Akira Kurosowa: How Rashomon Was Made

Rashomon (Directed by Akira Kurosawa)

A woman is  brutally assaulted and her samurai husband is slain in a jungle by a bandit. The woman and her attacker give contradictory narratives of what transpired in court, while the deceased man, talking through a medium, offers another version. Finally, a woodcutter who claims to have observed the attack provides a fourth version. However, whose account is to be believed? Rashomon, which won both the Venice Grand Prix and the Academy Award for best foreign language picture, is not only an example of the great Kurosawa at his peak – collaborating with his constant partner, the imposing Toshiro Mifune – but also of cinematic storytelling at its most audacious. Rashomon has had a profound influence on film structure and terminology in the 60 years since it was released, with its various contradictory flashbacks conspiring to show truth as an amorphous entity. 

However, the film's visual eloquence and remarkable cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa, which employs the dense woodland environment as a metaphor for the story's tangled emotions, should not be overlooked. "[The] peculiar impulses of the human heart will be represented through an intricately crafted dance of light and shadow," Kurosawa wrote of his preparations for the film, which he adapted in part from Ryunosuke Akutagawa's short tale Yabu no Naka (In a Grove). "In the film, characters who become lost in the maze of their own hearts venture into a larger wilderness..." Kurosawa's effort to reconnect with the art form's roots, which he feared were in risk of being obscured resulted in the bristling brilliance of the film. "I believed that since the arrival of talkies in the 1930s, we had misplaced and lost what was so magnificent about the old silent films," he explained. I was acutely conscious of the aesthetic loss as a source of ongoing annoyance. I felt compelled to return to film's origins in order to rediscover this unusual beauty..." The final devotion to truth and idealism may be a little too soothing. However, this is readily mitigated by Rashomon's meticulous psychological examination of its audience — probably Kurosawa's greatest work.

In the following extract from his autobiography, Akira Kurosawa discusses the making of Rashomon.

When I had finished Scandal for the Shochiku studios, Daiei asked if I wouldn’t direct one more film for them. As I cast about for what to film, I suddenly remembered a script based on the short story ‘Yabu no naka’ (‘In a Grove’) by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. It had been written by Hashimoto Shinobu, who had been studying under director Itami Mansaku. It was a very well-written piece, but not long enough to make into a feature film. This Hashimoto had visited my home, and I talked with him for hours. He seemed to have substance, and I took a liking to him. He later wrote the screenplays for Ikiru (1952) and Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954) with me. The script I remembered was his Akutagawa adaptation called ‘Male-Female.’

Probably my subconscious told me it was not right to have put that script aside; probably I was—without being aware of it – wondering all the while if I couldn’t do something with it. At that moment the memory of it jumped out of one of those creases in my brain and told me to give it a chance. At the same time I recalled that ‘In a Grove’ is made up of three stories, and realized that if I added one more, the whole would be just the right length for a feature film. Then I remembered the Akutagawa story ‘Rashomon.’ Like ‘In a Grove,’ it was set in the Heian period (794-1184). The film Rashomon took shape in my mind.

Since the advent of the talkies in the 1930’s, I felt, we had mis­placed and forgotten what was so wonderful about the old silent movies. I was aware of the esthetic loss as a constant irritation. I sensed a need to go back to the origins of the motion picture to find this peculiar beauty again; I had to go back into the past.

In particular, I believed that there was something to be learned from the spirit of the French avant-garde films of the 1920s. Yet in Japan at this time we had no film library. I had to forage for old films, and try to remember the structure of those I had seen as a boy, rumi­nating over the esthetics that had made them special.

Rashomon would be my testing ground, the place where I could apply the ideas and wishes growing out of my silent-film research. To provide the symbolic background atmosphere, I decided to use the Akutagawa ‘In a Grove’ story, which goes into the depths of the human heart as if with a surgeon’s scalpel, laying bare its dark com­plexities and bizarre twists. These strange impulses of the human heart would be expressed through the use of an elaborately fashioned play of light and shadow. In the film, people going astray in the thicket of their hearts would wander into a wider wilderness, so I moved the setting to a large forest. I selected the virgin forest of the mountains surrounding Nara, and the forest belonging to the Komyoji temple outside Kyoto.

There were only eight characters, but the story was both complex and deep. The script was done as straightforwardly and briefly as possible, so I felt I should be able to create a rich and expansive visual image in turning it into a film. Fortunately, I had as cinematographer a man I had long wanted to work with, Miyagawa Kazuo; I had Hayasaka to compose the music and Matsuyama as art director. The cast was Mifune Toshiro, Mori Masayuki, Kyo Machiko, Shimura Takashi, Chiaki Minoru, Ueda Kichijiro, Kato Daisuke and Honma Fumiko; all were actors whose temperaments I knew, and I could not have wished for a better line-up. Moreover, the story was supposed to take place in summer, and we had, ready to hand, the scintillating midsummer heat of Kyoto and Nara. With all these conditions so neatly met, I could ask nothing more. All that was left was to begin the film.

