From the New York American, February 28, 1915, City Life and Dramatic Section, 9.
If your mental picture of “Dave” Griffith is that of a man of the bludgeon type, you are mistaken. The biggest man in the moving picture business today is a curious mingling of the man of leisure, man of the world, and the dreaming poet.
Yet his quarrel with life is that “They,” the indeterminate word with which he includes people and conditions of today, “keep him running around.” He clutches two telegrams that looked, as he said, like the afternoon editions of newspapers, as he talked to the interviewer across the luncheon table at a Broadway hotel and confided that the only man on earth of whom he is afraid, his secretary, might enter the room any minute.
“It’s amazing the way that man keeps me running around,” he said. “I hope he’s taking a nap, a nice long one, that will keep him away from me all afternoon.” He has the poet’s quality of wanting to be left alone while he is dreaming his poet’s dreams and getting a little pleasure in a good joke or a story, and those pestiferous persons who keep you “running around” sadly interface with both.
Yet, in defiance of these leanings, and in large part because of them, he is conceded to be the greatest producer of motion pictures in the world. The most poetic, the most daring, the most artistic, and the most stupendous works have had their inception in his brain and been worked out under his direction. This week there will be shown at the Liberty Theatre [New York] the largest film drama yet conceived, a film 13,058 feet long, a three-hour entertainment, during which no less than 18,000 people come before the eyes.
“Why call it The Birth of a Nation?” the interviewer asked.
“Because it is,” was the sufficient answer from the lean, smiling man across the table, who has been called the “David Belasco of the Motion Pictures.” “The Civil War was fought fifty years ago. But the real nation has only existed the last fifteen or twenty years, for there can exist no union without sympathy and oneness of sentiment. While Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman is the basis of the play, we don’t get to that until the film is half done. The author himself was good enough to say that the novel was so small a part of it that he thought it should not be considered. He said that in his novel he had taken a small section of the subject, a racial war. But we have gone back to the Civil War itself. We have shown the burning of Atlanta and the assassination of Lincoln. The birth of a nation began, according to an authority [Woodrow Wilson?], with the Ku Klux Klans, and we have shown that. We are using many veterans who served in the war.”
“What do you think is the biggest thing in the big picture?”
“The burning of Atlanta, perhaps. More probably the battle of Petersburg, with the armies in the trenches. Yes, that is the biggest.”
“And the littlest?”
“The littlest thing, in one sense, is the sigh of General Lee as the papers of surrender were signed. And, too, the fact that they had to pass the pen around and dip it into several bottles before they could get enough ink to sign it.
“We took some of the pictures in the region around Los Angeles, some of them in Mexico, others in various southern states. I traveled 15,000 miles in making the picture.”
“Is it your greatest work, and are you content with it?”
“It is the biggest thing I have undertaken, but I shall not be satisfied until I do something else. I can see the mistakes in this. I am, like all other human beings, aiming at perfection.”
“And that is the reason we never achieve our ambitions. But The Birth of a Nation received very high praise from high quarters in Washington.”
“Yes, I was gratified when a man we all revere, or ought to, [Woodrow Wilson] said it teaches history by lightning.”
“They say a great many things about you. One is that you came into the world of moving pictures when they were despised, and that you raised them to dignity. I have heard that if it hadn’t been for the transfusion of your blood into it the motion picture art would have died.”
“If that were true I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. I believe in the motion picture not only as a means of amusement, but as a moral and educational force. Do you know that there has been less drinking in the past five years, and that it is because of motion pictures? It is absolutely true. No man drinks for the sake of drinking. He drinks because he has no place to go. Man is a moving animal. The bigger the man the more he has need of activity. It isn’t so with women. Their natures are different. The motion pictures give man a place to go beside the saloons. He drops in to see a picture. He has been somewhere. He has seen something. He comes out and goes home in a different state than if he had gone to a saloon. The domestic unities are preserved.
“As for improprieties in motion pictures, they do not exist. What motion pictures have you seen that revealed the anatomical wonders that a Broadway musical comedy or burlesque show frankly discloses? I recall no motion picture that deals in any way with the nude save one, and that should never have been produced. There was once the claim that the playhouses were kept too dark for propriety. That criticism was made long ago, and it was never true. The requirements for motion picture lighting are such that you must be able to see a face twenty feet from the picture.
“If I had a growing son I would be willing to let him see motion pictures as he liked, because I believe they would be an invaluable aid to his education. They would stimulate his imagination, without which no one will go far. They would also give him a fund of knowledge, history and otherwise, and all good. And they would shape his character along the most rigid plane of human conduct. In moving pictures the code of conduct is hard and fast. No one need fear that it will deviate from the Puritan plane.”
“And the physical side of it? When will motion pictures be so made that they will not strain the eyes?”
“They have improved greatly in that respect within a year. They are constantly improving. Even now some of them do not tire the eyes any more than do the figures in a play.”
“What is your vision of the motion pictures of the future?”
“I expect that in five years pictures will be made at a cost of a million dollars. The Birth of a Nation cost half a million. And I expect audiences will pay not merely what they are paying for a legitimate drama today, but as much as they pay for grand opera— five dollars a seat.”