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00:00David Wolper was a key figure in American documentaries and in American television.
00:12Why and how did you get to work with him?
00:16Well, actually I got to work with David Wolper because Wolper was one of the few people then
00:23and even now who would hire people right off the street to work in film.
00:31And I hadn't gone to film school, I wasn't really, I mean, I was always a film buff,
00:36but I didn't actually know what a film buff was.
00:39I mean, I just knew that I liked films and went to see films all the time.
00:43And I'd gone to school in Europe, in Germany, and I spoke German.
00:48And I had also, at that time, gone to school in Spain and worked in Mexico,
00:53so I was fluent in Germany and Spain.
00:56I knew European history fairly well.
00:59I didn't really have any particular qualification.
01:02And Wolper hired me as a researcher.
01:07He was just open to new people.
01:09And that's how I got hired and that's pretty much how Billy got hired.
01:13But what did he bring to a documentary and in particular a television documentary that wasn't there?
01:20Well, what Wolper did in the television documentary was that up until then,
01:26there were Edward R. Murrow and the TV news departments were basically the only source of documentary.
01:32And Wolper made a film called The Race for Space and got Mike Wallace to narrate it.
01:39And Wolper and Haley tended to treat the subjects like movies.
01:44And so they used music.
01:46They used sound effects.
01:48You know, they added sound effects.
01:50I mean, in the older documentaries and the newsroom documentaries, when cannons,
01:54when they showed Second World War footage and bombs were falling and cannons fired,
01:58you didn't hear the cannons or the bombs.
02:00You know, you just saw the image.
02:02And Wolper started making documentaries like they were with the same kind of dressing that movies were made.
02:11And they were accurate, but they looked for the things that were dramatic.
02:15And it distinguished the style.
02:18And within a couple of years, the Wolper documentary style, you know, was like,
02:23people were going, wow, this is terrific.
02:25They were very excited by it.
02:26And then the networks themselves began imitating it.
02:29Which is probably why also they like so much People vs. Paul Crum,
02:32because that's not like any documentary you can really see.
02:36Yeah.
02:37It's got dramatic reenactments.
02:38Oh, yeah.
02:39No, and Billy took it even a step further.
02:41He took it the furthest of any of it.
02:43When Friedkin came, People vs. Crum was very, very much a Wolper type show without being a Wolper show.
02:54And I think it was Mel Stewart and David Wolper went to San Francisco and saw it.
02:59And they came back and they wanted this guy really bad.
03:03And when he came to Wolper on the basis of that film, you know, I mean, he's always been a movie maker.
03:12And basically, Wolper said, come here.
03:16And I think the first, it was way out, no, The Bold Men, I think was his first show.
03:21And his screening with Wolper, it was one of the memorable screenings.
03:25I think it was a disaster.
03:27It was a total disaster.
03:28Wolper took off his shoe and threw it at the screen.
03:32And he said, when the white hot light comes on, the shit falls and it lays like bricks on the floor.
03:41And Wolper had a reputation for hysterical screening.
03:47And Billy said, only you could have said that, Dave.
03:51And he walked out.
03:53And I was working at David Wolper probably for three years before Billy came from Chicago to work with David Wolper.
04:07And I was his very first editor for when he came to David Wolper.
04:13And we did a film called The Bold Men.
04:16And that was my first experience with him, my first film with him.
04:22And I was supposed to be the guy that knew about filmmaking.
04:26And he was the new guy coming into town.
04:29And he taught me more on that film than anything.
04:32What was particular about him, even compared to the filmmakers that were working for Wolper?
04:37Well, I mean, he was experimental.
04:39Well, the other guys are very documentarian and very straightforward.
04:43You know, pretty much exposition, as you say.
04:46And his was a little bit more abstract.
04:50And, you know, it's like when he did a sequence on Art Arfonz,
04:54who was this guy who went 500 miles an hour on the salt flats.
04:58Well, we were cutting a scene and he was in the backseat shooting over shoulder of this guy, Art Arfonz,
05:05driving to the salt flats.
05:07And he did a little zoom into the mirror, which then reflected back into the guy's eyes,
05:12which made an extreme close-up of his eyes.
05:15And in that, it's called In the Mind's Eye of someone.
