The head of one company did consent to see Pepper, however, and when he arrived, he was shown into an already well-populated waiting room. A few minutes later, a television screen suddenly lit up in the room and the company president’s face appeared.
“Good morning, Mr. Pepper,” the face smiled. “Thank you for coming. We’ve examined your proposal, but I’m afraid it just doesn’t interest us at the moment. I hope we’ll have the chance to work together someday in the future, however. Goodbye, Mr. Pepper.”
In the end, we sold the option, and Tony Richardson made the film.
During this period, I was very interested in doing an adaptation of Lord of the Flies, but we couldn’t get the rights. On the other hand, I read Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, which struck me like a bolt of lightning. In the early 1960s, I was supposed to make this movie; the producer Gustavo Alatriste was ready to put up the money, and Trumbo, then one of the most famous scriptwriters in Hollywood, worked with me on the screenplay (I talked and he took notes). Even though he incorporated only a few of my ideas, he insisted that both our names appear in the credits. For a variety of reasons, however, the project was shelved, and it wasn’t until ten years later that Trumbo made the film himself. It certainly had something, although it was a bit too long and overintellectualized.
On several occasions, both American and European producers have suggested that I tackle a film version of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a novel set in Cuernavaca. I’ve read the book many times but cannot come up with a solution for the cinema. If you confine yourself to the action, it’s hopelessly banal, because everything important takes place within the main character, and how can inner conflicts be translated into effective images on a screen? To date, I’ve read eight different screenplays, but not one of them seems convincing. Other directors besides myself have been tempted by the beauty of the story, but so far no one has made the movie.
My last abortive American project was the time Woody Allen proposed that I play myself in Annie Hall. He offered me thirty thousand dollars for two days’ work, but since the shooting schedule conflicted with my trip to New York, I declined, albeit not without some hesitation. (Marshall McLuhan wound up doing the self-portrait in my place, in the foyer of a movie theatre.)
My Hollywood saga wouldn’t be complete, however, without mentioning blacklisting. In 1940, after I began work at the Museum of Modern Art, I had to fill out a questionnaire concerning my relationship with communism in order to get a visa. In 1955, the visa problem came up again, although this time it was somewhat more serious. On my way back from Paris, where I’d been making Cela s’appelle l’aurore, I was arrested at the airport and ushered into a small room, where I learned that my name had appeared on a list of contributors to the journal España Libre, a virulently anti-Franco publication which had occasionally attacked the United States. Since my name had also cropped up as one of the signers of a protest against the atomic bomb, I had to submit to another interrogation. Once again, most of the questions concerned my political affiliations and opinions. The result was that my name was added to the infamous blacklist, and each time I went to America, I had to go through the same inquisition. Not until 1975 was my name removed from the list, and I could stop feeling like a gangster.
I didn’t return to Los Angeles until 1972, for the opening of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. It was a joy to walk the streets of Beverly Hills once again, to luxuriate in that sense of order and security, to enjoy that American amiability. One day, I received an invitation to lunch with George Cukor, whom I’d never met. In addition to Serge Silberman, Jean-Claude Carrière, and my son Rafael, there’d also be some “old friends,” he told me. In the end, it turned out to be an extraordinary gathering. We, the Buñuel party, were the first to arrive at Cukor’s magnificent house, followed close behind by a large, muscular black man half-carrying an elderly gentleman with a patch over one eye. To my surprise, it was John Ford, who sat down next to me and told me how happy he was to know I’d come back to Hollywood (a strange thing to say, since I didn’t know him and assumed he’d never heard of me). As he talked, he outlined his plans for another “big western,” but unfortunately he died just a few months later.
At one point during our conversation, we heard footsteps shuffling behind us, and when I turned around, there was Alfred Hitchcock, round and rosy cheeked, his arms held out in my direction. I’d never met him, either, but knew that he’d sung my praises from time to time. He sat down on the other side of me, and, one arm around my shoulders, he proceeded to talk nonstop about his wine cellar, his diet, and the amputated leg in Tristana. “Ah, that leg … that leg,” he sighed, more than once.
