Arthur Penn: Themes and Variants

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and they wanted to go down in history in some way. And I suspect that everybody who's involved with film has something of that same thing.

This is my mother, and this is my aunt, and this is my father. And this is them having their dinner at the Gibson's house and their house is down the road. This was in 1955. Now, this is still a dinner before their marriage. That's Mr. Guilson, Bill Gibson. That's my mother's father. That's my uncle. That's my father's drinking. That's my aunt. These are all pictures of their dinner, you know? And that's my cousin. He's playing a piano. He's 17 now. And Margaret Gibson airs pregnant with their youngest son. He was going to be 13 on Sunday. And that's mom and taking her beauty back.

And that's Tom Tan, taking a peek. Well, listen, don't do that to your mother. She'll kill you. Where she is going, breath. And there they are coming downstairs. And dad's kissing her in the neck. Dracula. This is them kissing here after their marriage. Notice how everybody has a different look. Margaret Gibson smiling. Mommy's father is kind of like... Well, I don't know, happy and... Like the kid did something wrong. Get out of here! Now, to the question at the end of Bonnie and Clyde,

Ben the Newman, who are the authors of the film, had an ending as I recall it, although I may not be accurate about this, which just said, you know, the sheriff... Oh, no, we saw more of the ambush for me. And we waited, and we waited, and we waited. And then Bonnie and Clyde rode into it. And the bang, it happened, and that was the end of the film. It struck me that we ought to do something more ballad-ic. I don't know why, but by that point, I thought that we had had enough killing of just playing killing. I didn't know how to do it. In a version, let us say different from the sort of immediacy of the other killings that we had done in the film. We used four cameras. Each guy needed a different speed. And it would take almost three or four hours to get each of the people ready for that.

That is, they had always bullet hits to be put on them inside their clothes, which would then become visible. Oh, all kinds of explosions in the car had to take place. And we would get in maybe two takes a day. That was really it. We'd get the ready one for the morning take and go, and we would get the ready for the afternoon take and go. And each of the cameras was geared to run at a different speed. 28. Four is the normal speed we'd have. Some running at 96, and then we're some running at very high speed for non-technical films that somewhere up in the 100 and whatever, the multiple of 24 is that gets us up to 160 or 100, and I carry an hour in a row what it was. And down as slow as I think 72, I mean as fast as 72, as near normal as 72, as well as normal. And the idea was to get a kind of spastic sensation, which would verge on dance as we did with it. And that was a clearly formulated idea going in.

I didn't shoot any alternatives to it. I had felt that one in my gut for a better or worse that was the way I knew that that film had to end for me. And when you think that they historically they fired a thousand rounds and I think that they were something like 86 distinct bullet hits on the two bodies. It was a kind of butchery. But whatever reason, if it seems to me that the myth of the people had built up sufficiently in their own time to engender this kind of overkill, you can't just be talking about two people and a car eating a pair. You have to be talking about the myth that precedes them, the enormity of that, the possibility of their ability to escape, their possibility that they could shoot you and so forth, because you don't simply break a butterfly on the rack unless the conditions preceding that event have so led you to believe that that is the only appropriate punishment possible.

And that seemed to me to be necessary to document in the ending. What you're doing though? You're putting your hand this way. Instead of coming down here. See here? There's no chance of hitting that. There you go. That's it. A little big man has to do with what happened to the Indian world. It's not really about historical accuracy at all, because it's told through the eyes of a man who claims to be the only white man who survived the battle of a little big horn. Uh, custard's last name. And then we learn how he survived it. And it's really as a result of his having been involved with the two separate cultures, intimately. And it's a man who moves between the two cultures. And it's really an identity crisis in two cultures that is really the substance of the story. How's that? All right?

Get a little more drama into it, can you? This is just practice. Yeah, but I mean, I'd like to get you more. Like that. More profile. You know what I mean? Let me show you. All right. Well, I can't, I can only tell you. I can't. Like that. Now, more. Yeah, this is... That's it. That's it. That's very... Yeah, real exercise. That's right. That's right. Gorgeous. That's terrific. Yes. Yes. Now, ah, that's one. All right? That's right. That's right. That's right. Up here. Up here. Up here. Real stress break exercise. Absolutely. Now, two. Yeah. Yeah. Now, three. Start facing this way. Huh? Yeah. Keep working, keep working, keep working.

Yeah. Looks like Jerry Lewis is mine, but... Yeah. I know it's meant to be coming over. Right. She's coming over. This is a fun. Oh, shit. I just don't want to be where he needs to go to fire that. No. Well, I thought you were. Great. At all times. You're supposed to bounce. Huh? Your body wasn't balanced. Go! Yeah. That's a... Goody-eyed. That's what he said in the earlier part of the scene. Go to the goody-eyed. That's it. That's it. That's very good. That's it. That's it. Ah! That's right. The implicit one has, particularly when you're confronted with the enormity of a given Hollywood movie set. Or a movie set anywhere, you know, where you're going to run up against 10 or 15 superb technicians, all of whom want specific information.

And you feel, it's very easy to feel that you're not doing your job, if you don't come in with all that laid out absolutely meticulously. And as I said, with my television background, it would be relatively easy for me to lay it out, lay it out actually specific lenses and so forth. But I have to fight against that impulse, because what I like to do is to stay open to what the actors are going to bring, which is always a surprise to me, what I'm going to find on the set in the morning, by way of a prop or an object or a, you know, I feel that I find that on the occasions where I have been too meticulously prepared, a kind of rigidity is appeared in my work, which I don't really like. And I'd rather stay open to that sort of happy accidents, because they, they're terrific when they occur. I mean, I can maybe cite some instances of them. Well, for instance, the big fight team between Annie and Patty in the medical work, who was largely, although I had been done in the play for nearly two years, it was left open to the camera in its own way.

