From The Director’s Event: Interviews with Five American Film-Makers (New York: Atheneum Books, 1970). Reprinted by permission of Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin.
Eric Sherman and I were two enthusiastic but inexperienced undergraduates when we interviewed Samuel Fuller at his home in Los Angeles in November 1968. Sam and his lovely wife Christa graciously invited us over for dinner first. After much wine and conversation, the interview did not commence until nearly midnight. Sam frequently addressed one or the other of us as “lad,” and he seemed to take a sly delight in plying us with Cuban cigars and high-proof Polish vodka. The shot glasses would be quickly refilled after the merest sip, with the encouragement to drink up. Eventually one of the interviewers passed out, but Sam was indefatigable: “What’s the matter, lad? Are you tired? I’m not tired! Got any more questions?” At around 3 a.m., he took pity on us, and we returned to complete the interview a day or two later. Such was the force field of Sam’s personality that, for several days after the interview, Eric and I found ourselves speaking with Fulleresque inflections and using his distinct brand of slang (“loot” for “money,” “boff” for “fuck,” “gibble-gabble” for “nonsense”).
Even to such newcomers as me and Eric, it quickly became obvious that only a few micromillimeters beneath Sam’s flamboyant tough-guy manner lay a great deal of sweetness and warmth. It perhaps took a little longer to discern that his Runyonesque persona fronted a very learned and sensitive artist, with dimensions (his Jewishness, for instance) that had been barely touched upon in his films, writings, or interviews. I think that Eric and I were lucky to catch Sam speaking so directly and substantially about his art, with less of the “playing-the-character-of- Sam-Fuller” that dominates other interviews I have read or heard. Perhaps it was the late hour, perhaps it was the Polish vodka, or perhaps he was just being generous to a couple of green lads from Yale.
—Martin Rubin
I Shot Jesse James
Q: In I Shot Jesse James, the Robert Ford character [John Ireland] strikes one at first as a rat. But as the film progresses, he seems to become more sympathetic.
A: I’ll make it very brief about Mr. Robert Ford. I happen to like Robert Ford, because he did something which should have been done quite a bit earlier in the life of Jesse Woodson James. Jesse James was a half-assed homo who impersonated a girl for Quantrill’s Raiders when he was fifteen. Acting as a hooker, he enticed soldiers into a little shack called “The House of Love,” where these bastard raiders robbed the soldiers and killed them. When he was eighteen, Jesse and his brother held up a hospital train, wherein they robbed all the casualties and killed them.
Since I despise Mr. James (and would give my right eyeball to make the true story of Jesse James), I’ve always had sympathy for Robert Ford. One day, the real story of Jesse James will be made. It will shock people. Rough! Vicious! We have young squirts today who are supposed to be under the spell of narcotics, and they hold up banks and mug women. They’re cream puffs compared with these old guys. They knocked off people immediately.
Q: In your picture, how well do you think Robert Ford understood his own motives when he kills Jesse?
A: Oh, he knew he’d get amnesty. He had to make a selection between freedom, a couple of dollars, a woman, and a little farm—and his friend [Jesse]. Being human, Ford naturally decided that the sacrificial lamb was the friend. Oh, he understood it all right. What he didn’t understand, until the end of the picture, was that he walked in a daze. I tried to get a groping, not half-witted, but not too mentally alert type of a man. The last line in the picture is my [version of the] story. Ford says to the girl, “I’ll tell you something I haven’t told anyone. I’m sorry I killed Jesse. I loved him.” I wanted that type of an association. Robert Lippert, the man who financed the picture, didn’t catch that. He just thought it was a kind of Damon-Pythias relationship, and he let it remain.
Q: How much were you relying on popular knowledge of the shooting of Jesse James? In Jesse’s living room in the movie, the picture on the wall is tilted. Would the audience know the popular version of Jesse’s death, and respond to that?
A: Even as kids, we’ve all seen illustrations of Jesse being shot while adjusting a picture on the wall. I wanted to get a simplification of what we know, but I wanted it to be fresh. I tried to get the feeling of a gun and a weird room by tilting the camera. I wanted the camera to tilt slightly in one direction and the picture to tilt in another. So that when it evens out, we have death. I wanted something weird in the beginning, but when it’s over, dead men are usually horizontal, and everything is simple, on one line.
I love the West. I read a lot about the West, and I’m shocked, I’m ashamed that in pictures they have not made the true story of the winning of the West—comprising 90 percent foreigners, 100 percent laborers, nothing to do with guns. Streets, mountains, roads, bridges, streams, forests—that’s the winning of the West to me. Hard! Tremendous, tremendous fight. But we have, as you know [instead], cowboys and Indians and all that. Shane comes into town, cleans it up, and leaves. He’s doing that every week now on TV.
That’s why I didn’t want any horsemanship in the picture. After we finished shooting, Lippert put in some stock shots of people riding around. I didn’t want that. I’m not interested in a horse story. I’m not even interested in Jesse. I’m interested in Ford, and how difficult it must be for an assassin to kill someone, especially someone he knows. How difficult!
The Steel Helmet
A: I made The Steel Helmet in ten days. Ten days! One set. One-half a day with all the action at Griffith Park. Twenty-five university students as extras. [Only] twenty-five men! We couldn’t afford anything else. I made them look like 350 or 400. Sometimes, when you can’t afford it, you improvise, and it comes off better.