The other guests included William Wyler, Billy Wilder, George Stevens, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Wise, and a young director named Robert Mulligan. After drinks, we went into the great, shadowy dining room, lit at midday by enormous candelabra. It was strange to see this incredible reunion of phantoms who’d gathered in my honor; they all talked of the “good old days,” from Ben-Hur to West Side Story, Some Like It Hot to Notorious, Stagecoach to Giant—so many truly great films at that table. After lunch, someone called a newspaper photographer, who arrived to take the family portrait, a picture that eventually became the collector’s item of the year. (Unfortunately, John Ford had already left. His black slave came to get him in the middle of lunch, whereupon he bid us all a faint goodbye and left, stumbling against the tables. It was the last time any of us were to see him alive.)
There were many toasts, and among them I remember George Stevens raising his glass to the “wonderful thing that despite our differences in origin and belief united us around the table.” I stood up and clinked glasses with him, but, ever suspicious of cultural solidarity, replied, “I’ll drink to that, even though I have my doubts.…”
The next day, Fritz Lang, who’d been too tired the day before to attend the luncheon, invited me to his house. You must remember that I was seventy-two and Lang past eighty. It was our first meeting, and at last I had the chance to tell him about the crucial role his films had played in my life. Before leaving, I asked him for an autographed picture, something I’d never done before with anyone. He was surprised, but eventually found one and signed it. When I saw that it was a photo of him as an old man, I asked if he didn’t have one from the 1920s, the time of Destiny and Metropolis. This time it took longer, but he came up with one in the end and wrote a magnificent inscription on it. As usual, however, I’ve no idea what’s happened to it. I vaguely remember giving one of them to a Mexican filmmaker named Arturo Ripstein, but the other should be around here … somewhere.
18
Mexico (1946–1961)
I HAD so little interest in Latin America that I used to tell my friends that should I suddenly drop out of sight one day, I might be anywhere—except there. Yet I lived in Mexico for thirty-six years and even became a citizen in 1949. At the end of the Civil War, many Spaniards, including some of my closest friends, sought refuge in Mexico. The expatriates came from all classes—laborers, writers, even scientists—but all seemed to adapt to their new country with relative ease.
Ironically, when Oscar Dancigers suggested I make a film there, I was just about to get my citizenship papers in the United States. At the same time, I met the great Mexican ethnologist, Fernando Benites, who asked me if I’d rather become a Mexican citizen. When I said yes, he sent me to Don Hector Perez Martinez, a minister well on his way to becoming president, had death not decided otherwise. When he assured me I could easily get a visa, I went back to L. A., picked up my family, and agreed to do Oscar’s film.
Between 1946 and 1964, from Gran casino (En el viejo Tampico) to Simon of the Desert, I made twenty films in Mexico, and with the exception of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Young One, all were made in Spanish with Mexican actors and technicians. Except for Crusoe, my shooting schedules never ran more than a fast twenty-four days, my budgets were small, and our salaries more than modest. (
On two separate occasions, I even made three films in one year.) I had, after all, to support my family, which may explain why these films are so uneven, a judgment I’ve often heard and can only agree with. Although I had excellent working relationships with my Mexican crews, I had to accept subjects I would normally have refused and work with actors who weren’t always right for their roles. When all’s said and done, however, I never made a single scene that compromised my convictions or my personal morality.
It would be absurd to list and evaluate all these movies, in the first place because that’s not my job, and in the second because I don’t think a life can be confused with a work. I’d just like to reminisce a bit about those long years in Mexico and mention a few things that strike me about some of my films; perhaps by doing so I’ll come to see Mexico from a different angle—through the camera eye, so to speak.
