From Cinema Papers 30, Melbourne, Australia (December–January 1980–81), 423–26, 498–500. Reprinted by permission of Tom Ryan.
Q: You seem to have heroes and heroines in films like China Gate and The Naked Kiss who live on the borderline, or outside of middle-class morality, outside the law.
A: I think they make the best characters, anyone who is involved in what we call “the lower depths,” whether it is Dostoyevsky with The Idiot, Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, the Count of Monte Cristo, or anyone who has been double-crossed by society. The melodramatic characters seem to last, and they ensure much more interest, as far as the reader or viewer is concerned, than the saintly do-gooder.
Q: Are you deliberately confronting your audience by making them empathize with these outsider characters?
A: No, I’m only concerned that these people, whom I call “Gutter People,” have their own code of honor. Even though I might not agree with them, they have a code that interests me. I met quite a few when I was a reporter. I found out that their way of thinking and living, ironically enough, had more solidity than the saintly people. They were thieves, pimps, and whores, very low people. But they stuck together in a way that the churches would like to have their congregations unite, though they never do. The “Gutter People” don’t try to live on lies—but we do.
I would rather tell the story of a whore than a sweet girl who comes to the city and meets a young good-looking man, marries him and raises children. I don’t see anything dramatic about that. It might be dramatic to other writers, but I couldn’t write that kind of copy [or screenplay].
Q: One finds oneself within asylums in films like Shock Corridor and The Big Red One. The madness is linked to those characters who are the outsiders, who had been on the periphery of society.
A: As far as I am concerned, we are one big asylum, though we shake our heads and say, “Tisk, tisk, tisk” when we see outsiders who are abnormal or mentally sick. I’ve covered some insane asylums in my day, and the true story I wanted to tell, I couldn’t tell. At the beginning of Shock Corridor, for example, I wanted to show, as the journalist passes them entering the asylum, naked men and women chained together on benches in a long corridor, sitting in their own filth. The Hollywood censor board refused me permission. I produced photographs from several mental institutions showing this was no fabrication, and they still said no. So I said, “The hell with it.”
I wanted to do a story of the maltreatment of patients, the insane people, by sane people who really are acting insane, who have nothing but contempt for anyone who is “sick.” When a man breaks a leg, or has a physical sickness, we say, “Too bad,” and we don’t shy away from him. Yet we want nothing to do with people who are mentally sick. It’s like talking about corpses. People turn away; they don’t like it.
Q: Almost as a counterpoint, there is the repeated intrusion of children into the action of your films. That seems to be a device that Sam Peckinpah uses too, perhaps influenced by your work.
A: Yes, and I love his films. You know, he called me—I’ve never met him—and offered to do Second Unit on The Big Red One. It was a good idea, but it didn’t come off. I would have loved that. Anyway, whatever has happened to adults will reflect on children. There is something that gets to me about a child emulating an adult. It is unfortunate if they grow up to be the same kind of sons-of-bitches, and then they presume to pass judgment on a new generation of children. I laugh at that.
Q: In Shark!—a film I know you are not happy with—there is a very positive relationship between the child called Runt [Carlos Barry] and Caine, played by Burt Reynolds.
A: I thought it would be interesting to have an adult thief and a child thief working together. I wanted to show, very clearly, the attitude of the adult thief, where, instead of inviting the boy not to steal, he tells him the most important thing is not to get caught. That to me is an editorial about how a lot of people raise children.
I have had the experience of seeing that in life. I have talked to young hoodlums. They told me that they were brought up by other hoodlums, who never tried to differentiate between right and wrong. All the hoodlums try to do is not get caught.
Q: There are often characters named Griff in your films: The Baron of Arizona, House of Bamboo, Forty Guns, The Naked Kiss, and The Big Red One. Is there a special reason?
A: No, it’s that I write a lot of stories and I get sick and tired of trying to change the names. Once I was writing two stories at the same time, and the characters of one appeared in the other. I got all confused, so I said, “Whenever I can, I’ll use the same name.” It’s easier for me to write that way, [though] there is no real Griff. But I’ll have to stop it now because I’ve done it too often. It’s just mental laziness on my part.
Q: In your films, there’s a lot of physical violence, which might be connected with the fact that you have made Westerns, gangster films, and war films. But you have said that you prefer dramatizing “emotional violence,” and you talk about “the bullets of emotion.”
