers then.

Dirty Harry (Directed by Don Siegel)

A lot of that probably goes back to the demystification of screenwriting through all the books and seminars and tapes...

It is mystical. All creative work is mystical. How dare they demystify it? How dare they think they can demystify it? Especially when they can’t write. These guys who write these books, what’s their great literary legacy to us? What have they done? They don’t even write television episodes.

A writer’s greatest fear now is not that he’s going to be no good when he sits down to write. A writer’s greatest fear is that he’s going to be brilliant and that no one will read it, that no one can read it, that no one knows the difference because they read these stupid ‘How to write a screenplay’ books. It’s made people into idiots. In the old days the writer’s greatest fear was always, this time out, it just isn’t going to happen. I just won’t have the stuff. Now the fear is that I’ll have it, but those little jerks from Harvard Business School won’t be able to understand it. Because these MBAs can follow instructions, they read these books and say your script has to have these characters and those turning points. They ask questions like, ‘Who are you rooting for at the end of the first act?’ I was never conscious of my screenplays having any acts. I didn’t know what a character arc was. It’s all bullshit. Tell a story.

When I got in, you had to write all that stuff like ‘ext,’ ‘day,’ all the stuff that’s necessary, and then writers actually wrote, ‘we see so and so coming down the hall, she is a beautiful woman in her thirties and by her walk we can tell she’s a certain type...’ I threw it all out. I said, ‘I don’t want to write that. That doesn’t tell you what the story’s about.’ With The Wind and the Lion, the first line was ‘A gull screams, horses hooves spattered through the surf.’ I actually wrote it in the past tense because it was in the past. But I wrote Apocalypse Now in an active tense because I wanted it to have a crisp, military feel to it. Plus, Vietnam was still going on when I wrote it.

I remember fooling with the form a great deal then and I was respected for it. Today, you fool with it and they say, ‘Well this doesn’t follow the form.’ They don’t know what’s good. They don’t have any judgment. This isn’t just sour grapes. Look at the crap that’s made. I’ll put my titles up against anything these jerks produce.

Big Wednesday (Directed by John Milius)

Have you had to change the way you think about your own writing to try to get it past some of these people?

Never compromise excellence. To write for someone else is the biggest mistake that any writer makes. You should be your biggest competitor, your biggest critic, your biggest fan, because you don’t know what anybody else thinks. How arrogant it is to assume that you know the market, that you know what’s popular today – only Steven Spielberg knows what’s popular today. Only Steven Spielberg will ever know what’s popular. So leave it to him. He’s the only one in the history of man who has ever figured that out. Write what you want to see. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to have any true passion in it, and it’s not going to be done with any true artistry.

So is it that passion that ultimately sells and makes people interested in a project?

Not necessarily. It’s that passion that makes for good writing, but a lot of tricky writing, a lot of gimmicky writing sells. That doesn’t mean it’s good. Most of the people who talk about how wonderful they are, about their great reputations and their great careers as writers, and being able to write what sells, don’t have very many credits. They may do rewrites and work occasionally, but they don’t have a body of work or a voice because nobody cares. There’s a million other people just like them.

Jeremiah Johnson (Directed by Sydney Pollack)

In those initial scripts, were you developing your perspective, your voice as a writer?

The real breaking point where I knew – and it was almost overnight – that I had become a good writer with a voice was Jeremiah Johnson. When I started working on that, it was called The Crow Killer and I knew that material. I’d lived in the mountains, I had a trapline, I hunted, and I had a lot of experiences with characters up there. So, it was real easy to write that and there was a humor to it, a kind of bigger-than-life attitude. I was inspired by Carl Sandberg. I read a lot of his poetry and it’s this kind of abrupt description – ‘a train is coming, thundering steel, where are you going? Wichita.’ That great kind of feeling that he had, that’s what I was trying to do there. I remember there was a great poem about American braggarts. You know, American liars – ‘I am the ring-tailed cousin to the such and such that ate so and so and I can do this and I can do that better than Mike Fink the river man...’ I just realized that this was the voice that the script had to have. It was as clear as a bell. I knew that writing was particular to me.

Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford didn’t trust me very much at first, though. I wasn’t really housebroken in those days. I was a wild surfer kid, you know, and they preferred their writers to be more intellectual. And so they would get the intellectual writers to try and rewrite it and they’d have to hire me back because none of those guys could write that dialogue. None of those guys understood that stuff. They didn’t understand the mountains. They didn’t understand what a mountain man was. I love mountain men. I’d love to write a mountain man story today.

Was that based on an historical figure? 

Yeah. Though it changed a great deal. That was when I really realized I had the voice. And I think what gave me something there that I didn’t have before is that I allowed a sense of humor to take over, a sense of absurdity – that was the spirit of the thing. ‘I, Hatchet Jack, do leaveth my Barr rifle to whatever finds it. Lord hope it be a white man.’

Jeremiah Johnson (Directed by Sydney Pollack)

So you wrote ‘Jeremiah Johnson’, but then you weren’t able to sell it.

No, I wrote it for nothing. I wrote it for $5,000. And then I was offered a deal to rewrite a Western script [Skin Game] for $17,000. But Francis [Ford Coppola] had this Zoetrope deal at Warner Bros. and asked me, ‘How much do you need to live on?’ I said, ‘$15,000.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll get you $15,000 to do your Vietnam thing. You and George [Lucas],’ because George was going to direct it. He offered that wonderful fork in the road where I could go do my own thing rather than just rewrite some piece of crap that would probably be rewritten by somebody else. That was the most important decision I made in my life as a writer. That sort of steered me onto the path of doing my own work and being a little more like a novelist. Today I see writers making the exact opposite decision, taking the $17,000 again and again.