And what we did, this is simply say to the operator, who was a very capable guy and very selected guy, you go for what interests you. We'll do it and let them go their own way. And so Annie and Patty really did sort of improvise that fight scene. From that big sort of example, to a very small one, like in Warren, in the beginning, Bonnie and Clyde Warren had a match in his teeth, you know. I never figured out having a match in his teeth. But the match in his teeth didn't mean anything one way or another, until just before she said that, I bet she don't have the guts to rob that grocery store. He did that funny thing with the match where he went, well, up and down like that. And then he took it out and said, what is that? None of that was planned. I mean, that all comes out again on the set. She found you, you never rob a place you'd faker. Thanks.

And anywhere between the range or something, as small as the match or as large as a whole nine or ten-minute sequence, which is a pretty improvisation. Or in Billy, in left hand and gun, where the people were ravaging at a general merchandising store. Well, almost all of that was really unprepared. I mean, in that sense, that was where we used the two cameras. That was the day, the happy day when Kevin Marley said, I will not be responsible for the second camera. Well, it turned out the second camera was the one that had almost all that action. And the only thing that had been pre-planned was the white coming in and doing the thing with the crackers. That was pre-plan. And the number one camera was on her. And actually, the other camera was taking all the wild, cavorting and stuff, and these kids charged right across the range with a cloth.

This is more of a mistake. I told the kids to do that, but I didn't tell her that it was coming. But again, that's an example of both the sort of improvisation thing and the other thing of preparing one portion of the scene, but not preparing the other so that they will be in a sort of an alert state to what is liable to happen rather than in a rehearsed state to where only the familiar is acceptable. I guess that Arthur's training with actors has been through, basically, the group of people that were or are in the actress studio,

as my training is not at the actress studio, but through the people, basically the people who evolved out of the group theaters, what we're talking about. Kazan, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sandy Meisner, this group of people. And one might say that this is a very psychologizing, I think, as the term used group. And also, can you hear? Also, let's say a style that is in many aspects fallen from favor, because of its stumbling and mumbling. I speak as one of the prime lovers of stumbling and mumbling. Well, there's nobody in the business who might know, who can talk to actors as he can. I don't know what he says to them.

Every directed shows of mine, I sit in the front row of the theatre during a rehearsal and I say something to Arthur and Arthur goes up on stage and whispers something to the actor. He takes the actor apart from the other actors, and nobody hears what Arthur's saying to an actor, and then it works changes. But it changes radically on the basis of not very much where did you from Arthur? He has told me some of the things he has actually said, and they're astonishing in their intimacy with the actor. You know, and kind of if it's a sexual scene, four letter words that will really turn the person on, in a way that I don't associate with Arthur's kind of reserve and the way for pride. You were around too fast, right? I was told to go in my hand the whole time. Yeah, I was told to go in your hand. It was quite kind of compressive, you know? Make the rope. Make me in this thing.

You know, skin color makeup. Me and my gun. My gun. With Paul and the other kids, we took a lot of very frivolous pranks through stuff. We just had never seen that in westerns, you know? Any of us, and we thought, it's insane that young people in westerns not be portrayed as being really cantankerous, giddy kids who play, you know, of a personal play which had sexual overtones. There's no question about it, but then that has for all of us. Of course, you know? I mean, what else does it have? Boy, your pain! I can have soldiers together, so he's got my shoulder. How about that, huh? It's cold, Charlie. I've got you. Come on. I'm still as a boy. I'll be snoring. We're going to Maxwell's party. How cold? You don't want to grab no gun? You want to grab a gun? Let's go. I'll bet I'll beat you, and I'll still in the board.

One, two, three, two, go. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. We're going to go up in Yonda. So that that was a very particularly gratifying part of that western because it was fun to get Paul in these two guys. It's just loose and giddy and reckless and, you know, doing their crazy thing. And although I never defined it as a psychological gesture, we did find sort of behavioral ways in which to achieve that kind of liberty and freedom that is rather difficult for an actor to come by, particularly on a movie set where you shoot in small takes. Take after take in tiny little bits. Right. Hey! Time to go! Oh, wait! Run it on the flag! Run it on the flag! Stop! You're inside! You ready to color light out of me! That's awesome.

And there's always courage for me as being fasting and to be able to jump forward in time so we had the idea that... During the time that one of these Gimmie County was taking the bath, the room would be steamed up. would be steamed up and then Billy would point out through the window and then it got more interesting because if the window was steamed up he really couldn't point out. And then I realized that what we could do is really sort of draw a map of the future. I didn't know how to accomplish that. I was surprised when we finally did do the shot. How relatively simple it was because I always did was bring up a window on a couple of posts and we just put the camera behind it on a little platform build out from it and Paul came in there and just did that close-up. The sad thing is that then what happened was they dissolved through instead of cutting through because in the instance this was a very good sort of film. I mean it does everything a dissolve does better, it does it more organically and you don't have the sort of intrusion of the optical effect.

Well I'm calling you, you hear me? You've been called. Paul was very good in it and he cared and he ran around and it had an energy to it. I went and made a mistake, it made a good mistake, you know, it didn't mess around. It had a good life about it and it has a lot of an opportunity for author to use. And this repressed violence that he carries around with him. I don't know what you're talking about, world. Life is just a joke. I'm not your head up. Hey boy! Oh! Oh! Oh! You had it right. You had a short, a fast film of what you are. Well I'm coming, didn't fire, Grant. Really late for cockle-meat amnesty. I think I got my speed back over.