Q: The relation between Sergeant Zack and the little boy in The Steel Helmet is similar to the one between Price and Drew in The Baron of Arizona. Zack doesn’t realize the boy’s attachment to him until after the boy is killed …
A: Ah yes! I see what you mean. Any damn emotional cementing between them grows on them. Yes, you’re right. What Zack epitomized there was the symbol of a non-com: no emotion whatsoever. None! Because if you have emotions, you’re not in war. There’s no time for emotion. It becomes a job. You wake up. You work a little. Maybe you go on a patrol or a little skirmish line. Your fight is very brief. You rest. You crap. You eat. Then you go out and shoot again. You go to sleep. Then you get up …
If you do this for three years, it’s just a job. It’s a tremendous machine inside you. The only emotion you have is: “When do I get out of here, and when does somebody replace me?” That’s the only emotion you experience in war. You become aware of sounds. You become aware of sight. And you become aware of trust in man. Very aware. If I know you two fellows are on my right, that’s fine. If I’m worried about you, I’m in trouble.
So I thought it might be a very effective scene if Zack blows his top, not because of the enemy or shooting or all that, but because of a kid. You should never blow your top over a person who’s on your side. The kid was on his side. You did catch something there; it was a growing love affair. It was a love story.
When Zack blew his top, he shot down an unarmed POW. To me, that was not a shocker. But it was to the press. Tremendous shocker. A lot of editorials. I have all the newspapers. Big full-page interviews asking, “would you shoot this man?” You see, I think it’s a little stupid, when you’re in war, to hold your fire just because a man puts his hands up. Five minutes before that, he’s shooting at you. He runs out of ammunition; he can put his hands up. I mean, certainly there’s no law. If there’s a law in war, then we’re really completely nuts. Now, we’re only 99 percent nuts. But if there’s a law…. How can there be a law for an illegal act?
So, I cannot get concerned about shooting a prisoner. It means nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. I think the idea of shooting a man is more important. I don’t care whether he’s a friend or an enemy. But the idea that we have laws and Geneva Conventions and rules and regulations is a cover up for a lot of stupid things.
Q: Why did you give such emphasis to the Buddha monument in the film?
A: I specifically wanted to put the blood plasma in the palm of the Buddha. I wanted to show the blood running out of his hand into the Commie. I thought it would be very touching to have death there in the lap of his God, and within minutes that the whole temple is going to be obliterated. But still that Buddha remains.
The big Buddha in Kamakura, Japan, was surrounded by a tremendous temple. Many hundreds of years ago, there was a quake. Everything was demolished except this Buddha…. Oh! You saw it in House of Bamboo. That’s the Kamakura Buddha. I did know the story of that Buddha, and I thought it was strange that it remained. Just like the Greek relics today. I don’t know why in the hell certain columns remain and certain ones don’t. That’s the flavor I tried to get with the Buddha in The Steel Helmet.
Q: At the end of the film, after the major attack on the temple, the three survivors are all outcasts in some way—the Negro, the Oriental, and the bald-headed fellow. This adds a very downbeat note to the “victory” over the North Koreans.
A: I deliberately put a line in that scene which is strictly dogface dialogue. No matter what happens, when the battle is over, there’s always one man who’s going to say, “I’m hungry.” And there’s always one fellow who’s ready to vomit. But the theme of The Steel Helmet is the ending. That’s what I wanted to show: that this was not the end. Wars go on and on and on. There’s no end to the story.
Fixed Bayonets
A: In Fixed Bayonets I wanted to do the story of a fellow [Richard Basehart] who cannot knock off an enemy soldier. In the end, when he does—out of pure fear, panic, frustration, and lack of coordination—they compliment him, and he accepts the compliment. That’s what happens in war.
To me, the thrill of war—and there is a tremendous thrill—is death. That’s the thing I’m really interested in, because it’s the only mystery. That’s why I’ll always dramatize it. I don’t think anything is more dramatic in motion pictures than death, even though we assume we’re coldblooded and can take it for granted. I don’t know of any other subject.
[In the War,] I seldom heard a dying man make a speech. The general things you heard, when a man was hit next to you: “Oh, no. Oh, hell. Oh, hell, no. Ooooh noooo. Please. Please. Not me!”
Q: That’s what the “mute” soldier in The Steel Helmet says when he’s killed.
A: Oh right! That’s what he says. That’s what you say, and you go. It’s selfish. All exits are selfish—and personal. And that’s the way it should be.
Q: The battle scenes in Fixed Bayonets are impressive and quite unusual: quick cuts, no sense of space or broad spectacle, very realistic and terrifying.
A: Very intimate, right. First of all, I had a tremendous ice machine. The set was built, and I rehearsed the actors and the stuntmen. Then I was ready to go. I told everybody, “Just leave the stage. Get a little air. Relax.” Then I said, “Ice it!” That big hose just went whoosshh, and the whole set was ice. Then I called the actors back in. Were they surprised! Those falls, there’s no acting in them. Didn’t you get a feeling of panic? It was real. They were slipping all over the place. They knew there were explosions going on, and they had to get out of there.
That reminds me of a funny incident on Fixed Bayonets. One of our stuntmen was hurt. Nothing serious, he twisted his leg. I found out that when stuntmen are hurt and taken off a picture, their salary is stopped. So I got an idea. I told my assistant, “Use him as a casualty.” Well, by the end of the week, I had a casualty list this long! Anyone who was hurt continued in the picture as a casualty. Only, they were real casualties! If a fellow couldn’t walk in the picture, he really couldn’t walk.
Q: I liked the scene at the beginning of the picture where all the troops are pulling out, and the rear-guard platoon is left behind. They’re standing there, frozen, while a very distorted, muffled melody is heard on the soundtrack.
A: I wanted a combination of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “Taps.” I thought that was a touching melody for the scene. I was very anxious to get the effect of a rear guard: the abandonment.
Q: In that scene, when the troops pull out, you track across the faces of the men in the rear guard. When they cross the river at the end, their faces all pass by the camera, and they look almost the same as at the beginning. Their situation is the same.
