Tommy Lee Jones: The Hollywood Interview

Tommy Lee Jones: Director, star, co-writer of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

TOMMY LEE JONES DIGS DEEP
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally was published in the December/January 2005-06 issue of Venice Magazine.

Tommy Lee Jones first brought his trademark intensity to the box office hit Love Story, in 1970, playing the small, albeit memorable role of Ryan O’Neal’s roommate, a Harvard football player. Appropriately enough, Jones himself was a real-life star of the Harvard gridiron, and graduated with a degree in English Literature just two years prior to Love Story’s release. Born in San Saba, Texas September 15, 1946, Jones was raised in the Midland area of west Texas, and spent his formative high school years at the exclusive St. Mark’s Academy in Dallas. After years perfecting his craft on the stage and in smaller films, Jones first garnered attention with his portrait of Howard Hughes in the 1977 television film The Amazing Howard Hughes, a turn that many consider the definitive portrait of Hughes by an actor to this day. Jones became a household name with his complex portrait of Doolittle Lynn, the ambitious husband of country singer Loretta Lynn (Oscar-winner Sissy Spacek) in Michael Apted’s 1980 classic Coal Miner’s Daughter. From that point on, Jones’ career has moved forward with a momentum that hasn’t ceased.
Tommy Lee Jones, who won a 1993 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrait of the Javert-like U.S. Marshall who relentlessly pursues Harrison Ford’s Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive, has now added the position of auteur to his already impressive resume. Co-written with Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams), although Jones receives no credit, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada tells the picaresque story of a Texas rancher (Jones) who sets out to avenge the shooting death of his friend at the hands of a callow Deputy Sheriff (Barry Pepper). An existentialist western road trip worthy of the best films by masters such as Sam Peckinpah, Jerry Schatzberg, and Anthony Mann, Three Burials takes the viewer on a harrowing journey that you simply can’t shake off once the credits have rolled. In his feature directing debut (he helmed the television film The Good Old Boys for Turner Network Television in 1995), Jones shows that he is every bit as gifted behind the camera as before it (Jones’ acting chops earned him a Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival). The Sony Pictures Classics release hits screens December 22 in limited release and goes wide February 3, 2006.
Tommy Lee Jones spoke with Venice over a beer during a recent stay in Los Angeles. Here’s what transpired:

This film reminded me of the great, existentialist road pictures of the 70s. Are you a Peckinpah fan?
Tommy Lee Jones: Yes, I am. Not for the clichéd reasons of violence and male bondage, but mainly for color and rhythm. It’s interesting you mention him and existentialism, because alienation is a theme of this movie, and we look at if from more than one perspective. Everyone’s an alien.

How was the film born?
Guillermo Arriaga and I thought it up together. This is the movie we wanted to make. I came up with a narrative form, which was basically an old, classical narrative form and we both liked the place and the issues there. With a classical form you can take those issues and raise even more, bigger issues, like alienation.

I like the fact that you took your time with it: the long takes, the emphasis on character. You let the characters be who they were, which you don’t see much in film anymore.
They’re all real. I would stand around the camera and say ‘You know guys, everyone in this movie’s an idiot.’ And they would say “What?!” They didn’t want to hear that because they felt they had a hierarchy of villains and heroes worked out. Eventually they caught on to what I meant, which was they were all human beings.

That’s something else Peckinpah was good at: painting shades of gray. There was no black and white in his films.
Yeah, he made very interesting characters. You just reminded me of the two killers in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. They were very interesting killers, sort of Southern California suave.

Yeah, and they were both gay.
(laughs) Yeah, right.

So it was a completely different take on a familiar theme. Then you had Warren Oates, who was one of our greatest actors. He could say more with a raised eyebrow than he could with a soliloquy.
Yeah, I think so, too. You loved him that movie, but he was a sleazebag. But he was also a hero, and likable, and troubled. Peckinpah had an interest in humanity and a respect for real human character that was admirable.

Let’s talk about your character in the film, who is very much composed of grays. Tell us how you saw him.
When Guillermo and I made this character up, Guillermo wrote the screenplay in Spanish and I translated it, and how did I see it…? We just built him. I didn’t spend a lot of time working on the character once we were filming because I’d already created him. He emerged through the process of Guillermo’s writing and my re-writing and his criticism and this process went on through eleven drafts.