I got you Joe Grant. I got you dead, you big mouth. In a peculiar way, I was really getting it to be a sort of personal film. I mean, I began to really invest it with my own feelings. And many of my own psychological formulations are in the film. And Billy and I became very closely identified. But what I was doing was sort of working somewhat intellectually and somewhat viscerally, somewhat out of my experience with drama and also out of just a plain gut experience about that feels right to me. Or I can't explain this to you, but I just know that Billy has got to come out of that saloon and grab that room and be in a kind of ecstatic grief rather than a repentant grief. I don't know why. I now, I think, know why, but I didn't at the time. That was a pure, if you will, aesthetic choice. There are others, however, that are more intellectual in character and more intellectually chosen at least. And we distinctly did set up sort of parental figures in the blacksmith and his wife

that Billy would be forced to violate. That were reflections of all kinds of searches for a proper father figure. And then, once one is acquired, a kind of violation of that, familial integrity. And that was seen to me to be fundamental to the character of Billy the Kid. Lieutenant Gordon was made under the auspices of the old studio picture. And the studio crew and the group from the studio was there all the time making that movie. And so I ran into, that's the way we do it, rather frequently. And having just come out of television, which was a medium that we sort of made up as we went along, because nobody had ever been there before, that was a really quite congested experience for me. You know, that seemed very closed and not the best use in the medium. And I remember when we were shooting in the warners back, a lot.

Another camera crew came by and they said to Pet Marley, you know, how's it going, Pet? And he said, General, I got one of them television guys. And the whole crew laughed. I mean, they knew what he meant, which was, I got a nut, you know. One of these nuts who's asking for the impossible stuff. And I remember that at that moment, I was asking him to shoot into the sun. And then that was just absolutely not done. And I said, shoot it into the sun. And he said, okay. And I thought he'd shot it in the sun. He really hadn't. He really had taken the shot without really shooting into the sun. He was pretty close to it, but he couldn't bring himself to pan that extra five degrees, because in 30 years of shooting, you avoided the sun no matter what you did. He just didn't shoot into the sun. And I wanted the whole screen to highlight at that point. We never did get the shot. Absolutely other ending on the picture. But it was changed.

What was the ending? The... After Billy's death, now is the scene where Pat Garrett's wife says, now we can go home, which makes almost no sense at all. Or maybe no sense at all. Billy, come to me. Come to me. The scene where Pat Garrett's wife says, I couldn't see. I couldn't see. Come home now.

In the other version, we had a little sort of processional start up around the town, and what happened was that the camera picked up some of the lady's carrying candles. And they started walking from various parts of the town, kind of converging on Billy to look at him. And so he began to pick up a kind of mythic heroic and, if you will, saintly proportion. And that was sort of the last image. And it was done with the ladies from a very mobile shot. But it was the view of Warner Brothers that that somehow would drive everybody out of the theater feeling that it was too sad a picture. I don't know how you changed sad to happy by, after the hero is dead,

saying let's go home now with some relatively secondary characters, but in the greater wisdom of Warner Brothers, they didn't. You know, I'm often asked, as a psychoanalyst, don't I think that Arthur's films are dangerous to people because they're so violent. And I really just shrug because this is, to me, theoretically, untenable idea that this is dangerous to anybody. In terms of Arthur's own development, I do think that when Bill says, when he first met him, he was an extremely angry young man. Although I didn't know him in the middle forties when Bill did first meet him, I'm quite sure this must be true. And that this, of course, doesn't disappear in a human being. But if it now comes out in a transposed form in the work, then I would suppose that this is really in the way the vicissitude of one's own hostile or aggressive needs as then given expression in art. You know, Gandhi in the whole non-violent movement said, anyone who has not in himself experienced violence and who was not able to even express violence can never become genuinely non-violent.

Which I think Arthur now is, as a person. I don't think so, but this is really insane. But I really don't know how you eliminate violence from a graphic art form like film when you are in a world of violence on every hand. It would be like eliminating one of the primary colors from the power of the painter, particularly in this time when the nuclear weapons park. When we talk about one missile system, knocking out another missile system, knocking out another missile system, you know, you're escalating in common violence up to the level of insanity. And to say, oh, that's too savage of meaning in a film, it seems to me to be a self-delusion and a very deep level.

I don't do it for sensational reasons, and I don't think that I am particularly liable to the accusation of gratuitous violence. When I go to the movies and see you a lot of blood, I know it's ketchup. I mean, I never believe that reality. I didn't believe Bonnie and Clyde with a violent movie. The last scene, I believed. See, when Bonnie and Clyde are shot down there, I believe that the other stuff where the guy gets shot through the call window and faces spattered with blood, I never react to that as anything except makeup. In anybody's movies, I think. I think the character of killing, character of violence. I think there was a certain character of... How should I say? Another kind of sexuality in that film that I think was meaningful, which was that sexual relations between people who are on the screen are not always blissful. And sometimes don't even exist, really, you know? And we would certainly more than touching on that point.

Is that the only special thing about you? Is your peculiar ideas about love making, which is no love making at all? And Clyde is so hurt by that. It seems to me that that is one of the ways in which Clyde's identity is not demonstrated. I should say, but is confirmed to him. It's in that private knowledge that Bonnie has of him, that he makes a sort of identity bond with her and they become sort of inextricably connected. Not because they're co-adventures. So much is because their identities are so closely interwoven that they cannot separate. They have become, by that time, one identity. I think of the sexual life as being very symbolic of the internal life. Very often we have been led to believe in through films that the sexual life was somehow different from the life that people led. They could be all kinds of people, but because the sexual life went undemonstrated, one had to assume that their sexual life was good and fulfilling and meaningful.

Respectable strangers, they'll stop you on the street just to touch out at you. Driving, you'll drive a milk-white Cadillac with a portable bar and air conditioning. Your name across the pockets of your custom silk pajamas. You'll have everything you ever prayed for. Money, clothes, success. The throwing away an opportunity. Let me help you. We'll protect him all we do.

Now listen, if he comes around here and tries to buy, I'll just pull out. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, call them. Want to stick around, help us protect them. All you need to come to my party is a pistol and you got one.

