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Hello, this is Bill Friedkin, the
director of To Live and Die in L .A.,

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going to do this commentary now about
the film without referencing the film

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itself. I'm just going to give you my
impressions, thoughts, and feelings

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what went into the making of it, why we
made it, what I saw in the material, a

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little background on the cast, and about
some of the things that we were trying

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to do.

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To Live and Die in L .A. started out as
the impressions of a former Secret

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Service agent on the job that he had
done with the Secret Service for about

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years.

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And he put his impressions in the form
of a novel called To Live and Die in L

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.A., which I read.

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A lot of the time I'll get recommended
by someone, a friend or even a stranger,

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who tells me you ought to read this
book. It looks to be right up your

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and often it isn't, but in this case it
was. What attracted me to this story was

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the surrealist nature of the life of a
Secret Service agent, of a guy who...

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would be protecting the President of the
United States one day, and in an

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informal relationship, would often be
playing cards with the President in his

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suite with other Secret Service agents.
They used to play poker for money with

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President Reagan.

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And then the next day, he would be
chasing some counterfeiter in a very

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neighborhood of Los Angeles for stolen
credit cards or bad checks.

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So that struck me as being a very
surrealist situation, and it's what

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me to the story.

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My

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initial impulse,

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as I've said, was to...

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show the surrealism behind the life of a
Secret Service agent. One day, being

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part of an elite squad that's protecting
the President of the United States

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against all enemies, foreign and
domestic, which is their charter.

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And the next day, chasing a guy for a
$50 bad check in Watts.

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And I realized once I...

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got all the footage together that I had
shot, that I didn't have the first part.

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I never bothered to shoot the detail
that was protecting the President of the

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United States.

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I sort of took that for granted in my
own mind and then realized in the

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room that we didn't have it, so we went
out and shot it as a kind of...

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but a prologue to the film.

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I also remember saying to Jack Hughes
and Nick Feldman, who are the group Wang

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Chung, when I asked them to write the
score for the film, I said, one thing I

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don't want you to do is write a theme
song.

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Don't write a song that has any lyrics,
let alone the lyric to Live and Die in L

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.A.

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To my amazement, they...

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one day in the editing room, handed me a
song that they had written and recorded

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with that title, and it was meant to be
the signature song of the picture.

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I liked it very much, I have to admit. I
thought it was...

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terrific and had a wonderful mood both
musically and lyrically that set the

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for the film.

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And so I decided to use that song again
as an aftermath over the sequence that

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we shot after all the other shooting had
been completed.

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The Iranian terrorist on the roof at the
beginning of the film,

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that's... something that I don't recall
being in the book at all.

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It was something that came out of my
discussions with Jerry Petovich, who was

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Secret Service agent and did write the
book.

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I remember asking Jerry,

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what were sort of the typical heroic
deeds that may have been done. And he

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mentioned the idea of a terrorist trying
to get at the president during a speech

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that the president would be making in a
big city hotel.

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In 1985, there were terrorists all over
the place making threats against the

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president, sometimes attempting to carry
them out. In many cases, they made

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attempts, and it was never even
mentioned in the newspapers.

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It was just hushed up because,
obviously, the Secret Service doesn't

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give people any ideas.

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But this was based on a threat to the
president, one of...

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many that occur every time the president
goes out and makes a speech somewhere.

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And the Secret Service is alert to these
guys, and they're very good at spotting

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things that seem to be out of kilter in
what would otherwise look like a normal

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operation, say, of a hotel, which you
and I might take no notice of.

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The main title sequence tries to give a
flavor of the world.

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That the audience is about to experience

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It shows several of the characters
without any explanation of who they are

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what they're doing, and it also shows
the act of counterfeiting and the act of

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passing the money. The money is
counterfeited, often in a very secret

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but then passed in very public places to
dealers by the mules, and the dealers

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know where they have a market for
counterfeit money.

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They know who's buying counterfeit
money. Often drug dealers will buy

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counterfeit money at half price and then
pass that money on to the people that

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they're buying drugs from.

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But all kinds of people who deal in
cash.

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to this day, are still buying
counterfeit money at half price.

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I forget the exact figure that the
Treasury used, but I believe it was

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of dollars of counterfeit money out
there that they were always trying to

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down.

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The number of people who made money as
good as Rick Masters in our film could

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counted on the fingers of one hand. He
was...

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really good.

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He really was a better counterfeiter
than he was a painter.

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And he probably knew that.

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But he needed the conceit as well as the
day job, so -called, of

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calling himself a painter so that he had
a profession.

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But secretly, I think he would like to
have been a painter but knew because of

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his high intelligence and taste.

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that he was not really a painter, he was
a counterfeiter.

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Rainer Fetting is an artist who sold a
lot of paintings on both sides of the

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Atlantic Ocean. He sold a lot in Europe
and in New York, and I really value his

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work.

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He was one of the young modern German
expressionists. And I thought that his

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painting was very evocative of the kind
of work that Rick Masters should be

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doing. So I called upon Rainer Fetting
to let...

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Willem Dafoe come to his studio, watch
him paint, see some of his paintings,

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a sense of how he painted, and then we
actually used some of Rainer Fetting's

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paintings in the film. The canvas that's
burned at the beginning was

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done by Rainer Fetting, and if it had
not been destroyed, it would have sold

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for quite a bit of money.

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But he did it very quickly for us, and
he knew what its purpose was. But when

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you see some of Master's other canvases,
they're all done by Rainer Fetting.

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The shot that precedes the dive off the
Vincent Thomas

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Bridge that's made by Richard Chance on
a dare...

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The beginning of that shot is, of
course, Bill Peterson standing on top of

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bridge waiting to dive, sort of getting
a sense of how he's going to do it.

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And that shot was achieved with a fairly
new piece of equipment at that time

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that's now in wide usage.

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It's a Luma crane, it's called.

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It's much more portable and lightweight
and easier.

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to set up and manipulate on location
than the original cranes were.

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A studio crane is too bulky and too
unwieldy to take to a place like a

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It was only possible to do a shot like
that because of this portable,

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lightweight crane that was originated in
France.

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and that they had very few copies of in
this country.

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And I remember seeing a demonstration of
that crane at the equipment rental

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house where we were able to rent it, and
I thought, my God, I've got to find a

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lot of usage for this. And so there's a
few shots of it in To Live and Die in L

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.A., a few shots using that Luma crane.

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or variations of it. Once we used that
piece of equipment, it suggested other

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kinds of equipment that we were able to
fashion on our own using parts of the

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technology of the Luma.

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And I don't think anybody has been put
in harm's way more than I have by this

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hot shot over here.

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Seriously speaking, if I'm going in to
beg somebody... I contacted

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Gerald Petovich after I read the novel,
learned that he had been a Secret

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Service agent for 19 years, learned
that, according to him, a number of the

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incidents in the book were based on his
experiences, which he had fictionalized.

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And I acquired the rights to the book
myself.

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And I wrote the screenplay.

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I wrote a draft of the screenplay
myself.

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And then...

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I found myself calling Jerry from time
to time or meeting with him, and he

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show me some of the hangouts for the
Secret Service agents downtown L .A. and

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introduced me to a couple of people and
took me to their offices to get a look.

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And I found myself leaning on him quite
a bit wherever I felt a little bit in

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doubt about doing something.

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It reached a point where I felt, you
know, I would often say, Jerry, why

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you write this scene?

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This is a new scene. It's not in the
book. I have an idea for something else.

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Why don't you write it and send it back
to me and I'll change it or maybe it'll

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be fine. And so I initiated a
collaboration with him.

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And when it was finished, I decided to
put his name on the screenplay because I

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thought it was a...

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a genuine collaboration, although it
didn't set out to be that way.

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My feeling at the time was I was going
to buy the rights to this book and then

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do the screenplay alone, and that would
have been that.

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Now, I felt that it would be good to
show the audience how counterfeit money

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actually made.

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And so Jerry Petovich, who had busted a
number of counterfeiters as a Secret

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Service agent, he got us a guy. I don't
even know if Jerry got this guy out of

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prison or if the guy had done his time
and he was back out. And the guy was

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out of prison for counterfeiting, and
guess what job he was doing?

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He was running a print shop, you know.
And guess, you know, what that involved.

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Out -of -the -way print shop, somewhere
in an area where you'd need a police

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escort to get to most of the time today.

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And we met this counterfeiter, and he
took us through the process.

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And he had the paper, you know, which we
paid for. It's a certain kind of, it's

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called rag. The paper's a certain number
of rag, it's called.

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And certain kinds of inks, and the money
that he was making.

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These $20 bills were every bit as good
as what the government makes in those

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days. They've changed the currency now
and put some little gimmicks on it

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so that it's tougher to counterfeit.

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I don't know if it is or not, but it's
supposed to be.

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As you make a $20 bill, let's say you do
one side,

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And that's finished, and it dries, and
then, you know, in a sheet of bills.

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And then you do the other side, the so
-called gray side and the so -called

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green side.

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And a lot of bills that we made, we only
needed one side for.

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Somebody on the set had taken some of
this money. It was lying all over the

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floor on the set, one side or even two
sides.

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Took it home and had a teenage son who

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saw these, young teenage son, I might
add, who saw these

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bills on his father's desk.

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And he and a friend took the bills and
went off to a grocery store and tried to

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buy some Hostess Twinkies or something.
And they offered the guy behind the

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counter a one -sided 20.

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And within five minutes, the store
manager had the Treasury Department

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And they grabbed these kids, where'd you
get this money?

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I had it from my dad.

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Where'd he get it? Visit him, boom, up
props the name of our property master,

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Barry Bedeck, who was in charge of the
counterfeit money.

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And so for weeks, if not months, the
Treasury...

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used to show up at Barry Bedeck's house
in the valley somewhere.

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They first arrived at about 3 or 4 in
the morning. Knock, knock, knock.

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Mr. Bedeck, yeah, United States
Department of the Treasury, Secret

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like to talk to you.

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Come in, sit down.

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They start grilling him, and they haul
him downtown to question him about where

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he got this money.

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And he's making a movie.

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Don't give us that.

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Making what? What are you talking about?
Nobody makes this money.

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You know, not for a movie or anything
else.

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And so gradually, my name comes up. Who
told you to do this? Well,

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the directors, Bill Friedkin.

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Bling! Hello.

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United States Department of the
Treasury. Mr. Friedkin, we'd like to

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you. Blah, blah, blah. And I had already
talked to Petrovich about what I do

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when that happens.

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And I did as he instructed me. I said,
yeah, you mind coming down and talk to

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us? I said, do you have a warrant?

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Do you have a warrant for me to come
down and talk to you?

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No, we don't. But if we have to go get
one, it's not going to be. I said, well,

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go get one.

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Just get a warrant and then present me a
warrant and I'll show up there.

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All right, if that's the way you want to
play it.

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The next call comes from the office of
the United States Attorney for the

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District of Los Angeles County.

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Mr. Friedkin, U .S. Attorney, blah,
blah, blah, blah. You have a warrant?

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00:17:11,920 --> 00:17:14,480
No. We just like your cooperation.

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Cooperation what? I made a film called
To Live and Die in L .A. We got an

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to make this money.

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It's not for the purposes of passing it
around.

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It's for the purposes of use in a motion
picture, and I want it to be as

220
00:17:32,320 --> 00:17:33,360
accurate as possible.

221
00:17:33,980 --> 00:17:35,060
And that's it.

222
00:17:35,630 --> 00:17:38,590
Well, how much money did you make? Not a
lot. I don't know.

223
00:17:38,910 --> 00:17:41,730
Do you have any of it on your person?

224
00:17:42,070 --> 00:17:43,490
No, not really.

225
00:17:44,470 --> 00:17:45,470
No.

226
00:17:46,590 --> 00:17:50,170
Maybe some souvenirs, but, you know, not
really.

227
00:17:50,870 --> 00:17:52,830
Well, I'd like to ask you a following.

228
00:17:53,130 --> 00:17:54,690
Do you have a warrant?

229
00:17:55,770 --> 00:17:59,070
No. Get a warrant. And they had no
grounds.

230
00:17:59,850 --> 00:18:03,250
you know, to accuse me of a crime or to
question me about a crime.

231
00:18:03,510 --> 00:18:08,250
They just tried to browbeat me a little
bit. There was no crimes committed.

232
00:18:08,950 --> 00:18:13,310
We made this money for a movie and then
basically destroyed it all.

233
00:18:13,570 --> 00:18:15,230
We weren't counterfeiters.

234
00:18:15,470 --> 00:18:21,150
But the guy who made the money had been
convicted of counterfeiting and did

235
00:18:21,150 --> 00:18:21,949
serve time.

236
00:18:21,950 --> 00:18:25,590
So the money in that film and the
process is totally authentic.

237
00:19:10,090 --> 00:19:14,130
The casting director was a guy named Bob
Wiener, who's since passed away.

238
00:19:14,450 --> 00:19:18,730
He was a brilliant young guy who was not
really a casting director. He was a

239
00:19:18,730 --> 00:19:24,930
writer for the Village Void, which was a
counterculture newspaper in New York,

240
00:19:24,950 --> 00:19:25,950
still going.

241
00:19:25,970 --> 00:19:32,810
And he would see every play and every
unusual or foreign film.

242
00:19:33,050 --> 00:19:39,430
So he had a wide range of knowledge
about actors around the world.

243
00:19:40,680 --> 00:19:47,500
And he cast the French Connection. He
brought me Roy Scheider and Tony

244
00:19:47,500 --> 00:19:48,500
and others.

245
00:19:49,140 --> 00:19:55,760
Several years later, I guess it was
about 12 or 13 years later, when I

246
00:19:55,760 --> 00:20:02,560
to live and die in L .A., I contacted
Bob Wiener. He was living

247
00:20:02,560 --> 00:20:05,440
in Paris then and writing...

248
00:20:06,050 --> 00:20:10,370
and I said, listen, why don't you come
back here? I want to do another piece

249
00:20:10,370 --> 00:20:15,390
that has similarities to French
Connection, and I'd like you to cast it.

250
00:20:15,830 --> 00:20:20,270
And he said, all right, send me the
script, and let me see if I have a

251
00:20:20,270 --> 00:20:21,270
for it.

252
00:20:21,330 --> 00:20:24,350
Sent him the script, and he said, okay,
I'll come back, let's do it.

253
00:20:24,730 --> 00:20:30,490
And he then sort of set about to find a
cast, and I said, Bob, I don't want to

254
00:20:30,490 --> 00:20:34,810
cast anybody that's known, or anyone
that's a big star.

255
00:20:35,340 --> 00:20:41,420
I had adopted that approach with The
Exorcist, French Connection, Boys in the

256
00:20:41,420 --> 00:20:44,600
Band, and other films that I had made up
to that time.

257
00:20:44,900 --> 00:20:51,720
I wanted just very good actors who could
disappear into their roles and not have

258
00:20:51,720 --> 00:20:54,340
people say, oh, they're so -and -so, you
know.

259
00:20:55,720 --> 00:21:02,620
He went out, and after a few months of
getting tips on this person or

260
00:21:02,620 --> 00:21:03,800
that person, he called me.

261
00:21:05,160 --> 00:21:11,500
And he said, I want you to fly up to
Toronto to the Shakespeare Festival.

262
00:21:12,060 --> 00:21:17,220
He said, there's a guy here who is doing
a streetcar named Desire.

263
00:21:17,560 --> 00:21:19,360
He's a young actor from Chicago.

264
00:21:19,780 --> 00:21:22,360
He'd never been in a film. His name is
William Peterson.