However, one day just before the shooting was to start, the three assistant directors came to see me at the inn where I was staying. I wondered what the problem could be. It turned out that they found the script baffling and wanted me to explain it to them. ‘Please read it again more carefully,’ I told them. ‘If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.’ But they wouldn’t leave. ‘We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t understand it at all; that’s why we want you to explain it to us.’ For their persis­tence I gave them this simple explanation:

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings – the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going be­yond the grave – even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.

After I finished, two of the three assistant directors nodded and said they would try reading the script again. They got up to leave, but the third, who was the chief, remained unconvinced. He left with an angry look on his face. (As it turned out, this chief assistant director and I never did get along. I still regret that in the end I had to ask for his resignation. But, aside from this, the work went well)…

There is no end to my recollections of Rashomon. If I tried to write about all of them, I’d never finish, so I’d like to end with one incident that left an indelible impression on me. It has to do with the music.

As I was writing the script, I heard the rhythms of a bolero in my head over the episode of the woman’s side of the story. I asked Hayasaka to write a bolero kind of music for the scene. When we came to the dubbing of that scene, Hayasaka sat down next to me and said, ‘I’ll try it with the music.’ In his face I saw uneasiness and anticipa­tion. My own nervousness and expectancy gave me a painful sensation in my chest. The screen lit up with the beginning of the scene, and the strains of the bolero music softly counted out the rhythm. As the scene progressed, the music rose, but the image and the sound failed to coincide and seemed to be at odds with each other. ‘Damn it,’ I thought. The multiplication of sound and image that I had calculated in my head had failed, it seemed. It was enough to make me break out in a cold sweat.

We kept going. The bolero music rose yet again, and suddenly picture and sound fell into perfect unison. The mood created was positively eerie. I felt an icy chill run down my spine, and unwittingly I turned to Hayasaka. He was looking at me. His face was pale, and I saw that he was shuddering with the same eerie emotion I felt. From that point on, sound and image proceeded with incredible speed to surpass even the calculations I had made in my head. The effect was strange and overwhelming.

And that is how Rashomon was made.

– Excerpted from Something Like an Autobiography, trans., Audie E. Bock. Translation Copyright ©1982 by Vintage Books.

Kurosawa on Kurosawa

Seven Samurai (Directed by Akira Kurosawa)

The great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, described by Stephen Spielberg as ‘the pictorial Shakespeare of our time’, was famously reluctant to discuss his films . However, he opened up to critic Donald Richie in an interview first published in Sight & Sound magazine in 1964. Extracts were reprinted in July 2010 by way of an introduction to a season of Kurosawa’s films shown at the British Film Institute:

1. Sugata Sanshiro, 1943

Kurosawa’s debut feature, made when he was 33, is set in the late 19th century, and follows a country boy who comes to the city to study martial arts.

‘I remember the first time I said ‘Cut’ – it was as though it was not my own voice at all. From the second time on it was me all right. When I think of this first picture I remember most that I had a good time making it. And at this period it was hard to have a good time making films because it was wartime and you weren’t allowed to say anything worth saying. Back then everyone thought that the real Japanese-style film should be as simple as possible. I disagreed and got away with disagreeing – that much I could say.’

2. Drunken Angel, 1948

The film that brought Kurosawa and Mifune Toshiro together is a thriller about a hoodlum and an alcoholic doctor (his other great actor, Shimura Takashi).

‘In this picture I finally discovered myself. It was my picture: I was doing it and no one else. Part of this was thanks to Mifune. Shimura played the doctor beautifully, but I found that I could not control Mifune. When I saw this, I let him do as he wanted, let him play the part freely. I did not want to smother that vitality. In the end, although the title refers to the doctor, it is Mifune that everyone remembers.

‘His reactions are extraordinarily swift. If I say one thing, he understands ten. He reacts very quickly to the director’s intentions. Most Japanese actors are the opposite of this and so I wanted Mifune to cultivate this gift.

‘One of the reasons for the extreme popularity of this film at the time was that there was no competition – no other films showed an equal interest in people. We had difficulty with one of the characters: that of the doctor himself. Uekusa Jin and I rewrote his part over and over again. Still, he wasn’t interesting. We had almost given up when it occurred to me that he was just too good to be true – he needed a defect, a vice. This is why we made him an alcoholic. At that time most film characters were shining white or blackest black. We made the doctor grey.’

3. Rashomon, 1950

Kurosawa’s masterpiece about a rape and murder as seen from the conflicting perspectives of several characters brought Japanese cinema to the attention of international audiences when it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.

‘I think Kyo Machiko was marvellous in the film... so forceful. And it took about a month of work to get that.