Well, all the pistols you got there, man, I don't need to be room for mine. The sexual experience of these people is an extension of all other experience of their life. And if there's anxiety and hostility and wild aggression in all other aspects of their life, it's going to appear in their sexual life too. And their capacities either are consummated or they're lack of capacity to consummated as in the case applied. All kinds of nervousness is certainly associated sexually. And it just seemed to me something which one includes. As much as you include the way somebody dresses or walks or talks, certainly the way somebody behaves sexually, he's a part of that of the lexicon of the character. I like well, you know, with you, because you probably get to be an album. Here, keep this souvenir. Same as if we made it. Just don't want to touch your cold.

Alice's restaurant sort of crisis in all of his life is past. That is, he's not accepted for the draft. And he feels the need to somehow discuss, to talk about, his own moral dilemma in relation to that. Maybe, maybe I wouldn't have had the guts to go to jail. Yeah, I could have done that.

Weird. We had a very verbose version of the scene. And Arla was the first one to spot it and say, listen, this is sort of like the father and soncein of the Andy Hardy series. You know, I mean, the father and soncein. And we say, well, it's the father and soncein, but it's not really. That's the way we're writing it for now, but let's when we get to know each other after a couple of months and after we work together. Let's see what the scene will be like then. But what happened, of course, was the scene simply got to be less and less verbal and much more related to simply two presences in a room and about five sentences. That's all that are spoken and seen now. But I think rather meaningful sentences about, could I have done that? Yeah, I think I could have.

All the good things in my life seem to have come out of not doing what I don't want to do. Not after me to do what I don't want to do. What do I want to do? And that's about the scene. But those questions now are possible to arise. I mean, I think the meaning of a scene is that there's a certain time in one's life when not the right answers occur, but the right questions occur. Or the questions which lead to the next phase in one's life. We were talking earlier today about, sort of, how do you go on to sit, whether you go on particularly meticulously prepared. And I, as I say, have schooled myself not to be that kind of person. I was envious of that ability of my father's, and I am envious of the certain sense of my brother's ability to be that meticulous in his photography. On the other hand, I have to recognize that whatever gifts I have lie in the other direction in sort of improvisational, from on my feet, make up the work. Do the work that way.

And where my father was so meticulous is a more watchmaker and a engraver, and later on as a painter, and where my brother is so meticulous in his photography, I have to be quite, I think, the other. And how that is my nature. And the fact that Arthur works in film and is essentially visually oriented the image now as against the word. Irving likewise. Irving likewise. Certainly no accident. But, you know, the father's son, Seam, is so universal and basic. I can't imagine finding any artist who works in literary terms, you know, language and story incidents and so on, whose work you couldn't find, that's just random. Very difficult to go into all that without getting extremely personal in terms of material, and it would be just, I think, extremely lengthy, but suffice it to say that. My parents were divorced when I was really very young. One of the things that I sought for conspicuously through my childhood was an association with my father.

He was a rather elusive figure. And when I did finally get to spend some time with him, which was from the age of 14 to 19, those were the years of his death. He was in a terminal illness, almost all of that period. He was as if one had finally achieved the goal of one's life only to have it sort of dematerialized, which is substantially what was taking place in terms of the human spirit in his case. So it's a very raw and open subject to me that quest for the father and finding of him. That part of my life is a very raw emotional part, and it naturally would chill up in the flames, and clearly in the case of a sort of a homeless boy brought up by his mother, which was sort of historically the case of Billy the Kid.

It all fits so neatly that I could not keep this person in the chair from simply washing into the film. It just had to come in. And then once it came in, it let loose all kinds of implications in me, which I didn't at the time understand. It could have come some good distance toward understanding it more recently, but it was only through the work that I did come to understand it. I don't understand the nature of these themes very often when I employ them. It's really hard to get that point across, I think, for me, because it seems so make it after the fact. And it looks at a consecutive number of films you say, but that is so conspicuous and obvious. Well, all I can say is that we all always have to examine our own sort of nature to know how much of it we keep unavailable to ourselves, because that way lies madness. I mean, if we opened all these wounds in a way, so many things are we withhold from our own consciousness, and they become visible when you look at two or three films in order. But I wasn't conscious that they were going into the films at the time, although I was conscious of something else,

which was their dramatic impact was right, and it seemed right in a piece to me. Hey, Molly, come on down. All right, come on, I'm going to read you something. Look, from the evidence available, 1601 was written during the summer of 1876 when Mark Twain, with his family, was residing at quarry farm. That's when Castle was killed. Right. Near El Myra, New York, which is up the way, at that time he was working on Tom Sawyer in the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Elizabethan Masterpiece, according to Pain, was the result of a desire to do something in the style of the musical Samuel Piep's diary. 1601, or conversation at the social fireside, as it was in the time of the tutors. Now, let me know if you don't understand something.

I'll talk to you in pretty straight English, okay? Yes, tonight took her majesty, your queen, a fantasy, such as she sometimes has, and had to her closet certain that do right plays, books, and such like. Any heat of your talk? It would fail, but that one did break wind. Do you know what break wind means? Hmm? Well, let's find out. Did break wind, yielding and exceeding mighty and distressful stink? We're at old at last, little sore at then. Come far, you know what break wind means now, Molly? All right, then it says, you the queen. Verily, in my eight and sixty, sixty years have I not heard you've followed to this part. We've seen this by a great clamor and sound of it, that it was male. Yet your belly it did lurk behind, should now fall, lean in flat against this part of him, that have been delivered, of so stately and so vast of bulk. Then the queen says, a god's name, who have favored us? How did it come to pass that a farch or fired itself?

