Roman Polanski being mobbed by the press in an early court hearing in 1977.
Editor's Note: In light of Roman Polanski's arrest for his 1977 charge of statutory rape in Zurich yesterday, we thought we'd re-post this June, 2008 piece Terry wrote on filmmaker Marina Zenovich and her documentary on Polanski, his infamous trial, and subsequent flight from the U.S. to avoid sentencing. Regardless of how you feel about what Polanski did, it's a great read.
By Terry Keefe
There are few figures in Hollywood history more controversial than Roman Polanski. One the one hand, he's the undeniably great filmmaker behind Rosemary's Baby and, Chinatown and on the other….he also was charged with sodomizing a 13-year old girl in 1977, faced a host of related rape counts, and ran to exile in France, where he remains to this day and is regarded as a national treasure. At the time of the rape proceedings, and since then, rumors have swirled about serious misconduct in the handling of the case by the presiding judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, whose actions led Polanski to believe that he had to flee the country because he would never get a fair sentencing. It has taken some three decades for anyone to do a true in-depth documentary examination of what went on behind the scenes during the proceedings, perhaps largely because of the reluctance of any of the principals in the case to go on the record. That film, containing a number of exclusive interviews, has now arrived in the form of Marina Zenovich's feature documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which was a hit at both Sundance and Cannes this year, and will premiere this month on HBO.
Zenovich first started kicking around the idea of doing a documentary on Polanski after reading a 2003 article in the Los Angeles Times which focused on whether Polanski would be allowed back in the United States to pick up the potential Best Director Oscar for The Pianist,an award he eventually did win. When Zenovich made a phone call to a friend of hers, explaining that she was hoping to speak to the attorneys in the Polanski rape case, she hit the documentarian's version of paydirt. Recalls Zenovich, "My friend informed me that the D.A. (Roger Gunson) in the case was also now in his church. And then he said that I should also talk to his friend Adam, who turned out to be Roman Polanski's godson. So, with one phone call, I had not necessarily access, but at least an entry into this particular world."
What allows Zenovich to do a deeper investigation into the case than any filmmaker or journalist has to date are the interviews with Gunson, as well as Polanski's attorney, Douglas Dalton, who has rarely spoken about the case until this film. The story that emerges contains a particularly damning portrait of Judge Rittenband, who seems to keep moving the finishing line for Polanski's punishment, at one point deciding to make the previously agreed terms harsher after the media whirlwind condemns him for going too light on the director. Says Zenovich on the subject of Rittenband, "I think the judge didn't know what to do and was buying time. He was in a very difficult position because there was a lot of press on the case."
Polanski himself declined to be interviewed for the film, although Zenovich has met him during the course of the production. Zenovich obviously had to walk a fine line during the filmmaking process, particularly during post-production, to present an objective point of view on the subject matter, as the facts of the case could easily be arranged as an outright condemnation of Polanski, or an attempt at rehabilitating his image. Says Zenovich, "This isn't any type of apology for Roman. I was just curious about the whole side of this case that people didn't know about. Most people can't get past the charges and the fact that he fled the country. But it was interesting to me to step back and explain through the people who were there what else really happened."
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired premieres June 9th at 9PM on HBO.
The HBO Trailer below:
For a totally different look at the life of Roman Polanski, check out our interview with filmmaker Damian Chapa about his biopic feature Polanski:Unauthorized.
Scott Hicks made his bones as a filmmaker the old-fashioned way, paying his dues as a crew member during the Australian film industry’s birth in the 1970s. Born in Uganda March 4, 1953, and raised in Kenya, England and finally Australia, Hicks worked his way up to assistant director for soon-to-be big names such as Peter Weir and Bruce Beresford before moving into directing industrial films and documentaries for television. Hicks didn’t direct his first feature, Freedom, until 1982, and had to wait for his second, in 1996, to put him on the A-list. Shine was the true story of Australian piano prodigy David Helfgott, and his battle with mental illness. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and won a Best Actor statuette for Geoffrey Rush, who played Helfgott as an adult.
Hicks has been choosy since then, going back and forth between features (Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), Hearts In Atlantis (2001), No Reservations (2007)) and documentaries (Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (2007)), but always putting quality before quantity. Scott Hicks’ latest film, The Boys Are Back, is based on Simon Carr’s memoir of the same name and stars Clive Owen as British journalist Joe Warr, a fiercely driven sports writer who now lives Down Under (Australia, for those not in the know), and finds his life turned upside down upon the sudden death of his wife, leaving Joe to care for their young son (newcomer Nicholas McAnulty). To complicate matters, Joe’s estranged teenage son (George MacKay) from his first marriage arrives from the UK to comfort his bereaved father. Hicks avoids the sentimental pitfalls that could have put this fine drama in movie-of-the-week territory, and delivers a quiet, powerful human drama that is also full of honest humor and terrific performances. The Miramax release opens in U.S. theaters September 25.
Scott Hicks sat down during a recent visit in Los Angeles to discuss The Boys Are Back and his nearly-forty year career in film.
What attracted you to this story, initially?
Scott Hicks: Well, I was sent a script, and the scripts come in, and there are just very few that move you quite so profoundly, and this was one of those. It was full of situations I felt I’d never seen. We’ve all seen films about fatherhood and bringing up children, but this was something new. It felt very real to me, and of course it was: it was based on a memoir that I was unfamiliar with at the time. I re-read it, and it moved me again, and I guess it wouldn’t let go after that. I said ‘I really want to do this.’ Then we went to Clive in fairly short order after that, and he fell for it, as well. And I thought, ‘Great, we’re off!’ That was 2004. Welcome to independent filmmaking. (laughs)
Clive Owen (left) and Scott Hicks (right) on the set of The Boys Are Back.
How was working with Clive Owen, both as an actor and a collaborator?
What was very pleasing, I think to both of us, we found the other agreed with one fundamental principle: we had to avoid at all costs allowing the film to cave into something sentimental, and avoiding some of the easy solutions. That required an actor that had the resolve to do things that are not always likable. And Clive’s not afraid to do that. He does things in the film that makes people wince, but it was essential that we didn’t soften off those edges, and we discussed at length about where to target those harsher moments, for instance when little Artie says to him, “Can I live at Laura’s?” And he says to her “You want to live with her? Right, pack your bag, and get out.” That’s not the way to talk to a six year-old who’s grieving for his mother. So it was in those critical moments that we had this mutual understanding that, if it hadn’t been there, would have led to some very uncomfortable moments on the set. A lot of actors would have protested, saying “I don’t want to do that. That’s really unlikable.” Not Clive. He had a bigger picture of how it should be.
Did you worry about finding the right kid to play little Artie? Oh God, yes. I mean, you read the script, and it’s so great, but then the realization hits you: how are we going to find a child to do all these intense emotional things? It was a huge search, hundreds and hundreds of boys were screened all around Australia. I was seeing the pick of the crop and it got to the point where I was lying awake at night, wondering if it was ever going to happen. Then one day, I saw Nicholas and he really stood out. He wasn’t just cute and appealing with all that lovely innocence children that age have. He had attitude. There was a defiance about him that I really liked. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew it was what we needed. With George, who plays Harry, it was a different thing. He’s a proper actor who’s done a lot of work before. He’s very focused and intensely interested in the craft of acting, and is very well-equipped. In a funny way though, what Nick was doing was the benchmark, because it was real, and that’s what I needed the other actors doing.
Geoffrey Rush's Oscar-winning role in Hicks' breakout film, Shine.
Like Shine, in the wrong hands this could have been a movie-of-the-week. You mentioned earlier that you avoided clichés and sentimentality in the story. Is that the key difference between a thoughtful study of human emotions and a one-off movie-of-the-week?
For a start, I think being an independent film gives you more leeway in terms of being able to keep those rough edges in there. Whereas if you working with a bigger committee that was testing material or trying to second-guess what the audience were trying to hear, you end up sort of blandifying, and that’s where you fall into the trap of sentiment. For example, in this story, when the father says to the little boy, “Mummy’s going to die,” I’ve never seen a film where the child responds “Is she going to die by dinnertime.” Now, in the American TV-movie context, the automatic response is “What an unsympathetic child! He should burst into tears!” Then we’ll all feel sorry for him, then dad will burst into tears, then we cue the music and we fade to black and we’ll all feel sorry for them. The whole point of this was the reality of the child who just doesn’t understand.
But in the independent world, you never run into filmmaking by committee?
Not as much, although we did have one person suggest that we get a female writer to come in to do a polish on the script so we could have a “woman’s perspective.” And I was like ‘What’s the point of that? It’s from a man’s perspective! It’s about three guys!’ (laughs) You have to resist in those situations because it can run off the rails so easily.
L to R: Scott Hicks, Clive Owen and Nicholas McAnulty on the set of The Boys Are Back.
You mentioned that this film has been in the works since 2004. What took so long to get it off the ground?
In addition to getting the money together it mostly became about synching Clive’s and my schedules. He’d be off doing something, then I’d get offered a job. And that went on for a few years, until finally everything just fell into place. It’s funny, because if we’d done this in 2004, the boy who plays Artie would have barely been born. I like to think we were growing our own during the waiting period. (laughs)
The film must have resonated with you very personally, because you have two boys, right?
I do, yeah. They’re 16 years apart in age, and both grown up now, but since fathering has been such a big part of my life, since I was 18, there was a very big appeal for me. But the take-away is the idea that family is where the love is. It’s definitely not DNA, and it’s definitely not nuclear anymore. But it’s about the fact that this guy pieces together a shattered family, and that’s powerful to me.
L to R: George MacKay, Nicholas McAnulty and Clive Owen in The Boys Are Back.
