From Framework 19 (1982): 26–28. Reprinted by permission of Don Ranvaud.
Don Ranvaud interviewed Samuel Fuller during the Salsomaggiore Film Festival in Italy, 1982.
DR: A lot of things started in Edinburgh. Did the rediscovery of your films at the Edinburgh Fest cause you to change your attitudes to cinema, to make you more self-conscious?
SF: Yes. But I would call it discovery rather than rediscovery because I had never had any kind of accolade before then. When I was invited to Edinburgh, [the Scottish filmmaker] Murray Grigor was there, [programmer] Linda Myles, [critic] Peter Wollen, [critic] Kingsley Canham, and people like that. From Edinburgh Ken Wlaschin called from the London Film Festival, and they went ahead [in London] and did the same thing. Books were written and I became a kind of celebrity to a point where I had to take all the mirrors out of the house where I lived because it went to my head! Seriously, it was a wonderful feeling and I now know how Shirley Temple must have felt. All round I would say that I owe the [Edinburgh Festival] anything that is in connection with making a dollar or being “bankable.”
Edinburgh reminds me of a story I want to make which Murray Grigor was very anxious to produce. I have a story about Dick and Brody, I mean the real Dick and Brody … one hundred years before Robert L. Stevenson was born there was Dick and Brody, the man with two lives. That inspired Stevenson to write Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One day I would like to make this story in Edinburgh, the old Edinburgh down by Dean Bridge with its atmosphere—a certain type of cobblestone streets and gallows and everything else connected with locksmiths and executions.
DR: Your attitude to women is very ambiguous. Some think that you have managed to make birth a male experience in The Big Red One’s tank. On the other hand, women like your pictures a lot because the women characters have “balls,” as you would say.
SF: Well, I did not set out deliberately to have anything to do with a feminist feeling. I did it from a character viewpoint and no matter what the picture is, I thought it would be a very good idea to have a woman as the heavy, a villain—rough. In other movies, it would be a man like Edward Arnold or Claude Rains fighting an idealist, a Jimmy Stewart or a Gary Cooper. I made the woman the heavy and not the romantic little girl like in a [John] Wayne picture, where she waves the cavalrymen off and cries when they return. Women loved my idea. Women in my pictures became an entity, there was no discussion about breasts, about ass, or about sex … nothing. Another example: Forty Guns, a thriller about someone in the American West after the Civil War who collected taxes for the United States. He kept most of the money, figuring that if he collected a thousand dollars, kept nine hundred and sent one hundred to Uncle Sam, that’s a hundred dollars he never would have seen. Generally you have a man doing that, but I thought it would be good to have a woman—[Barbara] Stanwyck played the part. Again, the women loved it. I love the whole idea of any women on the screen having balls because generally they do have balls. Unfortunately man’s rule and man’s beliefs, not the Lord’s, have made them the inferior sex and subjected them to slavery in a form without any stripes, in a jail without any cells. That’s why I’m nutty about any situation in which a woman has big balls and waves them and makes a noise like the clanging of two big shells in bells on any street.
DR: You say that you did not set out deliberately to have anything to do with feminism but you do have strong feelings about the position of women in society.
SF: A woman is a slave, a chattel, she is owned by a man. Because she gives birth to a child, it’s the only thing she has been deemed good for, for thousands of years. Now that is wrong. A woman is a human being just like a man, a woman should have the same rights, women are entitled to equality in every phase of life. When equality in all laws and in every nation is talked about, it’s always in terms of men, including in the United States. The Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal, it doesn’t say men and women. In the United States up until 1926 an American woman who married a foreigner lost her citizenship. In 1926 a law was passed … oh, isn’t that a beautiful law! An American woman marries a foreigner and does not lose her citizenship. The hypocritical irony of that is that even in the 1920s we had this law, and its repeal is just another example of tokenism. We now have women judges, a woman governor, but they are like tokens, it’s like using a black man as a judge, an actor, a director, it is called token—TOKEN. It’s not sincere. Women’s rights should not come from speeches or laws, or parades with pickets, that’s bullshit, good but bullshit. What’s not bullshit is if every man says, goddamnit I’m not better. That is the way I feel about it.
DR: How did you come to be involved in the White Dog project?
SF: First of all White Dog has nothing to do with the color of the animal. White Dog is the definition of a dog trained by a bigot since a puppy to grow up and attack blacks. The way these Ku Klux Klanners and members of the White Citizens’ Council trained people to grow up and hate anyone who is black and anyone with contrary religious beliefs. The original story was written by Romain Gary about twelve years ago, it appeared in Life magazine in its entirety, and they gave him the cover as well. Romain Gary wrote an allegory or parable which was an autobiography of his own life, the life of his wife, Jean Seberg, and the Black Panthers situation. As you know, Jean Seberg took her own life, and soon afterwards Romain Gary did the same. When Paramount bought the story seven or eight years ago it was for Robert Evans to produce and Roman Polanski to direct. Since, they have had seven or eight scripts—then I was called in. Jon Davison, the successful young producer of Airplane!, said he would not make the picture unless I wrote and directed it and that’s how I met him.