Hmm. The queen says, my lord bacon, lord bacon. Not from my lean entrails have this prodigy burst forth, so please your grace. Then there was a silence, and each to turn, told you, worshipful Sir Walter Rory, that grounded and battled, bloody swashbuckler, who rising up to the soil, and simpering say, and this is what Sir Walter Rory said. Most gracious majesty, to his eye that did it, but indeed, it was so poor and frail a note, compared with such as I am want to furnish. Good sooth, I was ashamed to call you weakling mine in so august a presence. It was nothing, less than nothing madam, I did it but to clear my nether throsed. But had I come prepared, then had I delivered something worthy, bear with me please your grace, till I can make amends. Then delivered he himself of such a godless and rock shivering blast, that all were feigned to stop their ears,

and following it did come so dense and foul us think, that that which went before did seem a poor and driveling thing beside it. I was sort of phobic about films as a kid and scared to death, so I didn't go to them very often for, well I guess almost ten years I hardly went to films. They really, I got scared as a kid at one of those horror shows, and I went under the seat and didn't come out for ten years. But also I think the kinds of movies they were making, although they were. It was a great place to go that I'm playing hooky from the world. It was rare that I really got belted by film, like citizen came just staggered me, and I walked out of that in the way that you walk out of any major sort of life experience. I wandered the streets for hours trying to think what had happened to me.

Somewhere there's another photograph in the family, the conventional bear skin, bear rug, bear-ass photograph, you know, the child. But I don't know what's ever become of that. These, that, that, and this are the only two photographs that I remember out of my childhood. This is a photograph where you photograph a map, approximately, of an age I would think. And then this is some stuff of Peggy and Matt that my brother took. Anyway, this is her study, where she works. We were living in Topeka, Kansas, and I came east about play of mine, and some people from Topeka were living in... in a flat in New York, and after was going world girls in that group, and I was there and met him, and he had read my play, and he had written a play.

And he gave me his play, and I read his play, and we got together and talked about the plays. So we were two young, he was much younger than I was, but we were two young playwrights. He was a very, well, he was in his mid-20s, I guess, and then a very intense dark, glowering... angry sort of young man, you know, to see that much in him now. But obviously intelligent and gifted. And we kept in contact after that, and it wasn't very long after that. A year or so later, we moved here to Stockbridge, and Arthur was just then about to go to Italy on the GI Bill, to spend a year or two at school there. And he came up for a weekend before he went over, and that was his first time as Stockbridge. He didn't know, he'd end up owning a house here, I suppose.

No one in Rockham is here with Stockbridge. This is the same shot we shot. You'll see it in Alice's restaurant, which is... they got three stop signs, two police officers and one police car. Just exactly where we shot him in a picture. Exactly, standing in front of the barber shop. This is the Austin Riggs Center, which is a psychiatric center, where Margaret Gibson and Eric Erickson's on the staff. Where I'm a local trustee, it's your place. I began writing a little bit for television, and directing a little bit. And then got the chance to come east, really, to work with Fred Coe, and then became the Foco Playhouse. And that was the big, sort of, big dramatic show, live dramatic show of Sunday Night's Train 50s, middle 50s. But somewhere along the line in there is the... in a commitment change from writing to directing.

And I... he's always been very strong on writing. You know, when you work with him as a writer, he always... he always thinks like a writer with you. And in Alice, of course, he's, you know, back to writing. So I think there's certain two halves of him at the beginning of Colorless, the two halves that I've known. And I think Colorless and became a medium of commerce, which is what it was not in the early days. It was really... there was not a big enough audience for the sponsors to be that interested in it. And consequently, there was very little interference. Nobody really sort of came in and said, do this, or do that, or don't do this kind of play, or do that kind of play. We were pretty much allowed to do what we wanted. As the popularity of the medium increased, the content of the medium ordered. And at a certain point, I don't think we were all terribly conscious of it, but we realized that we had run out of our own thing in television. That is the kind of freedom and the eloquence to say what it is we wanted to say.

Because suddenly there was a man from the agency in the booth, and then there were two men from the agency in the booth. And pretty soon there were people shaking their heads about script before we ever put them into rehearsal. And then finally, I signed sort of a censor, and before we knew it, banged with the medium. And each of us, in his own way, drifted away from it. Someone had a film very early, like Del Mann, one of the film very early. Someone to the theater, and that's the path I took. Although in point of fact, I actually did my first film before I did the theater, but I thought I was taking theater at that time. Arthur and I were out doing the TV version of The Miracle Worker, and Fred Coe was in New York trying to cast two for the CISO. And just prior to my going out to the coast, I had dinner with an actor, and Fred and the actor recommended an actress name, and Bankraft, who nobody had heard of, although she wasn't going to go to the theater.

There's something, but they were all involved with chasing guerrillas. Fred called Arthur and said, look at her when she's out there, so Arthur looked at her and called back, said she's a little on the roof. She's never been on a stage. She's never been in a theater. And we were all kind of concerned about that. But as soon as we started working, Arthur and Annie just hit it off beautifully. And of course all actors become enamored of being directed by Arthur. You're joking, I never saw a camera that close to my mouth. What are you taking a picture of? The two of you. Wait a minute. Bring your hands up. You mean you're even going to get that? That's it. That's a poster. That's beautiful. Right, down. Okay, look right here. Good. That looks nice.

Yes. Let's get into mood of the play. Which part of it would you like? Any part. I'm going to give it up to you. She said, when Arthur directs me, I have to keep myself so soft that I can feel a speck of dust settle on my skin. I must say I had a string of hits that really was indecent. I can imagine when you go into the theater and don't have it. I had like five hits in a row. There was just one right after another. It was insane. They were all running at once at one point. There was one point right, five. And still I was by that point ready to be taken out there in a jacket, you know? It was just incredible. If I thought that was going to be my life from now on, I'd go into engineering. If you can, that's why I hit you on the ball, huh? Why? Oh, no. I don't know. I don't know. Okay. Mr. Pan could you come on the other side then? Could you come here like this?

I think it looked down at him. Five, yeah. Five, yeah. Just a minute. Mr. Pan, do I have a point to do? I don't want to make sure. You double check the number with a dozen marked maps, any of the slates that gave me. Okay. What I mean about when I say it's very, very good photographic sense is that he's not tied into a lot of old clichés about the film, you know, from here and here with lights.