Let’s talk about your background. You were born in Uganda and raised in Kenya. How did your family wind up in Africa?
My father graduated as an engineer during the Depression in London, and there were no jobs. He saw an advertisement for young engineers to come to East Africa, and off he went. He was a mountaineer, so he looked at a map and saw these wonderful mountains, which attracted him to go. That was in the ‘30s and all my family was born there. I’m the youngest of four. There were there for 30 years or more, my parents. It wasn’t until the year when Kenya was given independence in 1963—my parents had lived through the Mau-Mau emergency and weren’t sure what would happen after independence—that my parents moved to England. England by then was such unfamiliar territory that they looked for an alternative and settled on a life in Adelaide, when I was 14.
What was Kenya like growing up?
Well, wildlife was in profusion back then, and sadly has been somewhat decimated now. I think back on it and it sounds quite romantic, and it was, but it was the only world I knew. You’d go on a drive, and you’d see these fabulous herds of animals. We’d call it “going on safari.” We stayed in these wonderful national parks, in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. As a child I remember walking up to the 12,000 foot mark of Mount Kenya, after which is a serious climb. In fact, my dad was the first person to climb the north face of Mount Kenya, which was considered unscalable. It was a 5,000 foot sheer granite rock face, which he studied for years, then he and a colleague came up with a plan of attack and did it.
He must’ve been quite a guy, your dad.
He was. He wouldn’t think himself that, because he was this very self-effacing, retiring person. I asked him why he took up mountaineering, and he said it was to overcome his fear. He was very frightened of heights as a little boy. I think he had it tough. He was sent away to boarding school at the age of 3, then at 7, he was sent to England for school and didn’t see them for seven years. It’s a definite cultural…thing in the UK that I’ll never quite understand.
All you have to do is see Lindsay Anderson’s If…to want to keep your kids out of those awful boarding schools.
It’s funny you should mention that movie. You know who I met last night? Malcolm McDowell. He came to our screening last night, he’s a friend of Clive’s, and we went out and had some drinks afterwards. And I said to him ‘You know, you are partly to blame for my induction into cinema because I was 15 when I saw If…and it was transformational.’
Did you ever see Richard E. Grant’s film, Wah-Wah, about growing up in Africa during the '60s and early '70s? The two of you would be contemporaries, I’m guessing.
Yes, absolutely, and I loved that film. There were many resonances for me, although he grew up in Swaziland, which was a bit different in nature than Kenya, but there were enough similarities that I really enjoyed his book and the film. He captured that era beautifully.
What was the epiphany you had as a kid that made you fall in love with film?
I wasn’t a kid. I was a teenager. I had really had very little exposure to cinema as a child, and no television. Basically, I started at Flinders University, which is in Adelaide, and wanted to study English and history. They had these interesting rules which were that you couldn’t study majors from two different disciplines, in my case social sciences and humanities. I wasn’t going to give up English, so I looked around for a suitable companion to English. I settled on drama, and then in drama, there was a little topic I stumbled into called filmmaking. There was a little bit of equipment, friends who were enthusiastic and would go out and shoot stuff. Suddenly this was the most fun thing you could imagine and it just took over my university life, and it became about filmmaking and seeing films. My family were completely mystified: “But you saw a film last week. Why do you need to see another this week?” (laughs) I was making up for lost time, I think. But I never imagined that you could make a living out of it.
Hicks and Max Von Sydow on the set of Snow Falling on Cedars.
What other films captured your imagination, in addition to If…?
Oh, a lot of the European filmmakers: Bergman, all the great Italian filmmakers, the sort of East Coast American filmmakers like Orson Welles, Scorsese…they were my sort of education, in a way. I remember vividly watching Max Von Sydow in Bergman’s films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and to be able to work with him in Snow Falling on Cedars was like coming full circle. It was almost an indescribable feeling. He’s the most charming man. In that film, he’s defending this Japanese-American man who’s unjustly accused of murder. The young man I cast had never acted before, and was struggling, to be honest, and I was quite concerned. And I just watched Max sit with him for a month in that courtroom, and it was like a master class for this young man. Max was so kind to him, so encouraging, when he could have been quite disdainful, and been like “It’s all about me,” but he was the antithesis of that. People would come in just to work for a day or two, some really fine actors, to appear in the witness box, and I remember one of them just fell apart when confronted by Max, being cross-examined by him. Max was so generous and helpful to me, and the actor, in keeping his performance together. Not all actors are that generous. The best ones are, because they know that any scene is only good as the worst actor in it, so it’s useless trying to steal it. Well, when working on other people’s films, I’ve seen some very selfish actors who demand attention and ruin a film
They’re usually flashes in the pan, though.
Yeah, or on the downhill slope in their careers. Clive is actually very generous, too. In doing this film, he had to accommodate, particularly when working with a six year-old, he’s so meticulous, prepared and organized, he knows his stuff. So he’s like that, and then you have this little spitball kid, who’s completely unpredictable, and Clive completely engaged him. When Clive comes to the set, he’s very loose and loves to laugh, but the minute you say ‘Action,’ he has this laser-like focus. Clive’s spirit was infectious, really.
Hicks and Catherine Zeta-Jones on the set of No Reservations.
You cut your teeth doing industrial films and documentaries. Was that a good training ground?
Yeah, I really learned on the job, because I had no real formal training at university. I had access to equipment, ideas and other people, but no real training, as such. I chose projects that interested me. They were little industrial documentaries and government department films, but some needed actors and I always tried to cast good actors, even if they had to come from another city, so I could figure out how to direct these people.
And this was the ideal time to being doing that, during the 1970s and the birth of the Aussie New Wave.
That’s right, and I got to work as a crew member on some of those big productions, when they’d come to town. I would be a third assistant, or work in the art department, but I just loved watching these guys work.
Hicks with Anthony Hopkins on the set of Hearts in Atlantis.
Who were some of those guys?
Peter Weir was probably the biggest name. I worked in the art department of The Last Wave and worked as the night watchmen at night, and slept on the set. I also worked on a little film of his called The Plumber, which was a telly movie. I’m actually in it. I walk out of an elevator at one point, since we didn’t have any extras, Peter cast me at the last minute. It’s a gem of a film, shot in three weeks on nothing, about $300,000. Anyway, Peter wanted to do some rehearsals with the key cast in the board room of the film corporation. He said “I need somebody to videotape these rehearsals. Are you interested?” And in those days, video cameras were the size of a suitcase, but I said ‘Of course!’ So I got to spend three days in this room with Peter and his key cast as he rehearsed them. At one point he looked back at my framing and said “You’re really getting into this, aren’t you?” (laughs) What a master class, you know? Then I worked on other films, by guys like Bruce Beresford, and other big names of the day. It was great.
Have you seen the new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, about the so-called “Ozploitation” movies of the ‘70s?
No, but I’m dying to see that! It was such a rarified time. I had no idea that as I was coming out of university, making films for a living was actually possible. But it was so wide-open back then, which isn’t to say that breaking in wasn’t problematic, but if you were creative you could get your foot in the door.
A lot of the guys in the documentary said that that’s what made it so easy: there were very few rules in place at that time, so you could really just take your crew out and shoot.
Yeah, there was very little unionization and delineation, so we really made it up as we went along. I remember vividly one night on The Last Wave, the scene was about this hail storm hitting a house, because these strange weather patterns are happening. In those days, the special effects were just physical, so you literally had the entire crew, the entire back office, the publicist, the caterer, and we were all chucking ice at this house. (laughs) It was crazy, but in its own way, a wonderful collective energy. So that was my film school, really, was working on other people’s films. Then there’s a certain defining point where you are either going to be a career assistant director, where I made good money, but it wasn’t apart to directing. I always “wanted to do what that guy did.” (laughs) Of course I realize now that there was nothing else I could have done. Choice wasn’t an issue. Do you remember the film Breaker Morant?
Of course.
Do you remember the actor who played the youngest solider of the trio of accused men, Lewis Fitz-gerald?
Yeah, he was the kid of the group who was spared in the end.
Exactly. He plays the newspaper editor in The Boys Are Back.
No way! I never would have recognized him.
Well, it was a long time ago. But he’s actually a director now. He directs television.
Great film.
Oh God, yes. That last scene, again speaking to the restraint we’ve been talking about, as Bryan Brown and Edward Woodward are walking across the field, away from the camera, towards the chairs that they’re to be shot in, and one reaches out his hand, and they just hold hands, and it’s just such a touching, profoundly moving image. No dialogue at all.
Scott Hicks, lining up a shot.
Except for Edward Woodward’s wonderful final line: “Shoot straight, you bastards!”
Yeah. Brilliant.
Two of my favorite actors in that film: Woodward and Jack Thompson.
Edward Woodward…(laughs) Noel Coward said “The man’s name sounds like a fart in a bath: Edward Woodward.” (laughs)
Did you ever see an old series Woodward did on the BBC called “Callan” about a working class spy/assassin.
Oh yeah! That was great! Really dark…
Yeah, dark and unrelenting, like John Le Carre, but even darker. I always wondered if Woodward’s show from the ‘80s, "The Equalizer," was supposed to be Callan in retirement.
Yeah, that would make sense, wouldn’t it?
Anyway, we digress. Let’s talk about documentaries. You’re one of the few filmmakers who still goes between docs and features. The only other I can think of who does that is Werner Herzog.