You directed one other film prior to this, The Good Old Boys. What was it like putting on the director’s hat for the first time?
Those were the happiest days of my creative life at that point. It’s a very happy occasion for me to be producer/writer/director/actor, very happy. My motivation, of course, is lust for creative control. I want everybody’s job! I don’t have time for craft service, but I would do it if I had time.

Did you not direct again during the past decade because you didn’t come across any material you were passionate enough about?
Well, those jobs are hard to get. I was busy acting, and I didn’t really aggressively solicit work, because I don’t have to direct movies for a living. My only motivation for directing a movie is complete control. Not everybody’s willing to give that away to a director. Not everybody’s willing to let a director direct. In many situations it seems that a director is expected to take direction.

Did you find that when you directed that first film you had a different take on the filmmaking process because you were already a seasoned actor?
I would think that was a help, it really is. It was an advantage to have been there. I’ve known a lot of directors who are afraid of actors, who hold them in contempt, or pretend to because they are afraid. Or regard them with both fear and contempt, and loathing. Some directors also hold actors in awe somehow, as they would a wizard who is possessed of some incomprehensible magic power or skill. I’m very comfortable with actors. (laughs)

Since you do have that comfort factor with actors, are you the type of director who “casts well,” then gets out of the way, once the cameras roll, or does it depend on the actor?
Of course it depends on the actor! The first thing we look for when we cast is the ability to read. In this screenplay, you can look at the pages and look at the words on them, and it will look pretty simple. You need someone who can read to find out exactly what’s going on there, because most of the action, whether it be emotional or physical, is certainly not in the dialogue.

The great thing about this cast was that while some of the faces were slightly familiar, there were no big stars with the baggage that iconic status entails. This really allowed them to disappear into their characters.
Yeah, wasn’t that wonderful? The thing they all had in common was they were really in love with the story and the idea of doing this, and as a result, were very highly motivated, and considered that reward and motivation enough, because we didn’t have any money.

What was your budget?
Not very much.

But you shot on 35mm, right?
Super 35. It’s easier to tweak and come up with that so-called “anamorphic format,” without using anamorphic lenses, which is a big savings, at least until you get into post-production. (laughs)

You grew up in Texas. Did you spend a lot of time south of the border growing up?
Well, west Texas is a bi-cultural society, so you’re going to be exposed to the Spanish language, culture, food. I started studying Spanish academically in the seventh grade and continued until halfway through college: a total of eight and a half years of academic Spanish. I’ve traveled a great deal in Mexico, Spain, Argentina and I’ve worked with a lot of people who don’t speak English, and I live in San Antonio, actually north of San Antonio, about 165 miles.

You have a working cattle ranch there.
Yeah, it works the hell out of me.

Did you feel an affinity with Latin culture growing up?
I lived in one. There are a lot of ethnocentric people who won’t admit to west Texas culture being bi-cultural…actually there’s only one culture there, and some of those people would deny that it’s of Hispanic character. I hope they see the film. (laughs)

You went from Midland to Dallas for high school, attending an exclusive school called St. Mark’s. What was that like for you?
It was a hell of a culture shock. I wasn’t used to doing any homework. It was a common thing in Midland to settle your differences with other people through violence, and I had to change those two things very quickly, in order to survive.

The gridiron was a place of refuge for you initially, both in high school and in college. Did you discover athletics concurrently with drama?
No. If you’re a kid in west Texas, you’re raised to play football. I had a great desire to play that game as a kid. It was a way for many kids to define achievement, manhood. It was a burning desire of mine from very early on.

When did you know you were an actor?
Well, I still haven’t decided what to do when I grow up. I’ve always thought acting was a lot of fun, and I haven’t had to quit it yet. I stumbled into it first when I was in prep school and stumbled into the little theater they had there and saw a rehearsal going on, and I’d done school plays and had fun, but that was really the first time it caught my eye. I did play Sneezy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in second grade, and having played the lead in Baby Bear’s Birthday Party in the third grade, I was already a seasoned actor by then. But I’d never really seen people moving through light in a communal effort to bring literature to life, until I got to St. Mark’s. When I saw that, I found it very attractive and I haven’t stopped acting since.

From there you studied English Literature at Harvard, and continued to excel at both dramatics and football. Your roommate was Al Gore. You also played in the famous “tie” game between Harvard and Yale in 1968.
Yeah, the 29-29 tie. That’s a very famous football game. We scored 16 points in the last 42 seconds of the game to tie Yale for the Ivy League championship. It was an exciting game. I played offensive guard.