He doesn't need five, 10Ks up here and down there. If there's a scene with people in it, you know, there'll be maybe a little spot that'll just get the eyes. And it won't really, you know, try to do all those things that were created for the female movie stars of the 30s. Now I begin to read about my visual sense, but I never really was aware that I had it, you know. It's like, well, you know, you're approaching your pros and, you know, now I'm speaking pros. When I wasn't particularly aware that I had a visual sense until really around Bonnie and Clyde, people then began talking about it. Although I could look back on things in the miracle worker and think, gee, that's really kind of attractive. That very grainy section of the miracle worker flashbacks. The picture was very good. The actors were good.

I haven't seen the picture, but once I saw one that came out, there were awkward moments in the film. But you can sure trade off a few awkward moments for that kind of energy and that kind of belief, that kind of dedication. You can see it. What the people say in a scene is often the least important of the many aspects. I'm sure you all know this, who are in a visual medium. But for me, it came as a great surprise. You see, having come out of the theater discipline where every idea and every nuance of psychological stance and viewpoint was demonstrated through what people said, how they said it, what language they chose to say it with and so forth. Suddenly I got into the movies and there I found that the screen was contradicting what they said, which just knocked me out. That dynamic just set me trembling because then we could go here on a guy who said, good morning and I really meant I want to kill you. His face could tell you one thing and his voice could be telling you another thing and it's such a different experience from the theater.

When we came to make the film, I managed to preserve those scenes intact. What I didn't realize was that with the camera, with an actress as eloquent as Patty Duke, no obstacle greater than a simple close-up of her or an experience of hers emotionally was necessary. The ending is identical. The only thing we did was to pull away with the camera. At that time, it seemed to me to be the most reasonable and proper thing to do, to go back, back, back. Now I'm not so sure. I think it was true for us. The film was at the end with the camera pulling back. I don't remember what the point was either that the characters have been unpersuasive or one doesn't know the future of the characters and so you sort of tend to lock them in amber that way. I must say I've come to share that view and I look at that shot with not much relish right now.

Also, the fact that the camera starts that kind of movement after all is a very commanding phenomenon. You better know what the hell you're doing with it. If you're just sort of moving away and saying, I'm through with my story, I'm out of story, I think that that's a bad thing to do. When you see how it says, I hope you find that ending shot related to this point because that's what we did there. We did something rather extraordinary, I think. Yes, I was just thinking about the closing shot of Alice's restaurant, which people have, you know, debated so much what's the meaning of that? The process is kind of looking out into a very misty future as it were, whether this is the pessimism or whether it's kind of left open ended. I thought that was a terribly sad kind of ending.

It's my mother, an art of mother, the abandoned mother. I mean, that's the sadness in that image. It's a very potent image without reason. It would be trail of the older generation, that's what's really in the end of that movie. That's interesting. I hadn't thought of it quite like that. But as you say it, it seems right to me, you know, there was a deeply empty kind of particularly feminine emptiness. Wasn't it like passive? There's nothing to be done and just kind of wait and look out the door. Very sad indeed. You can't get anything you want. I Alice's restaurant. Walk right in and it's around the back. Just a half a mile from the railroad track. And you can't get anything you want. I Alice's restaurant.

Accepting Alice. Not even sure I wanted to make Alice's restaurant. We played the record one night with Eric. He heard something on the record, which he said, oh, that seems to me to be very interesting. It was one line in the record, which is the last refrain that are those things. You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant, accepting Alice. That line has really made for more questions. What does that mean? Anything except out. And I don't know. He was accepting Alice. It seems to me a very provocative thing to say. I thought that was pretty provocative, too. We had a conversation back and forth about that. And when you look on the screen, you'll know that there's real people on the screen. Do your friends. There's Alice. And there's Ray.

There's the same big fat movie. And he's still the same that he was, because this time he's acting. He was known nice guy when he busted us. You know, he's a nice guy now in the film and all that, but he was known nice guy when he busted us. And if you got any head and you go to the movies, he's saying, there's big, fat, ol' acting. And that's beautiful. The reality comes across. You know, it's a real film. So what if he's acting? So what if I'm acting? If Arthur and Venable were to take what happened and do it exactly like it was, then it would rob them of their ego thing. You know, their ego trip of creating something themselves. You know, aside from being my story, it's really Arthur's movie.

Although I'll place himself in the film, we have two extraordinary actors playing Ray and Alice, because we felt that it was important that we have trained people who could lead the scene. It's not alone, questions of how a kid relates to the open society and the society with a draft or the society that's engaged in warfare, but also to the more contained society of the church where there were, all kinds of other figures, other parental figures, who took up a very strong... functioning all those like Ray and Alice, very, very definitely had it. Massive importance in, sort of, personality formation of Arnold. You know, it's called Alice's Restaurant and the whole emphasis is on Alice, but although we're a lot without each other, we still operate. But together, it's unbeatable, and he really, he really started it more than I did, because I was a little girl.

I was 19 when I met Ray, when I married him, 19. I was out of reform school, two years. No, I didn't know. Shit from Cheyenneola, to get that. Court Ray was it. When those kids first met us, they met Ray. Ray, you met Ray. Can you imagine if you were a 15-year-old boy, you're not interested in girls yet. I thought I was in a very dumpy state then. But Ray was gorgeous. You know, it was just perfect. It's a hero. The cowboy, Superman, father. I like it. I mean, I like my life, you know. It's not like anybody else's, but I like it. I'm aware of it. I'm aware of what's happening to me. I'm aware of what I'm visible. But I keep living anyhow. So I must be enjoying life more than death.

At the time of Alice's restaurant, during the making of the picture, I thought I was really kind of closing out this episode. I recognized a lot of the personal experiences. My father in the hospital, Woody in the hospital, me in an age, you know, prematurely post-adolescent that kind of strung out a few years of 18, 19, 20, which was the period of my mother's death. That time, and you think, well, I've done that. But then comes the shock of recognition in the later piece of work. There it comes up again in a very disguised form, but essentially again, it's the same emotional material. And I would suspect that what you really work on throughout your life, particularly in a similar film, you work on those five or six or seven sort of major crises periods of your life again and again and again and again and again in one form or another. But I really think that what's most important is not that you remember back, but as in, for instance, wild strawberries, one sees a man, re-experiencing his life crises in order to bring together a present solution for himself. And I think that a filmmaker does that all the time, and I think it's a kind of normal synthesis that you're always engaged in.