Yeah, and Scorsese does the odd doc as does Michael Apted. Coming out of this sort of sponsored documentary background, when the ‘80s arrived and I stumbled on the story that became Shine, I was hired to do these big budget documentaries for the then-emerging Discovery Channel. I did a big documentary on the Chinese army that I won a Peabody Award for, so they asked me to do a series on submarines, and I won an Emmy, and all the while I’m writing Shine, I’m working on Shine, I’m trying to get Shine to happen, and I’m thinking to myself that this is all trying to tell me something. You’re doing well at documentaries, why don’t you just stick with that. It was like I’d been given a chance to really be good at something. So why do you keep going on and on about this other story—all said in an interior monologue. (laughs) I read as much non-fiction as I do fiction, and I guess it influences the films that I make, since Shine, like The Boys Are Back, was based on truth.
Hicks (center) interviewing a subject for Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. Philip Glass is seated at right.
Your most recent doc is the film about composer Philip Glass.
Yeah, it’s out on DVD now and the DVD is really good. There’s a second DVD in the set which are my full interviews with Philip and then 45 minutes of performance. The film worked out really well and got short-listed by the Academy, and made it down to the last 15 nominations. He’s one of the most remarkable men alive, and so accessible when you’re lucky enough to be in his company. He’s completely unlike what you’d probably imagine, which is austere, intellectual, dry. He’s funny, sociable, a gossip, likes to cook for his friends. He has two kids under age 5, and he’s 70. He loves riding the roller coaster at Coney Island, just a fantastic, all-around man. But the defining moment of the film, which I won’t give away, comes early, and you see that his life isn’t all beer and Skittles. You see that in The Boys Are Back, too: the more technologically advanced we get, the more things like family get squeezed out into a tiny box. If there are prevailing themes in what I’m interested in, it would be those, I guess.
Bent Hamer's O'Horten arrives on DVD today, complete with Interviews with Hamer and composer John Erik Kaada. Below is my talk with Hamer, who I had interviewed previously for his 2004 film Kitchen Stories. This article previously appeared in Venice Magazine.
(Actor Bard Owe in O'Horten, above, and director Bent Hamer, below.)
Norwegian director Bent Hamer has just come back from a walk around the beach in Venice and eagerly relates, “I just saw this house on the beach and it had a sign which said, ‘Hippies, please use kitchen entrance!’” Hamer then laughs, captivated by this little glimmer of absurdity he has discovered. The sign in question actually wouldn’t be out of place in a Bent Hamer film, which are known for mixing visual oddities of the everyday with characters and plots which keep the overall film grounded in reality, somewhat anyway. We last spoke when he was releasing Kitchen Stories in 2004, the story of which was inspired by the real-life studies done by a Swedish kitchen appliance company in the late 1940s, specifically centering upon the journey of a Swedish researcher who is sent to live with an aging Norwegian bachelor to document his kitchen habits. One of the most memorable images from Kitchen Stories was the towering high chair that the researcher sits upon in the bachelor’s kitchen, to separate himself from his subject. At the same time, the plot movement focuses on the subject and researcher bonding, almost buddy-style, and it was this spine that allowed Hamer to simultaneously explore the inherent ridiculousness of kitchen research, without spinning off into total farce.
(The high chair in Kitchen Stories, below.)
Hamer’s newest feature film is O’Horten, which is essentially a character study about a recent retiree, a train engineer named Odd Horten (played by Bard Owe), who suddenly finds himself with too much time on his hands and falls into a series of minor misadventures, all with a slightly absurdist tinge. O’Horten is a sort of About Schmidt-style, coming-to-age tale, if it had been visualized by Magritte. O’Horten is marked by a number of striking images: a POV shot of someone going down a seemingly unmonitored ski jump at night; a businessman willingly sliding down an iced-over road because it is too difficult to walk on; and another POV shot from the engineer’s seat of a train going through a tunnel, amongst many others, and so it comes as little surprise that Hamer constructed his story with various images such as these in mind. Says Hamer of his scripting process, “It was very unlike Kitchen Stories, which was centered so much on a concept. With Kitchen Stories, I worked from the inside, to my way out, around a very focused idea. But this time, I had to piece it together, and I started from the outside with a lot of loose ends, and then tried to find the center. It was a very different approach for me, this writing. I didn’t always know where to go.” He then adds with a laugh, “Sort of like Odd Horten on his journey!"
Hamer’s last film, Factotum, was actually shot in the United States, starred Matt Dillon and Marisa Tomei, and was adapted from a book by Charles Bukowski. Although he appears to be very open to working here again, Hamer has also managed to develop a worldwide audience with largely character-driven films such as O’Horten, and Kitchen Stories, which have visuals and elements that feel very specific to Norwegian, or at least Scandinavian, culture. Some of my own pleasures derived from O’Horten included the travelogue-style elements of seeing what was unquestionably actual ice falling from the sky in several shots, and the different styles of dress, not to mention faces, in small-town Norway. There is a lesson here for filmmakers that all you need to find a large audience might already be in your backyard. Hamer nods vigorously when presented with this statement and expounds, “People talk about ‘big’ films. What is a ‘big’ film? There is some connotation there I don’t understand. What it’s all about is if you can recognize something which is universal and specific in a film. Of course, you can talk about pure entertainment, but hopefully there’s something more than that.”
O’Horten opens this month via Sony Pictures Classics.
All films buffs have guilty pleasures. You know, those movies that high-minded cineastes love to turn their noses up at, especially critics for The New York Times, people with MFAs in some sort of film-related field, or just plain snobs who refuse to acknowledge anything released on celluloid that doesn’t have English subtitles and at least one reference to death, either as a character or a metaphor (and oftentimes both). Patrick Swayze was the undisputed King of the Guilty Pleasure. From his screen debut in Skatetown, USA in 1979, to his final appearance on television’s "The Beast" as a take-no-prisoners cop, Swayze was an unapologetic good ol’ boy who happened to be a classically-trained dancer, student of martial arts and Eastern philosophy, and possessor of an IQ that was nothing to sneeze at. In fact, he closely resembled Dalton, his character in this writer’s all-time guilty pleasure, Rowdy Herrington’s Road House (1989), as a bar bouncer with a Master’s in Philosophy from NYU, who could quote Confucius and snap necks in near-perfect synchronicity.
In June 2004, when I was asked by Venice Magazine to interview Swayze for his turn as pulp fiction icon Allan Quartermain in the Hallmark television production of "King Solomon’s Mines," his star might have waned a bit since his mid-‘80s heyday, but his stature as a reluctant pop cultural icon had only increased with each passing year, and his refusal to be anything but himself. Renowned for fighting against being typecast as a typical pretty-boy star/leading man, Swayze’s rep indicated not only that he marched to the beat of his own drummer, but was also known for not suffering fools. That said, I didn’t quite know what to expect when I went to meet Swayze at photographer Greg Gorman’s studio for our sit-down. I’d met more than my share of egomaniacs and narcissists in my ten years of entertainment journalism, living embodiments of “never meet your idols.” From the minute Patrick Swayze shook my hand, and for the next six hours we spent together, I was completely disarmed by his charm, honesty and just plain normalcy. After a half hour or so, I felt as though I was hanging out with a buddy from the old neighborhood (his Texas to my Arizona made us cultural cousins). Swayze was reflective, yet totally un-self-indulgent. He was engaging, but usually more interested in your opinion than expressing his own. He was close to the earth as a rancher and man who loved the outdoors, yet also a man of letters who could put most PhDs to shame with his knowledge of, from what I could tell, almost everything.
The only bad thing I can say about Patrick Swayze: goddamn, did he smoke a lot. Patrick must have gone through at least a pack and-a-half (a conservative estimate) of American Spirits during our talk. The only time he wasn’t smoking was when we were eating a magnificent sushi dinner. The minute those chopsticks went down, a lit nail was back in his hand. I knew he’d gotten sober after an ongoing battle with the bottle, one that had claimed his father and sister, but cigarettes continued to be a demon he wrestled with. When I asked him about the irony of such a fine athlete destroying his lungs with tobacco smoke, he smiled gently, looked at the cigarette in his hand and said “Yeah, I know, but I’ll beat this thing eventually. I’ve beaten worse, man.” He had, and for a while, he nearly did: Swayze’s self-described “peaceful warrior” attitude allowed him to survive nearly two years longer than doctors predicted he would, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer eighteen months ago. He lost the battle on Monday, September 14. He was 57.
At the end of our talk, Swayze took my hand in his, and said “Alex, I’d really like you to stay in my life.” Over the next few years, we shared some nice chats over the phone, a few emails, and almost worked together, when Patrick read the script for my AFI graduate thesis film, a Hollywood satire, and loved the part of an arrogant movie star. Scheduling conflicts dictated that collaboration was not to be, however, and eventually we lost touch, as people tend to do in Los Angeles. As Raymond Chandler wrote in The Long Goodbye, “To say goodbye is to die a little.”
Goodbye, Patrick. Thank you for always staying down to Earth, even when Hollywood tried to cast you out among the stars.
PATRICK SWAYZE: PEACEFUL WARRIOR By Alex Simon
Originally published in the June, 2004 issue of Venice Magazine
Patrick Swayze has always been his own man. As early as 1979, when the former dancer and stage actor made his big screen debut in the roller disco opus Skatetown, USA, Swayze easily could have let himself be packaged into that year’s teen idol. But despite his cover boy looks, Swayze refused to be pigeonholed as flavor-of-the-month, and persevered as a serious actor, until 1983, when Francis Ford Coppola cast him, along with a crew of other unknowns with names like Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, and Matt Dillon in a little picture called The Outsiders. When he landed the lead in the hit miniseries “North & South” two years later, his stardom was solidified, and Patrick Swayze became another “overnight success,” whose single night of paying dues lasted over a decade.
