INT: So talking about--[WF: THE FRENCH CONNECTION. So--] Did you spot it with him [Don Ellis], or how did you--

WF: Yeah, I--we would sit at a Moviola then, and I'd say, "I think we need some music here. Nothing here. Don't write anything for the chase, 'cause I want to use natural sounds for the chase. But then come in after the chase with big music as the case continues but it's not quite so exciting as it just was." And so we spotted it, and then he goes in to record it, and he had never done a score. And Lionel Newman, who was then head of music, really didn't like what Don was doing. And he'd sit next to me at the recording session and he'd say, "I don't understand it. What is this crap he's--you're letting him put in the picture?" He said, "I've got a young composer here named Johnny Williams [John Williams] who's gonna be a big star Composer someday. He knows what he's doing. Why don't you let him do this? What is this insane crap that you're putting into this film?" He said, "You're up there hocking with the camera, and he's hocking with the music, and he shouldn't be hocking when you're hocking." And I said, so I said, "Well, I like it, Lionel," and he said, "You're not going to use this crap in the chase are you?" And I said, "No, nothing in the chase." "Oh, thank god." So I put the score in, and it, you know, it's one of the few things that wasn't even recognized by the industry. It didn't get a nomination. It--the film got eight nominations, won five, but not the music, which is perhaps the most unusual and exceptional part of the movie. [INT: And it's interesting, by the way, when you just sang that little theme, you remember it instantaneously. You know it’s from that movie.] But it wasn't meant to be musical, in a sense. [INT: Right.] It was meant to be atmospheric. [INT: Got it.] But so that was that, then Don Ellis died young, or I would have worked with him again, absolutely.

WF: Then for TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., I was in London. I forget why. It was 1985, and I hear a band on the radio called Wang Chung, and they had some pop songs out that were really unusual sound. One was called "Wait," which had a completely other-worldly sound. It was clearly rock and roll done by guys who understood classical music, who understood dynamics and Shostakovich [Dmitri Shostakovich]. And so I contacted these two guys. I thought they were Chinese. You know, they called themselves Wang Chung, and that simply meant the sounds you get on a guitar when you go like this, "Wang Chung," and it was two guys, a guy named Jack Hues and a guy named Nick Feldman, and they would make all these sounds, and I said, "Look," I told them the story of TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., I told them what the film was about. They didn't know much about the American Secret Service, or anything, but I gave them a sense of it, and I gave them the script, and I said, "When you're ready, just mail me some impressions that you have from what I've told you and the script." And they did. They sent me some quarter-inch master tapes. I listened to it. It was great stuff. And it inspired me in the way that I cut the movie. I cut a great part of the movie to their music, which I had no idea what it was going to be when I shot this stuff. And then the one thing I said to them was, "Don't write me a title song called ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’" [INT: This story you've told.] Okay. [INT: This story I know. And they did, and you used it.] And I shot a scene for it. [INT: Yeah.] Which I didn't have originally in the script just to use it. I told you the story about the SORCERER track with Tangerine Dream? [INT: Right.] What--[INT: What about the, any of the scores for these last like--] JADE was a guy called James Horner, whose music I liked a great deal, who later went on to write the music for the TITANIC. But I liked James' sound, and I wanted him to also utilize the Stravinsky "Rite of Spring" [The Rite of Spring] as a kind of inspirational rhythmic and thematic piece in the film and to work off of that, and he did what I think is a brilliant score. [INT: So you suggested that to him, though. This was not something that were--] Right. I played, we sat and listened to "The Rite of Spring," and I said, "Write something like this." And then I said, "And I'm actually going to use part of the opening of "The Rite of Spring" in the film. BUG was mostly done by a young Composer named Brian Tyler, whose work I had heard on some independent films that had a very small release, and he works alone out in a studio in the Valley [San Fernando Valley]. And he picks up very quickly on stuff, and I wanted him to write mostly atmospherics. And then some rock and roll groups heard about the film and wanted to see it and saw it. There was a group called, there's a guy called Serj Tankian who had a very popular group at the time [System Of A Down], and Chris Cornell, and they gave me songs that I sort of put in a source music, which was also used as score. And the rest of the atmospherics were done by Brian Tyler and a guy up at Lucas' [George Lucas] company [Skywalker Sound], who I've worked with a number of times to do atmospherics, whose name escapes me at the moment. [INT: Not Allen Split and--] No, not Allen Split. Steve something [Steve Boeddeker]. [INT: Okay.]

INT: When you were in the mixing stage, are there moments when you see that you want to dump some music that you thought was going to be great for it but now as you're putting all of it together, or do you feel that most of it inevitably blends?