05:19And we did a flashback of what he was thinking about.
05:22He was thinking about his friend that was driving this car on the salt flats that crashed and killed him.
05:28Killed himself.
05:29And that was the first time I'd ever really been involved with that kind of filmmaking,
05:35where you really get inside of someone's head.
05:38He and I hit it off great, and I did that film with him,
05:42and I cut a half of another film with him called Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon.
05:50Billy was into making films about people, but making them very dramatic.
05:55And Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon, for example, you know, everybody thought,
06:00oh, it's a disaster.
06:01He's going to do a film about, there was a football team.
06:06I think it was San Francisco.
06:08Yes.
06:09And it was following these guys, and then they lost.
06:12And Billy didn't have a problem with that because he knew,
06:14I can dramatically construct the show.
06:17It isn't about winning or losing the game.
06:19It's the dramatic construct of trying to get this team to win.
06:24But still, your work and his work has, compared to the filmmakers that went to film school,
06:29has a really much stronger relationship with reality.
06:33Billy and I have always connected on that when we worked together
06:37because he never, anytime you could say this happened, or here's something,
06:45or this actually happened, or this is a place, or this is a person,
06:49or this is a character, a real character, he gets it right away.
06:54Anytime you say we could invent someone who, he doesn't want to know that.
06:58And the range of material when we were talking about scripts, I mean, the range of stuff that we would look at,
07:04which people would think has nothing to do with the film and often didn't, you know, was limitless.
07:11I mean, when I was writing Sorcerer, you know, we were both looking at Barbe Schroeder's film on Amin Dada,
07:20and, you know, I mean, we were looking at films about these experiments that were done at a university
07:28about coercing people to do bad, you know, you know about that famous experiment?
07:33No.
07:34Well, they put these people in a room, and they had an actor that the people couldn't see,
07:37and they'd say, you're going to push this button, and it gives a person a very mild shock.
07:42And they would push the button, and it'd go, oh, like that.
07:45And then they'd say, push it a little harder, and push it a little harder.
07:47And then finally, the person would be screaming.
07:49And they'd say, well, I don't want to do this. It sounds like it's really hurting.
07:52They'd say, no, you have to do it. You signed up to do the experiment.
07:55You've agreed to do it. Now you must do it.
07:57And these people were, like, shocking these people, like, in the other room until they thought they were killing him.
08:02It basically showed you that you can coerce people into inhuman behavior.
08:07We looked, I mean, that was a film made for, you know, for just classroom film.
08:14But we looked at all that stuff. We always went to what the reality of the situation was.
08:20And I mean, I think, you know, because I'd lived in, I'd lived in, I'd been in South America.
08:26I spoke Spanish. I lived in Latin America, you know.
08:29When Sorcerer came along, I was, that was, for him, I think, a bigger qualification than the writing I had done.
08:37He and Bud Smith had been talking, and Smith had said, he said, I'm looking for a guy to write Sorcerer.
08:42And he wanted Terry Mallon, and, who was doing another movie.
08:47And Bud said, well, you know, it takes place in South America.
08:54You know, Waylon Green lived in South America. He wrote The Wild Bunch.
08:57He's lived in Latin America. He speaks Spanish, and he knows it.
09:00And so he called me, and it's funny, because someone else had once approached me to do a remake of The Wages of Fear, and I turned it down.
09:09Who was that?
09:10It was Jack Haley, and Steve McQueen. And McQueen was the perfect guy.
09:16Uh-huh.
09:17And that was who we angel.
09:18You wanted him.
09:19Yeah, we wanted him.
09:20And, uh, but I thought, but Jack, I thought, was too light. You know, he's too lightweight in his approach.
09:31But when Billy said, Wages of Fear, he didn't say McQueen. He said, Wages of Fear, shoot it in South America.
09:40So what kind of discussions were you to start having on Wages of Fear?
09:45Well, first, you know, I mean, there was this movie, and there was a book, and then he really wanted to know about, you know, we started talking about the characters, who they could be in today's world.
09:58And I wanted to go, I said, I'd like to, let's try something, let's try like an Arab, let's try a Palestinian, you know, as one of the characters.
10:12Because that's buried today, and it's also somebody that, if he does something heroic, it'll be unexpected, you know.
