O: It's taking a real and technical problem and solving it with a metaphor.
M: Right. And it happened that Edie was the one who saw the metaphor: that we had two bombs in the original story, and that if we didn't have the big bomb, we could just as well—better, even—use the smaller bomb as a metaphor for the big bomb.
O: It is strange, however—and this is perhaps one of the lacks in film—that we can't jump to the world outside the main story, to the larger canvas. It's almost as if irony would kill the intimate drama that has been created. Kurt Vonnegut talks somewhere about how as long as “the lovers” are together at the climax of the film it will be seen as a happy ending, even though a thousand enemy jets from Mars could be approaching the country.
M: Yes, perhaps film has much more inertia than prose. A book can nimbly switch tracks in a way that would wreck a film.
ENFORCED IDLENESS
O: You have said that having assistants grounds the artist, as opposed to the artist's being in isolation. We have, for instance, the great masters of medieval art being surrounded by their assistants, in contrast to the solitude of the contemporary artist….
M: The situation's changing so rapidly in filmmaking. Digital technology allows, more than ever, a single vision to work itself out, and that carries a particular danger because you need fewer collaborators. Right now we're in a transition period when it seems we need even more collaborators because we have to work in both film and digital, but I can see that down the road it's possible that a film crew will be a very, very small bunch of people. The director Mike Figgis talks about his ideal: a “two-suitcase film,” where all the equipment can be put into two suitcases. In the early days of Zoetrope, in the late sixties, there was a similar goal: All the equipment had to fit in one van. Trends come and go.
O: You hire a new group of assistants on every project, don't you? It's always new people, I believe, so you don't fall into a rut. Do you feel a necessity to bring something new to the pot, every time you work on a film?
M: I don't work with new assistants on every single picture. But compared to some editors, who work always with exactly the same team, I've worked with many different people over the years. I enjoy the variety—I thrive on it, actually—not only because new people bring new ideas but also because I have to redefine, reexamine myself and my sometimes hidden assumptions. How do I work? Why am I making certain choices? Is that really the best way to do it? I also like to introduce new technology, to experiment with new procedures, for the same reason.
It's part of my general predilection for things that somehow randomize the process and make it more interesting, keep me on my toes, and in the end more humanly productive.
O: Louis Malle talked about how, between any fictional films he did, he always made a documentary on his own. He took a camera, and he shot it himself. I think perhaps it's the same kind of thing—entering a different reality, an alternative set of rules, or pacing so you are continually in the process of learning, of even changing essential principles.
M: Do you do anything similar yourself, between books? I guess this conversation is something like that.
O: I find I need to get away from written language. After working on my first long book, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, I needed to turn away from words, from my own brain's vocabulary. So I made a documentary film. I've done that a couple of times—worked in film or theatre or dance—so I would eventually come back to literature with a refreshed sense of language. A new voice.
M: One of the side benefits of moving Zoetrope up to San Francisco in 1969 was to take the filmmaking out of a self-contained film universe. In Los Angeles it's very easy, if you get to a certain level in your profession, to live, breathe, eat, think, sleep film. And to have so many offers that you're working all the time—without that ability, given by time and space, to reinvent.
In San Francisco there's not that much work. There aren't that many producers up here. There's a kind of enforced idleness between projects that allows you to develop other interests and then, in the best sense, to plow the results of those interests back into the next film.
TWO KINDS OF FILMMAKING
O: Somewhere you draw a distinction between two kinds of filmmaking: the Hitchcock idea that a film is already complete in the creator's head—“I invented it in my solitude, and I now just have to go out and make it”—and the Coppola concept that thrives on process, where one choreographs and invents and gathers during the process of filmmaking. Do you see one kind of film-making taking over from the other as technologies improve? You've worked with both kinds of filmmakers…. Someone like George Lucas, for instance, seems closer to the Hitchcock style.
Hitchcock trying to get results from a very young Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman during the filming of Spellbound, 1945.
M: Yes, the very first people I worked with professionally were the epitome of those two different approaches. Francis is a practitioner of and is fascinated by the human and technical process of making the film. George, in comparison, is somebody who has a complete vision of the film in his head. For him, the problem becomes how to get that vision, practically, onto the screen, in as unadulterated a form as possible.
Both approaches involve a process. But the most important distinction is whether you allow the process to become an active collaborator in the making of the film, or use it as a machine and try to restrict its contributions. The most extreme practitioner of the latter approach is Hitchcock. The equivalent in another discipline would be an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright who has all of the building on the drawing boards, down to the colour of the bedspreads in the room, and his only concern is to make the contractors who'll do the work “get” what he already has. Any variation from it is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists.
The other approach—Francis's, for example—is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in the filmmaker's mind when he began.
I'm overstating in order to clarify the distinction. In fact, nobody is completely hot or cold in this regard, and I don't believe everything that Hitchcock writes. I've seen the breakdown of the Psycho bathroom scene, which supposedly was storyboarded down to the nth degree, and followed exactly. Just from knowing what I know about filmmaking, I know that what is in the film was not storyboarded exactly like that….