‘We were staying in Kyoto, waiting for the set to be finished. While there we ran off some 16mm prints to amuse ourselves. One of them was a Martin Johnson jungle film in which there was a shot of a lion roaming around. I noticed the shot and told Mifune that that was just what I wanted him to be.

‘At the same time Mori [Mori Masayuki, who plays Kyo’s murdered nobleman husband in the film] had seen downtown a jungle picture in which a black leopard was shown. We all went to see it. When the leopard came on Machiko was so upset that she hid her face. I saw and recognised the gesture – it was just what I wanted for the young wife.

‘I like silent pictures and always have. They are often so much more beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they have to be. At any rate, I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember, this way: one of the techniques of modern painting is simplification, I must therefore simplify this film.

‘We had our share of troubles in making the picture. After one reel was edited there was a studio fire, and another one during dubbing. I’m not happy when I think back to those times. Also I did not know that the film was being sent to Venice. And it certainly would not have been sent if Giuliana Stramigioli [head of Unitalia Film] had not seen and liked it.’

4. The Idiot, 1951

Kurosawa followed ‘Rashomon’ with an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel. His long initial edit was heavily cut by Shochiku, and the film proved a commercial and critical failure.

‘I had wanted to make his film since before Rashomon. Since I was little I’d read Dostoevsky and had thought this book would make a wonderful film. Naturally you cannot compare me to him, but he is still my favourite author – he is the one who writes most honestly about human existence. And I think that when I made this picture I really understood him.’

‘People have said this film is a failure. I don’t think so. At least, as entertainment, I don’t think it is a failure.’

5. Ikiru (Living), 1952

Shimura Takashi gives an unforgettable performance as a bureaucrat who finds meaning in his life after learning he has cancer.

‘What I remember best here is the long wake sequence that ends the film, where from time to time we see scenes in the hero’s later life. Originally I wanted music all under this long section. I talked it over with Hayasaka [Hayasaka Fumio, the great Japanese composer who worked with Kurosawa and Mizoguchi] and we decided on it and he wrote the score.

‘Yet when it came time to dub, no matter how we did it, the scenes and music simply did not fit. So I thought about it for a long time and then took all the music out. I remember how disappointed Hayasaka was. He just sat there, not saying anything, and the rest of the day he tried to be cheerful. I was sorry I had to do it, yet I had to. There is no way now of telling him how I felt – he is gone.

‘He was a fine man. It was as though he (with his glasses) were blind and I was deaf. We worked so well together because one’s weakness was the other’s strength. We had been together ten years and then he died. It was not only my own loss – it was music’s loss as well. You don’t meet a person like that twice in your life.’

6. I Live in Fear, 1955

Kurosawa followed ‘Seven Samurai’ with this sombre film about an ageing man (played by Mifune) haunted by the prospect of nuclear war.

‘While I was making Seven Samurai I went to see Hayasaka, who was sick, and we were talking and he said that if a person was in danger of dying he couldn’t work very well. He was quite ill at the time, very weak, and we did not know when he might die. And he knew this too. Just before this we had had word of the Bikini [atomic] experiments. When he had said a person dying could not work I thought he meant himself – but he didn’t. He meant everyone: all of us.

‘As we [Hashimoto Shinobu, Oguni Hideo and Kurosawa] worked on the script we more and more felt that we were really making the kind of picture with which, after it was all over and the last judgement was upon us, we could stand up and account for our past lives by saying proudly: We made I Live in Fear. And that is the kind of film it turned into.’

7. Throne of Blood, 1957

Shakespeare is translated to 16th-century Japan in Kurosawa’s visually stunning adaptation of ‘Macbeth’.

‘I wanted to make Macbeth. The problem was: how to adapt the story to Japanese thinking. The story is understandable enough, but the Japanese tend to think differently about such things as witches and ghosts. I decided upon the techniques of the Noh, because in Noh style and story are one. I wanted to use the way Noh actors have of moving their bodies, the way they have of walking, and the general composition which the Noh stage provides.’

8. The Bad Sleep Well, 1960

Kurosawa made masterly use of widescreen in this contemporary story, an indictment of corrupt big business.

‘This was the first film of Kurosawa Production, my own unit which I run and finance myself. From this film on, everything was my own responsibility. Consequently I wondered about what kind of film to make. Making a film just to make money did not appeal to me – one should not take advantage of an audience. Instead, I wanted to make a film of some social significance. At last I decided to do something about corruption, because it has always seemed to me that graft, bribery et cetera on a public level is the worst crime that there is. These people hide behind the facade of some great organisation like a company or a corporation – and consequently no one ever really knows how dreadful they are, what awful things they do. Exposing them I thought of as a socially significant act – and so I started the film.

‘But even while we were making it, I knew that it wasn’t working out as I had planned, and this was because I was simply not telling and showing enough.’

9. Yojimbo, 1961

Mifune is at his most iconic here as a samurai who plays two rival factions of a small town off against each other. Sergio Leone famously stole the plot for ‘A Fistful of Dollars’.