10:20Because there was such a prejudice towards, you know, any kind of decent portrayal of Middle Eastern characters.
10:29He was totally, yeah, great.
10:31And then, originally, I wrote, I think, 60 or 70 pages that probably wouldn't have been a bad script for Sam Peckinpah, but he hated it.
10:41What was it that was more from Peckinpah than for Christie?
10:46I don't remember, really, but I just know it wasn't. We weren't in tune yet.
10:51And he dumped, you know, he said, are you willing to dump this and start, you know, I said, absolutely.
10:56So then, I said, you know, I think the best way for us to work is, let's just do it scene at a time.
11:04Which is an unusual way, actually, for a writer and director to work.
11:08Because, I said, instead of me going off and writing a bunch of, let me write an opening scene.
11:14And then when you like that opening scene, I'll write the next scene.
11:17And when you like that scene, I'll write the next scene.
11:20And then we'll kind of talk about the story as we're doing that.
11:25And he said, yeah, let's do that.
11:28And, I mean, most people would have fired me, I think, at that point.
11:32You get 60 pages you don't like, you usually say, this guy doesn't work.
11:37Did you work more looking into the novel or looking into the film?
11:42Well, we had all kinds of legal problems.
11:45We could only use this from the film and that from the novel.
11:48And, you know, I mean, we had like all these weird, the guy who wrote the novel hated the guy who made the Clouseau.
11:56It was hated by Arnaud.
11:58And Arnaud wouldn't let us use this.
12:00It was in the film.
12:01It was all this kind of French political complexity.
12:05And so we just said, well, let's go with the bones of the idea.
12:11It's a funky town and people are there.
12:13They're desperate.
12:14He said, let's start with a prologue that shows how they got there.
12:18He likes prologue.
12:20Yeah, he likes prologue.
12:22And we'll shoot it in wherever it happened.
12:24He likes that too.
12:26But what about the Sorcerer?
12:27You were a co-producer as well, the Sorcerer?
12:29Well, I was actually an associate producer on that.
12:32Yeah.
12:33Because I was, when I went from the Exorcist doing all the foreign versions, we were going
12:37right into doing Sorcerer.
12:39And Waylon Green and Billy, as I told you before, they're writing.
12:44And Wally had been in South America, so he knew all these different places.
12:49And they sent me to South America to scout locations on film.
12:53So I took a camera, 16mm camera.
12:56And I went to, first I went to Mexico.
12:59And then I went to Ecuador.
13:04And then I went to, well, I went to Peru, but they kicked us out of Peru.
13:10They didn't want us to.
13:11And then I went to Brazil.
13:13It's been about, went up the end.
13:15Every place, every country I'd go to, I'd come back to Los Angeles.
13:18And I'd cut together the beginning, middle, and end of the journey.
13:22You know, from the time they got the dynamite in the truck up over the Andes, so to speak,
13:28and down to, um, to wherever they were supposed to deliver the nitro to blow out the fire.
13:34Yeah.
13:35Which was really in the Amazon.
13:37Um, but yeah, I spent a year scouting locations in all these different South American countries
13:44while they were writing.
13:46And I would come back.
13:47And then finally, Billy, while I was in, I figured what country I was in.
13:50But I had an assistant editor who would get all the film as I would ship it back
13:54and put it to, you know, put the dailies together and Billy would look at it.
13:58I like this, I like that.
14:00And, uh, so then he decided he would go through every country, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela,
14:05Brazil, Peru, Mexico, New Mexico, Colorado, and cut together what his ideal location was.
14:14So it was a little bit of everything that we shot, you know, as, as like the, the big mountain road was in Colombia.
14:23I mean, it was in Colorado.
14:25You could have shot it there, but we found a place in Dominican to shoot.
14:29Um, but anyway, it was really ironic that they'd take a bit of Ecuador and a bit of Brazil and a bit of Colombia
14:36and a bit of Venezuela.
14:37What is ideal?
14:38What is ideal?
14:39These are ideal locations.
14:41So, but then we got the production designers involved, which was John Box and Roy Walker,
14:47who were David Lean's guys.
14:49Yeah.
14:50And actually they ran the film.