265
00:21:23,000 --> 00:21:25,880
And he's got his own acting company in
Chicago.

266
00:21:26,140 --> 00:21:27,140
And he loves theater.

267
00:21:27,420 --> 00:21:33,540
And he's doing streetcar up here. And
he's not doing anything that would

268
00:21:33,540 --> 00:21:34,540
you of Brando.

269
00:21:34,780 --> 00:21:40,340
which is hard to do. I mean, that role
in Streetcar, Stanley Kowalski, is so

270
00:21:40,340 --> 00:21:45,460
identified with Brando as much, if not
more, than any role in the American

271
00:21:45,460 --> 00:21:48,200
theater is identified with one actor.

272
00:21:48,720 --> 00:21:53,980
You know, just as Death of a Salesman
was identified with Lee J. Cobb for

273
00:21:53,980 --> 00:21:58,560
decades. And he said, this guy is really
good. And he said, the other thing is,

274
00:21:58,700 --> 00:22:01,860
he's unusual looking, but...

275
00:22:02,220 --> 00:22:04,080
You know, women find him attractive.

276
00:22:04,560 --> 00:22:08,400
I've seen a couple of performances of
this thing, and there's women lined up,

277
00:22:08,420 --> 00:22:12,020
young women lined up to see A Streetcar
Named Desire.

278
00:22:13,940 --> 00:22:19,520
So I flew up there, and I saw Peterson's
performance, and it was great.

279
00:22:19,720 --> 00:22:26,020
It was really different, and he had a
great stage presence, and he had very

280
00:22:26,020 --> 00:22:28,980
-like movements, and he commanded the
stage.

281
00:22:29,840 --> 00:22:33,840
And I met with him after the
performance, spent a couple of days up

282
00:22:33,840 --> 00:22:39,240
him and talked about this picture. And I
was trying to get a feel as to whether

283
00:22:39,240 --> 00:22:43,920
or not I would be willing to hang a
starring role on this gentleman.

284
00:22:45,100 --> 00:22:46,540
Very intelligent guy.

285
00:22:46,760 --> 00:22:53,280
He was also an athlete. He had played
college football somewhere up in the

286
00:22:53,280 --> 00:22:58,460
Pacific Northwest, whether it was
Colorado or Wyoming, I'm not sure.

287
00:22:59,390 --> 00:23:04,210
But he was like a cowboy and a football
player and a fantastic actor.

288
00:23:04,510 --> 00:23:09,810
He had all of the ingredients for this
role, most especially

289
00:23:09,810 --> 00:23:14,770
intelligence. He was extremely
intelligent.

290
00:23:16,570 --> 00:23:19,050
And so I decided, yeah, I'm going to go
with this guy.

291
00:23:19,270 --> 00:23:21,910
I'm not even going to screen test him.
I'm just going to go with him.

292
00:23:22,510 --> 00:23:27,250
And then he suggested John Pankow, who
he had worked with in Chicago.

293
00:23:28,200 --> 00:23:29,200
and elsewhere in theater.

294
00:23:29,400 --> 00:23:32,700
And I met John, and I liked his quality
as well.

295
00:23:32,940 --> 00:23:34,980
I'd never seen him in anything.

296
00:23:36,180 --> 00:23:42,920
Wiener went out and found the two women,
Deborah Feuer and Darlan Pflugel.

297
00:23:43,360 --> 00:23:46,480
He found them somewhere.

298
00:23:47,320 --> 00:23:50,660
I had never seen them before in
anything.

299
00:23:50,900 --> 00:23:52,300
He brought them to me.

300
00:23:53,600 --> 00:23:59,840
suggested this guy Willem Dafoe, who was
and is part of an experimental acting

301
00:23:59,840 --> 00:24:05,980
company in New York called the Worcester
Group, where they do really plays that

302
00:24:05,980 --> 00:24:07,340
are totally out of the box.

303
00:24:07,940 --> 00:24:13,280
You know, not the classic, just
experimental work.

304
00:24:13,800 --> 00:24:20,340
And Willem had made one or two films
that were not widely

305
00:24:20,340 --> 00:24:21,420
seen at all.

306
00:24:21,800 --> 00:24:26,900
He had worked with Catherine Bigelow,
who's a director that I admire very

307
00:24:27,580 --> 00:24:32,760
And I think he had made one other film,
you know, not in a lead role.

308
00:24:33,180 --> 00:24:38,200
But I met him, just sat in a room with
him, and I said, this guy's great. He

309
00:24:38,200 --> 00:24:42,380
extraordinary quality, exactly what I
want, a theatrical background.

310
00:24:42,620 --> 00:24:47,020
He's been in front of a camera. Nobody
really knows who he is. And so I went

311
00:24:47,020 --> 00:24:50,180
with him, which is what I tend to do
when casting.

312
00:24:50,700 --> 00:24:52,900
I'll just go instinctively.

313
00:25:05,820 --> 00:25:08,900
Federal agent, excuse me. Ma 'am, I'd
like to see the bills that man just

314
00:25:08,900 --> 00:25:09,900
you, please.

315
00:25:20,730 --> 00:25:27,250
During this foot chase between Bill
Peterson and John Turturro at the Los

316
00:25:27,250 --> 00:25:32,750
Angeles International Airport, we had
many restrictions that were put on us by

317
00:25:32,750 --> 00:25:38,450
the airport personnel. Of course, we
could only work around moments when the

318
00:25:38,450 --> 00:25:45,290
traveler traffic was light. There were
many other areas they didn't want us to

319
00:25:45,290 --> 00:25:48,890
go through and other areas that they...

320
00:25:49,780 --> 00:25:52,040
indicated we could use.

321
00:25:52,500 --> 00:25:59,340
They didn't want to get a lot of real
people who were traveling from one city

322
00:25:59,340 --> 00:26:01,500
another caught in this film.

323
00:26:01,720 --> 00:26:05,220
So they asked us to use extras, our own
extras.

324
00:26:05,520 --> 00:26:09,740
But I wound up shooting a lot of people
who just happened to be there.

325
00:26:10,510 --> 00:26:15,130
And one of the other restrictions that
they put on us was under no

326
00:26:15,130 --> 00:26:20,350
could Peterson get up on those rails and
run along the rails, largely for his

327
00:26:20,350 --> 00:26:21,249
own safety.

328
00:26:21,250 --> 00:26:24,810
They felt that their insurance wouldn't
cover it if he got hurt.

329
00:26:25,090 --> 00:26:28,550
But Bill assured me that he could run
those rails with immunity.

330
00:26:29,010 --> 00:26:35,470
And Bill had been an ex -college
football player, very athletic and very

331
00:26:35,470 --> 00:26:38,070
lithe and very capable.

332
00:26:39,030 --> 00:26:43,430
In all of the physical stunts that he
did and he did almost everything in the

333
00:26:43,430 --> 00:26:49,510
film himself Including a lot of the
driving But he assured me he could get

334
00:26:49,510 --> 00:26:53,550
the rails and make the run and at one
point We worked it out where he would

335
00:26:53,550 --> 00:26:59,310
actually do that for a short stretch and
After we made the shot, of course, I

336
00:26:59,310 --> 00:27:00,310
had a severe

337
00:27:01,149 --> 00:27:07,810
talking to from the airport manager who
said we violated our agreement and this

338
00:27:07,810 --> 00:27:11,610
and that. He was all upset and I
remember telling him, look.

339
00:27:12,270 --> 00:27:17,630
This is just a young actor who got
carried away, you know? He wanted to do

340
00:27:17,650 --> 00:27:22,950
It was his dream. It's always been his
dream to run along the rails of the

341
00:27:22,950 --> 00:27:25,290
people movers at the airport.

342
00:27:25,550 --> 00:27:30,530
Now he's done it. I said, it's a
harmless incident, and he's okay, so why

343
00:27:30,530 --> 00:27:35,770
we just forget it and move on? And the
guy finally gave it up, and it's in the

344
00:27:35,770 --> 00:27:40,900
film. But it's not something I've seen
in too many other films that have been

345
00:27:40,900 --> 00:27:41,900
shot at LAX.

346
00:27:45,300 --> 00:27:51,040
The first

347
00:27:51,040 --> 00:27:58,380
time

348
00:27:58,380 --> 00:28:03,900
I had ever seen John Turturro was when
he came in to read for To Live and Die

349
00:28:03,900 --> 00:28:10,570
LA. And I thought that... he had created
a really original character.

350
00:28:10,890 --> 00:28:14,670
And he looked kind of strange and
sounded strange.

351
00:28:15,030 --> 00:28:18,590
The part was not written that way. The
part was written rather

352
00:28:18,590 --> 00:28:25,230
straightforwardly. But I think he comes
off as a very strange kind of a

353
00:28:25,230 --> 00:28:31,530
character in the way that Peter Lorre
and Sidney Greenstreet used to in the

354
00:28:31,530 --> 00:28:35,530
films of the 1940s and late 30s.

355
00:28:35,920 --> 00:28:42,600
And this was, again, created by
Turturro. I loved his accent, which was

356
00:28:42,600 --> 00:28:48,280
own sound, the way he sounded, his
attitude, a lot of the dialogue which he

357
00:28:48,280 --> 00:28:54,060
improvised from what had been written
and took it a step further and took it a

358
00:28:54,060 --> 00:28:55,060
step wilder.

359
00:28:55,260 --> 00:28:57,720
I loved the way he had this...

360
00:28:58,510 --> 00:29:03,570
quality of really looking into the eyes
of whoever he was talking to and

361
00:29:03,570 --> 00:29:09,570
becoming emotional with every word that
was being said to him.

362
00:29:10,210 --> 00:29:13,810
Master is like a poker player.

363
00:29:14,070 --> 00:29:15,790
He never reveals his emotions.

364
00:29:16,170 --> 00:29:18,550
He'll just talk to you. He won't get
excited.

365
00:29:18,830 --> 00:29:24,450
He won't be elated. He won't be
depressed. He just very calmly lays

366
00:29:25,170 --> 00:29:26,670
Cody's emotions.

367
00:29:27,520 --> 00:29:31,260
are a kind of mirror of his temperament.

368
00:29:31,580 --> 00:29:38,040
And I think that Turturro did a really
wonderful job in creating this character

369
00:29:38,040 --> 00:29:39,040
in that way.

370
00:29:48,200 --> 00:29:49,700
Don't forget about me.

371
00:29:50,900 --> 00:29:53,740
I won't. You have my word on that.

372
00:29:57,410 --> 00:29:58,410
Oh,

373
00:29:58,850 --> 00:30:03,430
yes, I do remember saying to Willem
Dafoe from time to time, I would just

374
00:30:03,450 --> 00:30:09,510
zen. And that, to me, was a code word
for the two of us about how I wanted him

375
00:30:09,510 --> 00:30:12,550
to approach his performance with a kind
of calm.

376
00:30:13,270 --> 00:30:14,430
Never push it.

377
00:30:14,690 --> 00:30:19,450
Never get forceful. Never show masters
as too excitable.

378
00:30:19,770 --> 00:30:23,190
Always as a guy who has his emotions
under control.

379
00:30:23,450 --> 00:30:25,430
And the suggestion that underneath

380
00:30:26,200 --> 00:30:29,540
that calm facade with some raging fire.

381
00:30:29,800 --> 00:30:35,320
And he ultimately goes up in flames. He
ultimately goes up in his own inner

382
00:30:35,320 --> 00:30:36,320
raging fire.

383
00:30:36,500 --> 00:30:41,760
But the key to me to his performance was
then, and I would very often give

384
00:30:41,760 --> 00:30:44,360
nothing but that as a direction to
Willem Dafoe.

385
00:30:54,670 --> 00:30:56,530
What's up? Is there anything you can
give me on Rick Masters?

386
00:31:00,270 --> 00:31:01,510
There's a guy in Pasadena.

387
00:31:02,730 --> 00:31:05,090
He's a lawyer or something. Used to
represent hippies.

388
00:31:05,370 --> 00:31:06,370
What's his name?

389
00:31:08,230 --> 00:31:09,230
Waxman?

390
00:31:09,630 --> 00:31:11,490
Max Waxman. Waxman? What's his story?

391
00:31:12,550 --> 00:31:14,310
I think he's moving paper for Masters.

392
00:31:15,510 --> 00:31:17,710
Good. Is there anything I can do for
you?

393
00:31:19,440 --> 00:31:24,800
The choreography of the dance scene was
done by a woman named Leslie Linka

394
00:31:24,800 --> 00:31:30,080
Glatter. And I first met Leslie Glatter
in Japan.

395
00:31:31,600 --> 00:31:38,540
Leslie Glatter was the only woman ever
to dance with the Japanese

396
00:31:38,540 --> 00:31:43,460
theater, which is all male, the Kabuki
theater.

397
00:31:43,740 --> 00:31:45,060
It's all males.

398
00:31:45,580 --> 00:31:51,560
all the women parts are played by men,
but Leslie Glatter had danced with the

399
00:31:51,560 --> 00:31:56,420
Kabuki troupe. And she was quite an
extraordinary dancer and had studied

400
00:31:56,420 --> 00:31:57,820
choreography in Japan.

401
00:31:58,080 --> 00:32:04,680
And I had this idea to copy the Matisse
chassables as their costumes.

402
00:32:05,080 --> 00:32:11,320
So the costumes in that scene are copies
of these chassables

403
00:32:11,320 --> 00:32:13,180
that the great...

404
00:32:14,110 --> 00:32:20,570
French painter Matisse made for a little
church in a small town in France called

405
00:32:20,570 --> 00:32:27,170
Vence. Matisse designed this chapel and
he designed everything in the chapel and

406
00:32:27,170 --> 00:32:32,230
he designed the robes or chastables that
the priests wore.

407
00:32:32,510 --> 00:32:38,620
And so I copied the design of the
Chasuble's for these dancers and their

408
00:32:38,620 --> 00:32:45,320
and their patterns which is pure Matisse
and I think at the time Matisse was so

409
00:32:45,320 --> 00:32:49,440
old he wasn't even painting things
anymore he was just making cutouts out

410
00:32:49,440 --> 00:32:54,220
colored paper and that's how he would
put the designs together so

411
00:32:55,100 --> 00:33:01,840
I showed Leslie Glatter these designs,
and she choreographed a dance number

412
00:33:01,840 --> 00:33:08,500
utilized the robes. And she taught
Deborah Feuer, who was the actress and

413
00:33:08,500 --> 00:33:14,740
had done some dancing, she had taught
Deborah Feuer the choreography for this

414
00:33:14,740 --> 00:33:20,760
piece with other dancers that she hired.
And the dance number was very kabuki

415
00:33:20,760 --> 00:33:21,760
-based.

416
00:33:29,489 --> 00:33:35,590
What motivates Vukovic is loyalty and
the need to prove himself.

417
00:33:37,250 --> 00:33:41,250
Vukovic comes from a long family of law
enforcement people.

418
00:33:41,570 --> 00:33:44,790
His uncle was a cop. His father was a
cop.

419
00:33:45,550 --> 00:33:48,410
They probably retired as cops.

420
00:33:48,970 --> 00:33:53,870
They influenced Vukovic to become a cop,
that it was an honorable profession.

421
00:33:55,560 --> 00:34:00,800
In the course of the film, Vukovic finds
himself caught up in an illegal attempt

422
00:34:00,800 --> 00:34:06,380
by Chance to trap Masters out of his own
desire to

423
00:34:06,380 --> 00:34:12,320
kill Masters in retaliation for Masters'
murder of

424
00:34:12,320 --> 00:34:15,400
Chance's former partner, Jim Hart.