‘The story is so ideally interesting that it’s surprising no one else ever thought of it. The idea about rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad. We all know what this is like. Here we are, weakly caught in the middle, and it is impossible to choose between evils. It was truly an enormous popular hit. Everyone at the company said it was because of the sword-fighting. But that is not so – the reason was the character of the hero and what he does. He is a real hero, he has a real reason for fighting. He doesn’t just stand by and wave his sword around.’

10. High and Low, 1963

Kurosawa adapted Ed McBain’s novel ‘King’s Ransom’ for this riveting, influential thriller about a kidnap.

’Every picture I’ve done has come out of something that has happened to me personally. A friend of mine had a son kidnapped and that kind of barbarism upset me so that I made High and Low. Since then I’ve got lots of letters, people accusing me of teaching people how to go about kidnapping children, but that’s not what I meant. When it happened to him, it happened to me.’

11. Red Beard, 1965

Mifune’s final collaboration with Kurosawa sees him play a doctor in a rural clinic in late-19th century Japan who teaches an arrogant young intern the rewards of caring for the poor. The shoot lasted an exhausting two years.

‘I had something special in mind when I made this film because I wanted to make something… so magnificent that people would just have to see it. To do this we all worked harder than ever, tried to overlook no detail, were willing to undergo any hardship. It was really hard work and I got sick twice.’

12. Kagemusha, 1980

Kurosawa’s first film made in Japan since 1970’s ‘Dodes’ka-den’ was part-funded by 20th Century Fox, following the intervention of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.

’I was in America for the Oscar ceremonies when I met George Lucas and Francis Coppola. They approached me and said that they’d learned a lot from my films. Lucas in particular said he would like to assist me in any way he could. At the time, I was trying to negotiate terms for the Kagemusha project with Toho, and we had reached a virtual standstill. Since it was the first time I had met them, I couldn’t tell them that I was lacking money for a project. But someone must have mentioned my problem to them, because they went to 20th Century Fox and persuaded Alan Ladd Jr to invest in the film in return for the rights outside Japan.’
(As told to Tony Rayns, 1981)

13. Ran, 1985

Kurosawa’s visually spectacular epic translated elements of Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ to 16th-century Japan.

‘What I was trying to get at in Ran – and this was there from the script stage – was that the gods or God or whoever it is observing human events is feeling sadness about how human beings destroy each other, and powerlessness to affect human beings’ behaviour.’
(As told to Michael Sragow, 1986)

– ‘Kurosawa on Kurosawa’. Sight and Sound magazine, July 2010. Original article here.

Ingmar Bergman: On Art and War

Shame (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

‘Ingmar Bergman’s simple, masterly vision of normal war and what it does to survivors. Set a tiny step into the future, the film has the inevitability of a common dream. Liv Ullmann is superb in the demanding central role – one that calls for emotional involvements with her husband (Max von Sydow) and her lover (Gunnar Björnstrand). One of Bergman’s greatest films, this is one of the least known.’

                                                                                                                      – Pauline Kael




‘Bergman’s magisterial confrontation with war, set in a characteristically ambivalent decor, either a peaceful farm somewhere in Sweden or a landscape from Goya secreting intimations of disaster. Here live a man and wife, indifferent to the war until it arrives on their doorstep to strip their lives to the bone. Presenting war with shattering power as a blindly destructive force, Bergman uses it brilliantly as a background to the real pain: the way the couple are forced to look at each other, and to realise that the only honest feeling they have about their relationship is shame. It ends with one of the cinema’s most awesomely apocalyptic visions: not the cheeriest of films, but a masterpiece.’

                                                                                                        – Tom Milne, Time Out


‘When I see Shame today, I find that it can be divided into two parts. The first half, which is about the events of the war, is bad. The second half, which is about the effects of war, is good. The first half is much worse than I had imagined; the second much better than I had remembered....One might say that the authenticity of the second half is disturbed by an overblown scheme involving a wad of paper money that changes hands several times. This scheme reflects an influence from American dramaturgy of the 1950s....When I made Shame, I felt an intense desire to expose the violence of war without restraint. But my intentions and wishes were greater than my abilities. I did not understand that a modern portrayer of war needs a totally different fortitude and professional precision than what I could provide. Once the outer violence stops and the inner violence begins, Shame becomes a good film. When society can no longer function, the main characters lose their frame of reference. Their social relations cease. The people crumble. The weak man becomes ruthless. The woman, who had been the stronger, falls apart. Everything slips away into a dream play that ends on board the refugee boat. Everything is shown in pictures, as in a nightmare. In a nightmare, I felt at home. In the reality of war, I was lost.’

                                                                       – Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film

One of Bergman’s most underrated works, Shame has however been highly praised by critics as one of Bergman’s most significant films and is noted for its resonance with contemporary political events, in particular the Vietnam war.