14:52They, you know, gave them great inspiration of ideas of how to build sets.
14:57And Billy didn't want them to build sets.
14:58He wanted the practical stuff, like what I'd shot on film.
15:02So then they had to set off and go into this recce, as they call it, scouting locations.
15:08And then I finally wound up going with them and showing the places that I went to.
15:13Uh-huh.
15:14And then we came back and decided we would shoot in Ecuador.
15:17This is the ideal, ideal perfect location for the movie.
15:21The studio said, no, you can't, because we can't get war insurance.
15:25So we had to, then Billy freaked out and sent the script to all the studios saying, you know,
15:31you can't do it universally, you can do it Paramount or someplace else.
15:35And Charlie Bluhorn said, if you go to the Dominican Republic, I'll give you as much money as you need.
15:41So we went to the Dominican Republic and built things and made it do.
15:47Otherwise we probably would have never got the film made.
15:49Sorcerer had a very long pre-production and we went to these places and we,
15:55I mean, we had direct experience in the place and we absorbed what we saw.
16:00It was sort of funny because there was a guy, he wanted a guy,
16:04he wanted Lino Ventura.
16:06It was a really good, terrific French actor.
16:08He wanted him to play the French guy.
16:10And Lino Ventura was a big French star.
16:13And I don't think, I certainly didn't realize,
16:15I don't think even Billy realized what a big French movie star really is, you know,
16:20because we always assumed, well, so he's a big French movie star.
16:24I mean, you offer him an American movie, he'll want to be in it.
16:27But Lino Ventura was the star of every movie he was in.
16:31And the other thing about him was that just politically he was sort of,
16:36he was not really a left-wing guy, let me put it that way,
16:39since I don't know what his politics actually were.
16:42And the script read very left-wing.
16:45So when he showed it to Ventura and Ventura said,
16:49well, he had a problem with that.
16:50He didn't believe that Latin America was really like that anymore.
16:53He said that, you know, there aren't these poor towns exploited by oil companies and so forth.
16:58Oh, no.
16:59And Billy said, well, come on, you know, I mean, is this bullshit?
17:04I mean, you've got to be, this has to be real.
17:07I'm not going to make something that's some political message of my left-wing writer.
17:12You know, I mean, I said, absolutely.
17:15I said, you know, come on.
17:17He said, well, we've got to see that.
17:19So we went to Ecuador and we saw this town called Esmeraldas.
17:25And it wasn't Esmeraldas, but it was near there.
17:29I can't remember the area.
17:30But it was like unbelievable, you know.
17:32And it was an oil company town.
17:34Is it true that Paramount got involved because they had some interest in, you know, one of the kinds of work?
17:40Yeah.
17:41Paramount.
17:42One of the major reasons for Paramount getting involved was because they, they,
17:47Gulf and Western is a sugar company with holdings in the Dominican Republic.
17:52And they said, if you can make the movie in Dominican Republic, we'll make the movie.
17:59So.
18:00And then you know that he put the chairman of the board of Paramount's picture on the wall in the American oil company.
18:08I didn't even know about that.
18:10The Charles Woodham.
18:11Yeah, Charles Woodham.
18:12It was hysterical.
18:14Yeah.
18:15So, the film is so, that's another really tight film of this.
18:19I mean, it's practically, it's virtually a silent film.
18:21You have this, the pro, the three prologues at the beginning with introducing the characters.
18:25Yeah.
18:26That's what they say about them.
18:27And then in tight.
18:28Did he come in with a, with a, with a shot list or, or something?
18:31When you look at all three sequences, they all have a different style.
18:35Yeah.
18:36You know, the French is a very soft, pastel-y, nice Dali moves and things, very slow and languish.
18:44Then you go to Israel and it's just like, it's like action, you know.
18:49I mean, it's a, it is action.
18:51It's all like total action in Israel.
18:54Then you go to, go to New Jersey and you turn it into a 1950s robbery film.
19:00You know, so it's like three separate styles completely.
19:03Yeah.
19:04Then you finally wind up in South America and you get the third style, which is the devastation
19:11of the setting.
19:13How hard was to edit Sorcerer and, and?
19:16Well, you know, I was there, I was in Paris, in Israel, in New Jersey.