It has to be said—both systems have their risks. The risk of the Hitchcock-ian system is that you may stifle the creative force of the people who are collaborating with you. The film that results—even if it's a perfect vision of what somebody had in his head—can be lifeless: it seems to exist on its own, without the necessary collaboration either of the people who made the film or even, ultimately, the audience. It says: I am what I am whether you like it or not.
On the other hand, the risk with the process-driven film is that it can collapse into chaos. Somehow the central organizing vision can be so eaten away and compromised by all the various contributors that it collapses under its own weight.
Hitchcock directing Janet Leigh during the shower scene in Pyscho, 1960.
O: It seems now that with the digital systems you have the ability to edit more personally. You can improvise privately and try a variety of possibilities—the way you can with a manuscript—tinker, move back and forth…. Whereas you did not have the same freedom when you were actually cutting film—which was a more arduous task.
M: That's true, to a degree. But I've always tried to listen closely to that little voice in my head which says: Why not go down this other path? It's just a question of the time you have to take those different paths. With digital, you can do more exploration in less time. But the real question is: Are you the kind of person who likes to explore?
It's not unlike the distinction between fresco and oil painting. With fresco, once the pigment hit the plaster of walls and ceilings, that was it, you couldn't paint over it, you couldn't change directions. The fresco was painted in its final location. Everythi
ng had to be very carefully planned, in advance. You also had to have the imaginative experience to know that a particular copper pigment would turn green with time even if it looked brown to begin with.
Oil painting on canvas, when it came into use sometime in the 1400s, gave the painter the ability to edit: to paint over, to change an apple into a melon. Also, a canvas was portable and reusable, and the pigments were applied in the colour that they remained when dry.
I think this oil-versus-fresco distinction is true of all creative processes: some writers plan extensively and their first drafts are their final drafts, whereas it seems that you, Michael, are almost the polar opposite of that.
O: If I had a blueprint of what I was going to be working on for the next five years I would die of boredom by day three. I would hate to be locked within a given scenario. As a writer you have the licence to surprise yourself, veer off the path. You can always go back and remove mistakes, erase subplots that don't work. Nothing is written in stone, so why limit yourself to a pre-planned story?
M: But the distinction is more vivid in film, because filmmaking happens at such an intense rate and involves many people collaborating, and is produced in a nonlinear, out-of-sequence way—so that to the casual observer it's not obvious what's going on.
Even sculpting in marble, where it would seem the artist has to have a pretty good idea what he's going to do from the start, has the possibility of improvisation. Michelangelo talked about discovering the sculpture inside the block of marble as he worked on it, so if he saw a certain vein of marble that became a different colour deeper in the block, he'd change what he was doing in order to take advantage of that.
O: In the images in the temple paintings of Sri Lanka, you are made to follow the horizontal line of the narrative in the panels. And as you follow it you realize there's an archway of a door there, and the painter has gone up and then over it. Or if he comes across a different kind of stone, he will work around it, or work it into the piece. So the real world is incorporated into the structure of the work of art.
M: I particularly love that part of the process when an element of chance enters. Even in the editing stage, when everything's already been shot. I'm always trying to open myself up to what seem to be chance juxtapositions of images that may not have been indicated by the script but are revealed in the process of working with the material as it's actually shot.
O: How might chance influence a scene during the shooting of a film?
M: When Francis was shooting You're a Big Boy Now, his script called for the boy to finally confront his father, with whom he's had a longstanding difficulty. The father is an avid golfer. The way Francis wrote it, the boy comes home, says to his mother, Where's Dad? Oh, he's out in the back practicing golf. The boy goes out, but the father barely looks up from practicing his putting to confront what seems to the boy life-or-death matters.
“The element of chance”: Coppola chose not to reschedule the golf scene in You're a Big Boy Now,and shot it in the rain.
They were shooting at a suburban house somewhere on Long Island. Fran-cis's vision was of a man on a sunny day practicing golf in the backyard. But on the day of shooting it poured with rain. What do you do? Reschedule because it doesn't look the way you had it in your mind? Not Francis—he decided to have the father practicing golf in the rain.
The scene played almost exactly as it was written, except for that chance ingredient of a huge rainstorm. It showed that the father loved golf so much that he would play it in the rain, and so little wanted to talk to his son that he would persist even in such weather conditions.
O: Didn't weather play a similar chance role during the filming of Apocalypse Now?
M: The typhoon that actually destroyed many of the sets can be seen gathering force in the Redux version, where the boat stops at the medevac camp. That scene was shot entirely in the rain, though that was not the original intention. It gives a dismal, dank hopelessness to the men and women trapped there, and the sex that follows. That was before the typhoon got so bad that they temporarily abandoned shooting.