425
00:34:15,820 --> 00:34:19,679
So Vukovic is torn between his loyalty
to...

426
00:34:21,150 --> 00:34:25,110
the Secret Service and to law
enforcement and his loyalty to Chance.

427
00:34:26,130 --> 00:34:31,909
When they first get together as
partners, Chance tells Vukovich he's

428
00:34:31,909 --> 00:34:37,730
get Rick Masters and he doesn't care how
he does it. And Vukovich doesn't say to

429
00:34:37,730 --> 00:34:39,969
him, well, I'm not going for that.

430
00:34:41,429 --> 00:34:45,050
I'm not going to do anything that goes
against the law.

431
00:34:45,550 --> 00:34:51,949
In the course of the film, he is seduced
by chance into the very thing that he

432
00:34:51,949 --> 00:34:57,870
fears most, and that's a compromise of
his values as a law enforcement officer.

433
00:34:59,470 --> 00:35:06,130
The location of the lawyer who trades in

434
00:35:06,130 --> 00:35:12,690
counterfeit money, whose name is Waxman
in the film, Max Waxman, and...

435
00:35:12,990 --> 00:35:15,950
a church right across the street from
Waxman's office.

436
00:35:16,190 --> 00:35:22,310
I chose those locations because I wanted
an office that had a church across the

437
00:35:22,310 --> 00:35:25,370
street. And so that location is out in
Pasadena.

438
00:35:25,630 --> 00:35:31,850
And we made the rain for that scene. We
manufactured the rain because I just

439
00:35:31,850 --> 00:35:34,030
felt the location was pretty dull
otherwise.

440
00:35:34,590 --> 00:35:39,970
But I wanted the two Secret Service
agents to be hiding in a church

441
00:35:39,970 --> 00:35:42,170
watching

442
00:35:42,970 --> 00:35:48,270
the comings and goings of people into
and out of Waxman's office.

443
00:35:48,570 --> 00:35:53,950
And so the scene is there to show the
kind of dullness of surveillance that

444
00:35:53,950 --> 00:36:00,150
often leads to the agents losing it and
even falling asleep while on

445
00:36:00,150 --> 00:36:03,910
surveillance because for so much of the
time so little happens.

446
00:36:04,920 --> 00:36:10,120
But the priest who comes in and brings
them some milk and cookies is actually

447
00:36:10,120 --> 00:36:14,420
Rainer Fetting, the painter who did
Master's artworks.

448
00:36:15,740 --> 00:36:17,260
So why don't you make a jump with me
sometime?

449
00:36:18,360 --> 00:36:19,360
Yeah?

450
00:36:19,500 --> 00:36:20,500
Yeah, you'd love it.

451
00:36:21,320 --> 00:36:23,820
Fabulous. Once you get over the first
fear, it's a piece of cake.

452
00:36:24,720 --> 00:36:27,420
It's the greatest feeling you'll ever
have. Until you float out, man, your

453
00:36:27,420 --> 00:36:28,420
go right up into your throat.

454
00:36:29,420 --> 00:36:30,760
I'm going to take a pass, partner.

455
00:36:32,140 --> 00:36:33,200
You know, I could help you.

456
00:36:34,640 --> 00:36:35,640
If you ever get in trouble.

457
00:36:37,320 --> 00:36:38,320
You know what I mean?

458
00:36:39,120 --> 00:36:40,120
No.

459
00:36:43,740 --> 00:36:44,740
Not here.

460
00:36:59,200 --> 00:37:02,080
I don't like to spell things out for an
audience.

461
00:37:02,560 --> 00:37:08,480
I don't like... to have the audience
know where the next scene's going to be

462
00:37:08,480 --> 00:37:09,860
where the next shot's going to be.

463
00:37:10,100 --> 00:37:12,000
That's something called show and tell.

464
00:37:12,560 --> 00:37:17,920
A typical example of that would be one
character says to another, I'm going to

465
00:37:17,920 --> 00:37:22,320
meet you around the corner in a half an
hour. And the next cut is to around the

466
00:37:22,320 --> 00:37:23,760
corner in half an hour.

467
00:37:24,300 --> 00:37:27,080
A lot of films are structured this way.

468
00:37:27,300 --> 00:37:31,800
The audiences are told where they're
going and when they're going there, and

469
00:37:31,800 --> 00:37:32,800
then you go there.

470
00:37:32,810 --> 00:37:39,530
I like to have events just unfold
without the audience's expectation of

471
00:37:39,530 --> 00:37:41,650
coming or what it's leading to.

472
00:37:41,930 --> 00:37:48,730
That's what I prefer in all of the arts
that I care about, whether it's music.

473
00:37:48,870 --> 00:37:54,930
I love, for example, the compositions of
Stravinsky, where they're completely

474
00:37:54,930 --> 00:37:56,430
unpredictable as to...

475
00:37:56,780 --> 00:37:59,860
where the rhythms are taking off, the
melodic structure.

476
00:38:00,360 --> 00:38:07,140
The films that I most value, films like
Citizen Kane and All About Eve and The

477
00:38:07,140 --> 00:38:13,320
Treasure of Sierra Madre and Paths of
Glory and any number of others, are

478
00:38:13,320 --> 00:38:16,020
that are unpredictable in their
structure.

479
00:38:16,380 --> 00:38:20,200
You have no idea where this story is
going.

480
00:38:20,580 --> 00:38:23,320
You have no idea, for example, in...

481
00:38:23,840 --> 00:38:28,420
in Citizen Kane that the meaning of
Rosebud will ever be determined for the

482
00:38:28,420 --> 00:38:30,840
audience, but not to the characters in
the film.

483
00:38:31,160 --> 00:38:35,600
Or that in Treasure of Sierra Madre, the
Bogart character is going to get

484
00:38:35,600 --> 00:38:41,140
killed. Or that in All About Eve, Eve
Harrington is going to be played the

485
00:38:41,140 --> 00:38:45,580
way that she's been playing all the
other characters in the film. It's a

486
00:38:45,580 --> 00:38:46,580
wonderful irony.

487
00:38:48,490 --> 00:38:54,170
That kind of ironic, unpredictable
quality is seldom achieved in film, and

488
00:38:54,170 --> 00:38:55,670
anymore almost at all.

489
00:38:55,970 --> 00:39:01,390
There are several examples today that I
could cite. The work of Spike Jonze and

490
00:39:01,390 --> 00:39:03,810
Charlie Kaufman is completely
unpredictable.

491
00:39:04,770 --> 00:39:11,230
And so in music and in art and in films,
I most

492
00:39:11,230 --> 00:39:13,870
value the ironic and the unpredictable.

493
00:39:45,550 --> 00:39:46,550
What's going on?

494
00:39:47,110 --> 00:39:50,330
Get up. The whole caper is gone. Come
on.

495
00:39:51,310 --> 00:39:52,310
Shit.

496
00:40:00,130 --> 00:40:00,750
In

497
00:40:00,750 --> 00:40:08,150
this

498
00:40:08,150 --> 00:40:13,870
particular section of the film, you see
that the two Secret Service agents have

499
00:40:13,870 --> 00:40:14,870
entered...

500
00:40:15,820 --> 00:40:17,720
Waxman's office after he's died.

501
00:40:18,040 --> 00:40:24,660
There has been an entrance previous to
that by the police department.

502
00:40:25,220 --> 00:40:29,940
And it's obvious that while they were in
the house, although I never show it on

503
00:40:29,940 --> 00:40:35,900
film, that Chance snatched up what he
felt were significant documents out of

504
00:40:35,900 --> 00:40:41,040
Master's house, for which he had no
warrant, so that they would never stand

505
00:40:41,040 --> 00:40:42,040
in a court case.

506
00:40:44,200 --> 00:40:49,300
It was Waxman's notebook, and it showed
the dates and the amounts of money that

507
00:40:49,300 --> 00:40:51,460
Waxman had purchased from Masters.

508
00:40:53,560 --> 00:40:58,420
Vukovich points out that that book is
evidence, that they should have left it

509
00:40:58,420 --> 00:41:01,000
the house or turned it over to the
investigating officer.

510
00:41:01,500 --> 00:41:07,780
Chance sees it as an opportunity to pin
some of these crimes

511
00:41:07,780 --> 00:41:09,700
on Masters.

512
00:41:10,120 --> 00:41:13,100
It gives him names, addresses, amounts.

513
00:41:14,140 --> 00:41:19,480
which though he could not use as
evidence because it wasn't subpoenaed,

514
00:41:19,480 --> 00:41:26,080
kind of roadmap to the people that
Masters associated

515
00:41:26,080 --> 00:41:31,360
with and the kind of amounts of money he
was counterfeiting and dealing with.

516
00:41:31,980 --> 00:41:35,680
Vukovic wants to turn it in. Chance
wants to keep the notebook.

517
00:41:36,020 --> 00:41:41,080
This becomes an essential fissure or
break between them.

518
00:41:41,760 --> 00:41:46,960
that never quite gets repaired until the
final sequences.

519
00:41:47,320 --> 00:41:53,240
But Vukovic begins to see at that point
that his partner is a psycho,

520
00:41:53,400 --> 00:42:00,120
that he's not just, by reputation, the
best agent in the Secret

521
00:42:00,120 --> 00:42:06,220
Service, he's a guy that will break the
law in order to arrest somebody.

522
00:42:07,760 --> 00:42:12,640
My subject, I guess, has always been the
thin line between the policeman and the

523
00:42:12,640 --> 00:42:19,080
criminal. The fact that the very best
cops or law enforcement officers

524
00:42:19,080 --> 00:42:24,420
are those guys who not only think like
criminals, but occasionally have to act

525
00:42:24,420 --> 00:42:26,540
like criminals to bring them to justice.

526
00:42:26,780 --> 00:42:28,480
Now, often that backfires.

527
00:42:29,520 --> 00:42:34,920
There was a time when the public didn't
mind law enforcement agents.

528
00:42:35,850 --> 00:42:39,310
having to bend, if not break the law, to
catch a bad guy.

529
00:42:39,850 --> 00:42:43,530
Today, if that comes into court, the bad
guy walks.

530
00:42:44,710 --> 00:42:50,970
And the public is less sympathetic to
the idea of cops breaking the law.

531
00:42:51,170 --> 00:42:57,110
But it's always been a major theme of
mine that there is a very thin line

532
00:42:57,110 --> 00:42:58,810
between the policeman and the criminal.

533
00:43:40,300 --> 00:43:44,440
Well, one of the things that I did with
Darlene Pflugel was let her hang out

534
00:43:44,440 --> 00:43:47,580
around the apartment that I chose for
her character, Ruth.

535
00:43:48,260 --> 00:43:53,960
And I let her do a lot of the decor for
it, or she worked actually with the art

536
00:43:53,960 --> 00:44:00,780
director, Cricket Rowland, in how the
apartment would look and what its

537
00:44:00,780 --> 00:44:02,760
emotional colors would be.

538
00:44:03,600 --> 00:44:07,860
And a part of letting the characters do
that...

539
00:44:08,360 --> 00:44:12,280
you also want them to get some feelings
about how they would behave, how they

540
00:44:12,280 --> 00:44:17,280
would move around in that kind of space
that's supposed to be theirs.

541
00:44:18,120 --> 00:44:23,460
So for the love scene, I let Peterson
and Darlan work that out themselves.

542
00:44:23,920 --> 00:44:26,320
I just told them where I was going to
put the camera.

543
00:44:28,480 --> 00:44:33,180
I gave them the direction that I think
is the greatest direction I've ever

544
00:44:33,180 --> 00:44:36,720
heard. It was Diaghilev's... direction
to Nijinsky.

545
00:44:36,980 --> 00:44:43,200
Now, Diaghilev was the ballet master of
the very famous 20th century ballet

546
00:44:43,200 --> 00:44:45,500
company, the Ballet Russe de Monte
Carlo.

547
00:44:45,760 --> 00:44:49,620
And his principal dancer was Vassilov
Nijinsky.

548
00:44:50,080 --> 00:44:55,500
And the greatest advice I've ever heard
was Diaghilev's advice to Nijinsky

549
00:44:55,500 --> 00:44:58,560
before Nijinsky went out to do a
performance.

550
00:44:58,840 --> 00:45:01,780
And Diaghilev said to him, E tonne moi.

551
00:45:02,510 --> 00:45:05,090
in French, which means surprise me.

552
00:45:05,590 --> 00:45:09,150
And that's what I said to Darlan and
Bill.

553
00:45:09,370 --> 00:45:12,430
I said, all right, I'm going to put the
camera over here, and when you guys are

554
00:45:12,430 --> 00:45:14,510
ready, you tell me, and then surprise
me.

555
00:45:32,590 --> 00:45:34,890
How much do I get for the information I
gave you on the accident?

556
00:45:35,450 --> 00:45:36,990
No arrest, no money.

557
00:45:38,510 --> 00:45:39,910
It's my fault he's dead?

558
00:45:40,230 --> 00:45:47,150
It's clear that Chance is using Ruth not
only for sex, but for information.

559
00:45:47,730 --> 00:45:54,550
And she's using him both for money, for
giving him information, and

560
00:45:54,550 --> 00:45:56,050
keeping her out of prison.

561
00:45:56,350 --> 00:46:01,350
So again, it's part of the metaphor of
the counterfeit world.

562
00:46:03,280 --> 00:46:04,280
You gonna stay a while?

563
00:46:05,440 --> 00:46:06,440
No.

564
00:46:06,920 --> 00:46:07,920
I gotta go.

565
00:46:11,780 --> 00:46:13,160
I got something for you.

566
00:46:14,180 --> 00:46:15,180
I'm here.

567
00:46:20,680 --> 00:46:25,000
The dealer from San Francisco is coming
into LA next week with 50 grand to buy

568
00:46:25,000 --> 00:46:26,000
stolen diamonds.

569
00:46:26,520 --> 00:46:28,360
Stuff that was lifted from the Bel Air
Hotel.

570
00:46:29,759 --> 00:46:32,980
He's a Chinaman and he's connected to
people in Hong Kong. I told you I'm only

571
00:46:32,980 --> 00:46:33,980
interested in Play -Doh.

572
00:46:36,460 --> 00:46:38,080
I was reading about the star.

573
00:46:39,440 --> 00:46:41,500
Talked about how the stars are the eyes
of God.

574
00:46:43,160 --> 00:46:44,600
I think it's true, don't you?

575
00:46:45,940 --> 00:46:48,020
No, I don't.

576
00:46:49,440 --> 00:46:52,540
I can't tell you that I actually
understand.

577
00:46:54,250 --> 00:46:57,970
the true nature of any character I've
ever depicted in a film.

578
00:46:58,170 --> 00:47:03,590
I just believe that there are tremendous
complexities to people, and that's what

579
00:47:03,590 --> 00:47:04,590
I try to show.

580
00:47:04,770 --> 00:47:11,090
It's Hamlet's dialogue to Horatio in
Shakespeare's play Hamlet. There are

581
00:47:11,090 --> 00:47:15,070
things in heaven and earth than are
dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

582
00:47:15,430 --> 00:47:20,110
And that's really how I feel about all
these characters that interest me, that

583
00:47:20,110 --> 00:47:23,530
have managed to show aspects of their
lives.

584
00:47:24,170 --> 00:47:27,790
I don't know everything there is to know
about them. I don't know all their

585
00:47:27,790 --> 00:47:30,610
backstories. I don't really care.

586
00:47:32,270 --> 00:47:33,770
I have your parole revoked.

587
00:47:39,770 --> 00:47:40,770
You mean that?