Patrick Wayne Swayze was born in Houston, Texas August 18, 1952 to Jesse Swayze, an engineer and former rancher, and Patsy Swayze, who would go on to become a world-renowned choreographer in her own right. Young Patrick was driven to be a success in everything he did, pushed by his mother in particular, excelling in sports, as well as music and dance. By then, Patsy Swayze had a thriving dance studio, with many attractive female students. One young lady, Lisa Niemi, caught Patrick’s eye and the two were married in 1975. It continues to be one of the most enduring marriages in show business.
After studying with the Harkness and Joffrey Ballet Schools, Patrick went on to act in dozens of Broadway and off-Broadway shows, before making the trek out to Hollywood, where he and Lisa lived on “a jar of peanut butter and oranges from our tree in the backyard” for more years than the actor would probably care to admit, before finally wrangling a secure career as an actor at age 30. Other notable films in the ‘80s included Walter Hill’s Uncommon Valor and John Milius’ Red Dawn, but it was the year 1987 that truly solidified Patrick Swayze’s star in the Hollywood lexicon.
Dirty Dancing was a small film that became a cultural phenomenon, and Patrick’s turn as Catskills dance instructor Johnny Castle made young girls’ hearts skip a beat and young men by the hundreds suddenly sign up for Arthur Murray classes. The film, which was made for a meager six million dollars, went on to gross over $170,000,000 worldwide. With his name now on the top of the A-list, Patrick went on to star in such films as Road House (1989), Next of Kin (1989), and another cultural phenomenon, Ghost (1990). The ‘90s also showcased Patrick in Katherine Bigelow’s Point Break (1991), Roland Joffe’s City of Joy (1992), and Three Wishes (1995). Recently, Patrick has lent his star power to such indie gems as Green Dragon (2001) and Donnie Darko (2001).
Patrick Swayze brings his bigger-than-life heroics to the small screen this month with the Hallmark Channel’s production of “King Solomon’s Mines,” based on H. Rider Haggard’s legendary pulp novel, with Patrick starring as its iconic hero, Allan Quartermain. Credited as being the inspiration for Indiana Jones, as well as dozens of other pop culture heroes, Quartermain is a 19th century adventurer who travels to Africa in search of a missing archeologist, a man who holds the key to untold treasures, and power. Patrick is given fine support from Alison Doody, Roy Marsden, John Standing and Sidede Onyulo in this full-throttle adventure that is must-see viewing for the whole family. It premieres on the Hallmark Channel Saturday, June 12.
Patrick Swayze sat down recently to discuss topics ranging from his impressive body of work, to spirituality, to the genius of Marlon Brando. Here’s what transpired:
Tell us about wearing the shoes of Allan Quartermain, one of the first heroes of pulp fiction.
Patrick Swayze: I think any kid who’s ever had an adventurous bone in their body, either read Haggard’s book or saw one of the film versions. It was a lot of fun for me because I felt like I was coming home, back to that kind of period hero role that I was born for, and in many ways I’ve lived my whole life, with all the training I’ve done in things like martial arts, horsemanship, stunt work, and just being a mountain man and survivalist. All these things that are passions in my life were great to bring to this character. It was also an interesting choice they made changing him from an Englishman to an American. There was a very specific reason for that; to try to bring it into a more contemporary feeling. “King Solomon’s Mines” helped launch an entirely new form of storytelling that evolved into films like the Indiana Jones trilogy and Romancing the Stone, although those films were all pretty tongue-in-cheek, and I think we take it much more seriously. We wanted to create a dramatic epic that had a sense of fun. What I also wanted to try to do with it was incorporate my passion for conservation and wildlife, to have Quartermain evolve from a great white hunter into a conservationist.
Swayze as the original pulp fiction hero, Allan Quartermain, in "King Solomon's Mines."
You spent five months in South Africa shooting this film. What were your impressions of the country?
I was there once before when I did a movie with my wife, Lisa, called Steel Dawn.
I loved that movie!
(laughs) Yeah, people love that movie. That cracks me up. It’s like I’m the king of cult followings, with Point Break, Road House, Next of Kin…but there is something about Africa, this ancient energy that just permeates your whole being, just standing on that earth. As I was there, and spending time with the lions and tigers and elephants—I actually became friends with this elephant named Harry that we used in the movie that was just amazing! He’s the huge, 15-foot elephant in the opening of the film. We actually used two elephants playing the same part: Harry and Sally. (laughs) I just decided to approach this elephant the same way I do my horses: with a lot of love and trust. It got to the point where he’d pick me up with his tusks and I’d shake him, and he’d shake back. On my last day, I was leaving the set in this Land Rover, and I stopped the vehicle, and there was Harry. I wanted to see if he’d come to me or not, so I yelled “Harry!” And he saw me, threw back his trunk, and started charging towards my vehicle! I thought “O-kay!” So he stopped right by the vehicle, stuck his trunk inside and wrapped it around me because he didn’t want me to go! I was ready to take a big part of my ranch back home and turn it into an elephant preserve after that.
Did you do most of your own stunts?
Normally what I do is let the stunt double do most of the rehearsals, the idea being that the less you do, the less chance you have of getting hurt. Although my stunt double didn’t ride horses, so all the horsemanship was up to me. But most of the stunts you see in my films are done by me.
It was nice to see Alison Doody acting again. I think every man who saw her in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has yet to catch his breath.
It’s a real pleasure working with a leading lady who knows exactly who she is. A lot of leading ladies, when they finally get to a certain point in their careers, get angry, and have an attitude, but Alison didn’t. She was a real pro and made it safe for us both, because she’s very happily married, and so am I, which helped us to establish this relationship set in the 19th century where you just didn’t cross a certain line with someone you weren’t married to, even though every fiber of your being is screaming to. Plus, it helped us to navigate around that predictable moment of “when is the guy gonna hook up with the girl?”
Of course, with this film, it was just that wonderful kiss between the two.
Which in the 19th century, was akin to a love scene! If there’s one thing I’ve learned in any love scene I’ve done in a film, it’s that it’s not about sucking face. It’s not about jumping someone’s bones. It’s about the connection between two human beings in the eyes, the idea that this person makes you whole and completes you. That’s what’s really sexy. And that’s what makes this relationship in the film really sexy: it’s all about working up to that kiss.
L to R: Patrick Swayze, Patsy Swayze and Patrick's wife, Lisa Niemi, in Patsy's Houston dance studio, circa 1977.
Let’s talk about your background. You were born and raised in Houston, Texas. Your mom is a legendary choreographer who started her own studio in Houston. What did your dad do?
Well, his dad was one of the foremen of the King Ranch, which was the biggest ranch in the world, at one point. So my dad was raised on a ranch. At one point, he was the state champion calf roper. Needless to say, he got me into that stuff from the time I was little. My dad was a really organic, kind of earthy man. He was one of those men that was full of loving energy and had a sweet, gentle nature, but he was also one of those men that you didn’t want to cross. He had that Southern man kind of energy to where if they ever lose that graciousness for one moment and that tone changes, you better run. There’s no warning. He really taught me so many things that in your younger years are kind of cliché, but as you get older, you realize their importance: like integrity, passion, in your work ethic. I now live my life by most of the things my dad taught me. I think my favorite saying of his would be: “All I got is my integrity. To this day, I ain’t never seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul.” (laughs) Really, playing Allan Quartermain was an opportunity for me to play my dad.
And your mother, Patsy, is world-renowned dancer and choreographer.
That’s the other side of me: the intensity, the passion, the drive, the belief in communicating something through the arts. It’s all those qualities of my mother’s that have really led me down all these tangential paths in my life. My parents were an amazing couple.
Swayze as Orry Main, in the ABC mini-series "North & South" (1985).
Your father was a man of integrity, and you seem to largely play men of integrity, going back to your character Orry Main in the miniseries “North & South,” the role that helped launch your career.
What sucks an audience in is that ticking clock of whether this character is going to achieve what it is that they want in their life and it’s usually not something physical. It’s usually something internal, some subtext that’s eating at them or haunting them like a demon. It’s a deep-seated thing that they may, or may not, get past in order to get to what they need to achieve. Who really cares how many things you can blow up and who wins? It’s how you get there. It’s the process that’s really the powerful thing in storytelling.
Clockwise: Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, and Emilio Estevez in Francis Coppola's The Outsiders (1983).
The Outsiders came out around the same time, and helped to solidify your stardom. Tell us about the experience of working on that landmark Coppola film, which made stars out of a huge cast of unknowns, with names like Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and many others.
It was wonderful. Playing Orry really graduated me into playing the role of Darrel Curtis. And Francis was a great teacher for me. What I got from Francis was the true essence of what “organic” means. He would have us live in the house as a family, and be brothers. I would teach these kids how to jump freight trains and ride them. I used to jump freights in my surfing days, when I’d jump a freight leaving Houston for the Gulf Coast and then jump another one to get home. I taught these kids all the skills I knew: how to fight, how to do back flips and hand stands. I was teaching gymnastics classes to all the guys every day. The only one who was too cool to work with us was Matt Dillon. (laughs) He was much more into “I’m a New Yorker. I ain’t into that stuff. That’s pussy stuff.” (laughs) But (Tom) Cruise took to it like a magnet. That’s what I love about Tom, same thing with John Travolta. I love guys who are like sponges. No attitude, just “I want to learn.” And if you look at them now, those are the guys that have careers. When you come from “I don’t know,” your growth is limitless. When you come from “I know,” your growth stops. But Francis got so detailed. He didn’t want anything coming out that didn’t come from you as a person. No play-acting. No doing “words.” We rehearsed that film completely improvisationally. We really became this family of three boys who were too young to be left alone, but we had no choice, because our parents were dead. And we had to survive, and we had to maintain our dignity. If there’s a common thread among all the characters I’ve played, I think it’s the exploration of all our dignity as people. So Francis became a huge part of my life. We were all together at his winery up in Napa for the 20th anniversary of the film, and the director’s cut that’s coming out on DVD, and it was like old home week. It was like my father was in my life again. Francis will always be an inspiration to me, because he never gives up.