DR: In order to be a good filmmaker, or make a good film, one has to be a “good cannibal,” would you agree?
SF: Yes, 100 percent, in that form and on those terms. Do you want an example? Wim Wenders recently made a film called The State of Things. The film is about a movie crew at work on location until there is no money and they stop production, which is where the cannibalism sets in. The director of the film, played by Patrick Bauchau, goes to Hollywood to look for the producer and find out what has happened to the money. Wim then concentrates on the crew and the actors waiting for the producer. If this were not called The State of Things it could be called “Waiting for Godard,” the director, or “Waiting for Beckett,” the producer, or “Waiting for Righty” instead of “Lefty” by [Clifford] Odets. The cannibalism which starts amongst the members of the crew behind the camera and the actors in front is symbolic of life in general covering every emotion from avarice, sensuality, to regret. I haven’t seen the film, it’s [maybe] opening at Cannes. I play the cameraman, a member of the crew, loosely based on Joe Biroc—a real cameraman who worked with me on a number of pictures. Wim had many artistic touches and I like his tempo—a European tempo, that to me is a superior tempo.
If you make any scenes with violence, [that tempo] is excellent: Fritz Lang’s M, and the explosive response to the child molester. The cannibalism and cannibalization which takes place [in M] amongst the thieves and underworld of Berlin in order to make sure they catch the child killer, so that the cops will leave them alone, takes place among the crew in The State of Things. How they eat each other and devour each other! If the actors come up to par with what [Wenders] had in mind, I think he will have a piss cutter of a picture.
DR: But I was also referring to the emotional drain involved with production that rests on a form of cannibalism.
SF: Now that is the mental form. It’s not 100 percent strain but it’s a drain, it drains the blood, the ambition, the plans, the dreams out of everyone. People snap at each other. It’s like being entombed in a prison where you enjoy what you are doing, you don’t want it to come to an end. But the monotony, the repetition, the waiting for shots can unnerve you, and you become cannibalistic in your approach. It’s a highly charged emotional situation when you live together on location. It’s different from being on stage, at least there you can go home every night, here you’re stuck together. The word cannibalism is an excellent word, it can mean mental, it can mean physical, or cultural, or spiritual.
DR: Which film do you feel closest to today?
SF: Script-wise my favorite picture was a complete failure when it came out, Park Row, because it was a nostalgic picture about a generation I never experienced. It was about people who lived a hundred years before I was born, but it’s also about a street which I grew up in. I love newspapers and, until I was thirteen, fifteen, that was my dream [job]. When I was seventeen, I was a crime reporter. By the time I was twenty-two, twenty-three, I found out that it was all a lot of bullshit and so I lost my goddamn interest in being a newspaperman. You have to die poor when you’re a newspaperman. But I still love the history of journalism, and Park Row is my favorite picture.
The story takes place in 1886 and I had a travelling shot of a man walking down the street and he passes the newspaper offices. Karl Marx worked for the New York World, and when the man passes the World, I put in a big photograph of Karl Marx with the beard. The people in the crew thought it was one of the Smith Brothers, who made cough drops! Only one editor, Cameron of the San Francisco Chronicle, recognized Marx in the picture.
DR: What importance do you give to the script?
SF: Almost 100 percent are my original scripts. The script is something I love to do, whether they like it or not, whether it is good or bad. I am in love with it, and it is the star of any picture I make. If a famous actor can play it, I am very happy, if he cannot play it, I’d use you, my boy … it makes no difference. You would be right for the part I thought of early in the morning. Nobody is with me at five or six in the morning when I’m typing, it’s my baby. The story is the most important thing in anything, be it a film, a play, or a book. I like to tell stories. Unfortunately, today making a movie has become too big, so that you now have over a hundred people in a crew. The fortunate part is that if you have a crew of five thousand or twenty, the people who pay to see a movie don’t give a damn how much it cost or how many people worked in it. They want to know what the story is about. The script is the czar of the whole goddamn film world.
DR: I would have thought Underworld U.S.A. may have been a “favorite” of yours—or maybe it’s just one of mine …
SF: Every time the underworld took one hundred dollars or one million dollars that meant no taxes for Uncle Sam. That made the politicians very unhappy, it made me very happy—that is why I wanted to make the film. Actually I’d like to be in the underworld to make three million, four million, ten million dollars … ha … ha … ha, and say, “Good morning” to the President. I used real names from every department of gangsterism. I met some of the men and I liked them, I liked them a lot more than many of the political people I met. I knew where they stood, and generally I found that most of them were very honorable men except to the people they killed and robbed. I met the head of Columbia, and I suggested using the most famous character in the past two hundred years for adventure. I told him the story of the Count of Monte Cristo and how the young Count was betrayed by three men, and how he got revenge. You are familiar with the Dumas book, The Count of Monte Cristo? That is Underworld U.S.A. It was not quite the film I wanted to make. I had to leave out the amount of money made and the names of the men involved making that money. But it was very successful in the United States for, even though I only touched on crime, it was responded to by the newspaper people [across] the nation. I don’t want you to go around thinking that I make up stories [saying] that crime does pay. I didn’t make that up—out of one hundred crimes committed only two or three are actually solved. I thought it would be very funny if a young man uses the FBI to avenge himself and find the killers of his father, that is why I made that picture.