Two grand more.

I see them always taking the two grand more because it’ll help their careers, they’ll get to work with a real big producer, they’ll be in a big office, they will be working on a greenlit movie, and it’s going to star someone who’s hot. They always take that job, every time. Whereas I tackled an unpopular subject that no one was going to make a movie about where the chances were really slim that I could pull it off. There was no book, nothing but me and the blank page. And that was wonderful because I had followed my heart. One of the nicest times in my life was writing Apocalypse Now.

What kind of guidance did you get from Coppola or anyone else in writing it?

None. Francis was very good about that. Francis wanted us to be artists, like him. He didn’t want to interfere with anybody. He wanted you to go out and write your scripts and if you couldn’t do it, if you went to him and whined and said, ‘Gee, I need some help,’ he didn’t have much regard for that. You know, he expected you to be independent and he was giving you a wonderful opportunity to be independent of anybody else. But people did go to him and complain and whine all the time. All the time.

Apocalypse Now (Directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

Had you thought about ‘Apocalypse Now’ at all in the interim?

Yeah, somewhat. I never think about any story too much. I sort of know where they’re going and I know specific things are going to happen to them along the way, but I don’t know when they go do this and when they go do that, because if you do know all that, for me anyway – I mean other people write it all down on little cards – I don’t want to know what’s going to go on. I want the people to surprise me each day. I have no idea how I’m going to make transitions from one scene to another. I have no idea where they’re really going to go and the thing I just wrote. On my latest script, Manila John, I had a voyage of discovery because I had my own ideas on who this character was and what he did and in the middle of writing it I found the man who knew him and who saw him die and idolized him back then, and he completely changed my mind about what I thought the script was really going to be, and that was wonderful.

How do you approach getting inside the heads of your characters?

You get to know them and perceive the way they’d say things and view things. Like Manila John, he comes from New Jersey, so he’s always going to call a girl a dame. You know? A dame, a broad, or a doxie.

Did you go back in then on ‘Apocalypse Now’ and rethink what you had written?

I didn’t need to because I had left it open. I knew what the beginning would be. I knew sort of what the end would be, and I knew certain things would happen in the middle. It was the same with Apocalypse Now. I knew where it was going to end, I knew Kurtz was at the end of the river, but I didn’t know how we were going to get to him. I knew somewhere along the line there would be the first obstacle, this character Kharnage [Kilgore in the film] who was really like the Cyclops in The Iliad, and then there are the Sirens, who are Playboy bunnies. But basically I didn’t know where I’d find them, or what would happen. When I was writing Apocalypse Now I wanted them to meet people and become involved in the war, but I could never think of anything that was appropriate. Every time I would get them into a firefight or an ambush or something it would degenerate into just another meaningless Vietnam war scene. They had to be thrown into the war at its most insane and most intense.

Apocalypse Now (Directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

Did Coppola just tell you to go for it, pull out all the stops and realize your vision? Be out there as far as you can be?

Absolutely. Absolutely. You have to also discipline yourself to pull it in afterwards and make sense of it. But you’ve really got to go for it. The worst thing about today’s films is the complete lack of ambition. I mean, look at all these independent films that should be interesting. Most of them are about a bad dope deal in the Valley. The rest of them are about a homosexual love affair that’s misunderstood. There’s really just not a lot of ambition there.

I find the violent films to be particularly onerous. There’s a lot of shooting and killing, and people turning on each other and they’re kind of supposed to be the film noir of the ’90s, but they’re not. They’re all about punks. Everybody gets killed and you sit there and say, ‘God, I’m glad that person got wasted,’ you know. ‘At least I got to see it.’

Some brain on the wall.

Yeah, at least you got to see that guy get knifed and that bitch get shotgunned to death. You know, I got my money’s worth.

So, did you do any rewrites on ‘Apocalypse Now’ with Lucas after your draft was done? 

No. People didn’t do that in those days. They didn’t sit there and interfere. They took things for what they were, and when Francis and I rewrote the script it was when it was being made. The script remained the same ‘til Francis really decided to make the movie, and then we went in and reexamined everything. That was part of a process.

Apocalypse Now (Directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

Do you think you’ve gotten enough credit for your writing on ‘Apocalypse Now’?

Oh, yeah. I get full credit for the movie. I mean, I get credit for writing the movie. And Francis gets the credit for directing, which he certainly deserves because no one could have – if I’d have made it or anybody would have made it, it would have never been as good as that. But I get the credit and it’s a Milius movie. It’s not a Coppola movie. A Coppola movie is The Godfather. He was the one who said very early on, ‘I will make this movie more like you than you are, you know? I made Mario Puzo’s The Godfather more like Mario Puzo than he is.’ There’s a thing that Francis did in this movie and in The Godfather, a sense of the theatrical. A sense of grand, epic storytelling that none of us could have done. So ultimately, he gets the full credit. I mean, I get credit as the writer, I get the credit like Mankiewicz did in writing Citizen Kane. But what is Citizen Kane without Orson Welles making it?