A: Did you get the sense of balance there? All except the ones who didn’t make it.
Pickup on South Street
Q: The opening of Pickup on South Street—when Richard Widmark picks the girl’s pocketbook containing the secret information—is played without dialogue. This gives the action a great deal of ambiguity. It’s only much later that you find out what actually transpired. So, instead of the “Commies vs. the Good Guys,” you’re concerned with personal issues from the start.
A: You’re right about the ambiguity. The ending is like that, too. Some people thought, “Well, I guess Widmark’ll go off with the girl and be happy.” I gave her a line at the end to show that they’ll never change. The cop says, “No matter what happens, I’ll find this son of a bitch in a week or two with his hand in somebody’s pocket.” She says, “You wanna bet?” The way she said that showed that I wanted the audience to feel he eventually will go back to picking pockets, and she’ll go back to doing whatever the hell she was doing.
This is what I got a kick out of in the picture: the idea of having a pickpocket, a police informer, and a half-assed hooker as the three main characters. The picture was made in about eighteen or twenty days at Fox. A big picture for me. The whole thing was shot in downtown L.A., and I used a lot of tricks to make it look like New York.
Q: Although you establish the city very forcefully in the film, you seem to be more interested in individuals than in the structures, political or otherwise, which surround the characters.
A: That’s why I played down the political situation in Pickup. I was not interested in the structure. I could have had a hell of a big scene, with fifty or sixty extras. They’re all gathered together, and the head man says, “This is terrible. What about the [Communist] Party?” You never hear the word “Party” in my film.
You are never even told that the FBI man in Pickup is from the FBI. He’s just from the government. I didn’t want to pinpoint it. Just before I made the picture, [Klaus] Fuchs, the British espionage agent, had been arrested for selling information to Russia. The government man in the film says to Widmark, “You know about Fuchs. You know what he did.” Widmark says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t care.”
Q: This seemed to be the most “close-up” of your films. You even kept dollying in from a close-up to a more extreme close-up.
A: Oh, yes. You noticed that? I like to do that sometimes. Jesse James was also shot with a lot of close-ups because I’m not interested in the bank or the people in the bank. I’m interested in a teller who is going to be shot and the man who is going to shoot him. The same thing in Pickup. Come to think of it, [there were] very few extras are in the film, very few people around.
Q: I especially liked was the way you moved the camera.
A: If your camera is moving, and your action is moving—boy, you have action! If your action is moving, and your camera is stationary, it is not that effective. It’s also better not to just follow the action. Again, it’s your eye. I want to go beyond the eye. So you have two sets of eyes: the camera is moving, and your own eye is moving.
Q: Just before the scene of Thelma Ritter’s death, there’s a shot of her selling her neckties in a construction area at night. I got a hellish, underworld feeling from that shot. Were you trying for this?
A: Oh, no. I wanted something that is being born right before somebody is dead. I wanted something alive. I wanted one of those riveting machines and fire and lights and life. Alive! Noisy! Because it’s going to be very quiet soon—for her.
Q: Just as a footnote, I’d like to ask about one of my favorite bit characters: Lightnin’ Louie.
A: Lightnin’ Louie was played by a card expert and magician from Chicago named Victor Perry. It was his first and last picture. I just happened to meet him. I asked him, “Are you good with your hands?” He said, “Am I good? Just watch my act!” I said, “What I want in my film is a man who is so indifferent to people that he has contempt even for the people he’s selling information to—especially if they interfere with him while he’s eating. That’s why I want a man like you, with a big belly. Now let me see you pick up some money with the chopsticks and just keep eating with them.” Did you like that touch? That’s exactly why I used him.
House of Bamboo
A: House of Bamboo was the first American picture made in Japan, and the first time I really went on location.
Q: The pre-credits sequence—the train holdup and the murder in the shadow of Mt. Fujiyama—was very striking.
A: I didn’t want to show Mt. Fuji as you always see it—with the cherry blossoms. I wanted white against white against white. In the foreground, I wanted that black train. I wanted a flavor of grim bleakness. Then, as we pulled away from death, the murder of the soldier, you saw a woman running. The titles came on, and we started getting lush with color, little by little. By the time she’s reporting to the police, we were in color! That excited me.
Q: Like Steel Helmet, House of Bamboo is essentially a love story between two men, Robert Stack and Robert Ryan.
A: Definitely. That’s epitomized by one line of dialogue that I gave Ryan. It comes right after the first robbery. Ryan is trying to figure out why, in Stack’s case, he [Ryan] broke his gang’s policy of killing wounded men so that they won’t talk to the police. First, he says to Stack, “I don’t know why I saved your neck.” Then he turns to the other men and says, “Will anyone please tell me why I did it?”
That’s the big line, the cementing between them. I hoped it would get people a little nervous, because it’s usually a line that a man says about a woman: “Why did I marry her? What am I doing with her? Why did I go out with her? Will anyone please tell me why I did it?” That’s as close as I could get to it, when Ryan says that line.
Q: The way in which we judge these two characters is typical of your films. On a structural, institutional level, Stack is a police agent out to stop a crime wave, and we should sympathize with him. But on a more personal level—the male love story—Ryan is more sympathetic.
A: I told Ryan to never say “my father” but to say “pappy.” Right away, you have to like any guy who says “pappy,” because he likes his father. When Stack talked about his family, he was dull. After all, he’s just a cop. Just a cop from California. Didn’t mean a thing.
Q: The way Ryan ran his crime syndicate was fascinating. A robbery was conducted like a military maneuver, with battle maps, briefing sessions, reconnaissance, photographs.
