From Movie 17 (Winter 1969–70): 25–29. Interview conducted in Paris in 1965. Reprinted by permission of Stig Bjorkman.
Stig Bjorkman: How do you prepare your pictures?
Samuel Fuller: If you notice this blackboard here, you can see that it’s separated into columns for the three acts of the film. The fourth column is for the cast. I haven’t filled the board yet. Most of it will be written in white chalk. When I introduce a character, I use yellow chalk. When I have a romantic scene, it’s blue chalk, and when I have action, violence, it’s red chalk. When the whole board is finished, I can sit back and look at it with my crew, and when we see a character that has been introduced a little too late, we can tell easily on the board. Or if we have too many romantic scenes together—two, three lines that are in blue—that’s wrong. And if I can end the first act with one or two red lines, the second act with two or three red lines and the third act with four or five red lines, I am going uphill. So I can get a pretty good idea of the balance of the violence and of the romance, or anything I want on the board. That’s how I work that.
I first make a very rough sketch of the characters. I don’t try to make them look like what I think they should look like. I just get the names up there. Later on, when I have about twenty, thirty pages of the script done, I make portraits. I am an amateur. But I draw the characters the way I visualize them, and I put them up on the wall. I try to cast as close as possible to the portraits. I also have illustrations of the action scenes. I do some fifty to seventy-five rough sketches, and later my art director comes in for what we call “the kill.” He will finish it off for me. That’s how I start to make a movie.
I can be very objective this way. You write on your typewriter in your room, you read it aloud to people, you read it for yourself and it reads good, and you think you’re a genius. And your friends and the actors read it, and the actors say, “Isn’t it wonderful?” Especially if the parts are good for them. But the blackboard never lies. If I see that your character is in the middle of the first column and then later on near the end of the second column, I know there is something wrong. Maybe I could take you out, and tell the story without you. That’s what I mean by objective.
I work on the set with a designer, with the wardrobe people, everybody. I rehearse, minimum a week, with the actors. And I rehearse in that week at least two days with my whole crew. And we shoot every key scene in the picture without film. The last day of rehearsal we shoot the toughest scene without film. Let’s say it’s Friday. The cast all go home at six o’clock. They rest over the weekend. Monday we repeat that scene. The actors are acclimatized now. They’re well rehearsed. They know exactly what to do. It gives me a chance to introduce new business.
For instance, I have an actor who has to sit down at a table and pour himself a glass of water. For one week I will rehearse him pouring that glass of water. And he says a certain line, say, “I like Stockholm.” And he knows that when he says that line, he must pour himself water. Now Monday without his knowing it I change that glass of water to another part of the set. I move props around. Now when he says, “I like Stockholm,” there’s realism in his face, because he’s really looking for the water. As he looks around, I catch a look that’s new. And that’s what I do right through the whole picture. And they never know, whenever they are to shoot a scene, when any business is added. I am liable to rehearse them, rehearse them, rehearse them, and suddenly in the actual take, when I want a little surprise, I will have an actor who is not in the scene just step right in. He’ll say something. Or I’ll say something like, “When you act, why don’t you wear shoes?” And they look around silly. And I use that shot for something else.
I use a gun a lot. I put a gun under the lens and actors don’t know it. When I shoot that gun, I get an expression out of an actor’s face that’s beautiful.
And I also use a gun when I want to cue my people. If I have a street scene, it is very difficult to depend on walkie-talkies, handkerchief-waving, or a whistle. If you have three or four things happening simultaneously and everybody knows that their cue is a gunshot, they laugh at it, but it comes in handy.
SB: Do you let your actors improvise too?
SF: No, I won’t gamble on that, because they might improvise something which doesn’t belong to the character. No, no. Many directors do that, but I won’t.
I Shot Jesse James
SB: You started your directorial career with a Western, I Shot Jesse James, which looked a bit different from other Westerns from that time.
SF: Well, the New York papers tagged a new word to it—which I laughed at—they used the expression that for the first time they’d seen an “adult” Western. Because no one is on a horse and there is just one quick chase, not really a chase, just one man going from one house to another.
I made one error. I used a saloon. In westerns to come I will not use a saloon, unless it is essential to the story. Every western has a saloon, where they’re always gambling. They never wash, they never eat, they never work, no one ever knows where they get their money. And even if you come in there at ten o’clock in the morning, there is a floor show with a girl singing. As long as there is a western, they’ll have a saloon where there’s a girl with a golden heart.