It just seems to me that the perception is out there, perhaps fanned by Bahr and Hickenlooper’s documentary ‘Hearts of Darkness’, that Coppola was out there in the Philippines writing the script and essentially improvising what he didn’t write. 

No, I think I get enough credit. Hickenlooper’s just trying to kiss Francis’s ass all the time. When the movie first came out, Francis tried to hog all the credit, but not any more. He gives the credit to me and to everybody else, because everybody who worked on that movie suffered and has credit for it. It stained everybody’s lives. We were messing with the war and war is sacred. There’s something about that war. It’s just, you know, obscene and sacred. You mess with it, you’re going to get your life fucked with.

Apocalypse Now (Directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

In the past you’ve called ‘Apocalypse Now’ a young man’s film. Do you think you could write its equal today?

I’d be different, you know. I’d be a lot different. Apocalypse had a certain outrageousness to it. It went headlong into things. The worst thing I could do now would be to try to do something like Apocalypse. You can’t go back and recapture that power...

What does a screenwriter owe his audience beyond a satisfying tale?

A certain honesty. A screenwriter has to be able to put it on the line. I didn’t have another agenda. I didn’t do something because I thought it was going to make me rich. I didn’t do something because I thought it was going to make me loved. I didn’t do something because I thought it was going to be hip. I did the best I could and put out something that I believed in…

You have a certain flamboyance. Do you think that helped you in building your career in Hollywood?

Yeah. I think that all the people who are successful in Hollywood have a flair for flamboyance. Francis certainly does, he’s the most flamboyant of all. And I guess you could say Spielberg has a flamboyance in a way. If you don’t have that kind of flair for being a showman, for being an entertainer, then you’re not going to live with this business very well. But to be truly flamboyant you have to be about something.

Apocalypse Now (Directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

The scripts of yours that I’ve read have an interesting style. It’s very much cast against the current Hollywood style where writers are warned against long, descriptively detailed passages and long speeches that are meaningful. Did that style just flow out of you, or is it something that you saw elsewhere?

No, I suppose it came from a real desire to do novels. Yeah, today is minimalist, isn’t it? I don’t know how they do it...

Do you find the anonymity of rewrite work exasperating?

I don’t even think about it. You take the job because it’s money and then hopeeully within the job you get to do a couple of scenes where you can really, you know, you can do good riff. Like a musician, you get a couple of good riffs and it feels good, and then you just take the money and go off to another gig.

You’ve rewritten a lot of screenplays by other writers for the films you’ve directed. How do you go about making the material your own?

You have to find something in it that you really like...

What’s the best atmosphere for a writer to work in?

Well, I think Francis was right. I think that you’ve got to say to the guy, ‘Go out and do your best and I’ll be here to help you. You can bounce stuff off, but I’m not going to be here to pick you up. I’m not going to be here to tell you what to do.’ Because the minute you start telling them what to do, you’ve lost...

– ‘John Milius: Interviewed by Erik Bauer’. Creative Screenwriting, Vol 7, #2 (March/April 2000)

Mind Games: Christopher Nolan on Narrative

Memento (Directed by Christopher Nolan)

Beginning in early childhood, Christopher Nolan made short films with action figures and an 8mm camera borrowed from his father. Nolan maintained an interest in film while studying for a literature degree at University College, London. After graduation, Nolan and a group of friends raised a few thousand pounds to make his 1998 debut feature Following, a neo-noir exercise shot in 16mm over several months of weekends. Using a non-linear narrative, developed to even greater effect in Memento, the film follows Bill (Jeremy Theobald), a struggling writer who follows people around London, seeking inspiration for his characters.

Well-meaning as it was, Following was effectively preparation for Nolan’s audacious indie breakthrough Memento (2000). Based on a story by his brother Jonathan Nolan, the film experiments boldly with narrative – taking the perspective of an amnesiac Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) who is on an apparent mission to avenge his wife’s murder.

For his next project, an impressive remake of the 1997 Norwegian thriller Insomnia, Nolan used a more conventional chronology, demonstrating a strong command over a complex and unyielding noir plot set in the permanent daylight of an Alaskan summer. The film stars Al Pacino as a veteran detective assigned from Los Angeles to investigate the brutal slaying of a high-school student. In an atypically dark and sombre role, Robin Williams plays his nemesis, a murder suspect who has witnessed Pacino accidentally killing his partner during a shootout in the fog.

Following Insomnia, his first studio film, Nolan became one of the most bankable of Hollywood directors, going on to make the hugely successful The Dark Knight (2008) and Inception (2010) which also take as their basis Nolan’s favoured theme of conflicted male protagonists struggling with the nature of identity.

Nolan talked to The Onion A.V. Club in 2002 – just after the release of Insomnia – about his thoughts on narrative, the appeal of the noir genre, and what it’s like to make a film within the studio system:

Following (Directed by Christopher Nolan)

AVC: Where did the money for ‘Following’ come from, and what were the problems of shooting over such a long period of time?

Christopher Nolan: Following was a film that I made knowing I couldn’t get any money for it, knowing that I was going to have to pay for it myself. I wasn’t a wealthy person. Everyone involved in the film was, you know, working full-time and trying to get by in London, which is difficult and expensive. But we figured out that if you shot in 16mm black and white, which made the lighting much easier to set up, we could shoot 15 minutes of footage every week, and pay for that, and keep going one day a week as we earned money through our various jobs. So it took us three or four months, shooting one day a week, to finish the production. It’s probably the cheapest feature ever made, for what that’s worth.