588
00:47:42,550 --> 00:47:43,550
You'd do that?

589
00:47:52,430 --> 00:47:57,330
I did send Peterson and Pankow around,
not only with the LAPD, but Jerry

590
00:47:57,330 --> 00:48:03,030
Petovich arranged for them to go out
with Secret Service agents as well and

591
00:48:03,030 --> 00:48:07,770
to some of the bars and places where the
agents hung out and told war stories.

592
00:48:08,110 --> 00:48:13,350
And I went out with them myself from
time to time, and we would compare notes

593
00:48:13,350 --> 00:48:17,590
and discuss mostly the attitudes of
these guys.

594
00:48:17,850 --> 00:48:20,070
Not so much incidents. It was tough.

595
00:48:20,490 --> 00:48:27,370
to put incidents into the story because
the story did not allow for a lot of

596
00:48:27,370 --> 00:48:28,370
digression.

597
00:48:29,130 --> 00:48:35,970
What I wanted Peterson and Pankow to
adopt was the behavior

598
00:48:35,970 --> 00:48:38,090
of the Secret Service agents.

599
00:48:39,650 --> 00:48:44,450
Amazingly, they had a kind of devil -may
-care quality about them, this group of

600
00:48:44,450 --> 00:48:45,450
guys.

601
00:48:45,890 --> 00:48:52,560
So I wanted John Pankow and Bill
Peterson to get a sense of their

602
00:48:52,560 --> 00:48:58,260
personal lives and their private lives
and their attitudes in the street.

603
00:49:32,160 --> 00:49:38,120
The scene with the artist in the
wheelchair, that's an artist, a downtown

604
00:49:38,120 --> 00:49:41,420
painter called Mark Gash. That was his
studio.

605
00:49:41,700 --> 00:49:46,740
I knew Mark Gash, and I have collected a
number of his paintings. I find them

606
00:49:46,740 --> 00:49:52,780
very original, and while they look to be
like... children's paintings and quite

607
00:49:52,780 --> 00:49:55,240
humorous and graphic.

608
00:49:55,560 --> 00:49:58,040
They have a very, very dark heart.

609
00:49:58,500 --> 00:50:05,320
And Mark Gash is handicapped. As you can
see, he's in a wheelchair.

610
00:50:05,460 --> 00:50:11,900
He is not exactly playing someone else.
He's playing himself. But I

611
00:50:11,900 --> 00:50:16,180
wanted to make him a part of the film,
so I gave him some lines that pertain to

612
00:50:16,180 --> 00:50:16,919
the story.

613
00:50:16,920 --> 00:50:18,860
And we shot at his studio.

614
00:50:20,810 --> 00:50:27,310
The only significance of that Chinese
character that's over the door of

615
00:50:27,310 --> 00:50:34,270
downtown printing operation is that I
saw it there on that

616
00:50:34,270 --> 00:50:39,690
location, and it was just the beginning
of the kind of Asian invasion of Los

617
00:50:39,690 --> 00:50:46,030
Angeles. There's now several million
Asians living in greater Los Angeles,

618
00:50:46,030 --> 00:50:52,300
that area had just... begun to become an
Asian enclave. I forget what that

619
00:50:52,300 --> 00:50:57,580
character means. There are probably
people watching this video or DVD that

620
00:50:57,580 --> 00:50:59,600
know the meaning of that character.

621
00:50:59,940 --> 00:51:04,820
I've long since forgotten it, but it was
up there when I chose the location.

622
00:51:08,860 --> 00:51:13,760
I just loved Steve James as a human
being and as an action actor.

623
00:51:16,970 --> 00:51:21,090
I actually, you know, we wrote this part
for Steve James simply because I was a

624
00:51:21,090 --> 00:51:27,550
fan. He plays a guy who was one of
Masters' contacts for passing

625
00:51:27,550 --> 00:51:31,890
counterfeit money. He was also a guy
that Masters could call on from time to

626
00:51:31,890 --> 00:51:37,490
time to do some unpleasant work, such as
killing somebody even while they were

627
00:51:37,490 --> 00:51:38,490
in prison.

628
00:51:39,790 --> 00:51:44,430
He was a guy that I both knew and liked.
I did a couple of television shows at

629
00:51:44,430 --> 00:51:51,150
NBC called The Cat Squad, and I cast
Steve James in those and

630
00:51:51,150 --> 00:51:56,350
loved working with him. He was just a
pleasure to see every day on the set. He

631
00:51:56,350 --> 00:52:00,530
was always ready, always there with
good, fresh ideas.

632
00:52:01,290 --> 00:52:03,750
He called himself the Funky Man.

633
00:52:04,840 --> 00:52:10,500
And I introduced my young son to Steve
as the Funky Man. And my son, who was at

634
00:52:10,500 --> 00:52:15,540
the time about six years old, he only
knew Steve as the Funky Man. Whenever

635
00:52:15,540 --> 00:52:17,740
see him, he'd say, Hi, Funky Man, how
are you?

636
00:52:18,440 --> 00:52:24,880
And Steve had a great, great sense of
humor and was a really terrific actor,

637
00:52:25,040 --> 00:52:28,660
well beyond the kind of roles that he
was mostly known for.

638
00:52:28,980 --> 00:52:30,640
You still driving that piece of shit?

639
00:52:52,080 --> 00:52:57,640
We actually shot the prison scene at San
Luis Obispo State Prison.

640
00:52:58,100 --> 00:53:02,660
And that's where, by the way, some of
the Manson family are being held.

641
00:53:03,080 --> 00:53:08,940
And we shot with actual inmates in the
yard, no actors, just our principals,

642
00:53:09,360 --> 00:53:13,160
John Turturro and a couple of other guys
that were cast in that scene.

643
00:53:14,860 --> 00:53:21,340
One thing I remember about being there
is that Bill Peterson and I and somebody

644
00:53:21,340 --> 00:53:25,220
else, we played some three -on -three
basketball with the inmates, and we beat

645
00:53:25,220 --> 00:53:27,800
the inmates, who were pretty good
basketball players.

646
00:53:29,130 --> 00:53:34,290
They were looking for an opportunity to
break their daily routine, and so they

647
00:53:34,290 --> 00:53:39,910
enjoyed participating in the film and
playing themselves, and the warden

648
00:53:39,910 --> 00:53:41,450
it was a good idea as well.

649
00:53:42,490 --> 00:53:43,730
I wish that...

650
00:53:44,000 --> 00:53:48,380
that prison sequence had been developed
more. I wish that I had done more with

651
00:53:48,380 --> 00:53:53,880
it, but I only needed a small part of
it, just really to show that Cody was in

652
00:53:53,880 --> 00:53:59,320
prison, that a hit had been put on him
by Masters, and that that was giving

653
00:53:59,320 --> 00:54:04,720
the motivation to suggest that he would
give Chance some information about

654
00:54:04,720 --> 00:54:11,260
Masters. It turns out that he was in no
way prepared to do that, but was just

655
00:54:11,260 --> 00:54:13,440
looking for a way to escape.

656
00:54:14,000 --> 00:54:15,320
by using chance.

657
00:54:26,600 --> 00:54:27,860
Pretty girl, Carl.

658
00:54:29,820 --> 00:54:33,880
Actress. There is a perceived code of
honor among thieves.

659
00:54:34,420 --> 00:54:36,140
I don't think it's very real.

660
00:54:36,340 --> 00:54:41,120
They pride themselves on their inability
to snitch.

661
00:54:41,790 --> 00:54:45,250
And yet, if the price is right, they
will snitch somebody off.

662
00:54:46,270 --> 00:54:52,790
Nobody's going to do time for somebody
else. There's always a way that law

663
00:54:52,790 --> 00:54:57,970
enforcement can get to a guy that
they've got the goods on and get him to

664
00:54:57,970 --> 00:55:04,530
out. The whole idea of honor among
thieves, whether it be mafia or the kind

665
00:55:04,530 --> 00:55:08,490
guys that were counterfeiting money in
Los Angeles in those days.

666
00:55:10,140 --> 00:55:12,620
drug dealers, it's just a myth.

667
00:55:13,220 --> 00:55:18,340
The myth of the godfather, you know,
that you, there is honor among these

668
00:55:18,340 --> 00:55:20,940
people. They are men of honor, men of
respect.

669
00:55:21,280 --> 00:55:27,340
My experience has been that there is no
honor, no respect, but that to

670
00:55:27,340 --> 00:55:31,900
each other, they're trying to display
these qualities.

671
00:55:32,320 --> 00:55:34,380
You know, I respect you.

672
00:55:34,640 --> 00:55:38,540
That's your turf. I'm not going to
interfere with...

673
00:55:39,050 --> 00:55:44,530
You're turf. And if something goes down
bad for me, I'm not going to pull you

674
00:55:44,530 --> 00:55:45,529
into it.

675
00:55:45,530 --> 00:55:48,410
That's something that they have to
perceive about themselves.

676
00:55:49,270 --> 00:55:54,090
They know if they have any intelligence,
and often they do, great intelligence,

677
00:55:54,390 --> 00:55:59,530
they know that what they are doing is
without honor, without respect. It's

678
00:55:59,530 --> 00:56:00,530
against the law.

679
00:56:01,390 --> 00:56:06,870
And yet, most of what you hear them
talking about and demanding from others

680
00:56:06,870 --> 00:56:07,870
respect.

681
00:56:24,880 --> 00:56:30,040
That fight scene between Steve James and
Willem Dafoe and a guy named Jack

682
00:56:30,040 --> 00:56:36,320
Hoare, who was an actual cop, a member
of the Ramparts Division, and he was the

683
00:56:36,320 --> 00:56:40,020
toughest cop I've ever met. He was not
really an actor. He's a cop.

684
00:56:40,320 --> 00:56:42,720
He's the guy who kills Peterson in the
movie.

685
00:56:43,600 --> 00:56:48,220
The choreography was done by a guy named
Pat Johnson, who I've worked with a

686
00:56:48,220 --> 00:56:50,980
number of times. Pat is a...

687
00:56:51,850 --> 00:56:58,630
Black belt, you know, ninth degree. He
was the number two middleweight karate

688
00:56:58,630 --> 00:57:03,990
champion in the United States. Chuck
Norris was number one.

689
00:57:05,310 --> 00:57:12,010
I like Pat very much. He's a very tough
guy and a lethal guy, but

690
00:57:12,010 --> 00:57:13,450
he's soft.

691
00:57:14,090 --> 00:57:17,450
He's soft -spoken. He's a wonderful
family man.

692
00:57:17,690 --> 00:57:18,910
He's a very gentle man.

693
00:57:20,030 --> 00:57:25,510
He had choreographed Bruce Lee's Enter
the Dragon, among others.

694
00:57:25,830 --> 00:57:29,310
And he did the Karate Kid, all the
Karate Kid movies.

695
00:57:30,050 --> 00:57:32,670
I can't afford to have it circulating
right now.

696
00:57:36,570 --> 00:57:40,610
A fight scene has to be choreographed or
you're going to hurt somebody.

697
00:57:41,290 --> 00:57:46,130
You might even hurt somebody if it's
choreographed. It's always a risk, which

698
00:57:46,130 --> 00:57:48,650
why you try to get a good...

699
00:57:48,890 --> 00:57:53,650
professional guy to make sure that the
blows look real but aren't.

700
00:57:54,530 --> 00:58:00,450
And one of the things that, you know,
the concepts that I had that I asked Pat

701
00:58:00,450 --> 00:58:06,790
Johnson to work through, and I worked
very closely, you know, with him, is

702
00:58:06,790 --> 00:58:08,590
they used objects in the room.

703
00:58:08,890 --> 00:58:12,690
That, you know, they didn't just come in
and start doing flying kicks.

704
00:58:13,010 --> 00:58:17,270
I didn't want a sense of karate in the
movie.

705
00:58:17,680 --> 00:58:22,700
except occasionally, but that what they
would do in a situation like that is

706
00:58:22,700 --> 00:58:28,480
what people do in any kind of an
impromptu brawl, and that is use the

707
00:58:28,480 --> 00:58:29,600
that are near at hand.

708
00:58:30,140 --> 00:58:36,380
So we worked very hard to use things
that would be natural to that setting,

709
00:58:36,420 --> 00:58:39,800
which was a guy's living and dining
room.

710
00:58:40,120 --> 00:58:41,920
You broke a contract with me, Jeff.

711
00:58:42,620 --> 00:58:45,160
Now, I don't know whether you're into
it. I don't think that...

712
00:58:45,960 --> 00:58:50,720
Masters kills the Steve James character
at all. He puts a gun in his mouth, and

713
00:58:50,720 --> 00:58:53,880
then you hear the loud sound of a
fireplace roar.

714
00:58:54,480 --> 00:58:58,260
I think he just forced him to give him
the money back, to get the money back.

715
00:58:58,940 --> 00:59:03,240
I know some people have told me that
they think that Masters killed him. He

716
00:59:03,240 --> 00:59:05,120
would kill him. He wasn't bluffing.

717
00:59:05,600 --> 00:59:10,980
But at the end of the fight, he just
puts the barrel of the gun down his

718
00:59:11,680 --> 00:59:15,580
I don't assume that he killed him at
all, but he may have. I just don't know.

719
00:59:18,220 --> 00:59:23,460
I felt that a part of Masters' character
was that he was a voyeur.

720
00:59:24,020 --> 00:59:28,740
He loved to watch himself having sex and
tape it while he was having sex.

721
00:59:29,480 --> 00:59:35,020
A part of the character of Masters is
that he looks at things. He looks at

722
00:59:35,020 --> 00:59:39,620
people. He looks very carefully at the
work that he does.

723
00:59:40,710 --> 00:59:43,170
And he's always looking and evaluating.

724
00:59:44,450 --> 00:59:47,310
His most important feature is his eyes.

725
00:59:51,570 --> 00:59:53,630
What do you want? I got a writ I need
you to sign.

726
00:59:55,470 --> 00:59:56,470
What kind of a writ?

727
00:59:56,550 --> 00:59:59,050
I need the release of a prisoner from
San Luis Prison to help me in a

728
00:59:59,050 --> 00:59:59,868
counterfeit case.

729
00:59:59,870 --> 01:00:00,870
Must be a big case.

730
01:00:01,170 --> 01:00:04,030
The target's a major counterfeiter
involved in the murder of a federal

731
01:00:04,510 --> 01:00:06,390
I never sign such writs.

732
01:00:12,680 --> 01:00:13,840
Why are you still here?

733
01:00:16,060 --> 01:00:21,500
I spent all morning working on this. The
scene in the federal judge's office, or

734
01:00:21,500 --> 01:00:26,480
the district judge's office, is actually
in a federal judge's office.

735
01:00:26,940 --> 01:00:32,380
We were allowed to shoot in the offices
of a wonderful federal judge named

736
01:00:32,380 --> 01:00:34,500
Mariana Felser, downtown.

737
01:00:35,300 --> 01:00:38,960
And the judge in the film is using her
office.

738
01:00:40,560 --> 01:00:46,260
His name is Val DeVargas. I have not
seen a lot of film on Val DeVargas. I

739
01:00:46,260 --> 01:00:52,700
not seen him for years on film since he
played a much younger gang member

740
01:00:52,700 --> 01:00:56,280
in the great Orson Welles film, Touch of
Evil.

741
01:00:56,680 --> 01:01:00,920
When Bob Weiner brought him in to see
me, I remembered him from Touch of Evil,

742
01:01:01,040 --> 01:01:04,540
and I naturally was excited to have him.

743
01:01:06,030 --> 01:01:08,610
play the judge in the scene. I think he
did a great job.