I made I Shot Jesse James because I am interested in assassinations. And I am interested in what makes an assassin act. So I picked the man who killed one of the most despicable, ruthless, falsely publicized characters in the American western folklore, Jesse Woodson James, a true bastard. He was so low that his first job was to rob a train with his brother, and the train was a hospital train filled with wounded soldiers. They killed all the wounded soldiers and took the few dollars. He and his brother were two illiterate, uncouth rats. They were fifteen and seventeen years old when they joined Quantrill’s Raiders, during the Civil War. Jesse James at fifteen was assigned a job by Quantrill: he would masquerade as a girl, pick up soldiers and bring them into a house called the House of Joy, a house of prostitution. He would get drunk with the soldiers—he had a very pretty face—and when they all got drunk, he and Quantrill would kill the soldiers and rob them.
That was Jesse James. In case we ever meet after I die, I will hit him as soon as I see him. He was no good. But thanks to many pop-magazine writers, he was celebrated and, over a period of years, he became a hero.
So I wanted to do the story of a man who kills another man. My story was based on one quote from Oscar Wilde: “Each man kills the thing he loves.” We find out that in the end of the story, the assassin loves the victim. No homosexuality. But the last line in the thing is that he says, “I love you.”
SB: I Shot Jesse James was built up from a ballad, wasn’t it?
SF: “The Ballad of Jesse James.” It’s a very famous ballad, and I use that melody for the main musical theme of the picture. The ballad is about Robert Ford, who killed Jesse James. And I got an idea about how to use this ballad. I’d have a troubadour, a traveling singer, come into a saloon and sing a song about the man who killed Jesse James. And in the song he’s no good, Robert Ford, the assassin: “… the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard in the back …” Suddenly one of the men in the bar (it’s the first time this kind of thing is used, this kind of drama with a ballad) says, “I’m Robert Ford.” Now the man stops singing. Ford says, “Sing it!” The man says, “Well, I don’t think it’s a very popular song, Mr. Ford.” But Ford repeats, “Sing it!” So the man has to sing the song to the man it’s about, and he insults him with the lyrics. The singer almost dies doing that. You see sweat coming down his face. Afterwards, my idea was stolen for I don’t know how many westerns.
Run of the Arrow
SF: It was the first American picture where the Indians won, and I was invited by the Indian Commissioner to Washington. He ran the picture for all the senators, including from North Dakota and South Dakota and Wyoming. Then the Indians wrote me and invited me to go to their tribes. And they liked the movie, because they didn’t act like, “Ugh! Me go. White man speak broken tongue. Red man speak straight tongue.” You see, I wanted to keep away from that. But that started a little thing; friends of mine who make pictures said, “We’ll make pictures, too, showing the Indians won.”
You know, the Sioux nation is the only nation within the territory of the United States that was never defeated by the United States.
SB: The Confederacy was defeated.
SF: In Run of the Arrow I tried to get a symbolism of the feeling of the South in 1865. I can appreciate and even accept a sore loser. It’s a natural thing that when you’re in a fight and you lose, you’re sore. You get unhappy. That’s OK. However I don’t think it’s normal for you to maintain that childish mood of being sore for over seventy-five years. I wanted to show that there was no change in the United States in the Southern parts from 1865 to when I made the picture in 1957. No change whatsoever. They still fly the Confederate flag down there. We, up in the North, are still called “damn Yankees.” They have an alibi why they lost. And the feeling of hate, instead of decreasing has increased. That’s the reason for the ending of my picture. I wrote that only “you” can write the end of the story. And I meant the Southern people. I hope they left that in.
SB: Yes, they did. What was taken out were the more violent bits, for instance the scene where [Lieutenant Driscoll] Ralph Meeker is being dragged after the horses.
SF: Oh, did they take that out? And the emasculation? It was a very striking scene and it shocked the people, though I didn’t show the real thing. The reason I didn’t show the real thing is that Meeker got so excited and said to me, “Now wait a minute, who’s gonna handle the knife?” And I said, “I am.” And that’s what he was afraid of. He said, “Now don’t let it slip. My girl is waiting for me for dinner.” He was really concerned. Because I get carried away. You see, I don’t care if I do anything wrong, if it was an accident. I don’t care. Je me’n moque!