The purpose of ‘Following’s unusual structure isn’t as apparent as that of ‘Memento’. Why did you construct the film the way you did?

When I was writing it, I really just constructed the film on an instinctive basis. I didn’t quite know what I was doing, in a way. I just knew that I had a structure that made a lot of sense to me, and it really took me the making of the film until I started to feel what I thought I was trying to do. And to me, what I tried to do was tell a story in something like a three-dimensional sense, to tell a story that expands in all directions as you’re passing through the narrative. Instead of just expanding in one direction, it expands in every direction. And the reason that was interesting to me, and the reason it worked instinctively, is because once I started to really sit down and think about what that meant, I realized that that’s the way we receive most stories in real life. If you look at the way a newspaper story works, that’s how it works. Say you have a headline like ‘Mountain Bike Stolen,’ and then you read the story, read another story about it the next day, and then the next week, and then the next year. News is a process of expansion, the filling in of detail, and making narrative connections – not based on chronology, but based on features of the story. There are narrative connections made between props, between characters, between situations, and so forth. That was very interesting to me. It made a lot of sense for that story. In the case of Memento, I absolutely had not intended to make another film with a fractured chronology, because I felt pretty good about how I had explored it in Following. But when it came to my brother’s short story, the first thing we said to each other was, ‘It’s most interesting told from a third-person point of view.’ And the structure of the film was from the process of sitting and thinking about how you put the audience into the position of somebody who doesn’t know what’s just happened. I finally came up with the answer: ‘Well, you don’t tell them what’s just happened, you tell them what’s going to happen, and tell the story backwards, and that way you remove the information from the audience that’s not available to the character, and that helps you get into his condition.’ That was the reason that I wound up making two films in a row with fractured timelines. But Insomnia has a very linear structure, specifically for the reason that I was trying to tell a story from the point of view of a character who’s passing through an intensely linear experience, an accumulation of many days without sleep.

Memento (Directed by Christopher Nolan)

In the broadest sense, all three of your features are in the noir genre, and all are told from something close to a first-person perspective. What attracts you to those styles?

Well, I think the two are sort of hand-in-hand, in the sense that, to me, the most interesting approach to film noir is subjective. The genre is really all about not knowing what’s going on around you, and that fear of the unknown. The only way to do that effectively is to really get into the maze, rather than look at the maze from above, so that’s where I sort of come at it. In the case of the three films I’ve done, there’s some element of the protagonist’s psychology that is skewed, that gives you a different take on that story. So if you can get in that person’s head and adopt that point of view of the story, you get to take familiar elements and see them from an unfamiliar angle. That makes the whole thing much more exciting.

Did you have any particular models in mind when you...

No, not really. There are a few models, particularly literary. The one example I like to use is a book by Graham Swift called Waterland, which is a fantastic book I read when I was a kid. Swift constructs the story in a nonlinear fashion that’s entirely clear and consistent and interesting, so I’ve certainly grown up feeling that there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to present the cinematic narrative in whatever form is most interesting. But I try not to have conscious cinematic references in mind when I’m figuring out what to do or how to do it, simply because I think it’s restricting. Not because you’re copying – probably more likely because you’d be afraid to copy, that you wouldn’t do stuff – and, to me, any kind of filmmaking that’s reactive is not going to be as good as something more inventive and original.

Memento (Directed by Christopher Nolan)

Your films, particularly the first two, return to the same sort of small set of locations again and again. Is there a reason for that?

Probably mostly practical reasons, because when you have no money, you start looking at the genre and the story like, ‘What’s the most I can do with the least? What’s the most I can do with the interrelationships of a very small group of characters and a small set of spaces?’ And Memento is somewhat bigger [than Following], but it still had to be contained, for practical reasons. I didn’t find that in any way restricting, because I went into the script stage constructing a story designed in that way. And it’s exactly the same, really, with Insomnia. The geography is much bigger, but it allowed me to juxtapose this massive Alaskan landscape with this very claustrophobic situation. I think the two, in the film, set each other off quite nicely. With Memento, there’s a lot of circularity with locations. You start with places you keep coming back to, so everything is in spirals and circles, allowing you to feel the main character’s disorientation.

Do you see a natural connection between ‘Insomnia’ and ‘Memento’, because both films deal with how the mind operates and plays tricks on you?

Definitely. Now that I’ve finished Insomnia, I look back and see all kinds of obvious connections. Certainly the idea of perception is carried over very strongly, and it’s something I continue to be interested in, trying to give the audience a slightly different perception of the story. Memento is about somebody who can’t make memories, and the way it skews his view of what’s happening. Insomnia is also very much about the Al Pacino character’s thought process, and how it’s clouded through cumulative exhaustion, combined with guilt and extraordinary stress. That, to me, is pretty fascinating. And I think the films also share all sorts of thematic concerns, such as the relationship between motivation and action, and the difficulty of reconciling your view of the story with the supposed objective view of that story.

Memento (Directed by Christopher Nolan)

So why remake ‘Insomnia’? What are the crucial differences between your version and the original?