Bergman’s film is rooted in his extraordinary sequence of 1960s chamber dramas, albeit in a different form and cloaked in a more political aspect. Following the modernist experiments of Persona and Hour of the Wolf; Shame is a more subdued “realist” work. And while Shame does focus on a central pairing, Bergman this time employs a larger cast of characters in the story.

Shame is something of a summation of Bergman’s career. His celebrated partnership with cameraman Sven Nykvist, editor Ulla Ryghe, his established ensemble of actors, are all on display here and fundamental to the film’s success. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann give key, masterly performances in the lead roles, while Gunnar Björnstrand is present in a superbly restrained performance.

Prior to the sudden intrusion of armed violence into the film, we are witness to a more intimate domestic catastrophe, the marital problems between Eva and Jan. The detailed early scenes of a marriage under strain are skilfully managed mixing buried conflict with affection and frustration, as we simply observe a couple going about their daily business seeing how they interact at any given time.

When the external world of military conflict intrudes into this couple’s seething domestic life Bergman switches to more handheld camera, zoom and jump effects to accentuate the realism of war as it breaks through into the more formal chamber drama. This is accentuated by the film’s bold use of sound, mixing war speeches with general war noise and the lack of a traditional film score. 

Shame is a genuinely political work engaging with issues  of occupation, violence and complicity in a typically “Bergmanesque” way, as Bergman the director finds moral complexity and crisis amidst the rubble of social collapse.

The film reaches a crescendo of cruelty and murder, carefully predicated, yet devastating in all its inevitability and foreboding. The final images, in which Jan and Eva await likely death in a fishing boat surrounded by a tide of corpses are amongst the most searing in Bergman’s entire oeuvre. 

Shame takes Bergman’s relentless preoccupation with personal relations, privilege and art, into a wartime sphere of survival and occupation, crossing the personal and the worldly, where the reality of pervasive violence can no longer be kept at a distance.

‘The Shame’ is Ingmar Bergman’s 30th film – a film in which improvisation has played a major part. ‘But improvisation must be prepared for,’ says Bergman.

A November noon; a small room in the Svensk Filmindustri studios. Ingmar Bergman, ensconced in a beautiful, baroque armchair, talks. He is interviewed by Take One’s Swedish correspondent, Lars-Olof Löthwall.

Q: During production of ‘The Shame’, you made certain minor alterations from time to time. Previously, the manuscript has been Holy Scripture to you, isn’t that so?

A: No, actually I worked in this way with Persona. With Persona, I had ample time, I had an ensemble of virtually two characters, and it cost nothing to begin experimenting, to try improvising.

But the basis for all improvisation must be preparation. If I haven’t prepared, I can’t improvise. If I’ve made careful preparations I can always improvise. Then I know I have something to fall back on. What I detest is formlessness. That terrifies me. It is seldom that mere formlessness in a work of art conveys anything vivid. More often it gives an impression of effort. But a combination of improvisation and planning – that’s good.

Q: You shot quite lengthy sequences in ‘The Shame’ which you didn’t at first think were suitable.

A: I’ve always done so, that has been my practice for the last ten to fifteen years. You see, one has to begin somewhere in a film; when you do, you’re likely to be far out from the centre of eventual interest, you find yourself disoriented. No matter how well you prepare, you don’t really know how a film’s going to look when you’ve finished it. Above all, you’re not sure of the tone, and that’s tremendously important...for which reason I always have a margin of at least a week for retakes, usually at the tail end of the production...

When we begin a film, the actors know as little about it as I do. Usually I overwork them, as well as myself, in the first week. I’m looking for something. All the time, in this first medley of images I’m in search of some strong, key expression. Now, if you try forcing this into existence by an effort of will, your work of art will be dead and thin.

Q: When you’ve written your manuscript and it’s ready for you to start shooting, it’s pretty well set up as a visual continuity. Do you work in such a way with your imagination that you can then – if one may express this in a banal way – close your eyes and see the film as a sequence of pictures?

A: No. Well, bits and pieces of it, yes. But it would be intolerable, for me and for those working with me, if, at every moment, I were to try and shape the film by force, if I insisted on a sequence of detailed, preconceived pictures to illustrate the conception I had as I envisioned or wrote the script.

When I write I must try to capture something in words which for all useful purposes, you might say, can’t be expressed in words. Later it is necessary to translate the words again so that in quite another context they’ll come alive. To be sure, so long as I have a firm grasp on my point of departure, there will always be an inner relationship between the original vision I had and the completed, materialized picture-sequence.

While that original conception must always be in the background, I must not let it become too dictatorial, since, for one thing, I must be prepared to modify it when I switch from writing to directing. For another, my actors, too, have a right – to say nothing of an obligation – to draw straws, to choose among alternatives. The whole process is essentially creative. You write down a melodic line and after that, with the orchestra, you work out the instrumentation.