I thought it would be time to show the truth that in many of the battles the Indians—particularly the Sioux—did not massacre all people (I did a lot of research for this) and often sent back survivors with a message, “Don’t make trouble!” They often did that. And I was very fed up with many American movies where Indians are jumping around and yelling and screaming and killing. The only ones who used to do that in the old days were the beatniks of the Indians, the avant-garde of the Indians, the delinquents.
Forty Guns
SB: I very much liked the ballad scenes in Forty Guns.
SF: That young man who is singing the song in the picture is not an actor. He is what we call a professional record-seller. If you wrote a song and you wanted it for Crosby or Sinatra, this man would do a record of your song and sing it the way Sinatra sings it. Then the song is sent to Sinatra and generally he buys it, because this man is an expert. He can sing like any singer. But in Forty Guns he sang the way he himself sang. But nobody cared about him, because he has no name. “Jidge” Carroll is his name.
In that scene I had no saloon. I had nobody chasing anybody on a horse. There is no gun shooting until the very end of the picture, really gun shooting. There are no barroom brawls and things like that.
SB: A very beautiful scene in the picture is the burial, which is staged in one long take.
SF: I’ve seen ten thousand funeral scenes. I’d love a funeral scene in the rain but I could not use one because somebody used it already. It is quite difficult to dig a grave in the rain—there’s the water, and the earth keeps sliding in again. So I thought it would be very effective if we got black horses, a black hearse, a glass hearse. And only the widow is at the funeral. It’s one of my favorite scenes: just two horses, two people, and a wagon. It was shot very fast.
The original title of the picture was A Woman with a Whip, like the song in the picture. But I didn’t want to use that title, because I’d heard that a book had just come out about the life of Eva Peron, and it was called The Lady with a Whip, or something like that.
The Crimson Kimono
SF: My favorite scene in The Crimson Kimono is the scene where the detective and the girl come out from the police headquarters and go into a Chinese restaurant to sit down with the old lady, the artist. I am very proud of that scene because it is a very tough scene. I had a long shot as they come across the street, and I pulled back into a real Chinese restaurant. They went through the restaurant, went into a corner, where I sat them in a booth. Now the restaurant was very narrow, and we could not get the camera in. And the booth was still more narrow, very small. So I had them take all the stools out. Unscrew them and take out the pedestals. Now I had room for the dolly, but I didn’t have room for the operator. So he had to slide on his derrière along the counter. But as he began to slide along the counter, there was friction with his pants and the camera jerked. So I said, “Let’s put some oil on him.” Then he told me he could not go home with his oily pants to his wife. But I said, “I don’t care. That’s your fault getting married.” We did that several times and then the shot was smooth. That was a good shot. I like shots like that!
But my favorite shots … I have two favorites. One is in Park Row. I open up in a saloon, 1886, and a fight starts. The men come out from the saloon into the street. They fight down the street. They upset different people. And the first man defeats the second man. He goes into an office and has a big scene with a woman in there, shakes her up a little bit, comes out, walks down a block, goes behind a big statue of Benjamin Franklin, and goes into the third set. Now that scene was taken without a cut. I had to have a little mike planted on my actor. And I had to strap the operator to the camera. In the first trial, the camera whipped around and the men flew in all directions. It was like a roller coaster. A good shot.
The other shot I like is in Forty Guns. It opens up in a bedroom with one of the brothers talking. He comes out from the bedroom, walks down the stairs, and meets the other brother. They start to walk. They meet the sheriff. They walk four blocks. They go to the telegraph office, send a telegram. Barbara Stanwyck passes them with the forty horsemen, and then they walk past the camera. That is the longest dolly shot in Hollywood.
You know what’s bad about that? It’s very dangerous. When you build a long dolly, a track as you know, it sags. The longer it gets, the saggier it becomes. And I don’t want the feeling that we’re going down a mountain. I want it straight. I think the trick is to get very short planks.
SB: In the striptease scenes in Shock Corridor and The Crimson Kimono you never see the public, though you can sense it’s there.
SF: First of all, this economically saves a lot of money. Secondly, let’s say we have the money to spend. I think it’s a bore to cut to people watching an act, to cut to baldheaded men, to cut to fellows with mouths open—shots, we call them artistic shots—five or six cuts. You’ve seen that a thousand times. I think to myself—I may be wrong—this is a more effective way of shooting it. And actually I want to see the girl!