To me, it’s a question of seeing this film that I absolutely loved, and that I thought was perfect and unimproveable. But I thought that the narrative situation could be taken in a very different direction by setting it in a very different arena, namely the context of the type of American studio film that used to get made 50 years ago. Setting it in that arena totally transforms the nature of the moral paradox; in the original, it’s completely fascinating, but I had no interest in attempting to redo that. What we did, and what Hillary Seitz’s script did very well, is give you a sympathetic character, particularly in casting Al Pacino, that you automatically invest a lot of trust and respect and sympathy toward. And then, using that, I take you to a very different impression of the man.

What do you mean by ‘moral paradox’ in this story?

Well, I think that the hero is put in the position where he can’t do the right thing, and that, to me, is what the moral paradox is. If he does the right thing, bad things are going to happen. By making him a good man who wants to do the right thing, the fact that he’s killed his partner by mistake and lied about it, and that he’s seen by the bad guy... He doesn’t have any way, if you think about it, to do the right thing. In fact, it really doesn’t matter whether he’s doing the right thing. I loved how the script completely scrapped the backstory [about Pacino’s alleged corruption as an L.A. police detective], so we wound up making a film that’s really the last act of a story. It wraps it up very tightly. In the middle of the film, he’s in a place where there really is no way out, which I love. To me, that’s what film noir is all about. Studios used to be much better at making these kinds of movies. Take Strangers On A Train, for example, in which the guy at the center of it is sympathetic and a good man, and you’ve invested a lot in him, but he’s compromised and therefore trapped, and you’re kind of trapped with him.

Insomnia (Directed by Christopher Nolan)

Did you have to go through studio things like test screenings? What was that process like?

You know, in retrospect, it worked enormously in my favor, because I got the film I wanted on screen. I was very afraid of the process, because I’ve never had to go through it. I can’t imagine having gone through it with something like Memento. [Laughs.] The test screenings were one of these things that just loomed over me, and that was just terrifying. Then, when I went through it, it was kind of okay. There’s a logic to it that the studio people explain to you, and you start to pick up. I don’t like it, and I would very happily not do it. Filmmakers are all different. Steven Soderbergh is a producer on the film, and he helped guide me through it. He likes test screenings, because he learns a lot about the film by sitting with an audience of unbiased strangers and feeling their reaction.

But that’s different from filling out those little cards...

Well, they do that at the end, but you’re still there for the screening, so there are potentially a lot of benefits for the filmmaker. For this movie, everybody in the audience was just kind of dead still and focused, you know, which is kind of what it’s supposed to be, because it’s not a comedy. [Laughs.] That was great, because I felt the tension was very good, and it felt like those things were working. I actually get a lot more out of showing films to small groups of people that I know, because I know how to gauge their reactions. Anyway, I wasn’t crazy about the process, but I have to say it worked in my favor, because there were certainly things in the movie that seemed confusing, or potentially confusing. And that’s always a big fear among producers and the studio: Are people going to understand the plot? Will they understand why the characters act the way they do? I felt pretty good going into the test screenings that people wouldn’t feel like that.

Insomnia (Directed by Christopher Nolan)

Do you think that same fear of confusion is why ‘Memento’ bounced around a little bit without finding a distributor?

Oh, absolutely. And it didn’t just bounce around a little bit; it was a long time. It was really gruelling. I kind of had expected it, but we went through about six months of saying, ‘What the hell are we gonna do?’ That’s a long time to be under that kind of pressure. I think the problem was a lack of adventurousness on the part of the so-called independent studios. I’m not an idiot, and I knew the film was going to be difficult for audiences potentially, so I made the film as small as possible. I made it for the right price, with the right cast. It made a lot of sense to me where it was coming from. What was weird as well was that there’d usually be somebody at each screening who totally got the movie, and could see that there was something there that people would enjoy. Hollywood is a very frightened place – one’s very nervous, understandably, with lots of money – so they watch movies in a different way. Which is one reason, to be honest, that the screenings can be helpful, because the audience is relaxed. They’re just watching a movie. Everybody else who you screen the movie for has a huge stake in it, so they sit there going, ‘Oh my God, is the audience going to know what this is? Are they gonna understand this business about the shell case?’ and this kind of stuff. Then, when you’re able to show it to a relaxed audience, they’re like, ‘Yeah. Fine. I’ve got it.’

I was at one of those early film-festival screenings of ‘Memento’, and, at the Q&A afterwards, you were inundated with questions from people trying to sort the movie out. Perhaps that was misinterpreted as the audience being confused, rather than interested in the movie.

Well, I wouldn’t even call it a misinterpretation, because the people who asked a lot of questions were very often pissed off by the film. People who had just accepted the fact that you can’t quite grasp everything, necessarily, and that’s part of the characters’ experience, seemed to be a little more relaxed about a lot of issues. And certainly with Insomnia, I was very interested in the notion of using linear construction to remove any concern about the plot. People don’t come out of Insomnia worrying about the plot. There are all kinds of complexities in the plot, and it’s actually a much more complicated plot than Memento. But people don’t worry about it. They pass through it, because they’re comfortable with their own familiar ground structurally, so they’re not constantly worried about it. I wanted to do a different thing, so that people would come out with questions about the themes– which is, in the case of Memento, too, much more interesting to me than questions about the plot. They came out with questions about the paradoxical situation, and the moral questions about the characters that the film raises. That, to me, is a lot more fun.

Insomnia (Directed by Christopher Nolan)

Would you say that you’re kinder to both the detective and the killer in this film than the original ‘Insomnia’—that your film’s view is perhaps a little softer?