19:22And I didn't start cutting the film until I was in New Jersey.
19:25But I would, you know, I was on location every day when, when we were shooting on the set.
19:31And I was shooting 16 millimeter of behind the scenes, the making of movie.
19:35Mm-hmm.
19:36Like what I did on the.
19:37Yeah.
19:38To live and die.
19:39You know.
19:40I was just capturing Freedkin as he was directing, but I didn't have a sound man with me.
19:44So everything is silent.
19:46Um, but then I would go off and I would shoot like in Israel when the, when the bank blows
19:53up.
19:54There's a shot.
19:55It was a 16 millimeter shot.
19:56I was across the street behind a stone fence, stone wall.
19:59I put the camera up like this.
20:01As soon as it blew up, I just snap zoomed right into it.
20:05And you see a guy flying out of the debris.
20:08Uh-huh.
20:09And that's a 16 millimeter shot.
20:10And then when this car is burning up after that, that's a 16 millimeter shot that I shot
20:15on some of the street.
20:17And I just cut him, cut him in.
20:19And, uh, well I cut him in because Billy saw the shots and said, well those would be great
20:23in the movie.
20:24So we just blew him up to 35 and cut him in.
20:27And, uh, same with a couple other shots at 16.
20:31The one where the truck goes over the side and blows up.
20:34Yeah.
20:35That's a 16 millimeter shot from way off where it looks like a big mushroom.
20:39Uh-huh.
20:40That's a 16.
20:41Wow, it's seamless.
20:42Yeah.
20:43But I was there, you know, like once I started cutting, I didn't really start, I started cutting
20:48in New York when we had the crash of the car with the robbers from the church.
20:54That's a beautiful crash.
20:55Well, it took us two weeks to do it and it took 13 cars to do it.
21:00Really?
21:01What was so hard about it?
21:02Well, when you hit the back of a truck, you know, it hit like this.
21:06What Billy wanted was the car to go up like this on its top and slide across the street,
21:11hit a water main and then go up.
21:14Well, it's almost impossible to do it.
21:19But we had all this footage of them hitting and then Billy got inside the thing and he started
21:24doing the camera just swirling around like this.
21:27So we got it hitting like that.
21:29We got the approach, the hit, the interior swirl, but we didn't have the upside down slide.
21:36Uh-huh.
21:37So the next weekend we could only shoot on Sundays when there was a big marketplace of trucks
21:42and things.
21:43The next weekend we brought in a guy named Joey Chidwood Jr. who did nothing but put cars
21:50up on the side and go on two wheels, you know.
21:52It's a circus thing.
21:54Uh-huh.
21:55So he built a little ramp.
21:56We had the truck sitting here, covering it.
21:58Shot it from different angles.
22:00And he just went up this ramp, rolled it over across the street, hit the water main and
22:05blew up, got out of the car and went home.
22:08One take.
22:09One take with multi-cameras.
22:11The scene in Elizabeth, New Jersey was an actual church that was actually robbed.
22:16And one of the guys who plays one of the robbers was one of the guys who robbed the church,
22:24unbeknownst to the church, because it was the actual church that we shot at.
22:29And he hadn't been back there since they had robbed it.
22:34How did he get it?
22:37He'd never been caught.
22:40And so he played one of the robbers.
22:43I think the scene I rewrote the most was the scene in the truck on their way, when Nilo
22:51is dying, you know, and he's talking to the guy in the truck.
22:54We tried a million versions of that scene.
22:57That scene was rewritten about 40 times.
23:01And we talked to people who had been with people who died.
23:06We interviewed people who had been with guys in the war.
23:10You know, we tried it.
23:12I mean, and we couldn't find the reality of the scene.
23:16And, you know, documentary guys you wanted to go back to.
23:21I mean, every time I wrote something, it was just bullshit.
23:24I mean, because I never had that experience.
23:27And neither had he.
23:29And so we tried to talk to people who had it and so forth and so on and on and on.
23:38You know, the great thing about Billy is you could come up with something really wacky.
23:43Like, I had a Doberman Pinscher then.
23:47He was a great dog.
23:49He was really crazy.
23:51He had this enormous energy.
23:54And if you drove up a windy road in your car, he would try to jump out.