744
01:01:08,850 --> 01:01:13,910
I think it's a wonderful performance
with a lot of things going on underneath

745
01:01:13,910 --> 01:01:18,450
that you're not quite sure of. Again, it
comes back to my belief that really

746
01:01:18,450 --> 01:01:23,550
good actors are magicians. They turn
paper into flesh, and that's what he

747
01:01:23,750 --> 01:01:24,750
Get back here!

748
01:01:31,350 --> 01:01:33,410
Let me look at it again.

749
01:01:50,670 --> 01:01:55,950
If this prisoner escapes from custody,
I'll make you testify in open court

750
01:01:55,950 --> 01:01:57,250
how we made a fool out of you.

751
01:02:05,390 --> 01:02:06,870
Now get the hell out of here.

752
01:02:09,610 --> 01:02:13,310
If you cross me or bullshit me, I will
dedicate my life to putting you back in

753
01:02:13,310 --> 01:02:17,050
here. Bob Wiener, our casting director,
rented a house.

754
01:02:17,450 --> 01:02:22,650
somewhere. I think it was even in
Beverly Hills or Brentwood or some very

755
01:02:22,650 --> 01:02:27,410
section of Los Angeles and all the
actors stayed at this house. It was like

756
01:02:27,410 --> 01:02:28,410
boarding house.

757
01:02:28,530 --> 01:02:32,590
They stayed there while we were making
the film and it became known as Camp

758
01:02:32,590 --> 01:02:38,750
Wiener and there were actually t -shirts
out about Camp Wiener

759
01:02:38,750 --> 01:02:40,790
on the crew and

760
01:02:42,000 --> 01:02:46,880
There was one famous T -shirt that said,
I've been insulted by Bob Wiener.

761
01:02:47,320 --> 01:02:52,680
And it was a very convivial atmosphere
that I put these guys through.

762
01:02:53,980 --> 01:02:58,420
Actually, the Willem Dafoe character and
the John Turturro characters, they

763
01:02:58,420 --> 01:03:05,000
stayed apart from Peterson and Pankow
because their characters were in

764
01:03:05,000 --> 01:03:06,200
conflict in the script.

765
01:03:06,460 --> 01:03:12,720
So they didn't become as convivial as
Peterson, Pankow, and some of the others

766
01:03:12,720 --> 01:03:14,780
who were playing Treasury agents.

767
01:03:15,080 --> 01:03:18,360
The town is in room 306. The elevators
are over there. Thank you.

768
01:03:25,060 --> 01:03:26,700
You have to come up to the room with me.

769
01:03:49,320 --> 01:03:51,560
What happened to your daughter? I don't
know. She was in a park and those little

770
01:03:51,560 --> 01:03:58,300
monkeys... You do see in the scene where
Totoro

771
01:03:58,300 --> 01:04:05,140
leads Chance astray, ostensibly to a
hospital, which was the Queen of Angels

772
01:04:05,140 --> 01:04:11,300
Hospital in Los Angeles, to visit his
daughter, who's supposedly sick, in the

773
01:04:11,300 --> 01:04:13,040
hospital. It's all a ruse.

774
01:04:13,600 --> 01:04:17,400
And you see Chance let his guard down
there.

775
01:04:18,000 --> 01:04:22,620
And it's a kind of precursor of what's
going to happen to Chance ultimately in

776
01:04:22,620 --> 01:04:24,840
the film when he lets his guard down.

777
01:04:25,320 --> 01:04:32,140
And it gives you some understanding of
why Chance is such a hard case and

778
01:04:32,140 --> 01:04:36,940
rarely lets his guard down, because
whenever he does, he pays a dear price

779
01:04:36,940 --> 01:04:37,940
it.

780
01:04:39,800 --> 01:04:42,440
I don't have a lot of time. I'm in the
middle of a trial.

781
01:04:42,760 --> 01:04:44,980
What kind of trial? It's a dope case.

782
01:04:45,790 --> 01:04:48,170
Client got busted smuggling 50 pounds of
cocaine.

783
01:04:48,590 --> 01:04:52,230
I should be able to get him off, though.
Bob Wiener, the casting director,

784
01:04:52,490 --> 01:04:56,170
brought me virtually every, well,
everyone in the film.

785
01:04:56,790 --> 01:05:01,130
And he had run into Dean Stockwell
somewhere or he had seen him in

786
01:05:01,210 --> 01:05:04,310
and I only knew Dean Stockwell as a
child actor.

787
01:05:04,510 --> 01:05:08,510
But then I saw Dean Stockwell in Paris,
Texas.

788
01:05:09,360 --> 01:05:14,160
And then I subsequently saw him in Blue
Velvet and realized that there was much

789
01:05:14,160 --> 01:05:20,700
more to Dean Stockwell than the child
star that I remembered from The Boy with

790
01:05:20,700 --> 01:05:21,700
Green Hair.

791
01:05:22,080 --> 01:05:27,500
And Dean Stockwell was a cute, lovable
child actor and very good.

792
01:05:28,140 --> 01:05:29,200
Then he...

793
01:05:29,420 --> 01:05:35,720
came in to meet me for the role of this
sleazy downtown L .A. lawyer, and he was

794
01:05:35,720 --> 01:05:36,720
pitch perfect.

795
01:05:36,740 --> 01:05:41,440
He understood the irony of that
character.

796
01:05:41,700 --> 01:05:43,880
He understood the double dealing.

797
01:05:44,240 --> 01:05:50,660
He knew how to use the law to bend the
law, and this was something that

798
01:05:50,660 --> 01:05:56,060
Dean understood innately, and he had the
quality that I most often look for in

799
01:05:56,060 --> 01:05:57,500
an actor, which is intelligence.

800
01:05:58,430 --> 01:06:04,030
That's the first thing I'm looking for
with an actor. Is this person

801
01:06:04,030 --> 01:06:10,490
enough to understand the character
they're playing and to do more with the

802
01:06:10,490 --> 01:06:12,190
character than is written for them?

803
01:06:17,210 --> 01:06:18,210
Mr. Masters?

804
01:06:21,010 --> 01:06:22,490
How you doing? Ben Jett.

805
01:06:23,270 --> 01:06:24,950
My associate, Dr. George Victor.

806
01:06:25,150 --> 01:06:26,150
Pleasure. How do you do?

807
01:06:26,740 --> 01:06:28,560
Cut yourself shaving, Mr. Jensen?

808
01:06:29,080 --> 01:06:30,880
No, as a matter of fact, I got hit by a
tennis ball.

809
01:06:32,600 --> 01:06:34,460
You're in from Palm Springs, huh? Yeah.

810
01:06:35,680 --> 01:06:36,780
What's the weather like there?

811
01:06:37,380 --> 01:06:39,060
It's really nice. You've been up here
the last few days.

812
01:06:40,960 --> 01:06:42,480
I've got a friend in Palm Springs.

813
01:06:43,600 --> 01:06:44,598
Lenny Green.

814
01:06:44,600 --> 01:06:45,600
You know him?

815
01:06:48,340 --> 01:06:50,300
I've got a friend in Hollywood, Donald
Duck. You know him?

816
01:06:53,040 --> 01:06:55,940
I understand you gentlemen do some
island banking.

817
01:06:56,510 --> 01:06:57,510
That's right. Where?

818
01:06:57,890 --> 01:06:58,890
Cayman Islands.

819
01:06:58,930 --> 01:06:59,930
Good business?

820
01:07:00,170 --> 01:07:01,170
Not bad.

821
01:07:01,230 --> 01:07:02,350
What sort of banking?

822
01:07:03,170 --> 01:07:04,690
We're a Dutch antilles company.

823
01:07:05,230 --> 01:07:07,850
We loan money to various enterprises
here in the state.

824
01:07:08,550 --> 01:07:10,950
Loans aren't secured by real estate or
anything else down there.

825
01:07:11,710 --> 01:07:13,470
Hey, Rick. Get a phone call, man.

826
01:07:18,670 --> 01:07:23,910
The idea of continuing a scene from one
location to another has been done...

827
01:07:24,250 --> 01:07:28,930
often in the past, not so much recently
that I can cite, but it's done in

828
01:07:28,930 --> 01:07:35,290
Citizen Kane where you take an idea or
some dialogue and you run it across

829
01:07:35,290 --> 01:07:36,290
several scenes.

830
01:07:36,550 --> 01:07:42,970
And I had that in mind when I moved the
first meeting between Chance Vukovic and

831
01:07:42,970 --> 01:07:47,710
Masters from the roof of a gym to the
weight room of the gym to the locker

832
01:07:47,710 --> 01:07:51,770
of the gym to the steam room of the gym.
And it's all one conversation.

833
01:07:55,690 --> 01:07:58,950
You see the physicality of the three
characters.

834
01:07:59,510 --> 01:08:02,170
They become naked to one another.

835
01:08:02,950 --> 01:08:09,650
And what's going on there is that while
they're sitting in a steam room or are

836
01:08:09,650 --> 01:08:15,650
shown in the locker room totally naked,
which is part of what Chance and Vukovic

837
01:08:15,650 --> 01:08:20,590
have to do in a meeting with masters to
show that they're not wearing a wire,

838
01:08:20,770 --> 01:08:23,450
that they're not wired for sound and
recording.

839
01:08:24,439 --> 01:08:31,420
the conversation because he somewhat
believes that these guys

840
01:08:31,420 --> 01:08:33,380
might be agents. He's always suspicious.

841
01:08:33,660 --> 01:08:37,160
So you see them get naked in front of
one another.

842
01:08:37,380 --> 01:08:41,220
And then they go into the steam room
where they have a conversation, which is

843
01:08:41,220 --> 01:08:45,380
place that's almost impossible to hide a
microphone.

844
01:08:46,359 --> 01:08:51,560
And Master speaks quite clearly and
honestly about his...

845
01:08:51,950 --> 01:08:56,529
intentions and his needs, and Vukovic
and Chance are just making up a story.

846
01:08:56,970 --> 01:09:03,550
So there is underneath that scene the
sense that, well, these three people

847
01:09:03,550 --> 01:09:09,970
gotten physically naked in order to show
that they are completely

848
01:09:09,970 --> 01:09:12,450
open, and yet they're not.

849
01:09:13,109 --> 01:09:15,770
They're just putting each other on.

850
01:09:19,430 --> 01:09:23,529
I've been coming to this gym three or
four times a week for five years.

851
01:09:24,609 --> 01:09:25,970
I'm an easy man to find.

852
01:09:26,490 --> 01:09:28,350
My reputation speaks for itself.

853
01:09:29,410 --> 01:09:34,910
The fact is that if you can't come up
with the front money, you're not for

854
01:09:37,710 --> 01:09:42,229
No way I can get you 30K to make a buy.
You'd hear him laughing all the way from

855
01:09:42,229 --> 01:09:44,790
Washington. Shit, Masters beats the
government out of that much in a day.

856
01:09:45,090 --> 01:09:47,149
We got a chance to make him on a hand
-to -hand buy.

857
01:09:47,450 --> 01:09:48,450
Robert Downey Sr.

858
01:09:48,649 --> 01:09:53,109
plays Bateman, who Chance referred to as
a pencil neck.

859
01:09:53,510 --> 01:10:00,130
And Jerry Petovich referred to his own
boss at the Secret Service as a pencil

860
01:10:00,130 --> 01:10:01,130
neck.

861
01:10:01,320 --> 01:10:02,960
And Robert Downey Sr.

862
01:10:03,300 --> 01:10:07,120
was a good friend of mine for many years
in New York. We used to play basketball

863
01:10:07,120 --> 01:10:12,580
together, and I would see early cuts of
his films, which were really cutting

864
01:10:12,580 --> 01:10:18,020
-edge comedies back in the 60s, Putney
Swope and Greaser's Palace.

865
01:10:19,120 --> 01:10:20,280
two among several.

866
01:10:20,660 --> 01:10:27,400
And I always thought Bob Downey had a
really weird sensibility and was a

867
01:10:27,400 --> 01:10:30,420
interesting guy, a nice guy, and a very
funny guy.

868
01:10:30,700 --> 01:10:36,920
He had not done a lot of acting for
other people, but I cast him in that

869
01:10:36,920 --> 01:10:41,880
simply because I liked him and I thought
he would bring a different color to the

870
01:10:41,880 --> 01:10:42,880
film.

871
01:10:53,130 --> 01:10:54,270
Let me try something on you.

872
01:10:55,230 --> 01:10:56,230
Yeah, what?

873
01:10:56,550 --> 01:10:59,290
Ruth tells me there's a guy coming in
Thursday to buy stolen diamonds.

874
01:10:59,970 --> 01:11:01,910
He's going to be carrying $50 ,000 cash.

875
01:11:03,090 --> 01:11:08,670
I think I've only made one or two
independent films in my career, and the

876
01:11:08,670 --> 01:11:13,930
13 or so have been major studio films.
But I wanted to make an independent

877
01:11:14,030 --> 01:11:15,030
let's put it that way.

878
01:11:15,250 --> 01:11:19,650
And I wanted to do it with guys who knew
how to work quickly.

879
01:11:21,080 --> 01:11:26,440
One of the things that happens on a full
Union picture, which is usually loaded

880
01:11:26,440 --> 01:11:30,500
up with a lot of personnel that are not
absolutely necessary,

881
01:11:31,260 --> 01:11:32,820
is you move slower.

882
01:11:33,780 --> 01:11:38,220
And when I did the French Connection, I
was very fortunate in that we had a

883
01:11:38,220 --> 01:11:41,740
Union crew, but it was a small crew in
New York.

884
01:11:42,220 --> 01:11:46,440
They didn't load a lot of people on us
that we didn't need. We only had the

885
01:11:46,440 --> 01:11:47,800
personnel that we needed.

886
01:11:48,700 --> 01:11:50,120
And it was almost...

887
01:11:50,390 --> 01:11:56,490
an independent sized crew it was very
small very hands -on by everyone

888
01:11:56,490 --> 01:12:03,490
no one had a lot of assistance no one
had you know the sound person was a one

889
01:12:03,490 --> 01:12:10,470
or two man band the camera operator and
the

890
01:12:10,470 --> 01:12:15,590
focus puller and the director of
photography, that was it, on the camera,

891
01:12:15,590 --> 01:12:20,150
know, and just a few key grip, just a
few guys to do light.

892
01:12:20,430 --> 01:12:24,990
And it was a small crew, and the picture
was shot in 40 days, the French

893
01:12:24,990 --> 01:12:30,090
connection. And a part of that is
because you had a small unit moving very

894
01:12:30,090 --> 01:12:36,990
quickly around to God knows how many
locations, possibly, you know,

895
01:12:37,010 --> 01:12:39,530
anywhere from 50 to 80 locations.

896
01:12:40,320 --> 01:12:41,660
in New York in the winter.

897
01:12:42,560 --> 01:12:46,800
And I thought, well, this is the way to
make to live and die in L .A., you know,

898
01:12:46,840 --> 01:12:47,840
in L .A.

899
01:12:48,040 --> 01:12:49,560
And so that's what we did.

900
01:12:49,780 --> 01:12:53,440
And I sought out people from the
independent world.

901
01:13:16,560 --> 01:13:22,340
Well, I had seen Robbie Mueller's work
in a number of European films,

902
01:13:22,340 --> 01:13:29,260
those of Wim Wenders and Paris, Texas
being the best example,

903
01:13:29,340 --> 01:13:35,700
which had a European sensibility but was
shot in the United States. And it had

904
01:13:35,700 --> 01:13:39,200
the kind of a look that I thought would
be very good for...