Perhaps. I think I try to understand them more, maybe, and in that sense, I’m kinder. Or I try to be a little more subjective with the film, a little more inside the detective’s head. I guess there’s a sense in which that feels kinder. But I think the film is, nevertheless, quite judgmental in a way that the original isn’t. The original is very dark and very alienating, and that’s kind of the point of it. This is much more inside this guy’s head, and kind of wrestling with it. I guess the only way I can really answer your question is just to confess to the fact that I really think of the two main characters as the same character, in a sense, and sort of approached it that way. So even though I refer to it as a very subjective experience, I think that that subjectivity encompasses both characters without jumping back and forth. I did actually talk quite a lot to Robin Williams about this: To me, there’s an odd quality to his character. It’s almost as if he doesn’t exist, like he’s just a projection of the hero’s guilty conscience.

If memory serves, the original ‘Insomnia’ put the detective up against someone who’s more of a serial killer, whereas Robin Williams’ character seems to be somebody who doesn’t do this habitually.

Yes. Partly because of who he is as a movie star, he takes the role to a very sympathetic level, where people are literally watching him murder someone in flashback, and they still kind of understand him. To me, he’s actually someone who’s very dangerous, because he isn’t able to apply moral judgment on himself the way Pacino does. So you’ve got these two guys who are really in the same boat, but one of them is constructing his own punishment for himself, and the other is waiting for punishment from somebody else. In fact, Williams is almost looking to Pacino for it. He’s saying to him, ‘I’ve done this horrible thing, and nothing bad has happened. The ground didn’t open up and swallow me, and God didn’t strike me down, so where do I go from here?’ Which is very dangerous, and really chilling.

Is it true that you’re planning to do a film about Howard Hughes?

Yeah, I’m writing it right now.

It’s sort of cursed, isn’t it? The whole idea of doing a Howard Hughes biopic seems cursed.

Well, it’s not cursed. It’s just never happened. Cursed is when you do it and it fails miserably, and somebody else does it and it fails miserably. No one has ever gone ahead with a Howard Hughes biopic. I don’t know why it has a reputation as being cursed, and I don’t intend to find out. [Laughs.] I think casting may have had something to do with it, and I think I’ve found the one guy, in the person of Jim Carrey, who can actually do what’s required by the part. It’s a monumental part to try to pull off, no question. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I hope. [Laughs.]

– Christopher Nolan: Interview with Scott Tobias. The A.V. Club (June 5, 2002).

Writing to the Beat: An Interview With Horton Foote

To Kill a Mockingbird (Directed by Robert Mulligan)

One of the foremost American playwrights Horton Foote has had a steady and impressive parallel career as a screenwriter.  He has adapted his plays into novels, teleplays, and films with surprising frequency and success. Horton Foote is best known for his adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. He captured American life in wonderfully, straightforward evocative works. 

Foote was born in Wharton, Texas, in 1916. He claims that he felt a calling to be an actor at the age of 10 and got his parents to let him attend acting school when he was sixteen. Foote studied acting in California's Pasadena Playhouse and in New York City. His first two plays, Wharton Dance (1940) and Texas Town (1941), were produced in New York City by the American Actors' Company. The Trip to Bountiful, Foote's most well-known original work, was created as a television play and aired in 1953; later that year, it was played on Broadway; and in 1985, it was made into a film, for which Foote also penned the Academy Award-nominated screenplay. His 1954 drama The Travelling Lady, which he also wrote the script for, was adapted into the 1965 film Baby, the Rain Must Fall. Foote also created The Orphans' Home Cycle, a critically praised sequence of nine plays set in rural Texas, including Valentine's Day (1980), 1918 (1982), and The Widow Claire. His understated yet perceptive drama The Young Man from Atlanta (1994) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. 

Foote earned an Academy Award for his script for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), an adaptation of Harper Lee's book. Following the film adaptation of "Mockingbird," Foote adapted "The Traveling Lady" for the film Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), but he became disillusioned with Hollywood. Despite being produced by Sam Spiegel, written by Lillian Hellman, and directed by Arthur Penn, and containing one of Marlon Brando's best performances, The Chase (1966) was a critical and commercial flop.

Foote, who had fallen out of favour in Hollywood and on Broadway, sought refuge in New Hampshire. Ten years after "To Kill a Mockingbird," Robert Duvall delivered a masterful portrayal in Tomorrow (1972), the film version of Foote's adaptation of a novella by William Faulkner. The film received favourable reviews. Ten years after their cooperation on "Tomorrow," Foote, whom Duvall refers to as "the country Chekhov," created an original script for the actor. Tender Mercies (1983) earned both of them Academy Awards, for Foote's Best Original Screenplay and Duvall's Best Actor. Geraldine Page would subsequently win the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Foote's The Trip to Bountiful (1985), earning him his third Academy Award nomination. Among his other significant screenplays are Of Mice and Men (1992), a film version of John Steinbeck's book of the same name, and Old Man (1997), a made-for-television version of William Faulkner's The Wild Palms.

Among Foote's other works is "Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood," a 1999 memoir about growing up in Wharton, Texas. Hoote invented the fictitious town of Harrison, Texas, which served as the setting for many of his plays. His autobiography's first two volumes, "Farewell" and "Beginnings," were released in 1999 and 2001, respectively. 

Along with his Pulitzer Prize and two Academy Awards, Foote received the William Inge Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Theatre in 1989, a Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America in 1999, and the PEN American Center's Master American Dramatist Award in 2000. 

