Roger Spottiswoode: The Hollywood Interview

Director Roger Spottiswoode.


Neglected Gems of the 1980’s: Roger Spottiswoode Remembers Under Fire
by Jon Zelazny

Editor's Note: The following article appeared on EightMillionStories.com in 2008.

The name may not ring a bell, but Roger Spottiswoode has been directing feature films for nearly thirty years, including popular hits like Turner and Hooch (1989), Air America (1990), and the James Bond adventure Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), as well as outstanding made-for-cable dramas like And the Band Played On (1993), Hiroshima (1995), and Noriega (2000).

2008 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of his remarkable third feature Under Fire, which starred Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman as journalists covering the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua.


It’s generally a given that every Hollywood movie endures a long, tortuous road to find financing, but not Under Fire. It had a long, hard road as well… but only after the film had been completed. Roger Spottiswoode and I spoke by phone:

You began your career as an editor, most notably for Sam Peckinpah, whose films were famous for their highly distinctive editing. Were you expected to match, or to conform to that style?
Roger Spottiswoode: No, but that style really emerged from the way he shot. What he wanted was to tell his stories from multiple perspectives, so you were always cutting to points of view from different characters, and even from the onlookers in the scene. He shot an immense amount of coverage, and he wanted you to use it—not because he liked lots of angles, but because those multiple perspectives shifted our perception of the story. Beyond that, Sam was fascinating because he told the editor almost nothing. He’d never say to make a shot longer, or to cut here, or cut there. He’d say, “You haven’t made it live enough,” or “I know what the character who’s speaking thinks; I want to know what everyone else thinks.” That’s how he talked to actors as well. He wouldn’t tell someone to cry, he’d say, “They’re thinking about their worst nightmare,” and let the actor figure out how to express that… or let the editor work out how to portray that through the editing.

Director Sam Peckinpah.

Were there things about Peckinpah that you really picked up on, that you’d use in your own work?
Well… you know what he was like, right?

Aside from the drinking and brutality?
(laughter) He was an enormously complicated and difficult person to be around, but we learned a lot from him. He was often cruel to people, but he was also very good in the sense that he wanted to get the best out of his crew, and gave us a remarkable amount of freedom. I was ludicrously young when I started with him: I was 27, and I worked with Bob Wolfe, who was 41… and Bob was probably the youngest editor in Hollywood! But Sam was very supportive of me. And very tough. If you asked him how he wanted something, he’d say, “If I have to tell you how to fucking cut it, pal, I’ll put you back on the bus, and let your fucking assistant do it! I know how I’d cut it; I want to know how you’ll cut it!” He really expected you to bring something to the party.

Let’s jump ahead a decade: you became a director, and Under Fire was your third film. I watched it again last night, and it’s amazing to think someone actually put up the money for a contemporary drama about foreign political turmoil. What was the main factor that appealed to the financiers? What made this a “go” project?
It got made because Ron Shelton wrote a really great script. And because of Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow, who were the heads of Orion, and had been at United Artists. And Mike Medavoy, who was their west coast person. I’d met Eric when I worked for Karel Reisz, and he was always very nice. He said to come see him when I became a director, so five years later I sent him the Under Fire script. Hackman and Nolte had both committed, and we had a budget worked out. I sent Eric the script on a Thursday… and Saturday morning he called me to say he’d read half of it, thought it was wonderful, knew he was going to say yes, and he’d call again on Monday. Nobody ever does that!

Nick Nolte in Under Fire.

Was it because of Nick Nolte’s success in 48 Hrs. (1982)? Had that even come out yet?
No, it was being made at the time. And I’d helped write that as well. But Nick was already enough of a name, and the money wasn’t high; we budgeted Under Fire at $8.4 million. So when Eric called back Monday morning, he said, “We’re going to do it, but we’re only going to give you $8.4 million. That’s what you asked for, and that’s what we’ll spend, but no more.” I agreed, and he told me to think about it, and then give him my word that I would stay on budget. I said he had my word. He said, “No, I want you to really think about it. This is a personal commitment. We’ll talk tomorrow, and if you’re sure you can do it, then give me your word.” So next morning I gave him my word, and he said, “Fair enough. We have a deal.” He said, “We’ll send you some story notes. You don’t have to use them, but just think about them. We’ll send you the money, and we’d like to see the film in about a year. Have a great shoot.”