I know you did a lot of theater at Harvard. Is that how you were discovered for Love Story?
No. I did do a lot of theater at Harvard when I wasn’t playing football. It became my summer job. During the summer I would join repertory companies. I’d done a lot of plays and inexpensive movies by the time I graduated and went to New York. I was there for a while, working in theater. I did not have a Screen Actor’s Guild union card, but I had been trying to get parts in movies, by going to open calls and agents. When they asked if I was a member of the union, I would slap my pockets and pretend to have left my wallet at home. I was able to insinuate myself into some interviews with casting directors. I went to see the casting director for Paramount, who casting roles for this upcoming movie called Love Story. It was for the role of a Harvard football player. I thought this might be a chance to do a couple day’s work and get a union card. So I went to the Paramount office and waited for a long time, and was finally admitted to see the casting director. As I opened the door, she glanced up at me and said “You’re not right.” I said ‘Well…,’ she said “No! You might pass for a football player, but these are special football players. Thank you very much.”

So how did you get cast?
I called an old Harvard guy, who was a friend of her boss’, boss’ boss. The next day they called me back and asked if I’d like to read for the director, Arthur Hiller. I did and I got the job and a union card.

The first film I remember seeing you in was The Amazing Howard Hughes. What did you learn about Mr. Hughes during the time you prepared for and played that role?
I did a lot of work on that, because I was very happy to have that part. I read every magazine and newspaper article that had ever been written about him. I had him profiled, a psychological profile, by a company in Connecticut. So I had a complete dossier on him, as well as every frame of film that had been shot of him, and all the recorded interviews. When it came time to shoot his testimony before the senate, we matched it pretty close. I tried to match his breathing patterns. That would be an interesting exercise: to look at the actual footage, shot I think by RKO News, and compare that to what you see in the film. I found a guy who wrote the December, 1946 Time Magazine story about Howard. He was an old guy, worn out, retired, living in one of those little houses at the bottom of Laurel Canyon, on the right side. He was happy to have the company, so I came and talked to him for about an hour, and he said “Come with me. I want to show you something.” We went down to his basement, and he wiped cobwebs out of the way, and moved boxes aside, and finally he found an old filling cabinet and pulled out all the notes that he’d made when he’d interviewed Howard—all of them! And there was the original manuscript of his article, complete with his editors’ red lines, of what they wanted to cut. So I got to read what Time wouldn’t print. That was really invaluable. Howard had a lot of things to say about his father that were not published in his lifetime, but could have been. I’m certain they thought it would have been too dangerous to print at that time.

Do you think a lot of Hughes’ personal psychology was based on his relationship with his father?
Absolutely. In the article he referred to his father as “a plenty tough son of a bitch.” Howard Sr. was a notorious character in the early days of the oil fields. History has changed him from “a plenty tough son of a bitch” to a swashbuckler. He was very hard on that kid. Very hard.

Do you think that horrible plane crash in Beverly Hills that almost killed him aggravated his psychosis?
Absolutely. It broke every bone in his body, damn near, and began his addictions. And it opened up the floodgates with those insecurities. It created a phobia of being invaded: by germs, by people coming through the door, by listening devices in the lamps, snakes under the carpet. Who knows where they are, or what they’re doing? You have to be ever vigilant…

Coal Miner’s Daughter was the film that really put you on the map in the film world. Did you spend a lot of time with your real-life counterpart, Doolittle Lynn?
Sure did. He taught me how to drive a bulldozer, the old kind, which has no real steering. You steer with the brakes. First of all, it has a decelerator instead of an accelerator. If you want it to run at an idle, you step on the pedal, which shuts the throttle down. If you want to go faster and open the throttle, you let the pedal up. It’s the exact opposite of what happens in your car. There’s no way to steer it other than by braking one of the tracks. You know, before that movie was made, the only way audiences had experienced people from those mountains was on The Beverly Hillbillies or Ma and Pa Kettle. It was a very good feeling to take part in something that had a chance of eroding the hillbilly stereotype.

You did three movies with Oliver Stone (Natural Born Killers, JFK, Heaven and Earth). Tell us about him.
He’s very bright, very smart and very talented, and very bold, and everybody knows that. He’s a friend. I just happen to like Oliver a great deal. He expects people to be prepared, rehearses a little bit, then shoots. He doesn’t waste time. He’s very unobtrusive.