A: I don’t care too much for physical violence, even though I use it a lot. It’s good for many melodramas. That has been proven as far as ticket buyers are concerned. But I prefer “emotional violence.” You don’t have to be violent with your fist, a voice can do it as well. One word can cut the hell out of your heart.
[There’s an] old film I love, written by Noel Coward and directed by David Lean: Brief Encounter, with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnston. It has more violence in it—emotional violence—than an automobile chase, or a horse chase, or a fight in a saloon. There is the violence inside the woman who is about to cheat on her husband, and the violence inside the man who is about to cheat on his wife. They are doing something they not only believe is wrong, but something they both reject, even though they are accepting it at the same time. That to me is pure violence, and only once in a thousand times do I find that in a film.
Q: In Pierrot le fou, you say, “Film is like a battleground. Love … hate … action … violence … death. In one word—emotion.”
A: Yes, that encompasses everything. That is all we can write or talk about.
Q: One aspect of your career you haven’t really made a film about is filmmaking. Do you have any plan for such a project?
A: No, but if I ever did approach a story about Hollywood, I would do it about the censors. It would rip the hell out of them, and expose them for what they are: parasites, frauds, and hypocrites. I would do a film about what makes a censor a real bluenose, those pious sons-of-bitches who tell you what to do, and what not to do, and how to think, and what to show!
One reason I’m pissed off with them is that, a number of years ago, I ran into one who was trying to sell scripts. He was using the censorship office in Hollywood as an entrée. That to me is a pretty good reflection of what the hell they represent.
Q: In 1964, you wrote: “An artist’s hell will always be paved with the skulls of critics and the bones of censors.” You avoided mentioning critics in your tirade against censorship. Do you still feel that way?”
A: Yes, though they have to make a living. George Bernard Shaw used to be a critic. When he became a playwright, he wrote a goddamn article about critics—and he tore them apart. I have read some wonderful critiques by writers whose essays are a hell of a lot better than what they were writing about. But there are those critics who just want to get their literary guns off, who want to prove they sleep with the thesaurus and the dictionary. I suppose there’s nothing really wrong in all that, whereas I have little patience with the critics who rip off publicity sheets, or take the goddamn copy out of a brochure and write it up. They’re taking money under false pretenses, though they are not the major critics usually.
I think any man who wants to be a critic and review films must also love films and want to make them. That is perfectly logical, and I encourage that. A number of ex-critics have become writers and directors in the U.S., and it has happened on a grander scale in Europe, specifically in France, Italy, and even Britain. I am very fond of [British critic] Peter Wollen, for example. I met him in a bar in Edinburgh in 1969. He had film ideas, and I said, “Write them.” He and another man [Mark Peploe] wrote a story called The Passenger for Michelangelo Antonioni. That makes me very happy. He did something about [his ideas].
I have tremendous respect for a number of critics and writers. To me, a man like Cyril Connolly or Edmund Wilson could cover anything, and I would enjoy what he wrote.
When I was in Germany, a new movie theatre opened in Cologne, and they asked me if I would review a film [playing there]. I said, “No, I don’t write reviews,” but they said, “You can do any film you want to see.” Well, I had never seen The Ballad of Cable Hogue, so I said, if they ran that film, I’d write about it. When I saw the film, I realized it was a modern version of Moliere’s Tartuffe, done very, very well. The other critics in Cologne and Berlin were upset with my review. They only wrote about whether they liked the film. I didn’t give a damn about that. I wrote about the cleverness of Tartuffe, a man with one hand under a girl’s skirt and the other holding a Bible. I just loved it.
Q: I assume from the fact that you accepted parts in films made by Godard, Luc Moullet, and Wenders, that you admire their work?
A: Yes, very much. Wenders called me again recently and said, “Would you do a walk-on for my new film, Hammett?” I said, “Certainly.” I really enjoyed [appearing in] it. It’s not finished, but so far I’m in it.
Q: Both you and Nicholas Ray were in Wenders’s An American Friend, but in different scenes.
A: I’ve known [Nick] a bit for a long time, but we didn’t really work together. Wenders was making a film about Ray in New York [Lightning Over Water], and he called me and he was crying. He was all choked up and said, “Nick Ray died.”
Q: It seems to me that your stories are less concerned with psychologically complex characters, and more with the complexities of situations.