The Crimson Kimono caused a lot of trouble. It was difficult in the beginning for the people financing the picture to accept the idea—not that they cared, but they knew that a lot of theatre owners did—that a Japanese man not only ends up with a white woman but also outrivals a white man, who is a nice guy, too. But I have to give Columbia credit for financing it, because this is a very ticklish subject in the United States. There’s no law against it, but it’s even worse sometimes than if there were a law. It’s an unspoken law.
Underworld U.S.A.
SF: I didn’t even know I was going to do this picture. Humphrey Bogart bought a serial from the Saturday Evening Post called “Underworld U.S.A.,” a documentary report about prohibition written by a Boston newspaperman, Joseph Dineen. Bogart died. His estate, Santana, owned it. [Producer] Ray Stark bought the serial from the Santana estate for 85,000 bucks. He couldn’t do anything with it because nobody cared about bootleggers. I was asked by the Studio if I would make a picture with that title. Ray Stark would get back his $85,000, and I said OK.
I had more trouble with that script than with any other script. Because I got all the information, the narcotics figures, the profit figures, gambling figures, prostitution figures, I had them in the script, then I had to take them out. I’d got the actual figures from Washington. That was censored. But the censors were right in a way. The average young fellow, fifteen, seventeen, eighteen, seeing the picture and listening to the figures would say, “What the hell, why should I work hard? I mean these men are making billions a year, not millions!” The censors said, “You take fifty or a hundred thousand young men and they’ll say, ‘What the heck, if I could make just a hundred thousand that way, it’s good enough for me.’”
SB: You had Shakespeare in mind while writing Underworld U.S.A.?
SF: I love him. He used one plot, and once he knew it’s successful, he used it over and over again. He was guilty of James Bond. And the reason why his plot was successful is that it was honest emotion. Somebody is jealous of someone, or somebody wants to double-cross someone, or somebody is greedy. He couldn’t go wrong with any of that. It’s funny but I have not heard this connection with Shakespeare brought up before. The only one who mentioned that was me with Mr. [Sam] Briskin, who was in charge of Columbia. I mentioned Hamlet and also Edmond Dantes. I didn’t want to keep those a secret. I even had a line in the script about The Count of Monte Cristo. The little woman says, “How can you carry such a grudge?” I even had one of the characters reading the book.
SB: Do you prefer working in color or black-and-white?
SF: I don’t believe in the argument that certain stories lend themselves to color. If you made a movie and it was a damn good drama, frankly I didn’t care whether it’s in color or not. We’ve accepted the idea that certain serious, intimate subjects should only be in black-and-white.
SB: In the minor parts you often use the same actors.
SF: I have to. They’re my friends. They hang around, they wait for me to make a picture. Every time I finish a picture, I make an announcement through a mike that from now on, and in the next picture, I don’t want to use them, I don’t like them, I don’t want to see them, and I hate them. And then I start writing a new one, and they come around asking me what I’m writing, and they hang around, and before you know it I say, “All right!” I’ve used some of them for years.
SB: Actors like Neyle Morrow and Paul Dubov?
SF: They’re in everything, and Gerald Milton I use. He left the business and has an investment brokerage company. He’s one of the most successful brokers in Los Angeles. But whenever I make a picture, he calls, and he leaves his sixty or seventy employees and acts for me. In my last picture, The Naked Kiss, all I wanted was a big man. A prostitute in a bar comes over and hits him. That’s Gerald Milton. But all these actor friends, they are dependable, they are good. They know how I work. And they all claim it will bring bad luck if I don’t hire them.
SB: You often use long takes in your films. Do you prefer working with actors and on the set that way?
SF: I like it for one reason especially. After five or six minutes, you can tell the difference in an actor’s voice. There’s something about it that to me is real, and you can’t get this feeling with speeches, cut, new angle, speeches, cut. Put together, it always has a funny sound to it. Actors become more tense, revitalized, when it’s a long take. They’re afraid if they make an error, they’ll spoil the whole scene.
I am going to be an actor! In a few days, I’ll meet the director and discuss the part. It’s a part of a couple of minutes. It’s for fun. The director’s name is Godard. He wants me to play a Hollywood director, I guess. He did this once before with Fritz Lang. So for the first time in my life, I’m going to feel like a little starlet. And I’m going to act like one. Someone told me, but I don’t know if this is authentic, that it’s an orgy with some forty girls in it. If this is true, I’m very, very excited.