I think it’s safe to say that’s almost entirely unheard of.
What an extraordinarily decent way to run a company!

And did you keep your word?
(laughing) Absolutely! I would have anyway, but they were such gentlemen. Here’s an even better story: a year later, the film was finished, and we were previewing it in Venice. It hadn’t tested particularly well, but they hadn’t asked me to change it. There was a bar next to the screening room, and Eric invited me to have a drink before the film started. We sat down, and he said, “Look, I love Under Fire, we all do, but I have to tell you we’re pretty sure it’s not going to do very well. Americans aren’t interested in politics; they’re going to say it’s left wing, and here in Venice, it’s probably going to be attacked as right wing because it’s not Marxist. But I think you should know that when you committed to us, we put aside $8.4 million, and another $5 million for publicity and advertising, and then we wrote the whole thing off. We knew it wouldn’t make any money.” He explained, “We make films like The Pink Panther, and the Bond films, and they make a lot of money, and we’re very lucky, but the other films we make because we want to make them. If they make their money back, that’s great, but we make them in such a way that if they don’t, that’s fine as well. Under Fire is a film we believed in, and we’re extremely proud of it. And if it doesn’t make a penny, we just want you to know that’s okay.”

Joanna Cassidy in Under Fire.

That had to be one of the greatest moments of your career.
It was painful to hear, but also one of the nicest speeches I’ve ever heard. The epilogue to that story is we go in to the screening, the film starts, and it’s much too dark to see properly; the projector was just hopeless. A couple minutes went by and it wasn’t getting any better —and there’s 2,000 people in there—so I snuck out, and went up to the projection booth to complain… and Eric is already up there! The head of the fucking studio is arguing with the projectionist! The man showed us how the mirror in the projector was almost gone, and he didn’t want to burn it out, and Eric kept telling him to raise the level into the red zone. Well, he wouldn’t do it, so Eric finally pulls out $100 and waves it in his face. The man shrugs, takes it, turns up the voltage even though it may damage the bulb, and finally the film looks right. I headed for the door, and Eric said, “Where are you going?” I said it looked fine to me, and he said, “He’ll drop it again as soon as the next reel comes up! I’m staying right here, and you’re staying with me!” And we stayed there for the whole movie. And every time there was a reel change, Eric paid him another $100! That was Eric Pleskow. He and Arthur and Mike Medavoy had more understanding and respect for film than any other studio men I knew. The next day was the press discussion of the film. And just as Eric had predicted, the Italian press took us to task for making a biased, right wing, politically naïve American film! And when it came out in the US, it was indeed denounced as left wing, socialist, politically naïve, and overly favorable to the Sandinistas. Of the major critics, Pauline Kael and David Denby liked it, and wrote very thoughtful pieces about it, but other than that we got about five hundred bad reviews in America; some of them really just vicious. You couldn’t help but smile.

Gene Hackman in Under Fire.