A: After the War, I tried to sell Metro a story about a group of men who were in the same platoon, and when the War is over, they form a combination of criminals. They take Fort Knox, using the same military maneuver with which they knocked out a pillbox on Omaha Beach. The studio didn’t buy it. So when I was asked to do House of Bamboo, I figured I’d use that situation.
Run of the Arrow
A: I wanted Rod Steiger to play the lead because he didn’t look like a typical American hero. He was blubbery. I thought he would look ungainly on a horse, and he did. He was perfect for that role; he was a misfit. The Steiger character became a religious zealot as far as hatred was concerned. He acted the same way the losers act in any war, in this case the Confederates.
Q: You often use a prop as more than just a symbol or a motif, but almost as a character, such as the helmet in Steel Helmet and the bullet in Run of the Arrow.
A: Yes. My original title for the film was The Last Bullet. That’s what started me thinking about the whole story: what happened to the last cartridge fired in the Civil War? I thought it was a good title, but it sounded too much like a Western.
Q: In this film and in Forty Guns, you used a lot of very slow dissolves. Why?
A: That was for the mood. I tried to time each one of those dissolves so that it was almost like music, a beautiful piece of music, and I had all hell break loose right after or right before that. I couldn’t have gotten any other contrast unless I used a long talking scene, and I didn’t want that.
Q: Why did you concentrate on feet rather than faces in the “Run of the Arrow” scene?
A: I shot that scene without my star. Steiger sprained his ankle right before we shot it, and he was taken off to the hospital. I used a young Indian in his place. Nobody noticed it. They thought I was being highly creative, highly artistic: “Imagine! Almost a boy wonder, a genius! Sensational! The way he shot it by just showing the feet!” Well, I would have shot about 80 percent of the scene with just feet anyway, because that’s the whole idea of the Run. But occasionally I would have liked to whip up with the camera and show Steiger’s face, just as I did with [Jay C.] Flippen. I couldn’t, because he was in the hospital.
Joe Biroc, the cameraman, did a terrific job on that scene. There are a couple of shots of two little dots in the distance; it’s the Indian running after Steiger. I don’t know how Biroc caught that, but it was exactly what I wanted: you have to look for a moment before you notice them, because it’s all vivid color, and then you see one speck chasing another speck.
China Gate
Q: I like the scene where Angie Dickinson leaves [Lee] Van Cleef and blows up the ammo dump, thus killing herself. It’s done so quickly. She never stops to think, “What am I doing?” She just does it, because she has to. These types of decisions are found frequently in your films—for example, in Underworld U.S.A., when Tolly Devlin kills Boss Connors, and in The Naked Kiss, when Kelly kills Grant.
A: If it’s anything connected with death, it should be quick, unless you have a good dramatic reason for stalling—for example, in Underworld U.S.A., when [Cliff] Robertson goes to kill Paul Dubov. I didn’t mind the stalling there, because first of all he’s going to maneuver the death of this man; second, he’s going to torture him; and third, he’s not going to shoot him himself. But if Robertson were going to commit the act personally, I’d have him blow Dubov’s head off as soon as he walks in the door. It’s very hard for me to accept a lot of gibble-gabble before a shooting. Instead, I want impact.
When I told Angie to run through that cave, I conceived the whole thing as taking place in five seconds or less, from the beginning of the run to the blow-up. Because not only is time important, but if she walked there, we would fall into a dangerous category: now she’s going to deliberate. She would be hesitant, and she shouldn’t be hesitant. It’s like a suicide. If you’re going to kill yourself, kill yourself. Don’t call the police and your mother and your father and your uncle. But you hit on something that’s very close to me: the rapidity. Didn’t that scene shock you a little?
Forty Guns
A: I don’t like the title Forty Guns; it’s meaningless to me. I was going to call it Woman with a Whip. Originally, Marilyn Monroe wanted to play the lead role. She liked the idea of this girl surrounded by all these men. I thought she was too young for what I wanted. I wanted a mother-sister flavor there.
The stuntmen refused to do the scene where the Stanwyck character is dragged by a horse. They thought it was too dangerous. But Stanwyck said she’d do it, and she did it. We did it the first time, and I said, “I didn’t like it. It was too far away from the camera truck. We’re not getting what I want.” So we tried it again, and I didn’t like it. She made no complaint. We tried it a third time, and it was just the way I wanted it. She was quite bruised.
Q: There is a pervasive sense of death in the picture, connected with sexual acts specifically. The most striking example of this is the wedding scene, where the groom is shot and falls dead on his bride.
A: I liked the idea of the honeymoon bed being the grave. The only time he really got to touch her, he was dead. I thought I would even contrast that scene a little bit, as far as sex was concerned, with the scene where the gunsmith’s daughter measures [Gene] Barry for a weapon. I thought I’d have a little fun with sex, because the connotations were all there. I had a shot where he looks at the girl through a loose gun barrel, and as she walks, he pans with her, just like a camera. When I was in Paris, Godard told me he used that shot in Breathless, except that instead of a rifle, [Jean-Paul] Belmondo rolls up a newspaper and follows [Jean] Seberg when she’s walking around his room.
I couldn’t use my original ending. I was asked to change it, and I changed it. The ending I originally shot was powerful. I had [Barry] Sullivan facing the killer, the young brother of Stanwyck. I had him grab Stanwyck and hold her in front of him. He knew he had Sullivan in a spot. I had him defy Sullivan. And Sullivan kills Stanwyck. Then he kills the boy and walks away. That was the end of the picture.
I had to put in that line where Sullivan says that he aimed the bullet so that it wouldn’t kill Stanwyck. She’s alive in the end, and they’re happy. I didn’t like that ending. A lot of people liked it, because they like to see the boy and the girl get together. I don’t think that’s important. I think it’s much more dramatic the other way, because Sullivan has to blow his top. That’s why he hasn’t used a gun in ten years. But the moment he squeezes that trigger, he’s a different man. He’s an executioner, and he kills anything in front of him. It’s a rough ending.