Horton Foote's popularity is due to his candid exploration of the human condition and the reasons why some individuals endure tragedy while others perish. For 60 years, his fundamental themes of belonging and desire for home have resounded with audiences.

The following extract is from an interview with Joseph A. Cincotti in which Foote discusses the influence of the Method technique on his work as a writer.

I know you studied for a long time as an actor and were influenced by the Method. Can you tell me a little bit about Tamara Daykarhanova? 
 
I stumbled on her early when I was a young actor. A very well-known actress of the 1930s, named Rosamond Pinchot, met me on the street in New York and told me she would pay me to be her scene partner, working with Tamara. That’s how I met Tamara. Tamara Daykarhanova was a student of Stanislavski’s. In Hollywood, Tamara started her own studio [the Tamar Daykarhanova School for the Stage]. She brought into the studio Andrius Jilinsky and [his wife] Vera Soloviova, both from the Moscow Art Theater. They taught the Stanislavski system, which I am very indebted to because it taught me a great deal about play structure. I worked in Tarmara’s studio with Vera for about two years, out of which we started a company called the American Actors Company [in 1938]. I guess, you’d call it an off-off-Broadway company now, but it was over a garage. That is where I first started writing.

What did she teach you? 

First of all, for me there was a whole period of unlearning the bad habits I had picked up in my conventional training as an actor, which was to be very vocal and to work things out vocally rather than to find my inner life. They gave us a whole series of exercises for actors.

To Kill a Mockingbird (Directed by Robert Mulligan)

Are you still, these fifty or more years later, influenced by the Method? Do you still find yourself writing in the beat? 

Absolutely. The whole sense of the through-line, the sense of actions, what people want on stage.

Can you explain what the ‘beat’ is? 

It’s just an arbitrary term. It’s like, what is the beginning of an action and the end of an action, you might say. The first beat of the play might be any moment that begins and ends.

The smallest unit of acting? 

It could be. As you work on, you try to make the beats larger. At first, you might break them down into infinitesimal beats; then you try to make them larger. Some people use the term ‘beats’. Other people use the term ‘actions’. It all means the same thing, really. The reason I like to use the word ‘beat’ is it’s almost a musical term. It’s like a musical phrase.

How did the Stanislavski system or method help you as a writer? 

It applied to me wonderfully as a writer, because in my work as an actor, I would break a play down so that, without really knowing it, I was studying its structure in the sense of what it was the characters wanted. That’s really much more important than the result of the character: what do they want, what causes the conflict between them, what is the structure of the scene, what is the overall through-line of the play, what is the spine, what does everything kind of hold on to. That was one way in which I could instinctually, as an actor, work on trying to understand the play.

To Kill a Mockingbird (Directed by Robert Mulligan)

Can you think of any other writers you would consider Method or system writers? 

Oh, I don’t think anybody in the modern theater has escaped it. They may think they have. They may disallow it or think it’s tiresome or unnecessary. But you can’t be in our theater and not have been, on some level, influenced either for or against the system or the Method. How is that possible?

Can we talk about ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘Of Mice and Men’? When your telephone rings and someone asks you to adapt a work of literature, what is your reaction? 

Well, I don’t like to adapt, to begin with. It’s a very painful process—a big responsibility— particularly if you like something, which I usually have to do. In the case of Mockingbird, it was sent to me, and I said, ‘I’m not going to read it because I don’t want to do it.’ My wife read it— she’s passed on now—but she had enormous influence on me. She said to me, ‘You’d better stop and read this book.’ So I read it and felt I could really do something with it. [The producer] Alan [Pakula] and [the director] Bob [Mulligan] had offered it to Harper [Lee, the book’s author] to adapt, and she didn’t want to do it. They felt she and I should meet, so they brought Harper out to Nyack, and we had an evening together and kind of fell in love. That script was a very happy experience.

Of Mice and Men (Directed by Gary Sinise)

Was it harder or easier to adapt than you thought it would be? 

Not hard, because first of all, Alan Pakula was the producer, and he’s very skillful. I have to find ways to get into things. I had read R. P. Blackmur, a critic I admired, and he wrote a review-essay about it called A Scout in the Wilderness, comparing the novel to Huck Finn. That meant a lot to me because Huck Finn was something I always wanted to do and still would like to do as a film—if you could, although you would have to wait until the era of being politically correct about it has passed. The comparison to Huck Finn made my imagination go.

Harper also told me that [the character of] Deal was based on Truman Capote, and that was very helpful to me. The contribution Alan made was to say, ‘Now look, just stop worrying about the time frame of the novel and try to bring it into focus in one year of seasons: fall, winter, spring, summer.’ Architecturally, that was a big help. Then I felt I could compress and take away and add from that point of view.

Tender Mercies (Directed by Bruce Beresford)

Of Mice and Men, again I resisted. But I had great respect for [the actor-director] Gary Sinise. My great resistance there was it had been done so much—what in the world could anybody ever say that was different? I had spent my young manhood pretending I was Lenny. Everybody was doing Lenny in those days. But then I reread the novella, and I was struck by how fresh it seemed, particularly how it related to today, with the rootlessness and the hopelessness and the migratory conditions. I felt quite taken with it. Then—I know I’ll get into trouble for saying this, because it’s considered a classic—I happened to run off the [Lewis] Milestone film [Of Mice and Men, 1940], which I decided was terrible. I thought it was full of clichés and everything I didn’t want to do. Gary agreed with me. He said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to that silly thing.’ He had a great passion about the male-bonding idea. He sent me a film, which I’d never seen, called Scarecrow, with Al Pacino, who I think is a remarkable actor, and Gene Hackman, also a wonderful actor. It is a tale of two guys on the road—very different from Steinbeck—but suddenly, I found myself interested in doing Of Mice and Men and exploring it.