A: It excites me to deal with how society breaks itself down. I try to reflect that on the screen. I don’t make up stories about pickpockets, Communists, radicals, reactionaries, they are just reflections of what happens all over the world, in every country. They make very good copy.
Q: You never give much of the history of a character, but deal with how a character acts in the present tense.
A: It’s not a question of getting into the character’s history, or weaknesses or strengths. I don’t like to pinpoint anyone in black and white. Most of us have a hidden side: most of us get away with it, some are caught out. If I ran Pickup on South Street for a thousand priests, a thousand ministers, and a thousand rabbis—I am talking about religious people now—I would be interested to know if any of them would have a reflection on what [Richard Widmark’s pickpocket] did as a child. Did he steal? Did he lie?
Q: Would you explain what has been described as your “colored chalk” system of planning a film?
A: I have a blackboard and I separate it into three panels for Acts 1, 2, and 3. White chalk just means my storyline. I introduce characters by using yellow chalk. If I have anything “romantic” or “gentle” or “peaceful,” I use blue. And for “action,” I use red. If I am doing a melodrama, I look at the bottom of Acts 1, 2, and 3, and see if the red increases from 1 to 2, and 2 to 3. If the red does not increase, then I don’t have a melodrama.
Q: Do you ever fall in love with your characters?
A: I fall in love with characters I know I’m going to kill off. In Pickup on South Street, for example, I fell in love with the character of Moe, played by Thelma Ritter. I knew many Moes. She was a composite of men and women who are police informers. Thelma’s dead now, but while we were shooting, I told her how much I loved the character she was playing. And she said, “Look, don’t fall in love with me too much, because I love the scene where they blow my head off, and I don’t want to lose it.”
Q: Is it possible to film what is going on in someone’s mind?
A: That’s a dream of mine, though it’s very difficult. When you go into a restaurant, even as you are saying, “Hello, Pete,” in your mind there is something that happened at the office three days ago, and on top of that is what happened in the car while you were driving to the restaurant. Generally, the average human being has a thousand flashes that go through the mind in the time that it takes Pete to say, “How are you, Tom?” and you to say, “I’m okay, Pete.” I’d love to get that on the screen.
Q: Your characters relate through the way they bargain with each other, deceive each other. That seems a very cynical attitude toward the human animal.
A: On the contrary, I don’t believe I’m a cynic. I am quite an optimist. I might get angry, but there is a big difference between cynicism and anger. I am only a cynic when it comes to the hypocrites’ familiar bullshit. They will tell you it’s bad to kill, or it’s good to show compassion, and then go ahead with their Inquisitions. That’s been going on for hundreds of years, from the Spanish Inquisition to now in South Africa, or in Khomeini’s Iran. There, one man says, “I’m a good Moslem but you are a bad Moslem because you do not pray on the right knee to Allah.” It goes way back to Socrates, nothing has changed.
Q: Why did it take thirty years for The Big Red One to come together?
A: It was my fault. I had collected little mementos in Europe during the War—many barns could be wallpapered with newspapers and magazines—but I didn’t do anything with them. I would write something down and send it to my mother, giving her the name of the town, the country, the date, and the action. I sent home all kinds of little souvenirs, and she accumulated them over three years, in case I ever wrote a book. But after the War, I did nothing about it. I just kept my two-and-a-half suitcases, which were filled with the stuff.
In 1958, my agent said, “Are you ever going to do a story on the Big Red One?” I said, “Yes.” He told John Wayne, and Wayne called me. We had lunch. He said, “I want to be in the film you are going to do about the 1st Division.” Wayne acted as my agent and he took me to see Jack Warner. Then he gave the story to Page One of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. He even announced the salary he was going to get, which was $77,777.77.
The editor of Bantham Books came to my office and said, “I read in the trades that you are going to do The Big Red One with Wayne. Don’t do it. Don’t do a film, give me a book. I’ll get you a hardcover and, a year later, Bantham will come out with a paperback.” I liked the idea and told Wayne, but he said, “To hell with the goddamn book, do the film.” And Oscar Dystel—he’s now the chairman of the board of Bantham—said, “To hell with the film, do the book.”
I did neither. Until [many years later, when] Peter Bogdanovich said, “If you write the goddamned script, I’ll produce it.” And that’s what happened. I wrote the goddamned thing, and Peter said, “Who do you want?” I said, “Lee Marvin.” He sent it to Lee Marvin, and Marvin phoned me from Tucson, Arizona, and said, “This is your Sergeant.”