Swayze and Jennifer Grey in the smash hit Dirty Dancing (1987).
With Dirty Dancing, did you and the rest of the cast and crew have any clue that the film would become the phenomenon that it did?
Everyone always wants to say in hindsight, “Oh yeah, I knew it all along.” But Dirty Dancing was another one of those situations where we were just re-writing constantly, Eleanor Bergstein, Emile Ardolino and I, around the clock. When you find one of those projects where everyone jumps in with both feet, for me, those are the movies that make history. Dirty Dancing had that kind of energy. I would say it’s the only film in my life that made me realize I had to keep my dancing quiet, because if dancing had been the thing that had launched me initially, I would have always been “dancer turned actor,” and never been taken seriously as an actor. But what made that movie famous wasn’t me shaking my butt. It was the fact that the young, funky Jewish girl gets the guy not because she’s the hottest girl on the block, but because of what she’s got in her heart. That’s what’s worth falling in love with. I truly believe that’s why that movie continues to live on, like Ghost. I never used to believe in luck before, but when I think back on some of the films I’ve done, there’s got to be a little luck in there somewhere, you know? I mean, who gets to be involved with one movie that makes history? (laughs) It’s that mystical law of chance the Buddhists talk about called “miyoho.”
Let’s talk about some of your other films. One of your earliest films I really liked was Walter Hill’s Uncommon Valor, with Gene Hackman.
I come from a place where I want to be part of a collaborative, nurturing kind of energy. A lot of times you’ll have actors who just want to phone it in until their close-up, or just phone it in when they’re off-camera, and Gene never did that. It didn’t matter if he had an attitude about something that had made him angry on the set, always with the other actor; he was there 100% for you emotionally, no matter which side of the camera he was on. That made me realize that was the kind of actor I wanted to be. I’ve always been very lucky with those kinds of people. I was in this hardware store off Vineland one day, and somebody got out of a car next to me, and I just turned into a zombie, got off my motorcycle, and followed this guy into the story, without a clue as to who he was. All of the sudden, this big Indian puts himself between me and this guy, and I’m thinking “Oh my God, I’ve just finished “North & South” and The Outsiders and I’ve had this kind of stalking stuff happen to me. What am I doing?!” Then I realized it was Marlon Brando! So I did the typical fan thing and said the completely wrong thing: “I just finished working with Francis Ford Coppola on a movie. Then I thought “Oh my God, you dummy! Isn’t he in the middle of a lawsuit with Francis?!” (laughs) So I wound up following him around and talking to him, and felt like I was at a therapist’s, and he just listened to me talk. I finally stopped myself and said “I’m sorry; I’m really embarrassed by this.” He turned around as he was about to leave and said “Hey son, I see something in your eyes. Don’t give it up. Believe in yourself.” And that has stuck with me forever, through the worst times, that Marlon Brando saw something in my eyes.
Trailer for Road House.
Let’s talk about Road House, which might be my favorite film of yours. Your character Dalton wasn’t the typical action hero. He was quite complex.
The whole basis of Road House was a modern-day western with the lead character being quite a complicated man. It would have been very simple to go down the road of playing tough and acting intense. But just playing “tough guy” never really goes anywhere. It might go somewhere for a little bit in a certain genre of film, but then people get tired of that genre and tired of that actor. This was going to be possibly the one real fight film I did where a lifetime of training I’d gone through would be able to be put into one movie. In the fight scenes, none of us were pulling our punches, except for the ones to the face. We made sure that everyone who was fighting really knew how to fight, so that you’d lift people off the ground, but you didn’t break bone. We wanted to avoid the stuntman “biff, bam, bop” thing. In certain ways, I saw Dalton as Shane. And I liked the fact that it was one of the first opportunities for me to put out there my passion for being a peaceful warrior: to be highly-skilled, but to avoid violence or hurting another human being at all costs, unless you have no choice. But my complete concern in that film was to focus on the performance, and the fighting was secondary. The thing that continues to amaze me about Road House is the huge cult following it has, not only with male viewers, but with women, as well. I guess it’s that whole idea of the man who’s really mush inside. Women want men to get more sensitive, then they do, and women write songs like “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” (laughs)
Swayze and Demi Moore in Ghost (1990).
Speaking of “chick flicks,” let’s talk about Ghost.
That, for me, was another testament that when you get people believing they’re doing something special, something special happens. Jerry Zucker, being renowned for his comedic work, brought a wonderful thing to this project. And the writer, Bruce Joel Rubin, was a real gift because Bruce is a very spiritual man. When we’d be talking during the re-writes, we’d go into deeper topics about spirituality, but we finally came up with the idea that if you truly love someone and then you die, you take the love with you, because that’s all you can really take. By curbing the desire to try to say too much, and thus possibly alienating people, and going back to very simple truths, it just seemed to resonate with a lot of people around the world. It was one of those films that come along and an alarm goes off in my body, telling me that I have to do it. It passed what I call “the goosebump test.” When that happens, I know I have to do a film.
Patrick Swayze and wife Lisa Niemi at their ranch, Rancho Bizarro, in May 2009.
Action flicks. Two-fisted tales. Guy movies. Whatever you want to call them, writer, producer, and director Walter Hill is one of the living masters, with a resume full of classics from The Getaway (1972), to the Alien series, and the definitive eighties action-comedy blockbuster, 48 Hrs. (1982).
2009 marks the 30th anniversary of The Warriors (1979), Hill’s surreal “street gang on the run” cult classic, and his breakout success as a director.
JON: A couple years ago, you did an audio commentary and on-camera intro for a new DVD edition of The Warriors. It was the first time I’d ever seen you; is it my imagination, or have you kept a low profile over the years?
WALTER HILL: I’d never done a commentary before on one of my films. I don’t like the idea of explaining a movie; I think it inevitably comes off as ego-driven, or pitiful: “Hey, look at this! I did this; isn’t it terrific?” I think a good book or a good film speaks for itself. Also, people always want to ask you what a film “means,” which is another reason why I don’t even like doing interviews like this—nothing against you.
Do you have a particular term for the kinds of stories you tell? Whatever the genre, they primarily concern men in violent conflict—
Somebody once asked me why I never did horror films, just action, and what was the difference? I said horror movies terrorize women, and action movies terrorize guys. For some reason, several people found that definition objectionable. (chuckling) I thought it was brutally accurate... I didn’t answer that too well, did I?
I’m a big Anthony Mann fan, and there are a lot of parallels between your bodies of work. Mann said his movies were about “the use of violence by thoughtful men.”
The kinds of stories I like to tell are part of a tradition—and I’m not comparing myself to, or placing myself as the equal of some of the great storytellers I’m going to mention; I’m artistically modest, as everyone ought to be—but it’s the tradition practiced by Robert Aldrich, Anthony Mann, Don Siegel, Howard Hawks, Sam Fuller.
I think there’s less room in the marketplace now for the kinds of stories I enjoy telling, and which I tend to think of as my strength; action movies today are more fantasy, exaggerated, comic book… That sounds pejorative… but tastes change. Audiences change. I think the older tradition was more intellectually rigorous, and the newer tradition is more pure sensation… and that’s not necessarily bad. It’s the old Apollonian vs. Dionysian controversy… Nietzsche might very well have liked the newer films more than the older ones… (laughs)
I was thinking about why things have changed. Do you think in the time of Ford, Hawks, Mann—when these kinds of films were being made regularly—the audience, the studio bosses, and those directors all shared a more common sense of morality?
Sure. I talked to Lindsay Anderson about this once; he’d made the remark about what a lucky director John Ford was… that in addition to his great talent, his sensibility was by and large in step with that of the mass audience. An obvious contrary example would be Orson Welles, who did not come along at the perfect time to find an audience for his vision, an audience that would have made his work commercially sustainable.
As a youngster, were you more interested in books or movies?
Both. I was particularly interested in the Western genre, in pulp novels of the thirties and forties, and film noir. That’s probably why I liked EC Comics as well; because they were so dark. I lived a lot at a fantasy level, I think. I was asthmatic. Stayed at home a lot. Didn’t go to school for weeks at a time. My mother and my grandmother taught me how to read.
Do you remember what movies first made you conscious of the director… or simply that there was someone making decisions about how the story was being told?
I began reading about films when I was in high school; my awareness of directors probably came later. The first filmmaker other than Orson Welles I was really terribly aware of—and who made me aware of what directors do—was Ingmar Bergman. And I saw his very early ones, before he became kind of fashionable. The other filmmaker who impressed me at a very early age was Kurosawa. I got quite interested in these foreign films, and I read a lot of criticism about them, which in turn opened my eyes to American film, and kind of led me to rediscover American genre film. I mean, I’d seen Howard Hawks films and Don Siegel films growing up, but without that awareness of their sensibilities.
But Welles was the first?
I’d seen Kane and Ambersons on TV when I was a kid. My dad and mom told me a lot about him. He was, of course, quite famous in a notorious sense. Even down in Long Beach, where I’m from.
Hill’s directorial debut, Hard Times, starred Charles Bronson as a bare knuckles boxer in Depression-era New Orleans, James Coburn as his wily manager, and Bronson’s wife, Jill Ireland, as his girlfriend.
Speaking of the thirties, I saw your film Hard Times (1975) last night. Do you know this new website Hulu? It’s a library of TV shows, old and new, which you can watch for free with limited commercial interruptions. They also have a small collection of movies—150 titles maybe—but Hard Times is one of them. Bronson is such a classic tough guy, but I don’t think I’d ever seen him do such intense physical stuff before. His fight scenes are really impressive.