Arguably Clay Shaw, in terms of the real people you’ve played, was your most mysterious character. What were your impressions of him?
He had an assistant who worked with him, and that assistant happened to be dying. His son interviewed his dying father on the subject of Clay Shaw, and I was able to acquire those interviews, and get really very close, about as close as you could to a dead man. This was a long-time employee who had no reason to lie, or distort. I also interviewed Jim Garrison three or four times specifically on Shaw, and of course the screenplay was pretty good. Shaw was a strange duck, to be sure. A desperate fellow, in some ways.

Andrew Davis is a terrific director, largely unheralded, that you’ve also done three pictures with (The Package, Under Seige, The Fugitive). He guided you to an Oscar on the last one, The Fugitive. What’s his process like?
Andy’s a good pal, also. He’s quite liberal, and very healthy in a sort of Chicago way. He’s a child of the theater, both his parents are actors. He’s also very bold. He’ll start shooting a movie before he’s got a completed script. Often working with Andy is a continual process of coming up with desperate, last minute solutions to impossible problems.

Some of that involves trusting his actors, too. Some of your best lines from all three of those films were improvised by you, right?
I don’t improvise, at all. I have written a few lines here and there, out of necessity. Sometimes that’s a good thing, to come up with your own dialogue, but not always. Ideally, you want a finished, shootable script before you start. That’s the way I prefer to approach thing. I don’t like writing or rewriting the day’s work at 7:00 in the morning, 45 minutes before we turn the damn cameras on.

You got to work with one of my heroes, Tony Richardson, on his last film Blue Sky. Tell us about that.
Oh, he was wonderful. He was a very elegant man of the theater, which is not to say that he wore fancy clothes, but he was very well prepared, very subtle. Totally disinterested in gimmicks or tricks. Or fads, or trends. I remember watching him review a script one time. I was just walking by, and he was in an isolated place but I could see him, and he was just going through the script, page-by-page, completely focused. It impressed me.

You worked with Clint Eastwood on Space Cowboys.
Another great one. He’s a hero. He’s iconic. He’s a hell of a lot of fun to be around. With those three guys: Sutherland, Jim Garner and Clint, I thought I’d heard every old actor joke there was, but they took me to school and kept me laughing every day. I had a hell of a lot of fun with them. It was so much fun to experience Clint’s work ethic. I’d heard about it, and admired what I’d heard. Then with the first movie I directed tried to follow what I’d heard second hand, but then to spend an entire shooting schedule with Clint, to watch him work and be part of the process was gratifying, of course, and educational to some degree. He was teaching me what I already knew.

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James Coburn: The Hollywood Interview

Actor James Coburn.


JAMES COBURN:
COOL DADDY
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the February 1999 issue of Venice Magazine.

cool n 1: Self-assurance 2: sophistication
3: calm 4: Poise, composure 5: See Coburn, James.

James Coburn was born August 31, 1928 in Laurel, Nebraska. His father, an auto mechanic, moved the family to Compton, California in the early 30's at the height of the depression, in hopes of finding a better life for his family. Young Coburn stayed in Compton through high school. Following military service in the Army, Coburn studied acting at Los Angeles City College, USC, and with the legendary Stella Adler in New York. He then returned to Southern California, where he made his stage debut at the La Jolla playhouse in Billy Budd. Following some work in commercials and live TV, Coburn made his film debut in 1959 in Ride Lonesome, a Budd Boetticher-directed horse opera starring Randolph Scott. He then hit paydirt with his supporting role in the smash hit The Magnificent Seven in 1960, following this with the classic The Great Escape in 1963. Coburn continued doing solid supporting work in film and TV throughout the early 60's, finally earning leading man status as superspy Derek Flint in Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967). He formed his own production company in 1967, Panpiper, producing the critical and cult favorite The President's Analyst, a brilliant social and political satire that is now widely regarded as one of the seminal films of the 1960's. Coburn also did three films with ultra-violence guru Sam Peckinpah: Major Dundee (1965), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and the WW II drama Cross of Iron (1977) which showed the war from the German P.O.V., and directed second unit for Peckinpah's Convoy (1978).

Coburn's screen persona gave Americans what Sean Connery gave to the English: an urbane, sophisticated hero, who can let loose a one-liner, dry martini or deadly karate chop in the blink of one eye, while winking at us, the audience, with the other. His cat-like grace and steely intensity made him one of the top box office stars of the 60's and 70's, and Coburn still retains a strong following of fans as the 1990's come to a close.