DR: Your films have been accused of being imperialist and politically reactionary.
SF: When I make a film I am not interested in the political climate, I am interested in the climate as far as the character is concerned. I’ll give you an example. I made a war picture many years ago called The Steel Helmet. I was on the front page of The People’s World and the Daily Worker who suggested that the film was financed by [General] MacArthur. The Hearst labor columnist Victor Riesel also wrote about the movie. I didn’t read it but my mother did, and she rang me in New York and said: “Good morning, Comrade, how are you?” and proceeded to read [to me] the article. Riesel said that this man must be investigated, that he had turned my name over to the Pentagon for making a picture which has a United States soldier shoot down an unarmed prisoner of war, a Manchurian major in Korea. The minute this happened, the men who put up the money said, “Well, we have a controversial hit.”
I had an idea of a picture about Russia at the time of the Cold War in 1952 called Red Square but we couldn’t get anyone in the country to make it. I wanted to do twenty-four hours in the life of a Russian soldier. The minute the picture was announced, they said that I was a radical. When you take a contemporary political subject, the easiest thing to do is to make a propaganda film, to make a picture that interests you from a political situation and not a human situation. If I had made a picture of Stalin in Russia before the War, the capitalist would say that I am a Communist, a fanatic, but everyone in Russia would say I’m a hero.
When some people call my pictures “imperialistic,” it makes me laugh. I don’t make my pictures anti or pro anything political. If my character is involved, say I make a picture about a Russian spy who is double-crossed by everybody in the United States, that doesn’t mean I’m a Communist or pro-Communist or anti-American, it means my character doesn’t like the United States. If you do want to make a film about your political philosophy, you must not make a film for your friends, you must not make a film where everybody who believes ideologically the way you believe will see it. You must make a film that the enemy will see, the people who don’t believe what you believe in, if you really believe it.
DR: But surely you cannot separate what you call the human from the political?
SF: OK. Let me give you an example. When I was very young I knew some newspapermen who were very friendly with Ezra Pound. I read his Cantos. Some I understood, some I didn’t, but what I did understand I liked very much. As years went by, Ezra Pound became a traitor in the United States, lived in Italy, worked for Benito Mussolini, and made speeches for fascism. Being an American I would say, “My God, he’s a son-of-a-bitch.” I began to think of his Cantos in terms of his politics. Only when he wrote them, they were not political—that’s the mistake I made. I then read them and didn’t like them, but I was wrong. What he believed in, that was his own business, even if he was wrong. It is somebody else’s business, if he’s wrong, to either change his mind or kill him … that’s politics. Now I look back on Ezra Pound from an artistic point of view. You should never let the political situation interfere with the character you are writing about. Never.
DR: In 1957 you made a film about Vietnam called China Gate. What do you think of recent treatments of the subject, particularly Apocalypse Now?
SF: I liked Apocalypse. John Milius wrote the screenplay and was going to direct it, but there was a change of plan. However, we lost a war, we invaded [Vietnam] and we lost. I wanted somebody to say that we had lost, but America is a new country and we are not used to defeat. I like both Coppola and Milius, I like them and I like their work. Coppola’s work is socially on one side of the rainbow, Milius has worked on the reactionary side of the rainbow. It’s immaterial to me. You know, in 1967 I wrote a book and a screenplay about Vietnam told by a twelve-year-old Viet Cong soldier. His god is Ho Chi Minh, his godfather is General Diap, who defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. The whole war is told through the eyes of the boy. I did nothing with the book until last year when I met a man called Walter Soethoudt, a publisher in Brussels, who was interested in the book. I told him that he wouldn’t publish it because it is against every country in the world. No country cares about a place called Laos, Cambodia, or Vietnam. It’s a little piece of the cake, it doesn’t mean anything. He published the book, it’s called The Rifle, and it is doing very well now in Belgium. In the book, I detail all the actions of every nation involved in Indo-China, their indifference to it, and all the horror which means nothing to them because they are not involved in all the horror. At the opening of the novel, the little boy sees a plane in the air and his mother and father thrown out of it without parachutes. If this book is any success at all, I’ll hear what all the political people have to say about it. I don’t think that they will publish it in America and I don’t think they will publish it in France. If this book does come out, it’ll give anybody a pretty good idea of how I feel about getting involved in something emotionally and then doing nothing about it.