He was in remarkable physical condition for a guy his age; I think he was about 52 at the time. He had excellent coordination, and a splendid build. His one problem was that he was a smoker, so he didn’t have a lot of stamina. I mean, he probably could have kicked anybody’s ass on that movie, but he couldn’t fight much longer than 30 or 40 seconds.
He eventually died of lung disease, didn’t he?
I believe so. I lost touch with him. We had kind of a falling out over the film. He thought I’d been a little too… how do I put this? Too draconian in my editing of his wife’s scenes.
Charles Bronson in Hard Times.
I thought you were quite generous with her.
I thought so too. So I’d occasionally run into Charlie around town, and even though the picture had done well, I never quite knew where we stood. Talking to him was kind of like being in a movie: there was one party, maybe five years later, and he was staring at me from across the room… like a gunfighter in a bar in a Western. I thought, “Is that sonuvabitch just going to stare at me forever? Ah, fuck it. I’ll go talk to him.” I went over and shook his hand, and once I’d done that, everything was fine. We had a nice chat. A year later, at another party, he passed me and cut me dead; wouldn’t even say hello. A year after that, we ran into each other again, and it was like we were old friends. So he ran hot and cold.
I just got a check for Hard Times last week. A profit share. It’s strange to still be making money on a movie you did thirty-five years ago.
Hill’s second film, The Driver (1977), starred Ryan O’Neal.
Your first two movies had big movie stars; The Warriors did not. What’s the difference, and which do you prefer?
The presence of movie stars is something you feel more in the reaction of the people that surround the movie. It doesn’t have much to do with the filmmaking process.
Though stars certainly influence a picture with their well-known personas. I assume the young cast of The Warriors was much more dependent on you to help shape their performances?
That’s true. One had to intuit what their personas were, and try to work out how they would play. It is an advantage to go in with a sense of what an actor will bring to it… though a mistake actors make consistently is they think they can play anything, and a mistake directors make is they think actors can only do what they’ve done before.
My favorite advice to directors about casting that I read was by the great Broadway director George Abbot, who said “Directors like to think there’s only one actor who can play a certain part, but there’s always somebody else.” I think that’s true. I’d written the lead in Hard Times for a much younger man; I thought we’d get someone like Jan-Michael Vincent… and I wanted Warren Oates for Coburn’s part. But it worked out.
Early in your career, you wrote scripts for John Huston and Sam Peckinpah. What did you pick up from them… or from the other prominent directors you worked for, like Norman Jewison or Woody Allen?
They were all talented filmmakers; interesting individuals, but as far as learning anything… I think what you learn is everyone makes their own way.
As far as creativity goes, I think you get your head to a place where things are discovered, not invented. It’s that Platonic, Keat-ian idea that you don’t really write a poem; it’s already there, and you find it. I think that’s true for the audience as well: they discover what they already know or intuit. And that’s the most ideal relationship between the audience and the storyteller.
Now Huston and Peckinpah had very similar outlaw personalities. At the same time, they were wildly disparate fellows; Sam worked in a much narrower—some would say deeper—channel, while Huston had a wider field of interest. I think it was also important that he was a much more omnivorous reader… which isn’t to say he was smarter or more talented, but he possessed a worldview, and sophistication, that went way beyond the very restricted world Sam chose to live in.
Steve McQueen and Sam Peckinpah on the set of The Getaway, which Hill penned.
I think you see that in Peckinpah’s films. In his later career, he seemed to be sinking into pure nihilism, while Huston always loved these offbeat character studies—right up to Prizzi’s Honor (1985) and The Dead (1987).
I think one of the biggest differences was that Peckinpah was purely a guy of film. He worked in it his whole life, from the time he got out of the Army, and his heroes were filmmakers, like Kurosawa and Bergman. Huston was from the generation before that; most of his generation never really regarded filmmaking as a serious artistic pursuit.
I guess that’s why Huston could make so many films he didn’t really care about. He could take a job and just amiably do the work in a way Peckinpah never really could.
Huston was a soldier of fortune, as anybody in film has to be to some degree. He also liked to travel, and to drink. He liked high society, beautiful women, horse races, and buying great art… and to live that kind of life, you have to make a lot of money. John could turn a buck… Sam mostly lived in a trailer in Paradise Cove.
Director and renaissance man John Huston.
And only made about a third as many pictures as Huston did.
But what’s so memorable about Sam is what a powerful, personal, artistic stamp he put on his work. His name alone conjures up a vision…
He comes up in almost every interview I do with filmmakers of your generation.
I think what we respond to most with Sam is his purity of commitment. And that’s always easier to idolize. And I’m not a critic, but I think it’s true his work fell into severe decline, while Huston was—in and out—but basically good until the end.
Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw in The Getaway.
Something that impresses me about Huston is that he survived the end of the studio system and the end of censorship. So many filmmakers of his generation couldn’t cope with that cultural shift in the late sixties; they couldn’t effectively judge what material might appeal to younger audiences… but Huston always trusted in the purity of a well-crafted novel or short story. I think that’s what got him through the seventies and eighties.
He was also a master at capitalizing on his own legend. Nobody ever looked more like what the public imagined a film director should be. Whereas someone like William Wyler, for instance, didn’t have a big dramatic presence.
Director Anthony Mann.
Nor did Anthony Mann.
I know very little about Mann. I’ve heard a lot of stories in my career—about this or that director; who said this, who did that—but I’ve never heard a story about Anthony Mann, or knew anybody who knew him. Maybe I should interview you.
I knew very little about him either, but I became friends with his family some years ago. His daughter Nina had most of his films on tape, so I watched them all—in order—in just a few weeks, and was completely knocked out. I’d been a Peckinpah fan, but as I got older, the ugly side of him really started to bug me. Mann’s films are also very much based on violent masculine conflict, but I think he had a far healthier moral outlook.
He did some awfully good movies. The Naked Spur (1953) is terrific, and I like Winchester ’73 (1950). It’s corny, but it’s got great energy, and wonderful scenes. The Indian stuff is dopey—isn’t that the one where Rock Hudson is an Indian?
Yeah. “This gun me want!”
The Indian stuff was always kind of dopey in those old ones. Even with Hawks and Ford.
What’s tricky when you look at those guys—any of those American masters of genre film—is understanding how they transcended all the hackwork going on around them. With Kurosawa or Bergman, the artistic quality of their pictures is obvious; with directors like Ford, Hawks, or Mann, you have to look harder. What usually distinguishes their work is their sensibility.
Did you always aspire to continue in that tradition?
I came into the business at an interesting time… when it was still like running away to join the circus. But within five years, the whole sensibility changed. Young people coming in, the so-called next generation, were all very influenced by European and Japanese cinema. The people who were older than me—like John Huston—their attitude was, if you have artistic ambitions, you should be off writing novels or plays. The cultural primacy of film as an attitude came from my generation, and the one after. And the flip over was huge; it was hard for a lot of folks to get behind. I mean, if you had told people in, say, 1937 that John Ford or Howard Hawks would someday be revered as major artistic figures in American culture—while someone like Maxwell Anderson would be all but forgotten—people would have thought you were insane.
I chuckle in agreement.
I’m pleased to see you even know who Maxwell Anderson is.
Sure. Winesburg, Ohio, right?
No, that was Sherwood Anderson.
Oh. Okay, who was Maxwell Anderson?
Playwright. He wrote Winterset, which was considered one of the greatest plays on Broadway in the thirties.
I don’t know that one.
I have in fact seen several films based on the plays of Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959), including Mary of Scotland (1936), Key Largo (1948) and The Bad Seed (1956); my favorite is The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn.
Sherwood Anderson (1886-1941) wrote novels and short stories. He publishedWinesburg, Ohio in 1919.
Anyway, when my generation came along, suddenly everybody since wants to be a great director. I have a daughter at NYU now; she’s very bright and creative—“promising,” as parents always say—what does she want to be? A director. I asked her, “Why don’t you be a novelist?” Nope. Not interested.
Is she a fan of your films?
No, not at all. I mean, I love her dearly, and we’re very close, but I don’t think she has any natural inclination to my work. She just doesn’t relate to it. And I think she doesn’t want to be tainted (laughs) by my career; she wants to find her own way.
I asked because I know Anthony Mann’s two daughters. They certainly respect and admire his work, but his movies are so overwhelmingly masculine—concerned with masculine issues, driven by masculine conflict—I don’t think women can relate to that.
Speaking of gender issues, you’ve produced the Alien series since the beginning, but you’ve never directed a movie with a female protagonist. Do you purposely steer clear of those?
No, and as a matter of fact, I’ve got a low budget science fiction project called Unknown with a female lead. I just finished the script a few weeks ago, and I’d like to do it with Sigourney Weaver. She and I had dinner last week. Her part wouldn’t occupy quite the same position Ripley holds in that series, but it’s certainly analogous.
Juzo Itami had also talked to me about doing a remake of A Taxing Woman (1987), and I loved that idea—
There’s a name you don’t hear much anymore. What a fantastic director... Tampopo (1986) was one of my favorites that year. I went to see it again and again.
He was here several times for dinner; a really wonderful guy. A sad end, though...
Itami shot to international acclaim with his first film, The Funeral (1984). He wrote and directed ten Japanese films, often starring his wife, Nobuko Miyamoto, but committed suicide in 1997 following public allegations of his possible marital infidelity.
The Warriors walk their home turf on Coney Island.
We should probably get back to The Warriors at some point. From your comments on the DVD, it sounds like you essentially discarded Sol Yurick’s novel, and went back to the original Greek history tale for inspiration.