I’ve seen so many pictures, from High Noon back, where the heavy grabs the girl and holds her in front of him, putting the hero in a hell of an embarrassing situation. Always, at the last minute, she pushes him away, and the hero kills him. I don’t like that in any Western. It doesn’t make sense.
Verboten!
Q: Verboten! seems to be your most chaotic film. Every scene was done in a different style. For example, documentary footage was intercut with a street set, and film-clip montages intermingled with long takes. What linked these scenes was that nearly every one dealt with a form of hysteria.
A: I’m very glad that you brought that up. I used the contrasts in shooting to help maintain chaos, because I’m very touchy about that subject, about postwar Germany. I had a very good ending, but I was forced to change it. I had the American soldier shot at the end. I had him killed by an MP, another American soldier, who saw this fellow walking around by the fire and shot him because he was dressed as a civilian. The other soldiers come over and say, “Who is it?” The MP turns the body over with his foot, and he says, “Ah hell, another Kraut.” Not that I want every hero to die. In this case, I thought it would give me more impact.
But I’m very close to the subject of Verboten! During the war we had a lot of arguments over whether there is a difference between a German and a Nazi. With the exception of one experience I had, I did not meet a single German, from the day we invaded Germany to the end of the war in Czechoslovakia, who said he was a Nazi. The one exception was a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl in a little town outside of Aachen. I was on a patrol with several men, and we asked her for water. She told us to get our asses away from there. We even tried to impress on her that behind us was the First U.S. Infantry Division of twelve thousand men. It meant nothing to her. That’s the only German I ever met who told us she was a Nazi and told us to go to hell. I’ll never forget that. Everyone else said, “I don’t know what’s going on.” Just like the Southerner in Run of the Arrow. You know; it’s always the other fellow.
I was very touchy about that. I took a lot of footage during the war. Not just good stuff. Great stuff. My stuff. Stuff you don’t see in the Army Pictorial Service films.
The last battle of World War II was in Falkenau, Czechoslovakia. The town was near a concentration camp. It was a camp for Russian soldiers, but many Americans were in it. They were mostly dying of TB. Dog tags had been removed, so we couldn’t tell which corpses were Americans and which were not.
The [American] company commander went into the town of Falkenau with a group of men. He stopped people on the street and asked them, “What about the camp? How do they treat them?” They said, “We don’t know anything about the camp.” He said, “Give ’em a shovel!” He grabbed a whole group of people—Germans—and marched them right into the camp. He made them take the dead, line them up row after row after row, dress them, put them in carts, lead the carts through the town, and then bury them.
I have all that on [16mm] film. Rough! Little things in there: They’re throwing dirt down on a grave, and the face of a corpse is uncovered. These Hitler Jugend kids have to climb down, cover the face with a handkerchief, and then continue with the burial. Rough stuff! The dead are being carted through the town, and a little boy runs out with a toy rifle. He doesn’t know a funeral’s going on. He goes bang-bang-bang-bang at the corpses with his rifle. I have it all on film.
Q: Did you feel that the people you met in postwar Germany were ideological?
A: There was no politics. Frustration, hunger, defeat, and wild kids, really wild kids: that’s what it was like in Germany at the time.
Q: Why did you use Wagner and Beethoven so much on the soundtrack?
A: To me, Beethoven and Wagner—politically, spiritually, and musically—conflicted. That’s why I was very wrought up with that. The rise of Hitler was told through Wagner. [Fuller hums Wagner, progressively getting louder.] That’s the way Hitler did it. He started with one man, and then there were two [, then three, etc.] That’s why I used the music a hell of a lot. And then it’s great for the ending. Jesus Christ! Wagner and fire and blond boys and horses! Good God, how can you go wrong with that?
Q: The destructive forces in the film seemed to be running out of control.
A: Right. I tried especially to personify that in one scene, where the young German leader is told by another neo-Nazi, “We can’t blow up these trucks because they’re carrying medicine to the people. Now, we’ll fight the damn Americans, and we’ll lie and cheat and steal and kill. We’ll do anything for you, but we need the medicine for the people.” The leader says, “Oh, the hell with them.” The other guy says, “But these are Germans!” And the leader says, “THE HELL WITH THEM!”
That’s why, in Verboten!, I wanted to get the feeling of … you used the word chaos, which is good. I wanted to get the feeling of animal fury and viciousness.
The Crimson Kimono
A: One of the oldest expressions in sex is “Let’s change our luck.” That means, “Let’s go and get a colored girl.” I thought it would be a good effect if I reversed the whole thing, so that when the white girl falls in love with the Japanese fellow, he would say, “Now wait a minute. I want to make sure you really love me. I have a funny feeling that, just like whites ‘change their luck’ with a Negro, you’re getting a kick finding out what it’s like to get laid by an Oriental.” I don’t know why, but I left out those lines of dialogue. I don’t know if [now] the idea comes across. One day, I’ll hit it. At one time, I even planned on using that line of dialogue in Run of the Arrow. I wanted to have the Indian girl think, “What is it like to lay a white man?”
But anyway, that idea got me started on Kimono.
There’s a highly experimental flavor to that picture. The whole thing was shot downtown [LA] in Little Tokyo. Since I was shooting a lot of street stuff at night with hidden cameras, I had to use a very fast, sensitive film. I couldn’t use any lighting. The opening scene was the most difficult I’ve ever had to do (and I’ve shot scenes with a thousand men in Merrill’s Marauders). I hid three cameras, one on a roof, one in a truck, and another in a car. When the girl fell, at my gunshot, she fell in the middle of the street in traffic. We didn’t stage it. That was real traffic. If some idiot had pulled out all of a sudden, the girl would have gotten it. Most dangerous scene I’ve ever shot.