Q: In an interview you said that if you once lost your feeling for play you’d be finished. But in ‘The Shame’ you’re actually very close to the intense centre, you have got something deep inside, in a grip...

A: But that’s a game, too. I believe that every seriously intended work of art must contain an element of play. If we believe otherwise, we commit ourselves to a colossal exaggeration. I believe that in this feeling of a game we can find a stimulating sense of shaping a universe, shaping people, shaping situations: we experience the passion of holding up a mirror and finding out what that mirror reflects...

Look at the great ones, like Churchill, Picasso, Stravinsky. Picasso and Stravinsky, both, have the eyes of a child, they have ‘humour lines’; they suggest some kind of secret feeling for the game.

Q: Games and games! Your script girl claims that when you did ‘The Silence’ and Ingrid Thulin was supposed to be dying, alone in a hotel bed, she spiced up the situation by doing a cha-cha before taking the scene!

A: Certainly; I’ve often noticed this: if you’re concentrating on a serious story, a deeply serious, perhaps tragic situation, a desperately painful involvement, you have a bursting need for jumping off into the opposite – into a lively clowning mood.

Perhaps because the moment of pain which was the nucleus of your creation is now far behind you, experienced long before you wrote it down, and even further away from the production of the film. Each and every artist who creates does so by building on his own painful experience, on a moment of agony which does not necessarily exist at the time of his performance. Of this we are reminded – sometimes with a secret smile – behind the mask we are assuming. This doesn’t mean that the experience will then seem less genuine. On the contrary.

Q: You have often mentioned the moment of pain which is the kernel of a film’s inspiration. Can you trace ‘The Shame’ back to such a moment?

A: No. That’s a long and tangled thread. It’s an experience of humiliation. A long, painful experience of man’s humiliation.

For some time, since the first moment of recognition, I have wondered how I would have sustained the experience of a concentration camp, of being forced into such a damnable position. How noble would I have been?

At the bottom of everything there lies this abomination to which man is exposed, the world over: they club his head in, they scream at him, they assault him, they terrorize him.

The older I get the more ghastly it seems to me. And the harder it is for me to live with in my conscience.

This is what we’re attempting, modestly, in The Shame: to show how humiliation, the rape of human dignity, can lead to the loss of humanity on the part of those subjected to it.

Q: You must despise films that glorify war, that interpret war as a manly adventure...

A: I think they are swinish.

Q: You have said that working with actors involves talk. In getting responses from them, isn’t it largely a matter of confidence, or what?

A: There is nothing more mysterious in it than that they have confidence in my ear and that I have confidence in their ‘inner hearing.’

Q: The rumour that you threw a chair through the window, and such-like, has never accurately been established...

A: I did so. That happens when one is afraid. The more insecure you are, the angrier you get. Or the more afraid. And fear is transformed into anger.

You can’t just stay being afraid.

I used to be very dependent on people’s opinion of me: I was tyrannically vulnerable to criticism and was unhappy for days if anyone said anything wounding to me or about me. Today I don’t care about anything except the life I have with friends and the work I have to do. This is all that’s important to me.

I have no need of power.

I have no need to be influential.

I have no need to be a participant in, or a shaper of, Swedish cultural life.

I have no desire to justify myself before criticism.

I have no need at all to be aggressive. I hate that.

I want to look around at the world, above all to read books and fill the gaps in my education which are a result of the uninterrupted work I have pursued since my student days.

Q: Do you experience the times when you don’t work as empty?

A: Not at all. Once I did, but only for short periods. I never had any free time. Spare time is something I experience as an unbelievable delight! To have a good book in my hands and actually immerse myself in it...

I have often thought that I should devote myself to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. I mean methodically. Actually stay with it. That takes time and patience. I have two kinds of spare time: one kind is only fugitive – attendant on my getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, eating and perhaps taking a walk. The other kind is methodical spare time, when I take a certain time every day to sit down and do something I believe is interesting. But it must be done at a specified time or the day just flies away.

Q: You like working by schedule?

A: I love to.

Q: You have said that it is more important for the public to feel than to understand.

A: To feel is primary, to understand is secondary. First feel, experience – and then understand. Self-evidently, the main thing for the public is to have an experience. Later they can bring intellectual processes to bear. That’s always a pleasure. And eventually the intellectual process, itself, may elicit a new feeling.

When the audience misunderstands a film...The Silence, for example – it became a great success because people went to see it not for the film’s sake, but to see certain parts of it.

By now, The Silence is as innocent as a kindergarten infant by comparison with the films made since. It’s no fun to make pornography when everyone else is making it...

Q: How do you see your future as a film-maker shaping up?

A: I know I’ll stay with it; if I make my films cheaply enough I can stay with it as long as I have reasons for making films. Nobody, however indirectly, can prevent me. For one reason: I no longer have occasion to be afraid. Of critics, for example: before now they were either sawing off the branch I sat on, or making it stronger for me. I depended on them for my livelihood...There were few moments in my life when I wasn’t gambling with my existence.