Way back then, Oscar Dancigers had two Latin American stars under contract, the popular Jorge Negrete, a real Mexican charro who sang the blessing before meals and never appeared without his groom, and the Argentinian singer Libertad Lamarque. Gran casino, therefore, was a musical, based on a story by Michel Weber and set in the midst of the oil fields. To write the screenplay, I went to the beautiful thermal spa at San José Purua in Michoacán, a paradisical retreat in a semitropical canyon, where I was eventually to write twenty scenarios. Busloads of American tourists arrived regularly for twenty-four sublime hours of taking the same radioactive baths at the same hours, drinking the same mineral water, followed by the same daiquiris and the same elegant meals.
I hadn’t been behind a camera in fifteen years, and if the scenario’s not particularly gripping, the technique, on the other hand, isn’t half bad. In this musical melodrama, Libertad arrives from Argentina to search for her brother’s killer, and suspecting that Negrete is the culprit, she attacks him furiously. Soon enough, however, they manage to reconcile their differences and begin the conventional love scene. I was bored to tears, so I told Negrete to pick up the stick at his feet and to turn it round and round in the oily mud as he talked. It was a nice moment. Despite its box-office names, however, the film was only moderately successful, and it took me over two years of scratching my nose, watching flies, and living off my mother’s money before I made another movie.
At one point, I began to write a screenplay with the Spanish poet Juan Larrea; and the film, Ilegible hijo de fiuta—The Illegible Son of the Flute—was a bit of a throwback to surrealism: a few good ideas clustered about the old chestnut of a dead Europe and the new life flowering in Latin America. Dancigers couldn’t get the financing, however, and it wasn’t until much later, in 1980, that the Mexican journal Vuelta published the script.
In 1949, Dancigers told me that Fernando Soler, a famous Mexican actor, was going to direct and star in a film for him; but given the amount of work involved, he needed an honest and above all docile director to give him a hand. I agreed to do it, and although El gran calavera was impossibly banal, it made a lot of money. Now Oscar was ready for a “real” film, and proposed that we make one about the slum children, abandoned and living from hand to mouth in Mexico. I’d loved Vittorio de Sica’s Shoeshine, and Oscar’s idea for Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned) seemed very exciting, so for the next several months, I toured the slums on the outskirts of Mexico City—sometimes with Fitzgerald, my Canadian set designer, sometimes with Luis Alcoriza, but most of the time alone. I wore my most threadbare clothes; I watched, I listened, I asked questions. Eventually, I came to know these people, and much of what I saw went unchanged into the film. I remember a review by Ignacio Palacio which argued that three brass bedsteads in a wooden shack was pure whimsy on my part, yet it was absolutely true. I saw those beds and, in fact, much more; some couples went without the most basic necessities just in order to buy brass bedsteads when they got married.
When I wrote the screenplay, I wanted to insert a few bizarre images which would flash onto the screen just for an instant, just long enough for the audience to wonder if it had really seen them or not. For example, when the boys pursue the blind man across the empty lot, they pass a huge building under construction. I wanted to put a hundred-piece orchestra on the scaffolding, playing soundlessly. Dancigers, his eye ever on the balance sheet, however, talked me out of it. He also forbade me to add a top hat to the scene when Pedro’s mother rejects her son after he comes home. This was, in fact, a very controversial scene; one of the hairdressers quit in a rage, claiming that no Mexican mother would ever do such a thing. (A few days later, I read in a newspaper article that a Mexican mother had thrown her baby out of a moving train.) In any case, although the team worked well, everyone was hostile to Los olvidados. I remember one technician asking me why I didn’t make a real Mexican movie instead of this pathetic one. And Pedro de Urdemalas, a writer who collaborated with me on the script, refused to allow his name in the credits.
The movie was made in twenty-one days, right on schedule, as usual. (Where deadlines are concerned, I’ve never missed a single one, nor has it ever taken me more than three or four days to do the editing. In addition, I’ve never used more than twenty thousand meters of celluloid, which in movie terms is very little.) For both screenplay and direction, I made the grand total of two thousand dollars—and no percentage. Although the opening in Mexico City was in itself uneventful, there were some violent reactions a few days later. One of the country’s biggest problems has always been its extreme xenophobia, based undoubtedly on a profound inferiority complex. Many organizations, including labor unions, demanded my expulsion, and the press was nothing short of vitriolic in its criticism. Such spectators as there were left the theatre looking as if they’d just been to a funeral. After the private screening, Lupe, the wife of Diego Rivera, refused to speak to me, while Berta, León Felipe’s wife, attacked me nails first, shouting that it was a crime against the state. With her nails hovering an inch before my eyes, the painter Siqueiros managed to calm her down, and, like many Mexican intellectuals, he had nothing but praise for the film.