24:00He'd drive you crazy until you let him out of the car.
24:03And then as you were driving up the road, you know, he would run alongside.
24:07He would run like in front of the car.
24:09And he would come around the car.
24:10He'd bark at you through the window.
24:12I mean, he did like this dance around the car.
24:15And there was something, on the one hand, entertaining, but it was slightly unnerving and dangerous,
24:21you know.
24:22And I said, what if when they start out, you know, on the trip there's this Indian who sees
24:30the truck and runs and he dances around the truck and so forth.
24:35And, you know, and I said, and it's like some kind of weird, it disturbs them.
24:42It's just, it's like some strange omen, you know what I mean?
24:45But it, it has no meaning, you know, it's just a crazy Indian, you know, like my dog,
24:50you know, energetic, and he plays with the truck.
24:53But it's unsettling.
24:54You know, it's unsettling.
24:56And, you know, he said, great, let's do it.
24:58I mean, we did it.
24:59Well, I tell you, I've never met another director who would do that scene.
25:02At that time, we were two weeks ahead of schedule of doing the, the, the Israel, Paris, New
25:09Jersey.
25:10We fell back a week in New York.
25:12But we were still two weeks ahead when we hit Dominican Republic.
25:15And then we came to a screeching halt because Billy didn't like the set.
25:19He didn't like what he was seeing.
25:20You mean the village?
25:21The village.
25:22The opening, you know, the pigs and the people and early morning trucks coming in.
25:28Yeah.
25:29That whole little sequence.
25:30So what did you have to alter on that?
25:32Well, he's late.
25:33He had to just shut it down, shut the cameras down and just build a set.
25:37I see.
25:38You know, the way he wanted it.
25:40And that took a couple of weeks.
25:44And so that put us back on schedule, right on schedule.
25:48But from that point on, we slowly slipped from rain, from weather.
25:52Still, he would only shoot in the morning and the evening because of the light.
25:57He hated that midday sunlight and the hot sunlight.
26:00So that slowed us down a little bit too.
26:03But he was right.
26:04I mean, you know, you look at the film and if he shot it in hot white light, it would just
26:10be ugly.
26:11It's like the sequence when they're going through the jungle with the trucks and they
26:16see the old man on the side of the road with the rain coming down and all that.
26:20Well, part of that was shot in the rain and part of it was shot without rain because it
26:26stopped raining.
26:27So we had to get, you know, rain birds and things.
26:30And then it didn't photograph because you got a backlighter.
26:34So when we put it all together, we had to do an optical rain of rain coming in different
26:40directions for that scene.
26:42And then all the trucks crossing the bridge, we did that and the same thing, rain.
26:46But if you're at a 250 millimeter lens shooting across and seeing the drivers drive, well,
26:51you're not seeing any rain.
26:53Of course, you see any rain.
26:54It's like shooting through a fence.
26:55Yeah.
26:56You can shoot through it and you don't see it until you pull back.
27:00But we shot all this rain footage against black with backlight and we supered all those
27:06shots right into this.
27:07I see.
27:08How long did it take to shoot the bridge scene?
27:10Six weeks.
27:11Yep.
27:12Six weeks.
27:13With six cameras.
27:15And I was cutting the film in Mexico, in Tuxtapec, Mexico, in a little Winnebago.
27:22Not a big one, but a little one.
27:24It's a pickup truck kind of thing.
27:26I was in the back of a Winnebago with my chem editing machine and my assistant.
27:32And, I mean, that film was expensive for those years, right?
27:36But it was very powerful at the time.
27:38At that time, Dr. Stein, I think it was at Universal, who hired him and gave him a three-picture
27:45deal based on The French Connection and The Exorcist.
27:49And at that time, like Billy said, I could have filmed the phone book and they would have
27:56distributed it.
27:57At that time, you know.
27:59But then Stein kind of went out of power and then Wasserman and Scheinberg came in.
28:05Scheinberg and Billy would get along at all.
28:08Oh.
28:09Not at all.
28:10Because he didn't want to, he banned them from looking at the dailies.
28:12He couldn't even look at the dailies.
28:15At least no one.
28:16He said, if you look at my dailies, he said, I'll stop shooting.