Peter then took it to Lorimar, while I made three [scouting] trips to Europe and Africa. In the meantime, Peter had a commitment to make a film called Saint Jack, about a lovable pimp in Singapore. So Gene Corman became the producer, and we made the film for Lorimar.
Q: Lee Marvin seems to embody the ideal Sam Fuller character.
A: Yeah, he’s crazy! It’s lucky for him the son-of-a-gun is wearing pants, otherwise I would fall in love with him. We worked together like two goddamn horses pulling the same stagecoach.
Q: The film was originally much longer than its present 113 minutes.
A: The original cut was four hours and twenty minutes. I cut this down to two hours. Then we brought in another editor. I liked 90 percent of his cut. He put back some things I didn’t like, but I was happy to have it under two hours. A four-hour film is too much, if you want to get it into a lot of theatres.
Q: Originally, did the film have the voice-over narration by Zab [Robert Carradine]?
A: That was later. They brought in a writer who went through my book [ed.—Fuller’s novelization of The Big Red One] and took stuff out of it. If the film is successful, Merv Adelson of Lorimar is taken with the idea of rereleasing it in its full length.
Q: You don’t think that The Big Red One has been defaced by shortening it?
A: No, it couldn’t hurt it. I’m not telling a story like the average storyteller. I’m telling the story of three years of war, and people would never miss sequences [they’d never know I had written and filmed]. For every sequence I did use, I could have used twelve or fifteen. There is a magnificent sequence that was cut with my wife, Christa Lang, who played the role of a German countess, and Siegfried Rauch, who plays Schroeder, a German soldier. We shot in Ireland in a big castle. It was beautiful, but slowed down the film.
Q: In 1942, you wrote the novel The Dark Page, which was published in 1944, while you were in the Army. Can I connect that with the character of Zab, who writes a book called The Dark Deadline?
A: That’s legitimate. Zab is me for about three or four little things. One, smoking the cigar. Two, having written a book before he was in the Army. Three, my mother did sell it to a publisher in New York, and I did come across an Armed Services Edition, just as you saw in the film. Also, I made that run on Omaha Beach, when the Sergeant tells them to find the goddamned colonel. Those parts of the Zab character are me.
Q: The Big Red One is a war film entirely without heroics.
A: That was the whole idea. The four young [soldiers] are not miracle workers, they are not John Waynes. They are certainly not smarter than anyone else. They are the symbols of the hundreds of thousands of survivors in every army. In war stories, people expect some of the main characters to get killed along the way. There is always someone who gets a letter from his mother and then gets killed. I said, “To hell with that. My [film] will tell the story of four guys who made it.”
Q: You have described the film as “a love story between The Sergeant and the four riflemen.”
A: Yes, but I didn’t want any gushing molasses in there. You have no time to fool around like that in combat. And I tried my best to keep away from the development of young men turning into “men.” That’s the normal thing in a war film—or in a Western, where a young fellow joins a group hustling cattle, and by the end of the drive he becomes a “man.” I kept away from that, because when you are killing, or being killed, there is no time for development of anything, except the drive to live.
Q: What do you see going on inside the head of Griff [Mark Hamill] when he fires the gun repeatedly into the Nazi gas chamber?
A: At first, he is completely ignorant of what the hell he is looking at. I kept my camera on him just long enough for people to realize he has seen a human skeleton in that oven. And by the time he reaches the second and third doors, and sees the SS man, it is the first time he realizes what the hell he is fighting for. Griff is fighting a very evil thing called Kill. That’s Hitler, in this particular case. And you cannot sit at a table with Mr. Kill and discuss any deal—that’s impossible. You have to resort to his goddamn level and kill his solders and, if possible, kill him. You have to kill Kill. And the idiocy of it, when it is all over, you can’t tell who really won, or who really lost.
Q: There’s a scene of a firefight in an insane asylum. The style of the shooting is really unlike any other war film. It’s more like the surrealism of somebody like Buñuel.
A: I love his work, and what I try to do is get a very coherent and quiet approach to insanity. I didn’t want any [patient] yelling or screaming. I didn’t want any silly questions asked, with the exception of one: “Is it all right to kill an insane man?” I wanted that done in a very off-the-shoulder way. I kept away from bloodshed, because I don’t like ketchup on the screen.