Los olvidados opened in Paris late in 1950, and I flew over for the event. As I walked the streets I hadn’t seen for over ten years, tears came to my eyes. All my surrealist friends saw the movie at Studio 28 and were very moved; yet the following day when I met Georges Sadoul for a drink in a café near the Etoile, he confided to me that the Communist party told him not to say or write anything about it.
“Too bourgeois,” he replied, when I asked him why.
“Bourgeois?” I echoed, stupidly. “What’s bourgeois about it?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “there’s the scene where we’re looking through a window at some boys being propositioned by a homosexual and a policeman comes along and frightens the guy away. According to the party line, your policeman is doing something good and useful, and you know that’s not exactly the position to take on policemen. And at the end, in the jail, you have this kind, humane warden letting one of the boys out to buy cigarettes.”
As criticism, it was hopelessly childish, but there was no taking anything back. Ironically, the Russian director Pudovkin happened to see it a few months later and wrote an enthusiastic review in Pravda, after which the French Communist party did an immediate about-face, much to Sadoul’s relief.
This story illustrates one of the major reasons for my antipathy to the Communist party. Another reason is the Communists’ tendency to rewrite history and ignore psychology, as when they declare after a comrade has been exposed as a “traitor” that he’d disguised his hand very well, but was of course a traitor from the very beginning.
Another adversary emerged during the private screenings in Paris—the Mexican ambassador, Torres Bodet, a well-educated man who’d spent many years in Spain and had even worked on the Gaceta Literaria. He too felt that Los olvidados dishonored his country. All this changed magically, of course, after the Cannes Film Festival, where the Mexican poet Octavio Paz appeared at the theatre door and passed out copies of a wonderful artic
le he’d written about the film as everyone walked in to see it. It was an enormous success at Cannes, receiving rave reviews as well as the first prize for direction. The moment was marred only by the fact that the French distributors had insisted on adding an embarrassingly ridiculous subtitle, making it Los olvidados, ou Pitié pour eux. Sure enough, the Mexicans came round soon enough, and the film reopened in a good theatre in Mexico City, where it played to full houses for two months.
That same year, I directed Susana (The Devil and the Flesh), a perfectly routine film about which I’ve nothing to say. I do regret, however, not pushing the caricature of the happy ending; even today I worry that someone might actually take that ending seriously. I remember one of the early scenes, when Susana is in prison, where the script called for a huge spider to crawl back and forth in the shape of a cross across the shadows cast by the bars of the cell. When I asked for a spider, the producer said he didn’t have one. Annoyed, I nonetheless arranged to do without it, when a prop man told me that they did in fact have a huge spider all ready in a cage. The producer had lied simply because he thought the spider would never do what I wanted, and he didn’t want to sit around watching the money run out while I ran him through his paces. Amazingly, when we opened the door of the cage and prodded him out with a stick, he immediately crawled through the shadows exactly as I’d planned, and the whole take took less than a minute.
There were three films in 1951—La hija del engaño (Daughter of Deceit), one of Danciger’s more unfortunate titles, since it was really only a remake of Arnices’s Don Quintín, a play I’d already adapted for film in Madrid back in the 1930s. Then came A Woman Without Love, which is quite simply the worst movie I ever made. It was supposed to be a remake of an excellent film directed by André Cayatte and based on de Maupassant’s Pierre et Jean, and I’d been told to set up a screen on the set and just copy Cayatte’s movie scene by scene. Not surprisingly, I made it my own way, but it was still a disaster.