28:20And we're like 10 million in.
28:22You know?
28:23That's poker playing.
28:26And Billy's a very good poker player, too.
28:29I mean, really, physically, he is a good poker player.
28:32Now, he has said, in many interviews, I think you've said it, that the Petrified Forest
28:37was a big influence.
28:39No, Treasure of Sierra Madre, sorry.
28:41Oh, yeah.
28:42Yeah.
28:43It was on both of our 10 best lists.
28:46We got it and ran it.
28:48You know?
28:49Because in those days, you didn't look at video.
28:51So that kind of breakdown of people, you know.
28:54These are all, the people in this, it was sort of the flip side of it.
28:59Because the people in Treasure of Sierra Madre were all decent people.
29:04And gold destroyed them.
29:06And in Sorcerer, the people were all flawed people, you know.
29:12But the chance to be something, the chance of success or heroism of any kind, elevated
29:19them.
29:20So it was sort of the flip side of that.
29:22And then, you know, we both believed that it wasn't fair to have people in the end win
29:30just because they had done a good job, you know.
29:33Because that really isn't the way, you know, nature in the end doesn't care.
29:39Yeah.
29:40And so, it has an existential in it.
29:44This preoccupation with destiny, a sort of, it seems to be a preoccupation that you
29:49and him both share.
29:50I mean, him in several films.
29:52Yeah.
29:53And you in that work.
29:54No, I know.
29:55We've been criticized for it, you know.
29:56But it's true.
29:57Why criticize?
29:58Well, people say, you have too dark of you or, you know, give us a break.
30:04But they weren't that, it wasn't that kind of film.
30:06I mean, I could, I could write a happy melodrama or a film with a happy ending, sure, as easily
30:12as I could write the other.
30:14But if I was going to write a serious film about the way people interact with the world,
30:19I don't believe that the happiness of the ending can be determined by the heroism of the
30:25people.
30:26Heroism is not success.
30:29Heroism is failure and the ability to fail and continue doing it.
30:34You know, a great, a guy, a brain surgeon, you know, who saves a person and then has five
30:41people die.
30:42He's a hero if he can operate on the sixth.
30:45You know, it's, it's the ability to face failure but continue to strive.
30:51And because I think there's too much luck involved in everything.
30:57And I don't think, you know, I think otherwise it's demeaning to the word heroic if the person,
31:03if heroism only has to do with success.
31:06Yeah.
31:07It's a beautiful film.
31:08I really, I really, I really like this one.
31:09Yeah.
31:10It's been a long time since I've screened it.
31:14So.
31:15I can't wait to see it on a big screen.
31:17You know, it looks okay on the DVD but I can't.
31:19Oh no, you gotta see it on the big screen.
31:21Oh, I can't wait to see it again.
31:22Yeah.
31:23And you, when they cut the film, you know, so the film opened here and then it didn't
31:27do well.
31:28It was not, it was not successful.
31:29And then it was, was it breaking that said that if other country distributors wanted to
31:34make changes, they could?
31:35I mean, no.
31:36No, it didn't.
31:37No.
31:38No.
31:39They, they went ahead and did the changes.
31:40No, CIC went and recut the film with a editor, a very famous editor, Jim Clark.
31:46And Jim called Greek and told him that, you know, he did it, you know, he was paid to
31:53do it.
31:54You know, so they did it.
31:55They took the prologues, the three prologues and spread them through the movie.
31:59Flashbacks?
32:00Like flashbacks.
32:01Yeah.
32:02As they were driving the truck on the Bonny road, there was a flashback to Paris.
32:05And then he says it's six o'clock and there he, you know, they need a flashback to Paris.
32:10Yeah.
32:11Well, I, Billy told me about it and I had to get on a plane and I was in Boston doing
32:17a Brinks job with it.
32:18And I flew to London to see the film in a theater.
32:21And I took a little tape recorder like this, cause I didn't have a camera with it.
32:26And, uh, I sat in the theater and I ran, just paid to go see a movie and, and recorded
32:32the thing and brought it back.
32:34And he could hear how it had been totally altered.
32:36Yeah.
32:37You know, cause you start off in South America and then everything is flashback.
32:40Yeah.
32:41And it didn't, um, it was totally against the director's guild as his cut.