Q: I like the contrasts in the ending. The killer is getting gunned down in the street, while all around are people in beautiful costumes with little jingling ornaments.
A: There’s another place that I used music to establish contrast. Several bands are in that celebration at the end. One plays classical music, one plays Japanese music, one plays hot music, and so on. Whenever I cut from the killer to the pursuer, the music changed. That gave me the discordant and chaotic note I wanted.
I thought the end of the picture was very honest. I hate phony, lying losers. I hate scenes, and I’ve seen them a thousand times, where one fellow loses the girl to another guy, and the loser says, “Well, we’ll still be friends. Don’t worry.” No! Not in my film. He didn’t give a damn whether the guy was yellow or white. He was angry because the guy stole his girl. And he stayed angry.
Underworld U.S.A.
A: I figured I’d do [The Count of] Monte Cristo; I’d do Dumas. With one exception: instead of getting even with the guys personally, he [Cliff Robertson] uses the law to knock off the people he doesn’t like. I thought that was a pretty good approach to the story.
Q: A theme of cleanliness runs through Underworld U.S.A. It starts with Tolly Devlin [Cliff Robertson] sterilizing instruments in a prison hospital and ends when, as he’s dying, he stumbles over a trash can which says “Keep Your City Clean.”
A: Again, I wanted contrast. In addition to sterilizing utensils, I told Robertson to put the bandages on the man very gently, very precisely, like a surgeon. I wanted to get that effect: he’s clean about those bandages even though he’s double-crossing the man he’s putting them on.
I also tried to get a contrast wherever I could between the cleanliness of the head of National Projects and the discussion he’s carrying on about narcotics and prostitution and murder. That’s why I picked the swimming pool location. I wanted that hollow, clean atmosphere you get around a swimming pool. It’s too bad we can’t have smell in motion pictures, because there’s an antiseptic smell around a pool, like in a gym. I thought that the cleanest thing in the world is a pool. So I had this crime organization hold their meetings there, rather than in the pompous office or the pool hall or the dingy little room where gangsters usually hang out. I wanted to get that contrast to what they’re talking about: it’s so vile and low.
Q: You depict National Projects, the front for Underworld U.S.A., as such a typical business organization, with adding machines and bankers and everything.
A: It’s all done mechanically, almost like robots, like computer systems. I don’t doubt that crime today is governed by computers. If I were to make that picture today, I’d show nothing but twenty machines. No people, just all the machines. I wanted to get that flavor of mechanization in the picture.
Q: It seemed to be that crime was defined in Underworld U.S.A. as lack of emotion.
A: Yes. And also a facade of good citizenship. Remember that Boss Connors [Robert Emhardt] said, “All we have to do is pay a little taxes, go to church, send a couple of kids through school, set up a few charities on the side. We’ll win. We always have. We always will.”
Q: The coldness of the organization is particularly well reflected in [Gus,] the Richard Rust character, the paid killer. He commits his murders totally without commitment, almost casually.
A: Now there’s an honest character! He’s not a psychotic; there’s nothing insane about him. He just has a job. He certainly isn’t interested in killing that little kid. There’s no vengeance in it. There’s no emotion in the man at all. That’s what finally terrorizes Robertson—the way Rust says, “We have to wipe out this girl. If you do a good job, it’ll get you in with the Boss.” The only emotion he has is that it will get him in with the Boss. To knock off a girl means nothing.
I didn’t want Rust to do anything that deviated from the character of a professional killer, except one thing. I told him, “When you’re getting ready to kill somebody, put on your dark glasses. Then we’ll never know whether or not you want to see anything, or whether or not you’re feeling anything.” You see, I wanted to keep away from emotion. I didn’t want a character like in the old gangster pictures: he likes his mother, he supports his brother, he has a little dog, he feeds goldfish.
Q: Tolly Devlin [Robertson] is the only one in the film who acted on personal grounds. He wasn’t motivated by a newspaper story; he actually witnessed his father’s murder.
A: I used the same thing in Pickup on South Street. This is human nature: [Richard] Widmark didn’t care about anything. Didn’t care! But when he found out that someone took a beating for him, that someone was physically hurt who was tied up with him, he said, “O.K. That’s it,” and he went right after the enemy.
It’s a theme I like in a picture. I never like a man to do something heroic for any chauvinistic or false premise other than emotional, personal necessity. If a newspaper says, “GREAT HERO SAVES 12,000 PEOPLE FROM BEING BOMBED IN A STADIUM,” we know he didn’t save 12,000 people. He saved one. That’s what I’m trying to bring out.
Merrill’s Marauders
Q: The theme of the fighter is carried over into your next picture, Merrill’s Marauders. It’s summed up when Merrill [Jeff Chandler] says, “As long as you can take another step, you can fight.”
A: That’s only 50 percent. I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to show that when he says, “You do what I do,” that means, “When I die, you die.” That’s the main thing I wanted to bring out. That’s the Big Baby.
We shot the whole thing on location. When we were shooting in this little village in the Philippines, I noticed a little boy who kept following me. So I told Claude Akins, one of my actors, “I have an idea.” This [scene was] improvised, and it turned out very nicely. The Marauders came into this town. They’re resting; they’re exhausted; they’re hungry, but they’re too tired to eat. The little boy came up and looked at Akins’s beard. When he started to scratch the beard, that gave me another idea: feeding. So this old woman came over and offered rice to an American soldier—who, as you know, is the best-fed soldier in the world. When Akins [Sergeant Kolowicz] realized the idiocy and the stupidity, the irony and the shame, that he, a big, burly, well-fed man, was being fed by this scrawny old woman, he started to cry. That, to me, is more important than anything else in the picture.