Q: That’s a wonderful moment, when the fellow in the asylum grabs a machine-gun and says, “I’m sane, I’m sane, like you!” and proceeds to fire at random.
A: Well, that’s your whole theme of sanity and insanity. If they are copying us, who the hell is insane?
Q: That’s a disturbing scene, but also very funny. The Big Red One seems to have a “fuller” comic sense than your other films. It looks more worked out.
A: I am glad you said that, because the 10 percent of the last cut that I didn’t like was the 10 percent without humor.
Q: There’s a crazy scene where the Germans, fleeing from an unseen enemy, run into a cave and get mowed down by another unseen enemy, the soldiers hiding there.
A: Yeah, it is funny. Half the time when people are taking a piss on the battlefield, they have no idea of the drama that could be taking place fifteen feet away. We once hid in an area where the Germans were standing above us. They pissed on us, and we couldn’t do a thing about it. And one guy began to laugh. There was so much noise that the goddamn son-of-a-bitch who was pissing didn’t hear the guy laughing. But imagine if he’d heard him. Imagine the guy with his cock out shooting a rifle. That would have been a hell of a scene, if you know what I mean.
Q: In this film, the Germans seem reflections of the Americans, except on the other side.
A: All human beings are the same once they are on the line with a rifle. The difference here is that we were not brought up to commit mass murder, nor were they in Australia, England, or France. Hitler’s was a very precise plan, which he wrote about in detail in Mein Kampf. The [orientations] of the German and the American soldiers were different. Once we were on the line with our weapons, we were the same.
Q: Are the soldiers’ nicknames in your film reference to soldiers you knew?
A: Yeah. Some are dead and some are still living.
Q: Why does The Sergeant [Lee Marvin] have no other name?
A: Because he is a symbol of war. It doesn’t make any difference who he is and where he comes from. He’s Death. And without going into a big editorial, when Death meets Death, when he meets the German at the end, nobody really wins. The only reason the Sergeant wants to keep the son-of-a-bitch alive at the end is because it will keep himself alive. And the definition of the thin line between “to kill” and “to murder” is very important to him.
The hypocrisy of the whole thing is that a piece of paper with a scratch of a pen tells me when I am allowed to kill [you, my interviewer,] Tom Ryan, and when I am not. A son-of-a-bitch thousands of miles away signs a piece of paper. If I was going to kill you, I’d want to kill you because I want to kill you, not because some son-of-a-bitch writes, “It’s okay, Fuller, now you can kill Tom Ryan.”
Q: What I liked about the film was that it wasn’t didactic, it just showed the absurdity of war.
A: Ah, you got it. I didn’t have to spell these things out. I went out of my way to make sure that it would be an intimate and very quiet look at a rifle in action. Men in war don’t talk about the war. The only thing I remember from three years is not, “What are we doing here?” or “Why are we fighting?” but “Why the hell isn’t there somebody here to relieve us?” and “Where is K Company?” and “Where is I Company?”
Q: It’s a question of survival rather than comradeship?
A: You are right: “I don’t mind if Tom Ryan and the 2nd Platoon gets killed.” I am using your name as an example, but that is exactly the dialogue. We would say, “Fuck ‘em, they got it. But we made it.” Now that is the story of the infantry!
In the action at Omaha Beach, my real sergeant rattled off those numbers just the way Marvin does: number one, number two, number three, number four—just like that. No emotion. That’s the overall thing I tried to get in this film—and, as far as women are concerned, I caught it—is the lack of emotion these men had. That to me is the emotion of the entire film.
Q: You have written a novel called The Rifle about Vietnam, but it doesn’t seem to be available in Australia.
A: It will be published in Flemish. If the goddamn book is slightly successful, I think I will be able to get British, French, and American publishers. My approach is to tell it from the side of the U.S. in Vietnam, and they are right. And to tell it from the side of the Viet Cong, and they are right. And to tell it from the side of Ho Chi Minh, and he is right. They all feel right when they stand in front of a mirror and look at the goddamn reflections in their eyes and do not blink.
The idea at the end is that not only are they all wrong, they are full of shit. All of them. Do China or the Soviet Union or the U.S. really give a goddamn about a little area called Indo-China, that nobody ever heard about until 1954? One says, “I want to give them their freedom,” and the other says, “I want to give them their freedom.” But both want the crumbs, and they want the cake. That is the story of the book.