Coburn has appeared in dozens of films. Just a few other noteworthy ones include Don Seigel's Hell Is For Heroes (1962), Charade (1963), Paddy Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily (1964), Sergio Leone's Duck You Sucker! (1971), Richard Brooks' Bite the Bullet, and Walter Hill's Hard Times (both 1975). A near-fatal bout of rheumatoid arthritis slowed Coburn down in the late 70's, just when he was reaching the peak of his career. After focusing his considerable discipline on building (or re-building) his body, Coburn now happily declares that he is "pain free." Seeing the silver-maned, elegant Coburn stroll through the garden of the Beverly Hills home where this interview took place, one would never guess this was a man who was near death once upon a time. The lithe, cat-like grace is still there, as is the charm, easy laugh, and ten thousand watt smile that has been captivating the movie-going world for nearly 40 years. The foremost thing on Coburn's mind these days is his latest film, Paul Schrader's Affliction. In it, he plays Pop Whitehouse, father to Sheriff Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte). Affliction is the searing, much-talked about film that deals with domestic violence as it's passed down through the generations of a family like a cancerous heirloom. Coburn's venomous performance has critics and the public alike buzzing "Oscar." If nominated, it would be a first for Coburn, who, at 70, seems less like an old veteran gunning for a last lap around the track, than a seasoned pro whose powers are every bit at their peak when he enters the ring. There goes the bell. Round one...

Your character Pop Whitehouse is one of the most loathsome villains to grace a movie screen in recent memory. Did you have trouble shaking him off once the picture wrapped?
JAMES COBURN: Not really, because I got it all out. It's really when you can't get it out or when you're doing it on stage and you have to do it over and over again that it can be troubling. But I learned long ago how to get rid of it by doing it! (laughs) You get it out...villains are really fun to play because they're usually meatier characters, because they've made decisions that haven't all been very good ones, (laughs) and are paying the price, with a little karma attached. They have something to say, I think. I never play them as a "bad guy." I play them like I have something to accomplish. In Affliction, it was "I have to get my boys to be men! If they're not strong men, by God, I'll beat the shit out of them!" That's what makes him seem so savage...it's that conflict. Scripts without conflict are really boring. Characters without conflict are really boring to play, because you're always trying to catch up with something. And this one was just loaded with conflict. Paul (Schrader) said to Nick and I in the beginning "I'm just gonna let you two guys go after each other!" And we did. We went for it. It was great fun. I'd like to do it all over again.

Is it difficult to go to such a dark place as an actor?
It's sometimes difficult to find, initially. But as actors, we don't have to be who we're playing. That's one of the good things about being an actor. But, if you let yourself get locked into that, where that character becomes your essence, that's scary. There was an old film called A Double Life (1947), starring Ronald Coleman, where he became so infected with Othello, that he actually performed it for real, with his own Desdemona. Stella Adler, who I studied with, said "Actors act. They don't have to be their roles." On Affliction, we were all joking around between takes, then when we went back to it, boom! We were right back into it again, because it was written so well. It was very straight-on. There was no ambiguity about the characters, and it's really fun and enriching when that happens. As actors that's what we try to do, enrich our own beings by absorbing impressions, then generating it out through our craft and giving it to the audience. Truth is obvious, it's always obvious, isn't it? Screenplays sometimes hide the truth, which isn't necessary. You have to give audiences some credit. You don't have to play around the truth. And what Pop Whitehouse was saying, even though you might hate him for it, was the truth! He knew exactly who he was. He was, nevertheless, afflicted, but he was also very honest.

Tell us some more about working with Paul Schrader.
Schrader knows what he wants and knows when he's got it. He'll play to shades. "A little darker, Jim." "Not so bright!" (laughs) It was a very good shoot, not difficult at all. And Paul certainly helped in that.

What was it like studying with Stella Adler?
Great. I actually studied with Jeff Corey out here first. His philosophy was more improvisational. Get away from your ego, get away from lines, things like that. Learn how to play the action of the scene, that's what improv is really about. Stella, on the other hand, was into style. The style of Shakespeare, modern styles...she'd show you how to do it. You'd see her transform into a raving hag and then into a little girl. Drop of a hat, bang. That's what I mean about acting. You don't have to live it. As long as the character doesn't inhabit you, that's the kick of acting. De Niro studied with Stella. She was furious with him for putting all that weight for Raging Bull. (laughs)(imitating Stella) "What are you doing to yourself?! You'll ruin your health!" (laughs). She was very demanding, very hard on women especially. She would just strip you down, peel your ego right off your skin.