The movie was thrown together very quickly, and for very little money. The producer, Larry Gordon, and I were going to do a Western, and the financing collapsed at the last minute. He was trying to do a deal at Paramount, and said maybe he could get The Warriors going. I read it, and loved it, but I said, “They’ll never let us make this. It’s too good an idea.” Then—I’ll be a sonuvabitch—he got it going…
Then I had to figure out how to do it. The novel attempts a kind of social realism that I didn’t think worked very well. But there’s a scene in it where one of the gang members is reading a comic book about the march of Xenophon and the 10,000, and he says, “Hey, this is just like us!” And I thought, that’s the way to do the movie—
I take it that also inspired the comic book framing devise you’ve added to the new edition. Had you been a big reader of comic books?
I read a lot of the EC Comics back in the fifties. I never particularly liked superheroes. People think of comics as exclusively about superheroes, but back then you had horror comics, and humor, and romance, and westerns; there was a whole experience one could have outside of superheroes. I particularly liked the EC comics because they were darker.
I saw The Warriors as graphically driven, as situational; it was broad, easy to understand, but kind of self-mocking at the same time… those were the aspects that suggested a comic book flavor to me. The idea really came up because when Paramount made the movie—and Paramount was a very different place back then—they hated it. They couldn’t understand what the fuck it was, or what it was about. They wouldn’t show it to critics. So I was trying to explain it to them: “In some sense, it’s science fiction, or… imagine a comic book based on a story from Greek history…” But it was like talking to the fucking wall.
To be fair, it’s pretty unique. The only movie I can think of that looks like it might have been an influence is West Side Story (1961)… uh, was it?
I honestly had not seen the movie, but I certainly knew what it was, so to say you weren’t influenced by something so pervasive in the culture is probably naïve. I think we’re all influenced by everything.
The Warriors during their final confrontation with rival gang leader, Luther.
When you and your designers began to conceptualize all the exaggerated costumes and make-up the various gangs would be wearing… were you ever afraid audiences were just going to laugh?
Yeah, I was.
The whole idea… when you really think about it, it’s just audacious.
I don’t think I could have done it as my first movie, but at that point I thought, “Well, they’re either going buy it, or not.” If I deserve credit for anything, it was for knowing I couldn’t go halfway. Halfway was death. And I just didn’t think it could be done realistically; the premise of the story was ridiculous. I think that was something Sol Yurick never understood about his own novel: he was trying to be socially accurate within this preposterous plot. Most people probably would have tried to make the movie more real; I said no, let’s make it more unreal.
I consider it a pretty good movie for the first… well, the first hour or so. We never really figured out what the hell to do at the end.
One of your tasks is deciding the characters’ fates. Who has transgressed, who should be punished, and to what degree. Movie scholars like to point out that Sam Peckinpah’s father was a conservative, Western-style judge; can you describe the influences in your upbringing you’d most credit with shaping your moral perspective?
My parents, and many of my extended family, were people who had a high sense of ethical responsibility, and some members of my family were definitely churchgoers. I went to church every Sunday until I was about fifteen or sixteen, before I could “escape,” which is how I thought of it back then. I now perceive it—and the lessons I was taught—to be gold. One of the things I’ve found to be the most interesting about making Westerns is that it’s like walking around in the Old Testament; the stories are all about primary ethical concerns. Of course, most storytellers shrink from that whole idea of being a moralist, from taking that responsibility—
But somebody has to make those calls. In drama or comedy, characters’ fates can be much less decisive, but a story based on a collision between shades of good and evil—
There are no set rules; it’s just a matter of your taste. But you’re right; storytelling in some specific way requires you to be judgmental about the characters. I think you can be forcefully judgmental and still be a great artist, or you can be more open-ended, which I think the greater artists tend to be.
Have the shifting moral standards driven you crazy over the years?
If you’re someone who thinks society is always supposed to be moving forward, that the story of history is the story of progress, and that we are all moving towards some idea of utopia, then I don’t fit it. I don’t have that worldview. While there are certainly discoveries made in science that materially alter the way we live, I think most of the ethical guidelines that determine personal human behavior have remained remarkably constant, for thousands of years. As we said, audiences change, especially when you’re dealing with popular entertainment… but ultimately they’ll always come around again for a good story.
That’s good to hear.
Yeah, we’re not necessarily forever stuck with the crap we’ve got… or worse, the crap that gets palmed off as good work. You talk about Anthony Mann—there was a lot of crap then too—we just cherry pick what we choose to remember.
Original theatrical trailer for The Warriors.
When The Warriors opened in my hometown, it already had this disreputable vibe about it. There was no way in hell my parents would have taken me to see it. Did that reputation ultimately hurt it or help it?
I kind of enjoyed the idea that something I had done would be considered disreputable. The bad reputation came from the fact that there were a couple of rough incidents at theaters where it was showing… which always leads to the question, “Was the film responsible for people’s behavior?” That to me is nonsense. Is it partially responsible? Well, “partial” is hard to define. I do think if you get people together in an audience that are carrying guns, and are sworn enemies, there’s a very good chance something is going to go amiss. Which is what happened.
My first job in Hollywood was working for producer Joel Silver, and The Warriors was one of the first pictures he worked on. How did he impress you at the time?
Joel worked for Larry, but he didn’t have a lot to do with The Warriors until post-production; I remember he was very involved in the music. He was a young guy; very energetic, very ambitious. I always thought he was going to have a pretty big career; that didn’t surprise me at all. I’ve always liked him. He’s certainly a character.
It’s like what you said about John Huston: Joel really became the definitive public image of what a hard-charging movie producer was in the eighties and nineties.
He became easy to caricature. His exaggerated nature branded him, as they say now… and I’m sure that helped him, but it probably hurt him in some ways too. I don’t know; I only worked with him. You worked for him; what did you think?
I was just off the bus, and I got a job there as an office boy. It was fascinating because it was big time Hollywood; at the same time, Joel operated—and wanted his office to operate—in this constant crisis mode. As a break-in job, it was phenomenal, but after six months I’d had enough. I was proud of the fact that he never once screamed at me.
Hill followed The Warriors with his first Western, The Long Riders (above, 1980), and then Southern Comfort (below, 1981), a grim combat tale about a Louisiana National Guard patrol that antagonizes some Cajun hunters and winds up in a fight to the death.
From left to right: Les Lannom, Powers Boothe, Keith Carradine.
What inspired Southern Comfort?
David Giler and I had a deal with Fox; we were supposed to acquire and develop interesting, commercial scripts that could be produced cheaply. Alien (1979) was one of them, and Southern Comfort was another. We wanted to do a survival story, and I’d already done a film in Louisiana—
I meant was there some actual incident where Cajuns had clashed with the Guard?
No, that was just our story. And we were very aware that people were going to see it as a metaphor for Vietnam. The day we had the cast read, before we went into the swamps, I told everybody, “People are going to say this is about Vietnam. They can say whatever they want, but I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
If you know about Vietnam, you can make those connections, but the story certainly stands on it’s own.
And Vietnam is hardly the oppressive presence today that it was in 1980. The story becomes much more universal.
I think the biggest parallel is visual: that swamp looks like Vietnam. You’d have to do some research to be able to discuss the parallels with Iraq. As a former Army officer, I think your depiction of military characters, dialogue, and attitude is dead-on; in Southern Comfort, and Geronimo (1993) as well. Both depict soldiers during peacetime. Warriors without true wars, stuck doing shit work… you have a very intuitive understanding of that mentality.
Wes Studi as the title character in Hill's Geronimo.
I’m pleased to hear you say that, but I think it’s just my intuition about human nature. And what I’ve read. People I’ve known. I have an uncle who was a career military guy. Wonderful man. Now in his eighties.
In my few years in uniform, I certainly met versions of all your Army characters.
I was never happy about the title Geronimo. It’s not about Geronimo. It should have been called The Geronimo War.
Or The Three White Guys Who Caught Geronimo.
Right. It’s as much about the Army as it is Geronimo. That came out of my reading of historical accounts, and realizing that so much of what we think we know about the Indian campaigns is wrong. The Army is generally depicted as the enemy of the Apache, but in many cases, the people who were most sympathetic to their plight were those soldiers.
Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman in Geronimo.
Because they were there. They saw what the deal was.
And tragically, it was these same soldiers who then had to go out and be the tip of the spear.
Yeah, the moral trap they eventually find themselves in is heartbreaking.
I thought the character of Gatewood, who was a real person, would be of great interest. But not a lot of people saw the film.
I was about the same age as Matt Damon’s character, so it really made an impression on me: that my duty might include a lot more than just defending my country.
There’s a longer version that exists. They cut about twelve minutes for the theatrical release, and most of it was about Army life. I always thought they should do a DVD release of the full version. It was damn good.
It seems like half the shots in Southern Comfort show those guys sloshing through swamp water up to their knees. How did the actors keep from getting trench foot?
That was a very tough movie. I don’t know how we ever…
I know you can’t keep guys in the water that long.
We did. We went out there every day, and just slugged it out. I was in the water too; it wasn’t like I was directing from some safe island.
Were you wearing waders?
Yeah, we had wetsuits on underneath. But it was just miserable. We were out there about fifty days. Six days a week, for nine weeks. And just to get out there took this enormous drive; we had to get up at four in the morning to be ready to shoot at the crack of dawn.
So nobody had to “act” exhausted.
I’ll say this about that cast: they didn’t complain much. They knew what they were getting into, they were all in very good physical condition, and they went out there and just took it. It was very much a collective experience, and it’s certainly one of my favorite films. Sometimes pictures become favorites for reverse reasons: because it was hard to make, or because people didn’t much care for it. It didn’t do particularly well. It did better overseas; the foreign critical reception was very good.
What were the circumstances of the American release?