If Smiles of a Summer Night hadn’t been an international success I would have been virtually finished. I had just had The Seventh Seal refused, in manuscript. When Smiles of a Summer Night became a success, after its showing at Cannes, I drove to Cannes to see Carl-Anders Dymling and laid that script on the table and told him: ‘Now or never.’ Then he accepted it.

Q: You have said that among films by others you have especially liked were ‘Lady With a Dog’, ‘Umberto D.’, ‘Rashomon’. Have you added to that list?

A: Yes, with Fellini’s II Bidone (The Swindler). I have a great admiration for Fellini. I feel a sort of brotherly contact with him, I don’t know why exactly. We have written brief, confused letters to each other many times. It’s amusing...I like him because he is himself, he is who he is and what he is. His temperament is something I have a feeling for, though it’s quite different from my own; but I understand it so damn well and I admire it, colossally.

He is said to be enchanted by my films. That experience is mutual.

Q: How many times can you see a film? You have a private collection of 200 films.

A: How many times depends on how much I like them. I have seen Les Vacances de M. Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday) countless times.

I sit and wait for the parts I enjoy. These can be whole sequences, great moments or just details.

Q: You have maintained that you are self-taught, yet surely a number of directors must have had a certain influence on you?

A: I have not been subject to influences from another director’s artistic style. But influences are not specifically those that come from one’s own occupational involvement. You can be influenced by anything around you: modern photography, TV reportage, pop music – which I find fascinating.

The whole life-way influences one.

But film-makers exert the least influence over me. Because I don’t see the world the way they do. Formally, I achieve my results by going my own way.

I don’t need help from anyone else’s means of expression.

Naturally I am influenced, at large, by the new mode of film-making, by the feeling for film as film, where actually you don’t need lighting effects, for instance, and in which you can get effective results without complex equipment. By these means we can return, in a sense, to the origins of film, when it was simple: when you set up a camera in a bush. I have always found this congenial. A purely technical extension of territory attracts me.

Q: Is ‘The Shame’ to be your last black-and-white film? You have been discussing colour very much lately.

A: I don’t know. Colour is interesting. I was at home with some friends Sunday afternoon and a young girl, about 15, came to the house. She had been to the movies and seen a film which I admired personally. But she was contemptuous: It wasn’t in colour! Then I thought: this is the new thing today; this new generation finds nothing stimulating in a film unless it’s in colour.

It has been a long time since I saw a colour film which I found inspiring. Yes, I was very impressed by the colour in Agnes Varda’s Happiness. There I felt the colour was deeply sensual.

Colour is best when it isn’t colour. That may sound banal, but it’s a fact.

Q: Music is finished, you said.

A: In The Shame it has come to that point. No music any more.

Q: You have seldom made a film with a purely literary foundation; usually it’s from your own manuscript. Does this mean that you don’t think books should be filmed?

A: I think it’s hard to film books or short stories. The material is too rich, it often fences in the film. It’s hard to create from it. I don’t know. I feel no temptation to try.

Q: Films which never become films – why can’t you make novels out of them?

A: I am not a writer, I am a film-maker. I have no need to express myself with words.

Q: Yet your scripts are written with such literary pregnancy.

A: That’s for practical reasons: so that my co-workers will understand what I mean.

Once I had a literary inferiority complex. I haven’t any longer. For some time I harboured the illusion that I would write a play or a novel or a collection of short stories, or whatever. I’ve entirely given up that idea. I am completely satisfied to express myself in my films.

– An Interview With Ingmar Bergman by Lars-Olof Löthwall. Originally published in Take One 2, no. 1 (September-October 1968): 16-18

   

Akira Kurosawa on ‘Stray Dog’

Stray Dog (Directed by Akira Kurosawa)

A bad day gets worse for young investigator Murakami when his gun is stolen on a sweltering, crowded bus by a pickpocket. Desperate to remedy the injustice, he goes undercover, combing the hot streets of Tokyo for the stray dog whose desperation has driven him to a life of crime. With each step, the lives of the cop and the criminal grow more inextricably linked, and the probe becomes a probe of Murakami's own shadowy side. 

Stray Dog (Nora Inu), starring Toshiro Mifune as the rookie cop and Takashi Shimura as the seasoned detective who keeps him on the right side of the law, is more than a crime thriller; it delves into the sordid reality of postwar Japan and the criminal psyche.

Kurosawa portrays postwar Tokyo as densely populated, with individuals piled on top of one another. Worse yet, it's hot. No scenario shows this more than Murakami's opening scene on a crowded bus, sweat flowing down not only his face, but also the faces of everyone else on the vehicle. The voiceover reinforces this point by noting, “Murakami was beat. And then there was that awful heat. On the bus, the air was so thick, he felt woozy. A wailing infant shook with tears, and the woman beside him reeked with the stink of cheap perfume. ” Murakami frantically tries to untighten his collar, eager for enough breath. 