Who was in your class at Stella's?
Warren Beatty was in my class. He played piano in this Irish drama we did called Red Roses for Me. I played an Irishman (in an Irish brogue) "Aye, what's goin' on over here?!" (laughs) There were a couple others, but Warren went on to the most prominence. From there, I went onto live TV. The first thing I ever did was with Sidney Lumet. That's how I paid my rent, that and commercials. I once did a Remington Rand commercial where I shaved off eleven days of growth, live on-camera, in less than a minute! (laughs)

You did a couple Twilight Zones also. What was Rod Serling like?
Serling was very tight-lipped. He had a jaw that never completely opened up! (laugh) But I really loved him. He was a sweet guy. I was always running into him when he was going back to D.C. to "do something." He was very active politically, always trying to "get things done." That's why all of his things had some sort of a political bent. Not just political, but sociological as well. They were all about something. You just don't have that anymore. You have a couple of guys beating each other up, a little sex here and there, but it's not about anything anymore. As good as NYPD Blue is, it's about relationships, and nothing else. But Rod was great, he was just dynamite and that's what killed him. He just used all of himself up. But now they don't even need actors. They've got The Rugrats, they've got the pig (Babe), they've got cartoons...they're slowly getting rid of the actor, which they've been trying to do for years. (laughs) "Why do we need actors?"

You and Steve McQueen were great friends. Tell us about Steve.
Steve always thought of himself as a re-actor, not an actor. I think he got that from John Wayne (laughs). What can I tell you about Steve? (His first wife) Neile used to call him a "male nymphomaniac." (laughs) He had an incredibly dynamic personality. He was like a kid. He said to me one time "Why can't they make a movie about just one guy--me!" (laughs) He even had a script idea about a guy who crashes in the desert, and trying to survive. While we were shooting Hell is for Heroes, we were shooting up in Redding, where it was so hot, I mean 110 in the shade. And the studio gave him this convertible. And we'd be driving along the road, and all of the sudden he'd shoot off the road and go tearing through the woods, as fast as he could until he ran into something! So he wore this car out in about a week and a half, and they sent a guy out who said "What the hell happened to this car?!" Steve said "I dunno. It just stopped running." (laughs) He would always test the producer, Marty Ransohoff. When they were doing The Cincinnati Kid (1965), he ordered two dozen pairs of Levis on the studio! Marty said "What the hell do you mean?! You don't wear any Levis in this picture!" Steve said "Yeah, but I wear them to and from the picture." (laughs) He hated to go out in public. He hated to sign autographs. He hated people to come up and bother him. So he'd put on disguises to go out.

It sounds like you guys were polar opposites.
We were, except that we both were fascinated with cars. We hung out together quite a bit, would drive cars, smoke grass, have a great time. He was a unique character, all those guys were. Steve. Peckinpah...

Tell us about Sam Peckinpah.
Sam Peckinpah was a genius for four hours a day. The rest of that time he was drunk. He called himself "a working alcoholic," but he was much more than that. I think the alcohol sort of quelled all the influences that were going on around him so he could really focus on what he was doing with the film. He would shoot with three cameras and just...do it. You never talked with Sam about things like motivation. I asked him one time, when we were doing Major Dundee. I said "Sam, what is it that makes my character tick?" And he thought about it for a minute and finally said "Drier. Dry. He doesn't give a shit." And that's who that character was! And that's how I played him...It was really sad what happened to that picture. The studio took it away from him and re-cut it. We had a great knife fight in that picture, between Mario Adorf and myself. And it was a viscous fucking knife fight. While we were shooting it, people were yelling for us to stop! That's how real it looked. It was a terrific piece of action, and it was cut from the film...the night it premiered at the Paramount theater, Sam saw the studio's cut and was just devastated. His hands were shaking. He had half a pint of whiskey and dropped it. It smashed on the floor. And my wife at the time said "Sam, it's okay, it's only a movie."