De Niro shooting the neighborhood Don in Godfather II, using a towel as a silencer.
O: There's a scene in Godfather II—one that I always wait for. It's where De Niro shoots the neighbourhood tyrant. He unscrews the lightbulb to darken the hall, he wraps a towel around the muzzle of the pistol, and as he begins firing the towel catches fire. It feels utterly accidental. And you think, Was that planned? Was it prepared? Did they pour gasoline on the towel to achieve that? Or is the effect created by quick cutting? De Niro is still shaking the pistol back and forth to put out the flame when the cut happens. But there's the sense that the murder is going out of control in a small way, and it feels real, a genuine accident caught on film. That's the only moment of something chancelike in his whole determined plotting of that murder.
M: It's an inspired moment, and it certainly does seem like chance. In fact, Francis wrote it into the screenplay, so it was planned from the beginning. He got the idea of the flames when he read that towels were sometimes used as silencers in those days.
O: What makes it powerful is its air of a caught accident, even if it's carefully prepared. It's the power of a quick unfinished detail—like that cigarette package being tossed into the air in slow motion during the robbery in Something Wild. The quickness of it buries the moment into your skin, makes it unforget-table.
M: Or the tobacco blown out of Charles Vanel's hand a second before the nitro explosion in Wages of Fear.
O: The other scene like that, because we are unprepared for it, is Grace Kelly's entrance in Rear Window—her walking out of the dark like a murderer—a suggestion of murder music on the soundtrack—to kiss a sleeping man before he's hardly awake. It's her first appearance in the film and we have no idea who she is—so the boundary between affection and danger has never been thinner.
And there's that remarkable moment in Ingmar Bergman's last movie, After the Rehearsal. When the final words have been said, there's this shockingly quick and blunt cut to black. We are allowed no beat of meditation. It's harsh and, in an odd way, bracing, strangely moving, because we've been pushed unexpectedly away from the usual time alloted for an emotion. I've always wanted to try to end a book that way….I think Donald Westlake did that star-tlingly in Comeback, one of his Parker books.
WHY DID HE LIKE IT BET TER?
M: Fred Zinnemann had an interesting approach to directing—a unique combination of the previsualized and the improvisational. He had been both a documentary filmmaker and an assistant director, and these two attitudes coexisted—sometimes uneasily—in his work as a director of feature films.
Director Fred Zinnemann at seventy, in his waders, on location during Julia, 1977.
O: How did you meet Zinnemann?
M: Matthew Robbins phoned me and told me Fred was asking who had edited The Conversation. I was out of work at the time, so I wrote a letter to him saying I'd heard he was making Julia—coincidentally I had just read Pentimento, Lillian Hellman's book— and I'd love to edit it if he would like to meet. So I flew to New York, in the spring of '76, and we hit it off. He was shooting Juliain England and France, so for the first time I would be working outside the country, on a studio project, with people I didn't know beforehand—although they became friends during the course of making the film.
O: How old was Zinnemann then?
M: He was about to turn seventy. Julia was an American project—Lillian Hellman and her partner Dashiell Hammett were both American figures. But her story about her friend Julia, who was finally killed by the Nazis, took place in Europe. It was very much a European production. Fred, although he'd spent many decades of his life in America, was born in Vienna and had been living in London since the early sixties. So I think he was anxious to get an American editor, to bring an American sensibility to the film.
O: He was really the first person you worked with who was outside your generation, wasn't he?
M: Yes
. While shooting the film, he got an invitation to the fiftieth anniversary of the film school in Paris that he'd attended in 1926, as a nineteen-year-old. He said, This is something that makes you feel old! He was a member of cinema's second generation. First were the Griffiths and the Chaplins, the people who started making film just after the turn of the century. They were the ones who got him intrigued by cinema when he was in his teens. He started making films with Billy Wilder in 1925, as a teenager, in Berlin. Then there was a third generation—Welles, Kubrick, Stanley Donen, Arthur Penn—and I guess my generation was the fourth. It was a great privilege for a young person, as I was then, to link up professionally with someone as talented and experienced as Zinne-mann. It put me in touch with a sensibility and an approach very different from those of our “film school” generation.
Murch with Zinnemann on the set of Julia.
O: How did Zinnemann combine the elements of chance and control?
M: He loved chance so much that he frequently shot the rehearsals of a scene. That meant everybody on the crew had to be fully prepared in advance. Usually what happens is that there's a rehearsal and the first one or two takes are shot just to see how everything is going to work. By the time you get into the third or fourth take things start to really click. Then maybe Take 7 is particularly good and Take 8 you shoot, and then you're done.
But Zinnemann liked to actually shoot the rehearsals—before Take 1. Which meant there was no time for all the people doing the lighting, the costumes, to get a sense of things. He wanted chance—but at the same time he wanted everyone to be fully prepared. As a result, people were frightened a lot of the time that something would go wrong and they would lose their jobs.