32:47I think he called it forced majeure.
32:50Yeah.
32:51The huge amount of legal documents there.
32:53Yeah.
32:54And I think he stopped the release of that version in Italy.
32:57And I'm not sure where they stopped it.
32:59I know it was the CIC was the ones who put up the money for us to make the film originally.
33:05And they had distribution, foreign distribution.
33:07Yeah.
33:08And, uh, it was the head of CIC that decided that he would re-cut it.
33:14He would make his version of Sorcerer.
33:16Do you think that, I mean, it's such a beautiful film and these days people really love it.
33:21I mean, for the, like, prison work, they think it's going to be more personal and, and, and, and more accomplished.
33:26And do you think that people were out to get him because it was so powerful?
33:30No.
33:31No.
33:32It could have been a little bit of that.
33:33But I think really what happened is when we opened the Sorcerer, Star Wars opened.
33:39So, in Billy's words, we took him over a mountain and they wanted to go over the moon.
33:44Uh-huh.
33:45And that's really the bottom line.
33:46Yeah.
33:47We were making an adult film, quote, unquote.
33:50And, uh, and we weren't making a, a, a cartoon.
33:53You know, I mean, Star Wars is basically a comic book in Friedkin's language.
33:58You know, it's not really a, you know.
34:00Yeah.
34:01Yeah.
34:02It's a, but, I mean, that was, obviously, that's what sucked all of our audience away.
34:07But, again, we were making an adult film.
34:09You know, it wasn't a kid's film.
34:11And we now know from past history that kids are your main product, main people now that
34:18go see movies.
34:19Yeah, that was the beginning, I guess.
34:20Yeah.
34:21I mean, basically, I think what we did, unknowingly, and not really deliberately, but kind of,
34:26we sort of made a European film as an American film.
34:31You know what I mean?
34:33Because that kind of sensibility of, in the end, losing and not winning, you know, or
34:41in the end, you know, in the end, give, in the end, fate taking, playing the last card,
34:46is very European, and not very American.
34:49I don't know.
34:50Yeah, that's possible.
34:51I, the way I saw it, and I was thinking about it this morning coming here, is when it
34:55came out, it was, what, 77?
34:56Yeah.
34:57Yeah.
34:58You got, what, Charlie?
34:59Yeah, we came out.
35:00Yeah.
35:01You know, and it was really, you know, a hard film compared to, compared to all those
35:06things.
35:07Yeah.
35:08Which, you know, by then, you know, Silver, they all had made their film, which had a
35:11much more, probably less 3D quality.
35:14I mean, even The Godfather, which is a very dark film.
35:17Yeah.
35:18It's sort of...
35:19Still is an operatic.
35:20It's an operatic.
35:21It's an operatic lifting, you know, emotional, emotionally it's lifting.
35:25Exactly.
35:26I mean, nothing new Hollywood was making films that were completely different.
35:29Mm-hmm.
35:30And I think, yours was harder, harder to take.
35:32Yeah.
35:33Yeah.
35:34And so, relentless.
35:35Yeah.
35:36You know, there are no moments.
35:37Well, that was deliberate.
35:38I mean, that was the film we wanted to make.
35:40Yeah, no, it's brilliant.
35:41But I, but I think, I don't think it's a, it's a, I mean, to me, it was never Europe
35:45versus America.
35:46It was really a film that is so advanced and behind at the same time.
35:50Yeah.
35:51Yeah.
35:52No, it definitely...
35:53Well, you know, it's a, it's still to this day, people either love it or hate it.
36:20Oh.
36:21That's true.
36:23It's only that it's not a storm.
36:25It's a core that, I mean, there's so many times when each comes, we remember, if we head
36:27up to no time as that.
36:29I've been flying around.
36:30As I said, I can't talk, but I can't really play with you now.
36:32I guess, I mean, it's background music and can't be high.
36:33What would you do to watch over there's all that fun, though, why not?
36:34And above that, color, it's a, I mean...
36:35I think it's like..
36:36It's not female the drama.
36:37It's not my phone where you want to play with two people, if you ask me a czy2,
36:39I don't long time what that's right?
36:40Me.
36:41I think there's a
36:47what too much.
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