When you look at Major Dundee, it's sort of like looking at the U.S. cut of Pat Garrett, which was also severely compromised by the studio. You can see there's a masterpiece in there somewhere.
I agree, but what they call the "director's cut" of Pat Garrett is actually just the television cut. Sam had the only true cut that he made, and that's up in his archives in Sonoma. When he finished cutting Pat Garrett, it was taken away from him. This was Jim Aubrey at MGM and he was more interested in getting his hotel ready than he was in film. I think he really despised anybody who displayed artistry. He really like digging into them. When we started shooting Pat Garrett, I just finished shooting a film with Blake Edwards called The Carey Treatment (1973) that Aubrey also took away and re-cut. And I said to Sam "This guy's crazy! He could do this film all sorts of harm." Sam said "Don't worry about a thing, Jim. I just bought one share of stock in MGM, and if they mess with me, goddammit, I'll sue their asses!" (laughs) "One share of stock, Sam?! What's that gonna do ?!" "You'll see." (laughs)

I heard a story that Peckinpah got drunk during the shoot and didn't want to kill Billy! True?
Yeah, but he wasn't that drunk. We were sitting in his trailer and he said "Goddammit! Why do we have to kill him?" "Well Sam, that's the way it happened." "Well, why can't we make it un-happen?" "Sam we can't do it." (beat) "Why...not?!" (laughs) I think he saw a lot of himself in the character of Billy...We found out halfway through the shoot that most of the masters we had shot were out of focus. We were using five or six cameras at once and we didn't have a camera mechanic because MGM wouldn't pay for one! So we used different lenses, different set-ups, and still, it's all out of focus. Finally the camera mechanic is sent out. It turns out the flange in the camera was off by one one thousandth of an inch, or some damn thing. So we tell Aubrey that we have to re-shoot all these masters. He says "You're not gonna re-shoot anything. The audience isn't gonna know the fuckin' difference!" Can you imagine?! It was just mind-blowing! So what we did was, we stole all those shots when the brass didn't know we were shooting and got it all! So now this really pissed them off, because now we had some real film on our hands! (laughs) So Sam had his cut previewed, and at the same time, Aubrey had his guys cutting their film. So all the editors got together and gave Sam a cut of his film, but without a soundtrack. He didn't get that back until he cut it for television. But there's only about five minutes missing from that cut he originally made.

I thought R.G. Armstrong was really amazing in that film.
R.G. Armstrong saved my life. I had rheumatoid arthritis really badly and every day for ten months he'd come over and give me a deep tissue massage. I couldn't stand up without breaking a sweat. This was about 1978-79. I didn't come out of it completely until the last couple years. Doctors don't really know anything about arthritis, other than to say "take these." So I went on a long fast, fifteen days, then broke the fast. Took a blood test and found out I was allergic to 45 out 75 foods that I was tested for. Started eating right, but I was still contaminated, so R.G. came over and just broke down all that crystallization that had occurred. I was turning to stone, really, is what happened. I'm free of pain now because of this drug I'm taking called MSM. It rejuvenates the tendons. It's fantastic because I couldn't move. And this was all right at the peak of my career. If you have a background of Irish or Scotch-Irish, you're predisposed to having that arthritic gene. But you never know what triggers it. Mine was triggered by negative emotion. I was going through a divorce and I wasn't going to "let it affect me." So I was just turning to stone on the inside instead. It's a terrible disease. The immune system takes calcium out of the bones, and puts it into the muscles. And then the ligaments shorten. That's why you see a lot of arthritics who look shriveled.

Tell us about the genesis of The President's Analyst.
Ted Flicker I met while we were shooting Charade in Paris. He'd come over to meet with his friend Peter Stone, who'd written the picture. So Ted was sitting in the background with his big black shades, watching us shoot. So Peter introduced us...George Peppard and Elizabeth Ashley were having a Christmas party a few years later. Ted was there. He said "I've just finished a script called 'The President's Analyst.'" I said "That's an intriguing title. Do you have a deal on it?" He said "No." So I took it home, read it, and wanted to do it. Ted said he wanted to direct it, so I said "Let me talk to Paramount." I had just done Waterhole No. 3 (1967) over there. Robert Evans had just taken over, he loved it. Peter Bart read it, loved it. They said "Can he direct?" I said "I dunno, let's find out." So they put the whole deal together in five days! It was Evans' first film at Paramount. There are some great scenes in there. It was named one of the finest political films of the decade by the Sunday Times in London...Ted Flicker never did another movie. He moved out to New Mexico, did one hit TV show, the name of which escapes me, and sculpts, paints. Just finished a script about the Civil War.