48 Hrs. came out the year before Under Fire. Were you then considered hotter as a writer than as a director?
I wasn’t hot at all. At the time I was involved with 48 Hrs., I was completely broke because I hadn’t worked very much. Then I took a TV series to try and pay the bills while Ron was rewriting Under Fire. The series was at Paramount, who also happened to be making 48 Hrs., a script that had sat in a trunk for five or seven years. So Ron would come to Paramount for our Under Fire story conferences, and Nick Nolte was often at a table across the room. And he’d come over to us, with that smile, complaining, “Ahh, this 48 Hrs.! I signed on for it, but the fucking plot’s so complicated! I don’t know what the fuck’s going on!” Ron and I became convinced he was the only guy who could do Under Fire, so we gave him the script when we finished it. Actually, Nick was notorious for not reading scripts, so we had about fifty copies printed up, and got a friend of his to plant them all over his house, on top of every script pile. No matter what stack he reached for, the first two or three scripts were all Under Fire! So he read it almost immediately, and said yes. That was right before they started 48 Hrs. I gave him some cameras that belonged to my photographer friend Matthew Naythons, who had first taken us to Nicaragua. A lot of the incidents in the script were based on Matthew’s experiences during the Sandinista revolution: the actual hand grenade scene was something he had witnessed, as was the bus attack. So Nick had these cameras Matthew actually used in Nicaragua and a number of other wars, plus several hundred rolls of film, and while he did 48 Hrs., he kept them in his trailer and practiced with them when, he wasn’t on set. By the time we started shooting--and 48 Hrs. went a month over schedule--he literally had a weekend off before starting Under Fire— Nick could sit there chatting with you, shoot a roll of film and reload those cameras without even looking at them!

Nick Nolte and Jean-Louis Trintignant in Under Fire.

Was the initial inspiration for the project the murder of Bill Stewart, the ABC News reporter who was gunned down by a Nicaraguan Army patrol in 1979?
Yes, it was.

And everything else in the story sort of grew out of that incident?
That incident was in the original script by Clayton Frohman. I didn’t connect with that script very much, but I thought the photographer character was interesting, and the war itself. I’d also read an article about the war photographer Don McCullum, which made the point that some of those intense, sensitive war photographs we all know and admire were taken by photographers who were sometimes not that sensitive, sometimes politically naïve--there’s that phrase again--and sometimes not above faking their own photos!

Looking at it again yesterday, it struck me that your three leads—Nolte, Hackman, and Joanna Cassidy—make their characters more interesting than I imagine they were on the page. Do you feel that way?
I don’t know. I can’t really see it that way.

I mean, compared to, say, Salvador (1986), where James Woods practically bursts out of the screen. The leads in Under Fire seem more like part of the realistic fabric of that place and time. They’re not larger than life “movie characters,” they’re just people.
They all came from real people. Nick was loosely based on Don McCullum, and I knew the journalist Joanna played; she was based on a woman my sister worked with, a producer on a BBC program, “Panorama.” Hackman was based on someone as well, so Ron and I had a very real sense of who these people were, and he wrote excellent scenes for them. I think one of his gifts is his ability to write interesting dialogue that feels ordinary and credible on the surface, but is also rich and evocative.

Perhaps the key dramatic moment, at the midpoint of the story, is Nolte photographing the rebel leader. Was that based on an actual incident?
I’ve always been interested in photography, and the idea that images can be manipulated and even faked to serve various ends was one of our themes. It’s particularly true today but even before digital photography, there’s a long history of famous photographs being either modified or staged. The iconic power of these images and the ease with which they can be manipulated was one of the themes of the film. In fact, it was that aspect of the film that finally helped revive Under Fire. A year or so after it came out, Frank Rich, at NYU, thought it was an interesting film about ethics in journalism, so he made it part of their curriculum for the next three years! A lot of journalists heard about that, which motivated them to go back and look at it again, whereupon a number of them suddenly decided, “Oh my goodness, this is actually quite good.” Then it came out on HBO—there was no video or DVD at the time, so films would show up on HBO after a two or three year time lag. And it was reviewed all over again. It was very odd, because when it was well reviewed, people then just assumed it had been a hit when it first came out, when in fact it had been a major disappointment… just as Eric Pleskow had predicted.

Well, better late than never, huh?
(laughs) Yes. It was very surprising.

Jamie Lee Curtis in Terror Train.