What I don't quite understand here about what you're saying about wild strawberries is that in the man who views his life backward, he kind of discovers the progression of his identity, right? Though death is not mentioned as a solution, it's what happens in the film is there and the sense of peace with all the parts of oneself. And as George Stevens says, each time you go out and make a film, it's your declaring war. I mean, you're not kidding around. And it's war on inertia. It's war on mediocrity that exists in all of us. Well, the train, a huge film. That was a war that Arthur was sent back to the front, no, sent away from the front because there were a couple of insecure, well, who knows the reasons?

I don't know. I wasn't there. Anyway, he was fired. The film I wouldn't exactly write home to my mother about. So he went off to then develop this other picture in I would say to say a state of anger and anxiety with I think a need to say, well, this system is beating me. I'm going to show him how smart I am. I'm going to make a film they can't even understand. That's how intelligent it's going to be. And he succeeded. We did it together and that was Mickey one. I'm happiest about the idea of Mickey one. That seemed to me to be an exquisite film of the 50s in the United States of a generation which grew up in the McCarthy era, which was somehow, namelessly, organically, profoundly guilty. That generation was mute, locked up in flight from itself, from its own identity, and mostly exemplified by silence, absolute silence.

And it seemed to me that that Mickey one was a very good analogy for that. I didn't know it was $20,000. I didn't say, how do you know it's only money? Why shouldn't crap? You said, how do you know it's not all the other crap games they tore up on you? And up with your slips. How do you know it's not the car they gave you smashed up? And a liquor in the good times and the apartment, and the clothes, and Christmas, and birthdays, and the rehearsal? Oh, what's favorite? They're favorites as long as they want them to be favorites. How do you know it is not the trips they paint for in a special material in the arrangements and music? That's quick. But it's the lawsuits, the parties, the expenses. Oh, you're good. 20,000, 20,000 is just a fraction.

How do you know it's not the whole life you're living? And those are all symbols, really, for a kind of well-being. You've lived high on the hard. You've lived very well. Now, when you come up against a matter of crunch and morality, because you're so into the man for the material things of your life, that you are no longer free to make a decision based on what you feel yourself, but are obligated to feel guilty because you have experienced all this material well-being, which seems to me to be a particularly opposite American analog. And it's one that I fear in my own life considerably. I mean, I think one of the things that one can do, particularly in the film world, is to get quite rich. And then a series of sort of material benefits can really, I think, incarcerate one. And one of the sort of pure, tyrannical, rather, tight-ass struggles that I'm engaged in is to keep myself from going back to that state. I know it sounds almost boy-scalish, but it's just maybe it's out of a lifetime of lack of such positions that I don't particularly have a hunger for them.

Let's see in the chase a glassiness that I think is not really what Arthur would have liked to have seen. Come on, stop talking foolish. Stop talking anything. Eventually, the coping with this problem becomes so innovating day after day after day that one really has to have other strong people on one side if you're going to cope with it. And I'm pretty strong in those areas. Terrific producer, just absolutely terrific producer.

By the time we got to doing Bonnie and Clyde, we were both more confident in ourselves and with each other and with the medium. Warren there chose such very strong specifics as the fact that Clyde had chopped off a couple of toes from one of his feet. He had that lived so organically internalized that if I had said run, Warren, he'd have run a little bit. He just never figured he had a whole body of sort of behavioral things. And I added a certain kind of quizzicality, I think, to the character. Like at the end of that scene with Buck when the two brothers are reunited and we're going to have a wonderful time, what are we going to do? And then Clyde says I chopped off my toes and next week I got paroled and he's just going out the door and I just thought there should be a coded to that scene and I haven't sort of looked back and say ain't life brand. Well that was something that sort of happened on the spur of the moment. That kind of quizzicality I was able to contribute to the character.

A lot of the physicality of Bonnie, I think I was able to help stay with again, never calling it psychological gestures, but finding a certain angry lastitudinous characteristic for Bonnie that was that was useful throughout a kind of slackness in the clothes and slackness in the kind of view of the world, a kind of sloppyness at the beginning of the picture which grew less and less as we went along. She grew more and more pristine, more and more cohesive. To go back to the question of the identity it was that she was really truly finding her identity which was to be a mall. There's just no question about it in my mind. That was Bonnie's true destiny. I mean, I would be the last to suggest that I wasn't ordering history in order to fit my needs in telling that story of Bonnie and Clyde that I wanted to tell. I wouldn't claim the historical accuracy for our film for one second. Any more than I would for a little big man, for instance, or for left handed gun.

What I'm saying is that you twist history, use history or social situations for insights and also by way of sort of saying, this is the way I understand the background and foreground of a given situation dramatically. These people worked against this kind of climate socially, economically, historically and so forth. Bonnie and Clyde were killers. I think, however, they were killers with an intention. They were not Robin Hoods by any means. They didn't have those kind of redeeming features. But they did have the redeeming feature of calling attention to the fact that the repository for the funds of the time were the local banks. The banks were somehow caught up in that inexorable drive of economic history that caused them to foreclose on the very farms that were keeping the banks alive and constantly the banks failed. And there was a circuit, an economic circuit going on there that was absurd. And I think Bonnie and Clyde attacked the absurdity of their time. We robbed banks. I think that Bonnie and Clyde were unconscious revolutionaries, annoying revolutionaries.