Were you on the set of all of your big four films?

No, just the middle two [Tender Mercies and The Trip to Bountiful]. For Mockingbird, I was there for all of the casting. I did some of the screen tests. I played Gregory [Peck’s] part in some of the screen tests with the kids. With [Gary] Sinise, I was there for the first week, and I went back the last week.

Do actors recognize that you are writing in the ‘beat’?

I don’t talk about it. But I think that’s why actors like my work. Mostly, too, because they love the subtext of it.

Sam Peckinpah: Screening Violence

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

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

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

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

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

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

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

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

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

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (Directed by Don Siegel)

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

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

What came next?

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

Wichita (Directed by Jacques Tourneur)

How did you make the switch from TV to movies?

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

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

Ride the High Country (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

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

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

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

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

Ride the High Country (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

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

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

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

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

Major Dundee (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

What came next – ‘Major Dundee’?

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

Was this when you were actually shooting the picture? 

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

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

Major Dundee (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

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

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

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

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

Major Dundee (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

What came next, ‘The Cincinnati Kid’? 

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

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

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

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

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

Major Dundee (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

What about the script to ‘The Glory Guys’? 

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

What about ‘Villa Rides’? 

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

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

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

The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

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

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

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

This was during the bank hold-up scene? 

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

The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

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

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

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

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

How fast do you work? Do you overshoot? 

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

Any ambition you want to fulfil? 

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

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

Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’: An American Nightmare

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

When Alfred Hitchcock was interviewed by Francois Truffaut in the fall of 1962, he had this to say on Psycho: ‘It wasn’t a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance... they were aroused by pure film.’ Adding that it ‘belongs to filmmakers, to you and me.’

Made in the spirit of a low-budget movie (Psycho cost $800,000), Hitchcock utilised his television crew from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, shot in what was then an unfashionable black and white, deployed long sequences without dialogue and eschewed the traditional narrative path by having the female lead killed early on. Moreover, Hitchcock forced the audience to be attentive while breaking convention, guiding the audience to switch allegiance from Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh’s) theft and escape, to an audacious sympathy with Anthony Perkins’ mother-fixated serial-killer, Norman Bates. The death of Marion Crane in the infamous shower sequence is followed by Norman’s painstaking clean-up of the crime scene and disposal of her body, car and stolen cash, into a nearby lake. A complex chain that plays with the audience’s identification with Norman’s feelings of fear and guilt.

The film’s melodramatic second half provides two potent set-piece shocks. The private detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam) is killed in a scene that uses back-projection to follow his death-tumble down the stairs. And the secret of Norman’s relationship with his mother is disclosed.

Hitchcock’s relish in how film affects his audience is most apparent in Psycho. ‘I was directing the viewers,’ the director told Truffaut in their book-length interview. ‘You might say I was playing them, like an organ.’

What makes Psycho timeless, however, is that it connects directly with its audience’s primal fears and concerns. Marion Crane takes a detour into a world of randomness, guilt and death. And yet on several occasions Hitchcock remarked that Psycho is a film made with a sense of amusement. ‘It's a fun picture,’ he once quipped. In his book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures, Donald Spoto writes that the sharp wit of the film is a refusal to submit to the horror and oppression of those fears and impulses which the film so relentlessly explores:

“For most, a first viewing of Psycho is marked by suspense, even mounting terror, and by a sense of decay and death permeating the whole. Yet for all its overt Gothicism – forbidding gingerbread houses, the abundance of mirrors, terrible dark nights of madness and death – repeated viewings leave a sense, above all, of profound sadness. For Psycho describes, as perhaps no other American film, the inordinate expense of wasted lives in a world so comfortably familiar as to appear, initially, unthreatening: the world of office girls and lunchtime liaisons, of half-eaten cheese sandwiches, of motels just off the main road, of shy young men and maternal devotion. But these may just be flimsy veils for spiritual, moral and psychic disarray of terrifying ramifications. 

“Psycho postulates that the American dream has become a nightmare, and that all its components play us false. Hitchcock reveals the emptiness of the dream that a woman can flee to her lover and begin an Edenic new life, forgetting the past. He shows that love stolen at mid-day, like cash stolen in later afternoon, amounts to nothing. He shatters the notion that intense filial devotion can conquer death and cancel the past. Finally, the film treats with satiric, Swiftian vengeance the two great American psychological obsessions: the role of Mother, and the embarrassed secretiveness which surrounds both love-making and the bathroom…. 

“These concerns, these vulnerabilities, raise Marion Crane and Normal Bates almost to the level of prototypes; thus Hitchcock’s insistence on audience manipulation and the resulting identification of viewer with character…. Broader in scope than the bizarre elements of its plot indicate, Psycho has the dimensions of great tragedy, very like Oresteia, Macbeth and Crime and Punishment. In method and content, in the sheer economy of its style and in its oddly appealing wit, it is one of the great works of modern art.”

– Donald Spoto. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures. New 
York: Hopkins and Blake, 1976.