905
01:13:39,640 --> 01:13:44,060
to live and die in L .A., and so I
contacted Robbie and sent him the script

906
01:13:44,060 --> 01:13:50,040
invited him to shoot the film. He
actually did not shoot any of the chase

907
01:13:50,200 --> 01:13:54,740
Robbie didn't feel too comfortable
filming a chase. That was the director

908
01:13:54,740 --> 01:13:58,800
photography and operator on the chase
was a guy named Bob Yeoman.

909
01:14:00,160 --> 01:14:07,040
But I loved Robbie's sensibility, and I
liked the idea of not

910
01:14:07,040 --> 01:14:08,320
doing a lot of cutting.

911
01:14:09,420 --> 01:14:13,440
in this film as I had in previous and
subsequent films.

912
01:14:13,660 --> 01:14:18,680
And Robbie is a kind of a master of the
single setup scene.

913
01:14:19,440 --> 01:14:26,140
So he would like to find the best light,
shoot the scene in that light, and

914
01:14:26,140 --> 01:14:27,540
that's it, then move on.

915
01:14:27,860 --> 01:14:30,120
And from time to time, that's what we
did.

916
01:14:30,380 --> 01:14:35,260
I told him when we started this that I
was not going to be able to do the whole

917
01:14:35,260 --> 01:14:36,260
film that way.

918
01:14:36,540 --> 01:14:39,040
I would have to do some intercutting.

919
01:14:39,440 --> 01:14:44,280
And he wasn't very happy about that.
Robbie is the kind of a guy that likes

920
01:14:44,280 --> 01:14:49,940
envision a scene and the light that it's
going to play in. And if it's natural

921
01:14:49,940 --> 01:14:56,240
light, you can't keep moving around to
cover it. But often you need coverage in

922
01:14:56,240 --> 01:14:58,240
an American film to keep a scene moving.

923
01:14:58,540 --> 01:15:03,260
So there are several sequences that we
shot that just didn't work because I

924
01:15:03,260 --> 01:15:08,860
didn't get coverage on them. But I was
very interested in Mueller's approach,

925
01:15:09,000 --> 01:15:14,120
and I think it's a unique approach to
the look of To Live and Die in L .A.

926
01:15:14,120 --> 01:15:17,380
was at that time uncommon for a
thriller.

927
01:15:18,240 --> 01:15:20,100
I'll give you five cheese.

928
01:15:20,540 --> 01:15:21,540
Not enough.

929
01:15:25,160 --> 01:15:27,320
And my promise not to throw you back in
the joint.

930
01:15:46,190 --> 01:15:52,730
I had heard some of the recordings of
Wang Chung on the radio while I was in

931
01:15:52,730 --> 01:15:57,910
London before I made To Live and Die in
L .A. And I really liked their sound. It

932
01:15:57,910 --> 01:16:04,350
had, for the time, a very unique pop
sound with very intelligent and ironic

933
01:16:04,350 --> 01:16:05,350
lyrics.

934
01:16:05,890 --> 01:16:08,930
Especially they had a hit song which was
called Wait.

935
01:16:09,580 --> 01:16:15,040
And you had to listen to the lyrics very
carefully before you really got it, but

936
01:16:15,040 --> 01:16:21,660
the beat and the melody were insinuating
and sinuous and very

937
01:16:21,660 --> 01:16:24,020
sensual and evocative, I thought.

938
01:16:24,300 --> 01:16:29,160
And so I met with the two fellows, Jack
Hughes and Nick Feldman, who comprise

939
01:16:29,160 --> 01:16:34,560
this group, and I told them I would be
interested in having them write a score

940
01:16:34,560 --> 01:16:38,780
for To Live and Die in L .A., but I
hadn't made the movie yet.

941
01:16:39,040 --> 01:16:41,380
and I didn't even finish the script at
that time.

942
01:16:42,040 --> 01:16:49,020
When I finished the script, I sent it to
Hughes and Feldman and told them the

943
01:16:49,020 --> 01:16:54,160
kind of movie I was making. I let them
read the script, and I described the

944
01:16:54,160 --> 01:16:59,140
style which I attempted to make the
film. And I said, now, based on what

945
01:16:59,140 --> 01:17:03,280
told you and what you're reading here,
go ahead and just write some stuff.

946
01:17:03,740 --> 01:17:04,740
Write it free form.

947
01:17:04,940 --> 01:17:10,920
Don't write anything that has
necessarily beginnings, middles, or

948
01:17:10,920 --> 01:17:11,898
take care of that.

949
01:17:11,900 --> 01:17:17,940
You guys just write me some long
stretches of track and sometimes

950
01:17:17,940 --> 01:17:24,940
even single sections of track, and we'll
mix them together later, and

951
01:17:24,940 --> 01:17:31,820
I'll find a way because I feel that your
music has an affinity with the movie

952
01:17:31,820 --> 01:17:32,820
I'm trying to make.

953
01:17:34,090 --> 01:17:39,430
It's strange because here are two guys
from England that had never really been

954
01:17:39,430 --> 01:17:44,910
to Los Angeles except perhaps to tour in
one or the other of the clubs at that

955
01:17:44,910 --> 01:17:48,030
time. I know they played the Whiskey A
Go -Go live.

956
01:17:48,850 --> 01:17:53,690
But they had no idea really of the
street life of Los Angeles, let alone

957
01:17:53,690 --> 01:18:00,190
lives of a Secret Service agent or what
they went through in an average day in

958
01:18:00,190 --> 01:18:01,190
Los Angeles.

959
01:18:01,840 --> 01:18:08,740
Yet there was something about their
music that inspired me in terms of the

960
01:18:08,740 --> 01:18:14,540
and attitude of the film. I had done
this once before with the group

961
01:18:14,540 --> 01:18:17,620
Dream for a film I had made called
Sorcerer.

962
01:18:17,930 --> 01:18:22,930
I heard that group playing in an
abandoned church out in the Black Forest

963
01:18:22,930 --> 01:18:27,870
Germany at 3 o 'clock one morning, and
it struck me as being the perfect

964
01:18:27,870 --> 01:18:32,890
soundtrack for the film that I hadn't
made yet. And so I approached them to do

965
01:18:32,890 --> 01:18:38,350
the same thing that Wang Chung did. I
think in both cases, the score turned

966
01:18:38,350 --> 01:18:44,250
to be very good, although the musicians
had not seen the film, any part of it.

967
01:18:44,750 --> 01:18:47,970
by the time they composed and performed
the score.

968
01:19:23,230 --> 01:19:24,250
Get your clothes on.

969
01:19:30,270 --> 01:19:32,210
Come on, two hands. Take your shirt off.

970
01:19:35,830 --> 01:19:36,830
Oh, that's great.

971
01:19:38,430 --> 01:19:39,249
That's it.

972
01:19:39,250 --> 01:19:40,290
Get your pants down.

973
01:19:40,650 --> 01:19:42,830
Let me get your fucking pants down.
Let's get the fuck out of here. Get your

974
01:19:42,830 --> 01:19:43,830
pants down.

975
01:20:22,960 --> 01:20:27,340
I love to see a good chase scene. I've
only been able to come up with about

976
01:20:27,340 --> 01:20:32,520
three in all the films I've made.
They're very tough to dream up.

977
01:20:33,000 --> 01:20:37,380
There's a lot of them that are being
done now. There wasn't at the time.

978
01:20:37,740 --> 01:20:43,300
But they're being done to a greater
extent now using digital opticals, which

979
01:20:43,300 --> 01:20:44,300
sort of cheating.

980
01:20:44,700 --> 01:20:46,040
Looks good, though.

981
01:20:46,980 --> 01:20:50,160
But we did all these chase scenes
mechanically.

982
01:20:50,600 --> 01:20:52,440
And I never said, let's...

983
01:20:52,650 --> 01:20:56,410
top the French connection or something
like that. Let's try to come up with

984
01:20:56,410 --> 01:20:57,410
something different.

985
01:20:57,870 --> 01:21:01,150
We have to come up with something
different. You can't do the same thing.

986
01:21:01,450 --> 01:21:05,890
And let's try to make it intrinsic to a
certain locale.

987
01:21:06,350 --> 01:21:11,010
We'll find the locale first that looks
cinematic, and then we'll work out a

988
01:21:11,010 --> 01:21:12,950
chase that fits that locale.

989
01:21:16,830 --> 01:21:19,730
The cooperation that we got from the
city was terrific.

990
01:21:19,990 --> 01:21:21,590
There was almost no...

991
01:21:22,040 --> 01:21:27,320
problem at that time getting permits to
do this stuff you had to do it on

992
01:21:27,320 --> 01:21:33,920
weekends when there wasn't heavy traffic
you know to get the control so

993
01:21:33,920 --> 01:21:39,720
we couldn't like shoot for three or four
straight days or something you'd have

994
01:21:39,720 --> 01:21:45,060
to shoot on a weekend a saturday and a
sunday often it was early in the morning

995
01:21:45,060 --> 01:21:49,180
first light until about four in the
afternoon then we'd be shut down

996
01:21:50,540 --> 01:21:55,580
and then come back the next weekend and
go do something else in between. If

997
01:21:55,580 --> 01:21:57,180
there was anything else, it could be
shot.

998
01:22:06,860 --> 01:22:12,460
You don't need a lot of people to shoot
a chase.

999
01:22:13,020 --> 01:22:14,140
You need cameras.

1000
01:22:14,780 --> 01:22:18,460
You don't even need a lot of sound. I go
out and record all the sound

1001
01:22:18,460 --> 01:22:19,460
afterwards.

1002
01:22:19,790 --> 01:22:24,470
Because when you're shooting a chase,
it's one shot at a time. One shot at a

1003
01:22:24,470 --> 01:22:30,750
time. Maybe with multiple cameras from
different angles, but one shot at a

1004
01:22:30,930 --> 01:22:34,370
And so sound can't do very much in that
situation.

1005
01:22:34,630 --> 01:22:40,370
We go out and record the sound later,
often after the picture has been cut,

1006
01:22:40,490 --> 01:22:43,690
after the film has been edited to just
picture.

1007
01:22:43,890 --> 01:22:46,730
Then I'll go out and figure out what
sounds I want.

1008
01:22:47,120 --> 01:22:52,380
and go out with one recordist, often not
even to the same location,

1009
01:22:52,780 --> 01:22:59,340
and make up a soundtrack from scratch
the way we make up the picture from

1010
01:22:59,340 --> 01:23:00,340
scratch.

1011
01:23:00,620 --> 01:23:03,280
Live sound isn't very good on a chase
scene.

1012
01:23:03,560 --> 01:23:09,180
Usually the length of shots is not very
long at all.

1013
01:23:09,400 --> 01:23:13,500
You can't sustain a chase scene in a
long setup.

1014
01:23:14,110 --> 01:23:18,350
The chase requires a lot of cutting to
be made to work.

1015
01:23:19,210 --> 01:23:25,510
Actions and reactions and points of view
and shots of the people who are looking

1016
01:23:25,510 --> 01:23:29,850
at something and then what they're
looking at. It's all done. It's like

1017
01:23:29,850 --> 01:23:34,350
knitting. Anyone who's ever knitted will
know the process.

1018
01:23:34,790 --> 01:23:40,530
It's painstaking and, you know, it's
knit one and purl two.

1019
01:24:07,210 --> 01:24:13,530
I remember seeing a lot of things as we
were filming that just became

1020
01:24:13,530 --> 01:24:15,250
ideas to me.

1021
01:24:15,530 --> 01:24:19,750
And you always have to be open to the
unexpected.

1022
01:24:20,470 --> 01:24:27,150
You always must be open to accidents
that occur or things that you see that

1023
01:24:27,150 --> 01:24:28,150
never planned on.

1024
01:24:28,350 --> 01:24:35,270
And I'll try and weave such things into
the sequence, either at that time or at

1025
01:24:35,270 --> 01:24:36,310
another time.

1026
01:24:36,810 --> 01:24:42,330
So, yeah, I saw that, you know, the L
.A. basin where we shot that riverbed,

1027
01:24:42,330 --> 01:24:46,850
riverbed, and I said, geez, this looks
really good.

1028
01:24:47,210 --> 01:24:49,870
There's some things we can do down
there.

1029
01:24:50,110 --> 01:24:55,430
And I even changed the concept of the
chase while we were shooting it. I

1030
01:24:55,430 --> 01:24:57,670
midway that these...

1031
01:24:58,060 --> 01:25:03,520
Two guys, Peterson and Pankow, weren't
just being chased by two agents in one

1032
01:25:03,520 --> 01:25:07,920
car. There were agents all over the
place tracking them and chasing them.

1033
01:25:14,440 --> 01:25:20,820
The phrase I used to Buddy Joe, which
sent him to the library, was I said, I

1034
01:25:20,820 --> 01:25:22,440
want this to be Kafkaesque.

1035
01:25:24,360 --> 01:25:29,760
referring to the works of Franz Kafka,
which is about, all of his works are in

1036
01:25:29,760 --> 01:25:34,200
some way about paranoia, and often
paranoia that's real.

1037
01:25:34,420 --> 01:25:39,320
These guys thought they were being
chased from everywhere, and they were.

1038
01:25:43,560 --> 01:25:49,320
The idea of doing various sounds that
were meant to be subjective.

1039
01:25:50,250 --> 01:25:54,050
in this sequence came to me in
editorial, absolutely.

1040
01:25:54,510 --> 01:25:56,650
Not at the time that I was filming.

1041
01:25:56,890 --> 01:25:59,790
I just filmed it as straightforward as
possible.

1042
01:26:00,270 --> 01:26:06,810
And then when I was cutting it, I
always, as I say, try to think cutting a

1043
01:26:06,810 --> 01:26:10,210
sequence out of the box, not the way
it's anticipated.

1044
01:26:32,810 --> 01:26:33,810
Going this way.

1045
01:26:37,690 --> 01:26:44,030
And along the way, I came up with this
idea of a car that's being chased going

1046
01:26:44,030 --> 01:26:49,290
the wrong way up a freeway, which I
thought, wow, I've never seen that.

1047
01:26:49,530 --> 01:26:53,530
And these ideas are just dictated to me
by the movie God.

1048
01:26:55,170 --> 01:26:56,990
And then I'll talk to...

1049
01:26:57,580 --> 01:27:02,420
the great stunt coordinator, Buddy Joe
Hooker, and we try to figure out a way

1050
01:27:02,420 --> 01:27:03,420
how to do it.

1051
01:27:03,880 --> 01:27:10,080
But, you know, I thought, what have I
not seen? Well, I haven't seen a car on

1052
01:27:10,080 --> 01:27:12,040
freeway traveling against traffic.

1053
01:27:12,620 --> 01:27:17,000
If we can pull this off, this is going
to be very hairy.

1054
01:27:17,460 --> 01:27:24,180
And Hooker came up with any number of
ways to do that with a team of

1055
01:27:24,180 --> 01:27:26,580
fantastic stunt...

1056
01:27:27,730 --> 01:27:30,550
to make it believable.

1057
01:27:30,790 --> 01:27:34,250
And it is pretty believable, I think,
even to this day.

1058
01:27:34,890 --> 01:27:41,670
And the only guidepost was that it be
different than

1059
01:27:41,670 --> 01:27:43,370
any other chase we'd ever seen.

1060
01:27:43,790 --> 01:27:47,950
You can't say better, because that's in
the eye of the beholder, but different.