WF: No, most of the time you've over-scored and you have to take out, and that's true with sound effects too. Most of the time you've made the tracks too layered, and there's too much hocking, as Lionel Newman would say. “You're hocking up there with the camera. He's hocking over here with the music.” And that often is the case, you know, and you'd basically try to simplify. And I've sort of become--I don't compare myself to this fellow, but like Samuel Beckett, who refined everything down in his playwriting to just the curtain going up and the guy--an ashcan on the stage, and the ashcan lid goes up, and the guy who's in the ashcan opens the lid and stares out at the audience for 45 seconds, closes the lid and the curtain comes down and that's the end of the play. In other words, Beckett refined all of life experience down to that one moment, and Harold Pinter did the same thing with his plays. He started to write simpler and simpler plays with fewer and fewer lines. [INT: Well, you know what's interesting--] And that's the point where I'm at now, so that BUG is like a refinement for me. [INT: I think it's really true, in a sense, if you look at EXORCIST [THE EXORCIST] and you look at BUG, and you think about the emotional intensity of the experience in both films, I get why Richard Schickel said that he thought this was one of your, if not your best film because I see the point in terms of you worked with the size brilliantly, obviously, in THE EXORCIST, and now in a much more simple, but not simplistic way, you are dealing with the unknown, what you believe, what you don't believe, and also the issue of terror, which are all there. So I think it's truly a case.] But the more you do something, I think, the more you become interested in refining it down to the simplest way to tell the story. And like I, for example, Ernest Hemmingway's short stories are more appealing to me than his novels, but his novels are damn good too. But the short stories, a story like “The Killers,” you know, which is just a few pages long and has to do with two guys who come into a little diner in a small town, and they're looking for a guy called the Big Swede. And they ask the counter man, "Where's the Swede?" And the counter man knows if they--instinctively that they're gonna kill him. [INT: Do you know what he said his favorite piece of writing was? A story, this could be apocryphal, was a six-word story.] I'm not surprised. [INT: They--this is, I'm talking about--] Hemingway? [INT: Hemingway. “Baby shoes for sale, never used.”] It's great. Yeah, well, that's what I'm talking about, to refine it down to that. You know, it says everything and nothing and leaves it--but the influence of his story, “The Killers” on me has been profound, because at the end of killing the Swede up in hotel room, these two guys are coming back to the diner to pick up their car, and Nick Adams, the counter boy, knows that they've killed him. He wasn't there, but he knows that they--they're two hired killers. And he says to one of them, "Why did you kill him? Why'd you kill the Swede? What did you have against him?" And one guy says, "We didn't have nothing against him. We didn't know him. We did it for somebody else." That to me says everything. They didn't know him. They killed him for somebody else. I mean that has inspired so many of my films. Who are these guys? What are they doing? Who's the somebody else? What happened? There are more implications than there are facts given. But "Baby shoes for sale, never used," is genius. It doesn't get better than that.

INT: Let's talk about one more thing, which is when you were in the East Coast, you were the DGA…

WF: I was president of the East Coast chapter. [INT: And what was--] I was on the board, on the council first, then I became president and on the council with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Elia Kazan, gee, several other of my idols, a guy named Tom Donovan who was a terrific television Director, who had been the past president. And I don't remember how many years I served. And I was first vice president of the national Guild when Bob Aldrich [Robert Aldrich] was president.

INT: What do you like about the Guild [DGA]?

WF: Well, the camaraderie and the fact that they have come up with really strong work rules that have stuck, stood the test of time, that have protected the creative rights of Directors, all Directors. Now, Steven Spielberg may not need his creative rights protected, but some other Directors who are working on staff on a TV show, they're creative as well, and look, Writers are creative, but they've never had a strong guild. They've had to go on strike, god knows how many times, for months at a time. They come out with a loss at the end instead of a gain, you know, when all is factored in, but the Directors Guild, I think, went out on strike once for about a half-hour, and they've always--because they studied the issues, it wasn't that they forced the studios to capitulate. I mean to me, if I was running a studio, the only guys that I would be afraid of would be the Actors, because without Actors, up until now, now you don't need Actors, you can computer generate them, but up until now, if the Actors walked off, you were dead. You couldn't make the movie without an act--you could make a movie with the worst Director in the world or the worst script ever written, but if you didn't have some Actor in it, even a lousy Actor, it wasn't going to be a film. So I wondered why the studios didn't give everything to the Actors and then the Writers 'cause they're really at the first moment of inspiration. But the Directors' contracts were always good for us, always strong, because we had leadership that studied the issues, studied the economics, knew what the traffic would bear, never made threats. The DGA never threatened anybody, never threatened a strike. They always worked with the studios to get better working conditions, rehearsal time, more cuts, you know, edits for the Director, more creative rights, and I believe in doing that, that the Directors Guild has elevated the work of the Director in American film and television and elevated the quality of the films, 'cause otherwise it would be a bunch of ex-agents and talent managers and lawyers who would be making all of these decisions, you know? But now the Directors have won these creative rights. They've been hard won, by the founders of this Guild, and so I felt the need when they elected me to give back, and whenever they call me to be on a panel or something, I'll--to settle some issue, I'll do that, but because the Guild is a terrific thing for Directors, and it's by no means been a Draconian union that has brought the industry to its knees like the Writers Guild [Writers Guild of America, WGA] has. I'm a member of that too, but--or the Actors, SAG [Screen Actors Guild], threatening to go out on strike and fuck everybody and this and that. The DGA has never done that. All they did was quietly study the issues and come in with plans that work. [INT: Smart. All right, Billy. It's great to be with you.] What a pleasure to talk to you. [INT: Truly great to be with you.] Even under a controlled situation like this, I enjoy our conversations [INT: Me too, me too.] and I enjoy your intellect. [INT: Thank you. It's probably mutual. I respect you enormously.]