I know you were also very close to Bruce Lee. Tell us about Bruce.
Bruce was a true martial artist, created himself, from a little roustabout guy running around the streets of Hong Kong, into this magnificent fighting machine. He truly was an artist. His art had no defensive movements. It was all attack. He was so fast, you couldn't touch him. He was so fast, he had to slow down for the camera, because it couldn't catch him! It would look like he hadn't done anything. (laughs) We wrote a script together called The Silent Flute, with Sterling Silliphant. We all went to India. Everytime we went someplace, Bruce had this pad that he'd hold in one hand and punch with the other! It drove me nuts! (laughs) I said "Bruce, will you cut it out, man?! You're shaking the whole airplane!" He said "But it make my knuckles hard!" "I know, but it's pissing me off!" (laughs) Everything he did was related to his art. But he had a great sense of humor, or he did until he went to Hong Kong. He came back from Hong Kong one time, and he was always very outspoken about martial arts. "This martial arts in Hong Kong is bullshit," he said, because there was no bodily contact. "Judo good. Ju-jitsu good. Aikido, best. But this other stuff, no good." So we'd go to these tournaments and he'd spout off...he was back in Hong Kong, and was invited to this tournament that was televised, as an observer. He was famous, and controversial, as being an outspoken martial artists. So they were breaking boards and ice with their heads...Bruce said "That's not martial arts." So they said "Why don't you show us your idea of martial arts..." So they taped up three thick pine boards. So he held it out and side kicked it, and everything went flying into the air, knocked one of the lightbulbs out way up. Sparks came flying down...it was one of those great, dynamic moments! And the next day, the papers were filled with this! From that, both Run Run Shaw and Raymond Chow, who were big film producers there, made him offers to do films there. So he came back and we were having dim sum at the Golden Door down in Chinatown, and he's telling me all this. He said "They want me to do this TV series at Warner Brothers called Kung-Fu. But I'm also getting these offers in Hong Kong. What should I do?" So I thought about it for a minute, because he really wasn't a good actor. But he had great dynamic presence and had this macho attitude that he could play really well...but that would be very tiresome watching for an hour on television. Plus he spoke with a very heavy Chinese accent. So I said "Go back to Hong Kong and make southeast Asian movies. You'll be huge star." "But I want to work here." I said "You want to be a movie star, right? It's what you've always wanted." He thought for a minute and said "I want to make more money than Steve McQueen." (laughs) So he went to southeast Asia, David Carradine did Kung-Fu in slow motion, Bruce became a huge movie star and made more money than Steve McQueen. Strange story...Anyway, then I get a call one morning from Sterling Silliphant saying "Bruce is dead." I didn't believe him, but I learned that a couple months before he'd come home and passed out in between really these really intense workouts that he was doing. And this girl that he was with couldn't wake him up. He went to all of these doctors who told him "Your body's perfect, you're just over-worked." He went back and within six weeks he was dead of an edema of the brain. And that was that...

What do you think of the state of most Hollywood films today?
I'm from the Billy Wilder school. Somebody asked him "Do you ever go to movies?" He said "No." They said "Why not?" Wilder said (German accent)"Build da set, blow it up! Boom!" (laughs) Finally, they've gotten rid of the actors.

Still, there's films like Affliction, only they're all indie films, as opposed to studio pictures.
Right, they're all about something. You have to go the indie route. The English Patient was about something, and it was an indie. But look how long it took that to get made. But when it was, all the actors went for it. And we do, we do go for that. And Billy Wilder, one of the greatest directors in history, can't get a fuckin' job! He can't get hired.

I know a producer who wanted Wilder for a film at Tri-Star a few years ago, and the exec at Tri-Star said "Billy Wider...?" Isn't he, like, 70?"
(laughs) Yeah, but he's got 70 years of talent in him, too! I don't know where these guys come from. They come out of business school, not film school...All the studio heads when I started out were filmmakers, they knew and understood the craft. They weren't owned by corporations. Zanuck was always a filmmaker. Jack Warner was at Warners when I started. Cohn was at Columbia. All their movies were about something. It wasn't about making money so much, as about making entertainment that would make money. Now it's about build the set, blow it up! Give somebody a giant gun and let it go boom-boom-boom...but it's really in the hands of the people. If it goes into the hands of the mechanics, it's going to go down the tubes. But I think there's enough interest in some of the young filmmakers and actors in doing quality work. There's some wonderful actors out there: Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., Helen Hunt, Ed Norton...I think real filmgoers are interested in something more intelligent and challenging...but where is it going? Well, if I could say where it was going, I'd invest in it! (laughs)

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Walter Hill: The Hollywood Interview

Director Walter Hill.


Kicking Ass with Walter Hill
by Jon Zelazny

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 published Winesburg, 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)

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