Or consider the passages in which Murakami disguises himself as an everyday man in desperate search, as many of the individuals he comes across are. Individuals in search of food, employment, and a place to sleep — something to do. At night, people sit next to fires, swapping cigarettes, or huddled together in one room to avoid the rain. Under any other director's direction, these episodes would appear fake and unsympathetic in their attempt to bring light to individuals on the periphery. However, Kurosawa stands out from other film directors in that he depicts these events with tremendous candour and takes care not to condemn them.

These are the kind of events that set Stray Dog apart from any other film noir, detective story, or cop film of its type. There is a true human understanding at work here, coupled with an uncommon amount of empathy.

If Kurosawa's ability as a director elevated Stray Dog to greatness, Mifune's equally measured performance as rookie detective Murakami elevates Stray Dog to near perfection. In truth, Stray Dog would not exist without Mifune, and it would be difficult to find somebody capable of matching his performance. Despite the fact that this is one of his early parts in his collaboration with Kurosawa, the two would be some time apart before collaborating on some of their more famous work, such as Yojimbo in 1961. Even so, one need not look too far into the future to understand that their collaboration is loaded with possibilities. Rashomon is just around the bend, as is Seven Samurai.

The following is a brief excerpt from Kurosawa’s autobiography, Something Like an Autobiography, in which he discusses the writing and production of Stray Dog.

Maupassant instructed aspiring writers to extend their vision into realms where no one else could see, and to keep it up until the hitherto invisible became visible to everyone. 

I first wrote the screenplay of Stray Dog in the form of a novel. I am fond of the work of Georges Simenon, so I adopted his style of writing novels about social crime. This process took me a little less than six weeks, so I figured that I’d be able to rewrite it as a screenplay in ten days or so. Far from it. It proved to be a far more difficult task than writing a scenario from scratch, and it took me close to two months.

But, as I reflect on it, it’s perfectly understandable that this should have happened. A novel and a screenplay are, after all, entirely different things. The freedom for psychological description one has in writing a novel is particularly difficult to adapt to a screenplay with­out using narration. But, thanks to the unexpected travail of adapting the descriptions of the novel form to a screenplay, I attained a new awareness of what screenplays and films consist of. At the same time, I was able to incorporate many peculiarly novelistic modes of expres­sion into the script.

For example, I understood that in novel-writing certain structural techniques can be employed to strengthen the impression of an event and narrow the focus upon it. What I learned was that in the editing process a film can gain similar strength through the use of comparable structural techniques. The story of Stray Dog begins with a young police detective on his way home from marksmanship practice at the headquarters’ range. He gets on a crowded bus, and in the unusually intense summer heat and crush of bodies his pistol is stolen. When I filmed this sequence and edited it according to the passage of chrono­logical time, the effect was terrible. As an introduction to a drama it was slow, the focus was vague and it failed to grip the viewer.

Troubled, I went back to look at the way I had begun the novel. I had written as follows: ‘It was the hottest day of that entire summer.’ Immediately I thought, ‘That’s it.’ I used a shot of a dog with its tongue hanging out, panting. Then the narration begins, ‘It was unbearably hot that day.’ After a sign on a door indicating ‘Police Head­quarters, First Division,’ I proceeded to the interior. The chief of the First Detective Division glares up from his desk. ‘What? Your pistol was stolen?’ Before him stands the contrite young detective who is the hero of the story. This new way of editing the opening sequence gave me a very short piece of film, but it was extremely effective in drawing the viewer suddenly into the heart of the drama.

Stray Dog is made up of many short scenes in many different settings, so the little sound stage we used was cleared and redecorated with lightning speed. On fast days we shot five or six different scenes on it. As soon as the set was ready, we’d shoot and be done again, so the art department had no choice but to build and decorate sets while we slept.

At any rate, the filming of Stray Dog went remarkably well, and we finished ahead of schedule. The excellent pace of the shooting and the good feeling of the crew working together can be sensed in the completed film.

I remember how it was on Saturday nights when we boarded a bus to go home for a day off after a full week’s hard work. Everyone was happy. At the time I was living in Komae, far out of the city near the Tamagawa River, so toward the end of the ride I was always left alone. The solitary last rider on the cavernous empty bus, I always felt more loneliness at being separated from my crew than I did joy at being reunited with my family.

Now the pleasure in the work we experienced on Stray Dog seems like a distant dream. The films an audience really enjoys are the ones that were enjoyable in the making. Yet pleasure in the work can't be achieved unless you know you have put all of your strength into it and have done your best to make it come alive. A film made in this spirit reveals the hearts of the crew.

– Excerpt from ‘Akira Kurosawa: Something Like an Autobiography’ (Vintage Books, 1983)

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.