Q: The film ended strangely, before it was resolved.
A: The ending was an abortion. I was originally going to end with a sequence of the airfield being taken. We were going to go out with a lot of action. They decided not to shoot it for two reasons, both of them money. So I said, “O.K. All we can do is end it where they’re walking away and then fade out.” Someone went ahead and put not only a narration there but also a stock shot of soldiers marching. Well, that was their business.
Shock Corridor
A: Originally, I don’t know how many years ago, I wanted to do a film exposing conditions in the mental hospitals of the United States. Then I decided to do it as a fiction piece instead of a documentary exposé. I said, “The hell with it! I can pull a Nellie Bly!” Nellie Bly, you know, impersonated a nut for a while in the Wards Island insane asylum many years ago. So I thought I’d dramatize a fellow who goes into an asylum to crack a murder and winds up insane. I’m glad I didn’t make it when I originally intended to. Even if it had been the same story, it wouldn’t have had the same up-to-date flavor: the combination Oppenheimer-Einstein-Teller, the tremendous [James] Meredith situation, and the turncoats of Korea. So I put that all together, and I modernized it, and that was Shock Corridor.
I enjoyed making that picture. I liked the idea of using color before a man became lucid. When he’s insane, and he’s thinking of something, once we see color, we know that immediately after that he’ll be rational for a few minutes. So each person had his own little [vision]. For the Southern soldier, I used Japan. When I went location hunting for House of Bamboo, I shot a hell of a lot of stuff with my own camera. That’s what I used for his nightmare. I have about eight thousand feet of film on the Mato Grosso. I went there [in Brazil] once looking for locations, and I lived with the Karaja Indian tribe for six or seven weeks. I used that for the Negro’s nightmare. In Peter Breck’s nightmare at the end, the waterfall coming down is part of the Iguazu Falls in the Mato Grosso. I shot all of this in Cinemascope and 16mm. I didn’t have it unsqueezed. All I did was blow it up to 35mm. So there it was, giving a weird effect without my doing anything.
Q: Was there any particular reason why Dr. Boden [Gene Barry] didn’t have a visual nightmare but an aural one?
A: Oh, that was intentional. I don’t know why, but I get a certain feeling when I think of a laboratory, Oppenheimer and all that. I see big buildings and big rooms—hollow chambers, little holes—and voices coming out. You know: “Dr. So-and-so, will you please report to so-and-so.” I don’t see phones. I see nothing but an intercom. A big, weird, almost science-fiction flavor—that’s what I wanted to get. I also wanted one thing that sets Boden apart from the others: voices and, more importantly, the coldness of it.
Q: Of course, the great tour de force is the thunderstorm scene in the corridor. Could you discuss how you shot it?
A: Of course! I thought it would be fresh to show a thunderstorm just as if it happened right here in this room. I needed really a lot of water. Now, you must realize this was a dangerous situation, because there was no outlet for the water on this particular sound stage. You have to have a tank under the floor for the drainage. Otherwise, you can ruin a lot of equipment.
We didn’t have any of these things, but I did it anyway, because I knew it was going to be the last day of shooting. I had to get what I wanted on the first take. To be very careful about it, I had a regular camera on [Peter] Breck and a second camera above that one, tipped down and shooting in close-up. I didn’t want to have to stop; I couldn’t afford the time. I had everything ready for me. The door was open, and my car was running. I had to make a hasty exit, since I’m chicken. I didn’t want to be around when the studio manager came in and started asking a lot of questions. As Breck screamed, I waited twenty seconds. I wanted the biggest scream I could get. Then, I said, “Forget it!” and I ran out. I never went back—to the studio or the set.
Q: How do you evaluate the character of Dr. Cristo [John Matthews]? Do you find him sympathetic or noteworthy?
A: No. To me, Dr. Cristo is a symbol of all officials in a hospital. I dramatized him as being understanding until he becomes slightly suspicious.
Q: Cristo says, “You can’t tamper with the mind,” and implies that this is why the reporter went insane. But were you trying to say more than that: that everyone has this insanity inside of him?
A: Sure! I should have emphasized that even more strongly in the film. I should have made it clearer that for the reporter to want to do this, to volunteer to be accepted as an inmate, he had to be a little crazy in the first place.
Every one of us naturally has an inclination to yell or go crazy or break things. Even if you don’t think that’s a form of insanity, I do. I’m positive that, next to death, insanity is one of the most interesting subjects. I mean, I’m intrigued by it.
The Naked Kiss
Q: I think that The Naked Kiss is in many ways more “shocking” than Shock Corridor.
A: It is.
Q: In fact, I would say that it’s the most shocking film you’ve made. It seemed that you deliberately went to lengths to get a reaction from the audience, especially when you pull the rug out from under everything in the child-molesting scene.
A: I wanted to bring something else out, but I don’t know if I succeeded, because we were short on loot, the bastards. I had a scene where [Kelly] Constance Towers confronts the townspeople after they find out that she’s innocent. At first they were ready to lynch her, and now they want vindication. She tells them to go to hell. I didn’t shoot this scene—no money. She calls them hypocrites, which is all right. But the important thing is that she realizes how happy she was in her [prostitution] profession. She says, in effect, “What a thrill it is: when you get through laying any of those bastards, he pays you off and leaves. You don’t have to listen to him or to his stories or to his lies, like I have to listen to your lies every day.”
I thought it would be very effective if a girl kills a saint, and no one believes that the saint is really guilty of a horrible crime. That’s the premise I wanted. How do I make this man saintly and canonize him? I made him the sweetest man in the world, with all sorts of charitable gadgets: hospitals, a town named after him, and so on.