Well, it was a negative pick-up. The studios, especially in those days, tended to treat those like the stepchildren in 19th century novels. So they didn’t spend a great deal of money trying to get us launched. The movie didn’t cost too much, so it wasn’t like it was some huge financial disaster… but I think the subject matter is just not widely appealing.
I love it. It’s gritty, it’s intense, it’s kick-ass.
It’s kick-ass, but it’s not fun.
After Platoon (1986), it became standard for anybody doing a combat picture to send the actors to boot camp and run them through hell for a few weeks. Did your cast have anything like that?
I ran them through hell for nine weeks, with the cameras rolling. I don’t think any of us came from a military background. We had a military advisor with us, but… (chuckling) I think most of our knowledge came from previous military movies.
One of my favorite elements is Ry Cooder’s score. That was your second picture with him, and you went on to do a lot more. How did that collaboration begin? How did you first hear of him?
My girlfriend at the time was a big fan of his. She had his albums, and was always playing them. I’d seen him play once at the old Ash Grove on Melrose Avenue, and there was just something about his music I thought would work very well in film. I’m also interested in the kind of film scores that don’t underline the drama. Film music should be mainly atmospheric.
I also liked the way Ry worked. We’d go into a studio, and he’d try various things, and we’d go back and forth about the ideas; almost like making a record. It’s a terrific process, and a lot of fun. He’s an unbelievably talented guy… but not that interested in scoring films anymore. He’s branched out into a kind of musical literature.
Do you know his album Chavez Ravine (2005)?
Yeah, it’s great. He’s got so much more he wants to say now, so working on films… you know, a composer is really confined to a supporting role.
Randy Newman joked about that during a concert. He said, “Here’s a wonderful song I wrote for such-and-such movie… but you can’t really hear it over all the talking.”Speaking of music, a real standout scene in 48 Hrs. is The Busboys’ performance of “The Boys are Back in Town.” Did you get offers to shoot music videos after that?
Those weren’t around that much back then. That Busboys scene was actually one of the first things that got shown a lot on MTV.
Do you like rock music?
Oh, sure. Though I never liked the so-called British Invasion much; I prefer hard-driving American rhythm and blues. I like folk music, county and western, blues.
How did you get involved in 48 Hrs.?
Larry Gordon had an idea for a crime movie set in Louisiana where the governor’s daughter is kidnapped, and has dynamite taped to her head, and the bad guys are going to kill her in 48 hours. The family assigns a top cop to rescue her—one aspect of the story was the cop getting one of the kidnapper’s old cellmates out of jail to help him.
Roger Spottiswoode, my editor on Hard Times, wanted to be a director. I told him he should try writing, so Larry gave him a shot rewriting that kidnap story. Roger was living in my house at the time, so we discussed it a lot. His draft got the story out of Louisiana, got rid of the dynamite on the girl’s head, and made it a more realistic, big city cop thriller.
That was at Columbia. Then Larry’s deal switched over to Paramount, a few more drafts were written, and then they asked me to rewrite it for Clint Eastwood. Larry and I flew up to Carmel to see him and he liked the project, but felt he’d already done that kind of cop character enough, so he wanted to play the criminal. I began tailoring it to that end when Eastwood decided to do Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz (1979), and since he played a prisoner in that one, that was really the end of his interest in our project. At which point I suggested we try to get Richard Pryor to play the criminal.
Was that your first notion that the piece had the potential to be funny as well?
Yeah, I’d say so. Again, the story was preposterous; why not make it kind of humorous?
Was that also when you decided the prisoner would be black?
Yeah. The part wasn’t written that way yet; it was just a verbal concept. But Paramount did not see the wisdom of that, so I went off and did The Long Riders and Southern Comfort, and then I got a call saying Nick Nolte wanted to do 48 Hrs., and was I interested in doing it with him and a black actor? I said, “Absolutely.”
The reason it finally got going was because Michael Eisner, who was running Paramount then, wanted a second movie for Christmas time—they had Airplane II (1982) as their big Christmas release, and he wanted a thriller for some non-Christmas-y counter-programming. But we couldn’t get Richard Pryor, who was a huge star by then, so we decided to go for Gregory Hines, but he wasn’t available either. Eddie Murphy’s agent had sent me a lot of tapes of him, and Paramount approved him, so we went with him.
We had one tough break in that Eddie couldn’t shake out of his TV show early. We’d already been shooting for two weeks before he joined us, so he came in absolutely cold. It was his first film, and he was a seasoned performer, but not a trained film actor, and we really could have used a good week of rehearsal. It’s one of the few times I’ve been sorry I didn’t rehearse. One old-time director told me once, “Don’t ever fuckin’ rehearse. All that happens is the actors don’t like the script.” And there is some merit in that.
What’s your S.O.P. in that regard?
Well, action movies, with all their physicality, tend to be hard to rehearse.
Which of your films was most rehearsed?
Probably The Warriors… just because with more experienced actors, it’s easier to work things out on the set.
Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hrs.
When did you start to realize during 48 Hrs. that Eddie Murphy wasn’t just funny, he was really, really, really funny?
What I realized right away was that he was really good; that he was bringing something to it. There were always these stories that circulated about tension between the studio and me; that they were angry, and even talked about firing me, because they didn’t think Eddie was very funny… and it’s true they brought me in to talk about that.
Were they expecting a more traditional comedy?
That’s how I took it: that to them, a funny movie with a black guy meant the guy should act like Richard Pryor. And I was perfectly happy with the way things were going. I thought Eddie was doing a very good job.
I guess there was no way they could imagine how audiences would react to him.
Well, in theory, that’s why you hire a director.
Although you weren’t Mr. Comedy.
I wasn’t Mr. Comedy, but I know how to make people laugh. Watch The Warriors with an audience; it gets lots of laughs. Lots of movies work like that. I always thought Sergio Leone’s movies were very funny.
Watching 48 Hrs. again last week, I thought if you take Murphy out, there isn’t much else about it that’s funny.
I’ll often see 48 Hrs. compared to Beverly Hills Cop (1984), which to me is a true comedy. If you go into 48 Hrs. expecting a comedy... well, I’m not a joke writer. I don’t think there’s a single joke in it. But if you think of it as an action movie, it’s very funny: the characters, the situations, the attitudes…
Of the movies you admired, which ones most informed that tone?
Probably the most obvious example is Robert Aldrich’s work, particularly The Dirty Dozen (1967). As far as guys playing off each other like that, I think the great master was Howard Hawks.
I think both Murphy and Nolte’s characters understand that the antagonism between them is a game they’re playing. It’s a tough game, a dangerous game, a nasty game, but these guys are positioning each other. They’re also not so thin-skinned that some casual remark is going to alter their attitudes. I don’t think Nolte’s character is really a racist.
Well, he finally says at one point, “Nigger, watermelon. I didn’t mean all that.” I took that moment as the true measure of his character.
I always thought that was one of the best scenes.
I’m always struck when people say, “Well, your films are like this, so you must be that kind of person.” I just think that’s terribly wrong. Your life is very different from your films. Your films are more like your dream life… and I think some of us just have more interesting dreams than others.
Original theatrical trailer for 48 Hrs.
When 48 Hrs. became a blockbuster, what was that like for you?
It was a lot of fun, but it didn’t really change my life that much. I’d spent the previous five years working on scripts, prepping movies, shooting movies, posting movies… and that’s what I did after 48 Hrs. as well. I just kept working. I got paid more, but really the biggest change was that it got easier to get financing, and to get start dates. Sadly, that never lasts.
Were you amused when everyone in Hollywood then decided the ticket to success was to do a cop movie where one of the cops was played by a comedian? There were a slew of those for the rest of the decade.
What surprised me was how they didn’t quite understand what the motor of it was. It was always called a “buddy cop” movie for instance, when in fact they’re not buddies. They don’t like each other. I think what the imitators always tried to do was copy the structural foundation of 48 Hrs., but fill it in with the more homogenized sensibility of Beverly Hills Cop.
Often when directors score such a massive hit, they’ll use their new clout to mount some kind of epic… be it an El Cid or a Heaven’s Gate. I’m curious why you never did.
I don’t know. The closest I probably came to doing an epic was when Warren Beatty talked to me about doing Dick Tracy (1990). But it didn’t work out.
Lucky for you!
(chuckling) Well, I like Warren… but we certainly disagreed on the way it should go. I had in mind something much more like The Untouchables (1987).
I guess I’ve always just been interested in telling the kinds of stories that appeal to me. You can make films for three concerns: for the mass audience, for yourself, or for the critics. I’ve probably been guilty of making films more for myself, and hoping the audience will like them as well.
Walter Hill (center, wearing hat) and his crew on the set of Streets of Fire (1984).
(Parts of this article appeared at EightMillionStories.com on May 22 and July 24, 2009)
Welcome to the website of writers Alex Simon & Terry Keefe. Every week, we log many hours interviewing the top actors, directors, and writers in Hollywood. Here you'll find some of those great Q&A's, plus some entertainment industry news and our musings on this business of show.
and, Chinatown
and on the other….he also was charged with sodomizing a 13-year old girl in 1977, faced a host of related rape counts, and ran to exile in France, where he remains to this day and is regarded as a national treasure. At the time of the rape proceedings, and since then, rumors have swirled about serious misconduct in the handling of the case by the presiding judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, whose actions led Polanski to believe that he had to flee the country because he would never get a fair sentencing. It has taken some three decades for anyone to do a true in-depth documentary examination of what went on behind the scenes during the proceedings, perhaps largely because of the reluctance of any of the principals in the case to go on the record. That film, containing a number of exclusive interviews, has now arrived in the form of Marina Zenovich's feature documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which was a hit at both Sundance and Cannes this year, and will premiere this month on HBO.
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