Here! What's the trouble, Captain? I think we have a renegade, General. He's wearing Indian tape. He doesn't know his commanding officer or his company. Take him away and hang it. General, don't you remember me? I'm Jack Crad of you, Skinner. Yes, sir. I applied for jobs. Scott, but you could tell me my true occupation just by looking at me. Oh, yes. Yes. I believe I do remember that. How did you become a renegade? General, I ain't no renegade. I was catching by the Cheyenne and held prisoner. It stopped catching the thorns in me for three days, but I just laughed and begged him to keep on doing it. You laughed.

I laughed my head off. Oh, why don't we be here? Well, for a gentleman, it's difficult to admit to an error. Now, change your look. Great. But what I'm saying is what the primary objective is, is to turn him around. The first coming year to kill him, the second thing is that you're absolutely interrupted in that. The third thing is dear to the man, and you'd like just one shot, one shot. Some way you have to be a guy who fights for an identity, fight for a recognition. Some way be a guy who you're way up to that point. What do you know? I'm not saying you have to do it, laughing. I'm not saying you have to do it, laughing. Let's just take the objective and fight out. I ain't no renegade.

I don't you remember me. Don't you remember me? I'm Jack Rad, the musical producer. Can you tell my true occupation? This is yeah. So, how come you went over the other side? How move over the other side? That's the second level of the scene that you've got to propel me in sanity if he's asking that question. Oh, yeah, I remember you now. You tell renegade. How'd you become renegade? I ain't no Indian. That little escalation is what I really miss here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you know, the biggest nut in the world. Take Hitler, isn't it? Watch it, watch it. How would you prove to him that you're not yours? And the way to do it is not through logic or reason or straight appeal, but the wilder the jump, the more bizarre, the posture, the more likely he is to embrace it. Make sense of it. And I want to start to break it,

and to emotionally break, and then to change it. That's where I would do it. That's where I would do it. I would do it in the middle of that tale. If you make it difficult, I was outpriced about a shion. That's three days. That's three days. That's three days. It didn't take him ten minutes to do this. If in there, if you take your time to try to make that story really believable, I think your own affect will come back. And what happened? At the reverse side. What? I think what happened is that you have room, then, for your own feelings. How about your life and shion, and what is that? Has actors to break? Oh, I can't. You know, if you make that very literal, if you tell that story very well, not generally, but very well, at least I can't deceive you. That's really me. And I... I... You've been here, and you have to get up to that. Not that you...

It makes the characters in these three days and a lot. But that you have to get up to there. Over your feelings. I'll be right where I see these dark castes. So it's in me. Yeah. Nothing could be... Yeah, that's my door. I'll give you a specific item. I'll give you a... Yeah, I love it. It's that absurd concrete work that I'm going to make out of it. Oh, don't worry about it. I'll just make this up for the spot for those. Sorry. Should there be anything on... I'll tell you, I applied a scout. Should there be anything so that I'm going into it, but you could tell my true occupation much. Since it would be, I applied... It would be like, I applied as the lead. But you could tell my true occupation if I'm looking. I applied the nerve to apply a scout. Should I try to do it that way?

I'll tell you a scout. I mean, I know I was out of my mind to do lovely. Yes. What's that on your face? Oh, sir. That's not mud, that's Indian pay. That's an Indian night. What's your company? What, my company, sir? Yes, and the name of your commanding officer. What's been going on, Captain? I think we've got to renegade, General. He's wearing Indian paint and he doesn't know his commanding officer or his company. Take him away and hang in there. General! General, don't you remember me? I've got to grab the new scout. New scout? Yes, sir. I've got to grab the scout. How about your occupation? Just look at him. Yes. Yes, I do remember that.

Maybe we ought to just shorten the cut and skip the first, yes. Yeah, yeah. First of all, I think we repeated the yes and you don't like that. Yeah, I wouldn't mind holding a look and then the yes. Yes. You're back. You're back. No, I don't like the reverse way. I'm going to become renegade. Yes! I don't renegade! I'll catch you by the chase! That prisoner! The big problem is that it's going to be something, because I either have to play it all in the long shot or play it in this and this long shot. No, no, no, no, no, no, no! Here you go! Renegade! I'll catch you by the chase! Prisoner, yeah, let's try it. We'll try. We'll try. I don't understand yet what's going on there. If it's possible to pop right on. Another one's here. Get out of here!

Get out of here! Renegade! I'll catch you by the chase! Hey! Get out of here! Get out of here! Get out of here! Get out of here! Don't go away from me. You feel like when he goes to Custard and Custard gets the... ...they start catching the thorns of me and I just laugh. I'm doing it! I'm doing it! I'm doing it! I'm doing it! I'm doing it! I'm doing it! I'm doing it! I'm doing it! Do you have anything to eat this movie? Anyway, you see why I think 1611 is a good girl. Oh, I like it. And I think it's a wonderful way of learning. A lot of things. Old English, the English view of the American, the American character as Mark Twainsoet, which was a very repressed and pure talent.

A life of about sex, about masturbation, about fighting. You're mostly about fighting. Yeah, I would say so. It's all the advertising. He's a superb master of life. That's one of the great things that the good humorous hazmat is the sense of when to get off. The thing is that that inside of Bergman's, which is... ...that I was to revisit these experiences of self-definition identity, if you will. I must revisit them. Estimate them from where I am and where I was. And somehow strike a balance which will permit me to move on to the other identity, which is to not to exist anymore. And to allow me to leave my despair. To go to death without despair. Well, I'll tell you what's good therapy of doing a good job.

Eventually, all the psychoanalytic aspects of relationships really bite the dust if you don't do something good. And it helps to have people accept it. And I don't think we should kid around about that. That when you make a film, well, let's say that people don't accept it very... They don't understand what you're talking about. And it doesn't really say, it doesn't move them because they don't have to really understand it. But if they feel something about it, it really helps to say, feel something about it. And if they don't feel something about it, it doesn't help. And one of the great therapeutic aspects of Bonnie and Clyde, your tape is running out, is that we really knocked each other around until it worked. I think that's a good therapy.