I had a question about one of your collaborators. Under Fire was shot by the great John Alcott, who was famous for working with Stanley Kubrick. I was surprised to see on IMDb that he also shot your first film, Terror Train (1980). How did you get one of the most acclaimed cinematographers in the world to do your low-budget horror movie?
I was incredibly lucky. He had just finished The Shining (1980), and one of my producers knew him. When I met him, I was a little nervous. I said, “I have to warn you: we need to do about thirty camera set-ups a day here, and I just read in an interview that you only did one set-up a day on The Shining. Won’t this be a nightmare for you?” And he said, “That’s the reason I’m here. We did one set-up a day, and I was bored to tears! It’s always like that with Stanley; I love him dearly, but I’m always bored!” I had to shoot Terror Train in twenty-five days, most of it on an actual train, and Alcott saw it as an interesting technical challenge. He really enjoyed it.

So when it came to Under Fire, you had a pretty good working relationship?
We became friends on that first one. He knew I was still learning, but I did have a good sense about what I needed to shoot, and he liked that about me. I certainly respected what he was doing. He liked using this Nikon lens they’d adapted for Barry Lyndon (1975)—it was an f/0.9 or something, a very fast lens—which meant we could shoot with incredibly little illuminatio… often just a couple candles. Press photographers would come on the set and ask “When are you going to turn on the lights?” John was shooting, and they couldn’t even get a light meter reading! Sometimes I would literally beg John : “Please give me an f/1.8! Or an f/2! Can’t the actors have three inches to move in?” He’d say, “Calm down. Now, which eye did you want in focus here?”. You can have one sharp, but not both… and not his nose.?” He was so good. I liked him a lot.

Cinematographer John Alcott and Stanley Kubrick on the set of The Shining.

You shot Under Fire in Mexico. Was that with a local crew?
Yes, and they were very good. I knew them from Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1974), and I’d hired them to work on Karel Reisz’s Dog Soldiers (aka Who'll Stop the Rain, 1978).

That sort of leads to what I consider the most enduring aspect of Under Fire: the way you staged and shot the war scenes. They’re very non-Hollywood-looking. Combat is often described as long stretches of incredibly tense boredom broken up by bursts of sudden violence. I think you captured that as well as it can possibly be done.
I’m a great believer that you can get great drama out of reality. Like the bus scene: a bus attacking a tank; that really happened. So it looks messy, and awful. I like strange details that make little rational sense, but tell the audience this must have happened. I just did a film about Rwanda, and I was very fortunate to have someone with me who had been there during the genocide, and I listened very carefully to all the stories.

Were there films you looked to when planning your war sequences?
Z (1969). I’d always liked Z. And The Battle of Algiers (1966).

I just watched Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) again. I think if you put some Under Fire scenes side by side with his riot sequence, anyone would be hard-pressed to say which events were real and which were staged.
Well, we spent a lot of time physically creating that world, and then just plunked the actors into it. We had about a square mile of that city dressed. The look was inspired by a wonderful book of photographs by Susan Meiselas: very bright-colored buildings under these very dark and ominous skies. That was kind of our palate. And we created it with almost no money: we bought a lot of cheap paint, and gave out it to all the residents, who were quite happy to get free paint. They painted the front facades of their homes, then we came along and “aged” it—sprayed a dirty water mixture onto it from trucks—which they could then wash off afterwards. Then we set fire to cars and tires in the streets, which you can’t do anymore. So we had this giant war zone, and we could pretty much drive through it wherever we wanted. I would be on the hood of the car, either directing Nick which way to turn, or he’d just make it up. It didn’t matter; we had soldiers all over the place. We’d made a great deal with the Mexican Army.

L to R: Nick Nolte, Joanna Cassidy, Jean-Louis Trintignant in Under Fire.

You talked about how the film initially failed, but had a resurgence. Were you surprised when this obscure little war you’d depicted likewise reemerged as a major American foreign policy issue of the 1980’s?
Well, what Reagan did with it was completely out of left field—supporting the Contras was very destructive to Central America. What didn’t come out of left field, and what I think Ron Shelton got absolutely right in the script, was the idea that once the Sandinistas gained power, they would run away with it, and become like everyone else. That took about two years to happen. So Jean-Louis Trintignant’s speech about what’s going to happen to the revolution was quite prescient. If you see the film today, you’d think that was written in hindsight, but it wasn’t. We made Under Fire a year after the revolution… and about a year before it all went wrong.