1061
01:28:01,870 --> 01:28:05,230
There's a minor tie -up on the North
Long Beach right near Henry Ford. A

1062
01:28:05,230 --> 01:28:08,250
of cars have tangled in traffic there.
Shouldn't take too long to get this to

1063
01:28:08,250 --> 01:28:11,230
the shoulder. It's a very simple affair.
No injuries involved.

1064
01:28:11,510 --> 01:28:13,550
Shouldn't cost you more than a couple of
minutes, though, if you're heading

1065
01:28:13,550 --> 01:28:14,710
northbound on the 710.

1066
01:28:15,050 --> 01:28:17,110
I'm Stacey Vinn for Metro Traffic
Control.

1067
01:28:21,190 --> 01:28:24,030
I think about my shots in my head.

1068
01:28:25,230 --> 01:28:29,610
And I often, you know, I'll think about
how I want a scene covered.

1069
01:28:30,320 --> 01:28:32,900
or if I want coverage at all or where.

1070
01:28:33,340 --> 01:28:39,360
And I may even write down some notes for
myself so I don't forget the coverage

1071
01:28:39,360 --> 01:28:45,320
the next day after I've worked it out
the night before or even weeks before.

1072
01:28:45,800 --> 01:28:49,440
And then I'll come to the set and tell
the whole crew what I want to shoot.

1073
01:28:49,640 --> 01:28:53,040
I'll say, we're going to cover the scene
this way. This is what's going to

1074
01:28:53,040 --> 01:28:56,300
happen. I like to pick up the following.

1075
01:28:57,300 --> 01:29:02,780
and I will encourage the crew and the
cast to make suggestions, and I'll very

1076
01:29:02,780 --> 01:29:09,220
often alter my plan if I get what I
think are better suggestions, you know,

1077
01:29:09,220 --> 01:29:14,060
especially from the director of
photography or the camera operator or

1078
01:29:14,420 --> 01:29:19,560
And so it's very much a collaborative
effort, but I come in with a total plan.

1079
01:29:20,380 --> 01:29:23,700
I don't show them drawings of, you
know...

1080
01:29:24,670 --> 01:29:29,850
come in here and do a shot, you know,
this big on Peterson, and that's all.

1081
01:29:30,150 --> 01:29:32,210
May not even shoot the other side.

1082
01:29:32,850 --> 01:29:37,810
Or all I want to do is do a one -camera
setup over this person's shoulder, and

1083
01:29:37,810 --> 01:29:42,310
then if that person moves, the camera
will move around and follow him and then

1084
01:29:42,310 --> 01:29:45,830
come back and pick up the person who
used to be over their shoulder.

1085
01:29:47,050 --> 01:29:53,790
I believe in only moving the camera when
an actor moves. or when

1086
01:29:53,790 --> 01:30:00,330
something's moving, whether it's an
actor or a car or some movable object.

1087
01:30:00,650 --> 01:30:04,770
I don't like to move the camera just for
the sake of moving it. The one

1088
01:30:04,770 --> 01:30:11,030
exception to that is if I'm trying to
draw the audience into a more intense

1089
01:30:11,030 --> 01:30:17,030
moment while an actor is either speaking
or listening, but they're sitting

1090
01:30:17,030 --> 01:30:21,650
still, I might slowly and
imperceptibly...

1091
01:30:22,320 --> 01:30:24,480
Draw the camera closer to this person.

1092
01:30:24,960 --> 01:30:28,340
But that's it. That's the only style I
ever use.

1093
01:30:28,600 --> 01:30:30,400
And the only rules I have.

1094
01:30:31,360 --> 01:30:33,500
Move the camera when the actors move.

1095
01:30:34,080 --> 01:30:38,560
But stage the scene so that there's as
much movement as possible in the scene.

1096
01:30:42,580 --> 01:30:48,480
I like to cover a whole movie without
repetitious angles.

1097
01:30:48,980 --> 01:30:50,840
The average film...

1098
01:30:51,050 --> 01:30:57,670
which owes a debt to television, is
usually covered in a very basic in -the

1099
01:30:57,670 --> 01:31:01,810
way. Two people are sitting and talking
and there'll be a shot over this

1100
01:31:01,810 --> 01:31:06,870
person's shoulder followed by a close
-up of the person who was in the over

1101
01:31:06,870 --> 01:31:11,010
-shoulder. Then the camera turns around
and shoots the other person the same

1102
01:31:11,010 --> 01:31:15,930
way. There might be a long shot followed
by close -ups or over -shoulders.

1103
01:31:16,330 --> 01:31:19,730
Today you can look at a lot of films
or...

1104
01:31:20,040 --> 01:31:24,900
most television shows, and you can sit
there and snap your fingers to the

1105
01:31:24,900 --> 01:31:30,800
of the cut. You know from experience
when the cut is going to come and often

1106
01:31:30,800 --> 01:31:31,920
where it's going to be.

1107
01:31:32,440 --> 01:31:38,560
You often know what the next shot is
because the editor and the director have

1108
01:31:38,560 --> 01:31:42,640
established a cutting pattern that
becomes boring and predictable.

1109
01:31:43,000 --> 01:31:46,280
And I perceived a long time ago...

1110
01:31:47,470 --> 01:31:53,510
that a director whose work I really
admired, the Italian neorealist, I guess

1111
01:31:53,510 --> 01:31:59,450
you'd call him, Michelangelo Antonioni,
his films used to never use the same

1112
01:31:59,450 --> 01:32:00,450
shot twice.

1113
01:32:00,510 --> 01:32:05,670
He would never do that over -shoulder,
close -up jive. He would cover a scene

1114
01:32:05,670 --> 01:32:12,090
one way, and it was simple. There'd be
no repetition of angles within the

1115
01:32:12,250 --> 01:32:14,010
and then he'd cut to the next scene.

1116
01:32:14,460 --> 01:32:20,360
It was sort of like the way you read a
good book. Your eye scans the page from

1117
01:32:20,360 --> 01:32:25,860
left to right, and you scan until
gradually the words disappear and become

1118
01:32:25,860 --> 01:32:28,720
thoughts and images and real dialogue.

1119
01:32:31,260 --> 01:32:37,440
If a book was indicating a pattern of
dialogue

1120
01:32:37,440 --> 01:32:43,100
that kept repeating itself in a boring
way,

1121
01:32:43,930 --> 01:32:45,350
You'd put the book down.

1122
01:32:45,690 --> 01:32:51,330
And Antonioni is the only other film,
and Kubrick to a great extent, never

1123
01:32:51,330 --> 01:32:52,330
repeated angles.

1124
01:32:52,990 --> 01:32:59,750
They would find the right angle for a
shot and then a scene and then move on.

1125
01:32:59,950 --> 01:33:05,470
Now, it's impossible not to repeat a
shot occasionally, often not by design,

1126
01:33:05,690 --> 01:33:08,690
often because something didn't work.

1127
01:33:09,260 --> 01:33:12,900
you get in the cutting room and you
find, well, I've got to repeat a shot.

1128
01:33:12,900 --> 01:33:19,720
in the films of like Antonioni and in
films that I've made, there might be 60

1129
01:33:19,720 --> 01:33:22,040
70 shots without a repeat.

1130
01:33:29,060 --> 01:33:30,060
Look okay?

1131
01:33:43,980 --> 01:33:44,980
When do I get delivered?

1132
01:33:47,680 --> 01:33:53,580
I regard the set and all of the filming
that goes on in production as simply raw

1133
01:33:53,580 --> 01:33:55,140
material for the editing room.

1134
01:33:55,760 --> 01:34:02,100
I often have no idea, except for maybe
one shot to another, how one shot might

1135
01:34:02,100 --> 01:34:03,460
connect with another shot.

1136
01:34:04,840 --> 01:34:10,460
But I have no idea, and I don't do
storyboards, of how a scene is supposed

1137
01:34:10,460 --> 01:34:12,560
look in its ultimate edited version.

1138
01:34:13,150 --> 01:34:17,170
I love the process of editing and I like
to go into the cutting room and sort of

1139
01:34:17,170 --> 01:34:22,090
find the film in the cutting room
because my experience has been that the

1140
01:34:22,090 --> 01:34:24,650
takes on a life of its own in the
editing room.

1141
01:34:24,970 --> 01:34:29,330
It decides what it wants to be and it
shows you what it wants to be.

1142
01:34:30,350 --> 01:34:36,950
Very often I found that I have shot too
many scenes that I didn't need that to

1143
01:34:36,950 --> 01:34:43,630
me were all like character scaffolding
that didn't need to be in the final But

1144
01:34:43,630 --> 01:34:47,830
I shot these scenes, and I'm sure they
helped the actors to play them.

1145
01:34:48,330 --> 01:34:55,210
But in terms of the ultimate telling of
the story, the film pulls me

1146
01:34:55,210 --> 01:35:01,430
in the cutting room in various
directions. So I use the editing room as

1147
01:35:01,430 --> 01:35:04,410
a creative way as I try to do with the
shooting.

1148
01:35:04,650 --> 01:35:10,750
And we determine the pace and the tempo
and the...

1149
01:35:11,410 --> 01:35:17,910
length of the shots and the ultimate
story in the editing room as

1150
01:35:17,910 --> 01:35:23,390
we're doing it it's like playing jazz
you have a theme and variations in your

1151
01:35:23,390 --> 01:35:28,970
head and then everything comes out of
improvisation improvisation is a word i

1152
01:35:28,970 --> 01:35:32,050
probably used a couple of times on this
recording

1153
01:35:32,760 --> 01:35:36,640
Now, and it's something I very much
believe in when you're dealing with an

1154
01:35:36,640 --> 01:35:43,120
American contemporary film where you
want the acting style to be loose, you

1155
01:35:43,120 --> 01:35:47,160
know, not sound like the words were
typed first.

1156
01:35:47,980 --> 01:35:52,100
You want it to sound as though the
actors are just making up the words as

1157
01:35:52,100 --> 01:35:53,100
go along.

1158
01:35:53,200 --> 01:36:00,080
You want the photography to almost be
caught by surprise by what the

1159
01:36:00,080 --> 01:36:01,080
are doing.

1160
01:36:01,520 --> 01:36:07,700
And so I let that attitude follow me
into the cutting room where I'm

1161
01:36:07,700 --> 01:36:13,400
improvising not only the structure of
scenes but the order of scenes. I'll

1162
01:36:13,400 --> 01:36:20,100
often change the order of one scene or
another while the film is telling me

1163
01:36:20,100 --> 01:36:22,320
it wants to be in the cutting room.

1164
01:36:29,930 --> 01:36:32,390
I never want to see an assembly on a
film.

1165
01:36:32,750 --> 01:36:38,850
I have seen assemblies on films years
ago when I started, and I hate them.

1166
01:36:38,850 --> 01:36:40,630
don't add anything at all.

1167
01:36:41,310 --> 01:36:47,510
I need to get in with the film into its
next phase, which is the editing, and

1168
01:36:47,510 --> 01:36:48,510
start from scratch.

1169
01:36:48,890 --> 01:36:53,150
I don't want to look at a film the way
it was supposed to have been put

1170
01:36:53,150 --> 01:36:56,010
or according to a script order.

1171
01:36:56,810 --> 01:37:02,570
Because a film is not a play. It's
something that must create a life of its

1172
01:37:03,310 --> 01:37:09,630
And where that life is literally created
is from the raw material that you have

1173
01:37:09,630 --> 01:37:10,630
in the cutting room.

1174
01:37:10,690 --> 01:37:15,850
And when you see an assembly, even by
the very best editor or a tremendous

1175
01:37:15,850 --> 01:37:21,830
editor like Bud Smith, it's his version
of the film based on his reading of the

1176
01:37:21,830 --> 01:37:22,830
script.

1177
01:37:24,120 --> 01:37:28,700
I've read the script too, but my
attitude toward the film has changed by

1178
01:37:28,700 --> 01:37:30,040
time I get in the cutting room.

1179
01:37:38,200 --> 01:37:41,460
Actors really are miracle workers.

1180
01:37:42,900 --> 01:37:47,620
Actors are people who take paper and
convert it into flesh.

1181
01:37:48,490 --> 01:37:53,550
Once you cast an actor as a director,
that's the most important decision

1182
01:37:53,550 --> 01:37:55,350
made in the making of the film.

1183
01:37:55,590 --> 01:38:02,270
It's certainly as important as the
script that you've chosen to film, but

1184
01:38:02,270 --> 01:38:05,090
the script is made flesh by the actors.

1185
01:38:05,330 --> 01:38:11,050
And the actors, whether they like it or
not, whether they want to or not,

1186
01:38:11,250 --> 01:38:14,930
whether they intend to or not,

1187
01:38:15,920 --> 01:38:20,400
must bring a great percentage of
themselves to every role that they do.

1188
01:38:20,800 --> 01:38:22,820
It's impossible not to.

1189
01:38:23,320 --> 01:38:29,440
You can try to become another character,
as all actors do.

1190
01:38:30,260 --> 01:38:33,480
It's not them up there, it's the
character as written.

1191
01:38:33,740 --> 01:38:40,600
Yet, it physically is them, and often it
is spiritually them as well.

1192
01:38:40,860 --> 01:38:44,220
And what I always try to do is invoke...

1193
01:38:44,750 --> 01:38:49,890
the spiritual aspect of an actor as I
perceive it, as well as the physical

1194
01:38:49,890 --> 01:38:50,890
aspect.

1195
01:38:57,510 --> 01:39:04,130
The character Masters is certainly
inspired by the character in Jerry

1196
01:39:04,130 --> 01:39:09,890
novel. I think I went a lot farther in
making him kinkier than Petovich

1197
01:39:09,890 --> 01:39:10,890
intended.

1198
01:39:12,300 --> 01:39:17,820
Petovich had written him as kind of a,
just a cold criminal.

1199
01:39:18,180 --> 01:39:23,900
But I was looking for the feminine
inside that.

1200
01:39:24,360 --> 01:39:30,860
To me, once I had cast Willem Dafoe, it
was clear that this actor

1201
01:39:30,860 --> 01:39:37,320
had tremendous complexity and a kind

1202
01:39:37,320 --> 01:39:40,160
of ambisexual quality.

1203
01:39:40,970 --> 01:39:46,370
So I adapted the character to what I
perceived about Willem.

1204
01:41:04,099 --> 01:41:11,020
The ending, for better or for worse, is
a culmination of what we see about

1205
01:41:11,020 --> 01:41:16,100
these two characters, Masters and
Chance, who are two sides of the same

1206
01:41:16,380 --> 01:41:21,260
They are both tempting death throughout
the film. They are both seeking death.

1207
01:41:21,880 --> 01:41:23,900
Masters' obsession is to burn.

1208
01:41:24,330 --> 01:41:28,830
He burns his painting at the beginning
of the film, which is a self -portrait,

1209
01:41:28,970 --> 01:41:31,810
and he burns himself at the end of the
film.

1210
01:41:32,090 --> 01:41:35,250
These are guys driving toward suicide.

1211
01:41:35,790 --> 01:41:41,350
They would not have this credo on their
wall, but the credo of both characters

1212
01:41:41,350 --> 01:41:44,710
is live by the sword, die by the sword.

1213
01:41:45,450 --> 01:41:47,970
You live by fire, you die by fire.

1214
01:41:48,590 --> 01:41:55,530
Both of these characters, the agent, and
the counterfeiter are

1215
01:41:55,530 --> 01:42:02,470
tempting death, if not suicide, from the
outset. I believe that

1216
01:42:02,470 --> 01:42:09,350
in that kind of lifestyle, whether it's
the policeman or the criminal, wherein,

1217
01:42:09,430 --> 01:42:14,930
to my mind, there's a very thin line of
separation that is often blurred,

1218
01:42:15,270 --> 01:42:17,050
there's a death wish.