So when I [conceived] the film as a shocker, the original impression I wanted was of a wonderful, almost dull, very, very ordinary love story: the poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks, the rich man who falls in love with her. Well, I hate those kinds of stories. So I knew I was going to have fun the minute she finds him molesting the child. Now, when you saw the picture, did that scene shock you?
Q: To say the least.
A: Good. That’s what I wanted. I don’t mean that I wanted it to shock you content-wise; I wanted it to shock you story-wise. A lot of people didn’t like that picture. Certain friends of mine said, “Oh, why’d you have him try to lay a little girl?” I don’t know, maybe they resented it because of some secret, hidden desire. What [did they] expect me to do? Suppose there’s no child-molesting scene. I wouldn’t have made the story. There is no story, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not interested in the girl from the wrong side of the tracks. They made those stories at Metro and Warners for fifty years: She goes to the right side, she meets the fellow, sometimes she finds out he’s a nice guy, sometimes she finds out he’s a phony, but there’s always a happy ending.
Q: The opening scene is astonishing, where Towers beats up the pimp as her wig is falling off. The viewer is assaulted before the credits even come on.
A: Did that surprise you, that beginning? There’s no fade-in, you know. We open with a direct cut. In that scene, the actors utilized the camera. They held the camera; it was strapped on them. For the first shot, the pimp has the camera strapped on his chest. I say to Towers, “Hit the camera!” She hits the camera, the lens. Then I reverse it. I put the camera on her, and she whacks the hell out of him. I thought it was effective. She had a difficult time making herself up at the end of the scene, because she had to use the lens as a mirror. As the titles come on, she’s looking into the lens.
Q: There are many artistic references in the film, mostly connected with Grant [Michael Dante], the millionaire. The most outstanding ones are to Beethoven.
A: Ah! First of all, I wanted to show that the millionaire’s a very “nice” man; he likes to sit and listen to music, and all that stuff. The girl is very hungry for something like that. Beethoven is a symbol. It could have been any other composer or artist.
Q: What were you intending with the imaginary trip to Venice during the big love scene?
A: I wanted that very badly for many reasons. First of all, I’m trying to sell him as a poetic, musical type—the fellow she wants so badly. She’s never had anything like this before. The Venice scenes gave me a chance to show that pictorially.
But what I wanted more than anything else was to use that to build up to The Kiss, The Naked Kiss. I have him kiss her in the gondola, with the leaves falling. I cut on that position to them kissing on the couch. One more leaf falls. We’ll never know whether that’s in her mind or it really happened. The minute she kisses him, she draws away. He says, “What’s the matter?” She says, “Nothing.” That’s when she should have said, “There’s something wrong with you.” But she didn’t.
I had to have something highly molasses-like, even cornily romantic, in that scene. I couldn’t just have them kissing on the couch. I had to have all that phony mood for one reason: I thought if I gave him an overload of gibble-gabble—about poets and painters and writers and musicians—we would understand why she doesn’t object right then. I had to get a man who symbolized everything she was hungry for. I went overboard. I had to.
When she does find out this man’s secret, and she realizes that he had given her a Naked Kiss, she’s shocked, and he’s shocked that she’s shocked. Since she’s a hooker, he thought that she would understand why he likes little girls.
Shark!
A: When I made Shark! I had what I felt was a brainstorm: doing a story about four amoral characters. One is a scientist [Barry Sullivan]: no morals. One is the girl [Silvia Pinal] he’s laying: no morals. One is the young hero [Burt Reynolds]: no morals. One is the cop [Enrique Lucero]: no morals. I thought it would be interesting to show not only a double-cross on a double-cross, but when we think we know who the heavy is, we find out that the real heavy behind it all is the girl. She’s the lowest. She does have a chance to get out of it alive, if she levels with the lead. But she doesn’t. She is responsible for her own death. He lets her die. I tried something different there. They’re in love and all that stuff, and I have the hero not only allow her to die, but he shrugs it off. I thought that was exciting.
I like the idea of a love affair where the man finds out the girl has used him. I gave her a great line of dialogue. The last line of the picture—now I find out that the producers have put it in ahead, and it’s no longer the last line—she says to him, “We’re both a couple of bastards—only I’m a rich one.” That’s the whole flavor I wanted. I shot some great stuff. For instance, when the boat is sinking at the end, he takes a lighted cigarette and throws it into the sea. I just stay on that cigarette. A fish sees it (the fish being a symbol of the shark), thinks it’s something, and grabs it—pssshhht! [Sound of a cigarette being extinguished.] That’s the end of the picture. Now I think they’ve cut it out. A lot of things like that were cut out.
As you know, I asked them to take my name off the damned thing, because I didn’t like the cut I saw. I thought it was terrible. I told them I wanted to restore my original cut. They said they didn’t know if they could get the film from Mexico. They couldn’t locate it. It was such a confused state of affairs. Finally, I told them, “Don’t bother me about it anymore.” It may be the world’s worst picture, or it may turn out to be a surprise to me. I don’t know. I do know I had fun with the characters, because I went beyond the average switch of revealing the villain. I also didn’t have a guy just letting a girl go off to jail; he lets her be eaten up by sharks. I’ve never seen anything like that in a picture before. Have you? That’s my ending. That’s what I shot.
The only reason I first called the picture Caine is that we went to a restaurant in Mexico where the service was bad. I got sore, and while I was getting sore, I felt like Cain, so I said, “Well, we’ll call it Caine.” That’s all. Hell. I felt like hell. Then the producer saw a layout in Life, some pictures of a guy being killed by a shark or something like that, and it said, “Shark.” So they changed the title!
Well, that’s the checkered career of an ex-copyboy. That’s thirty.