1219
01:42:17,410 --> 01:42:19,390
I mean, you're out there every day.

1220
01:42:20,270 --> 01:42:24,630
dealing with the possibility that you
may get killed or you may have to kill

1221
01:42:24,630 --> 01:42:25,630
somebody.

1222
01:42:26,690 --> 01:42:31,090
And it's dangerous in that world.

1223
01:42:31,530 --> 01:42:37,410
And I've tried to show in some of the
police procedural films I've made what

1224
01:42:37,410 --> 01:42:43,990
that danger can amount to. And the
personalities of the guys who do this

1225
01:42:44,070 --> 01:42:48,090
either on one side of the law or the
other, is that of...

1226
01:42:48,679 --> 01:42:50,360
suicidal people, I think.

1227
01:42:50,980 --> 01:42:57,740
I can't imagine a lot of people who are
watching this tape or this DVD choosing

1228
01:42:57,740 --> 01:43:02,160
to go into a profession where they could
die at any moment.

1229
01:43:02,380 --> 01:43:05,860
But that's what these characters are in.
That's what they're doing.

1230
01:43:06,220 --> 01:43:09,640
And ultimately, it's a death wish that
comes true.

1231
01:43:27,630 --> 01:43:33,870
I found one of the best ways well to get
a blood effect and I've used it often I

1232
01:43:33,870 --> 01:43:38,850
it came to me out of desperation and
when I did the French Connection and the

1233
01:43:38,850 --> 01:43:43,020
guy in the first scene the undercover
French cop is shot in the face.

1234
01:43:43,240 --> 01:43:48,440
We had elaborate makeup made for that
guy, you know, and the standard way to

1235
01:43:48,440 --> 01:43:55,420
it was you'd make a mask of his face and
put a part of his face

1236
01:43:55,420 --> 01:44:00,680
and then there'd be these little
monofilament wires and on cue, when the

1237
01:44:00,680 --> 01:44:06,200
supposed to be shot, the makeup artist
would pull away the piece of makeup and

1238
01:44:06,200 --> 01:44:09,120
blood would be behind it and spurt. And
we had...

1239
01:44:09,360 --> 01:44:14,040
a great makeup artist on French
Connection who tried to accomplish that,

1240
01:44:14,040 --> 01:44:15,820
never worked. It always looked phony.

1241
01:44:16,060 --> 01:44:22,360
And finally, just out of inspiration, a
gift from the movie god, I saw a

1242
01:44:22,360 --> 01:44:27,320
huge one of those plungers that had
makeup blood in it.

1243
01:44:27,840 --> 01:44:32,300
And I picked it up, and I put a white
card next to the camera, and I said, let

1244
01:44:32,300 --> 01:44:38,890
me see how this is going to work.
Because, you know, in a real fast cut,

1245
01:44:38,890 --> 01:44:45,010
is not going to detect the direction
from which this ensues, a blood spurt.

1246
01:44:45,290 --> 01:44:50,510
And so I tried a test of it against the
white card, just myself standing

1247
01:44:50,510 --> 01:44:55,930
alongside the camera with a big plunger
very close to the subject, the actor's

1248
01:44:55,930 --> 01:45:02,890
face, and when he did not expect it to
come, you know, I would silently cue

1249
01:45:02,890 --> 01:45:04,900
action. without saying a word.

1250
01:45:05,120 --> 01:45:09,000
And the actor would be all prepped, and
he was a little nervous because this was

1251
01:45:09,000 --> 01:45:10,000
something different.

1252
01:45:10,240 --> 01:45:15,340
And without his realization, I just
squeezed the plunger into his face, and

1253
01:45:15,340 --> 01:45:20,300
looked like, when you edit it with a guy
shooting a gun, and then you cut it to

1254
01:45:20,300 --> 01:45:25,040
this guy's face, it looks like that's
the source of the blood.

1255
01:45:26,140 --> 01:45:28,620
The simplest solution's always the best.

1256
01:45:29,100 --> 01:45:30,980
You know, I didn't want to use an
optical.

1257
01:45:31,610 --> 01:45:38,010
to do that, and I didn't want to go
through the time -consuming and costly

1258
01:45:38,010 --> 01:45:43,170
process of a prosthetic device, which
may or may not work.

1259
01:45:43,670 --> 01:45:48,470
It's easier in a trial and error basis
to do it the way I just described.

1260
01:45:48,870 --> 01:45:53,250
Even if you miss, even if it doesn't
work right away, all they have to do is

1261
01:45:53,250 --> 01:45:56,210
clean up the actor and then do it again
until it does work.

1262
01:46:09,610 --> 01:46:10,810
I don't know what's acceptable.

1263
01:46:11,090 --> 01:46:16,010
The film got an R rating and there were
no cuts requested.

1264
01:46:16,990 --> 01:46:20,110
Same is true of The Exorcist when it
came out in 1973.

1265
01:46:20,790 --> 01:46:23,090
That got an R rating with no cuts.

1266
01:46:23,930 --> 01:46:27,990
Today, of course, the envelope has been
pushed a lot farther than anything we

1267
01:46:27,990 --> 01:46:34,970
did. But, you know, I think if a film is
depicting violence

1268
01:46:34,970 --> 01:46:40,940
and a violent world... that it's up to
the individual filmmaker to decide where

1269
01:46:40,940 --> 01:46:45,180
to draw back, and it's up to the
audience to decide whether they want to

1270
01:46:45,180 --> 01:46:46,180
that place or not.

1271
01:46:46,780 --> 01:46:51,200
But I don't believe in a great deal of
self -censorship.

1272
01:46:51,560 --> 01:46:53,760
I don't believe in any form of
censorship.

1273
01:46:54,829 --> 01:46:59,990
Anybody watching this tape or DVD, if
they don't like it, they can just click

1274
01:46:59,990 --> 01:47:02,290
off. You know, put on another DVD.

1275
01:47:02,590 --> 01:47:06,230
I'm sure you have a huge collection out
there, whoever you are.

1276
01:47:06,470 --> 01:47:09,390
And there's always Rebecca of Sunnybrook
Farm.

1277
01:47:09,830 --> 01:47:12,630
Or there's always Lethal Weapon 3.

1278
01:47:13,070 --> 01:47:15,970
Or there's Police Academy 6.

1279
01:47:16,770 --> 01:47:22,410
So I think it's up to whoever's watching
to decide whether they want to go.

1280
01:47:22,960 --> 01:47:24,480
to this place or not.

1281
01:47:24,760 --> 01:47:31,180
And it's up to the filmmaker to decide
how far you wish to go in depicting

1282
01:47:31,180 --> 01:47:35,620
something. I think I've always put the
brakes on when it comes to sex and

1283
01:47:35,620 --> 01:47:40,800
violence. And I think we all have to
have a built -in sensor.

1284
01:47:41,320 --> 01:47:46,080
But I just like to forget that that
sensor is there while I'm working.

1285
01:48:20,010 --> 01:48:22,070
You might want these. They're very
personal.

1286
01:48:23,450 --> 01:48:24,450
Yes.

1287
01:48:26,210 --> 01:48:28,410
I can't seem to find any of his
paintings.

1288
01:48:29,970 --> 01:48:32,530
He told me he did two large portraits of
you.

1289
01:48:33,090 --> 01:48:34,610
They might be worth a lot of money.

1290
01:48:35,730 --> 01:48:38,330
He used to burn a lot of things. Maybe
he burned them.

1291
01:48:42,650 --> 01:48:45,210
I can't understand how you stayed with
him so long.

1292
01:48:46,370 --> 01:48:47,890
Why did you work for him?

1293
01:48:48,300 --> 01:48:54,100
You find out at the end of the film,
really, that Bianca, played by Deborah

1294
01:48:54,100 --> 01:48:58,980
Feuer, had been playing Masters. You
think throughout the film that Masters

1295
01:48:58,980 --> 01:48:59,879
playing her.

1296
01:48:59,880 --> 01:49:05,380
But in the end, you find out that she's
part of a betrayal of Masters, and she

1297
01:49:05,380 --> 01:49:11,240
winds up with his car, his paintings,
his house, and everything else, and goes

1298
01:49:11,240 --> 01:49:13,160
off with her girlfriend into the sunset.

1299
01:49:14,040 --> 01:49:16,020
So you learn that...

1300
01:49:16,970 --> 01:49:23,890
As with all of the relationships in the
film, this is another counterfeit

1301
01:49:23,890 --> 01:49:24,890
relationship.

1302
01:49:25,290 --> 01:49:31,710
As I've stated a number of times to the
point of overstatement, the entire film

1303
01:49:31,710 --> 01:49:35,390
is about counterfeit relationships, not
just counterfeit money.

1304
01:49:35,750 --> 01:49:42,590
And it's a metaphor for a lot of what
I've seen in the years that I've been at

1305
01:49:42,590 --> 01:49:44,010
work in Los Angeles.

1306
01:49:55,500 --> 01:50:00,960
There's a lot of email that appear on
movie sites to this day about To Live

1307
01:50:00,960 --> 01:50:01,960
Die in L .A.

1308
01:50:02,020 --> 01:50:05,360
I think it raised a lot more questions
than it answered.

1309
01:50:06,740 --> 01:50:09,840
Do I wish it had been as successful as
Star Wars?

1310
01:50:10,100 --> 01:50:14,480
Certainly. But did I expect that? No.
What did I expect?

1311
01:50:15,040 --> 01:50:21,200
I expected to make a film about
something that interested me, characters

1312
01:50:21,200 --> 01:50:22,200
interested me.

1313
01:50:23,720 --> 01:50:30,100
The two people, as I say, primarily who
are two sides of the same coin, the

1314
01:50:30,100 --> 01:50:34,960
policeman and the criminal, and the thin
line that exists between them, that's

1315
01:50:34,960 --> 01:50:36,500
something that I'm just drawn to.

1316
01:50:36,940 --> 01:50:43,040
And I try to do it in the form of a
thriller or whatever these things are

1317
01:50:43,040 --> 01:50:46,340
in the genre, but I have...

1318
01:50:46,590 --> 01:50:51,410
other motives for doing them. I would
like them to reach as large an audience

1319
01:50:51,410 --> 01:50:53,970
possible, but that's not in my hands.

1320
01:50:56,010 --> 01:51:01,350
I don't know anyone who sets out to make
a film and says, I know this is going

1321
01:51:01,350 --> 01:51:05,070
to be a huge hit, or I know this is not
going to be.

1322
01:51:05,270 --> 01:51:10,030
You just make the film unless it's
purely a commercial hack job.

1323
01:51:10,430 --> 01:51:15,630
You make it because you have some inner
need to express your feelings about

1324
01:51:15,630 --> 01:51:16,630
these characters.

1325
01:51:26,370 --> 01:51:33,170
What I did for the making of this DVD
was work with a very talented young

1326
01:51:33,170 --> 01:51:39,070
man named Michael Eric, who, along with
me, arranged to...

1327
01:51:39,500 --> 01:51:43,580
have each shot in the movie retimed for
video.

1328
01:51:43,920 --> 01:51:50,720
So the print that you are looking at is
the very best print that exists of

1329
01:51:50,720 --> 01:51:56,360
this film. There is no theatrical print
that ever looked this good where all the

1330
01:51:56,360 --> 01:52:02,120
dirt is removed, all of the scratches
are removed, shots that were mistimed in

1331
01:52:02,120 --> 01:52:07,820
the printing process because the
printing process only can go so far.

1332
01:52:08,510 --> 01:52:11,030
The digital process has managed to cure.

1333
01:52:11,750 --> 01:52:17,730
The digital timing of the film is the
very best way to print out a

1334
01:52:17,730 --> 01:52:24,690
film. I believe that it captures all of
the colors in

1335
01:52:24,690 --> 01:52:29,470
their truest nature. We're able, with
this process, to make it more vivid or

1336
01:52:29,470 --> 01:52:30,389
less vivid.

1337
01:52:30,390 --> 01:52:35,650
But in the case of To Live and Die in L
.A., extremely vivid and full of color.

1338
01:52:36,090 --> 01:52:37,510
We're able to make...

1339
01:52:37,980 --> 01:52:42,820
The black's blacker and the white's
whiter so that the film has more

1340
01:52:43,800 --> 01:52:50,680
The densities are all perfectly timed.
And that's the process

1341
01:52:50,680 --> 01:52:53,620
of digital color timing.

1342
01:52:53,860 --> 01:53:00,240
The timer's a man named Brian McMahon
who does an absolutely brilliant job. He

1343
01:53:00,240 --> 01:53:02,420
is like a restorer.

1344
01:53:02,860 --> 01:53:08,240
I view the work of making a digital
video similar to that of someone who

1345
01:53:08,240 --> 01:53:12,940
in a great museum restoring paintings
that are centuries old. And I've seen

1346
01:53:12,940 --> 01:53:18,980
process. I've seen how they take a
canvas that's falling apart and touch it

1347
01:53:19,400 --> 01:53:22,320
Where there's holes in it, they sew it
in the back.

1348
01:53:22,560 --> 01:53:28,220
They sew the canvas back together
imperceptibly. And then they paint on

1349
01:53:28,220 --> 01:53:29,220
the canvas.

1350
01:53:29,610 --> 01:53:33,970
to try and recapture what the original
artist maybe three or four hundred years

1351
01:53:33,970 --> 01:53:35,750
ago had intended.

1352
01:53:36,110 --> 01:53:40,090
But the colors have been lost or faded
because that's the process.

1353
01:53:40,470 --> 01:53:45,970
The work of timing a film digitally is
exactly the same as that of a great

1354
01:53:45,970 --> 01:53:51,650
restoration artist or someone who
restores great paintings.

1355
01:53:51,930 --> 01:53:53,690
We did the same thing with the
soundtrack.

1356
01:53:55,240 --> 01:54:00,200
mixed again, brought in new elements to
emphasize certain sounds and de

1357
01:54:00,200 --> 01:54:01,400
-emphasize other sounds.

1358
01:54:01,760 --> 01:54:06,880
It's, of course, re -recorded at a
louder level than the original was.

1359
01:54:07,600 --> 01:54:14,500
And there's a lot more give and take
with the dynamics of sound

1360
01:54:14,500 --> 01:54:18,960
than I had on any print of the 35mm
film.

1361
01:54:19,260 --> 01:54:21,660
So I'm a big fan of this process.

1362
01:54:21,900 --> 01:54:23,260
In the case of...

1363
01:54:23,850 --> 01:54:27,770
Three or four of the films that I've
done with Michael Eric and Brian

1364
01:54:28,010 --> 01:54:34,530
they look better than any theatrical
feature that I've ever seen in a

1365
01:54:34,910 --> 01:54:38,370
And presumably, this is the way they
will exist.

1366
01:54:39,350 --> 01:54:46,230
To the end of time, the memory of man
runneth not to the contrary, because

1367
01:54:46,230 --> 01:54:48,550
time you run the film, you're not
destroying it.

1368
01:54:48,830 --> 01:54:50,970
as you do with a film on a projector.

1369
01:54:51,430 --> 01:54:58,090
Every time the film is projected in
35mm, it's dying a little death.

1370
01:54:58,590 --> 01:55:05,350
But when you put this little DVD on your
DVD player, it's treating

1371
01:55:05,350 --> 01:55:07,850
it as gentle as one treats a baby.

1372
01:55:08,070 --> 01:55:12,630
And there's no reason for the colors or
the sound to ever fade or become

1373
01:55:12,630 --> 01:55:14,810
distorted or pick up dirt or scratches.