INT: Well, let’s start with Pinter [Harold Pinter], one of the great Writers of the 20th century. [WF: Oh yeah, he won the Nobel Prize for literature, last year.] So here you are, this is your third film now, if I’m right about this. [WF: Yes, yes.] Because you did MINSKY’S [THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY’S] and then this. [WF: THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, which Pinter wrote originally as a play and then adapted as a film script was my third film.] So how do you deal--let’s start with, you know, you’re still a new filmmaker.

WF: Communication, and to be specific, I mean, I love Pinter and I learned a great deal from him and it took me up several notches in terms of my understanding of the world, working with Pinter for a year on THE BIRTHDAY PARTY in England. And there was this rumor that you could not change a word of Pinter’s script, and I understood why because it’s written in a kind of blank verse poetry. [INT: And did you see it on Broadway or--] What? [INT: The play.] It wasn’t on Broadway, no, I saw it at a workshop in San Francisco and I thought it was just stunning, and so I wrote to him and I said, “Look, I have these movie studios that want to make little films with me and I’d like to do THE BIRTHDAY PARTY.” He said, “Come on over,” and we met. He was very young and I was 10 years younger, and he said, “Okay, we’ll do it,” and we cast it with a great British cast, with Robert Shaw and Patrick Magee, and what it is about is irrational fear, irrational fear and paranoia and there’s a scene in it where this character played by Robert Shaw is in a seaside resort, out of the way and cheap in a boarding house, and he’s hiding from something or someone. And two guys come in to the resort out of nowhere, an Irishman and a Jew. It’s almost like a joke, “an Irishman and a Jew walk into a resort…” And it turns out that these two guys are looking for this Robert Shaw character. We don’t know why, we never know why, but it’s part of the idea that paranoia becomes real. And they go from a kind of polite conversation at one point with him, where they’re sitting alone in the living room and it becomes an interrogation that’s terrifying and they ask him questions and he can’t answer, and has no way of answering and they break him down at the end of the scene.

WF: And Patrick Magee, who was a scholar as well as a great Actor, a great--Samuel--a lot of Samuel Beckett’s plays were written for Patrick Magee, who first performed them, and Magee had been in an original production of THE BIRTHDAY PARTY in England. And Pinter [Harold Pinter] used to come to rehearsals [for the film adaption of THE BIRTHDAY PARTY], but this one day he didn’t come to the rehearsal of the interrogation scene, and Magee was saying to me, “It was a shame, because when Pinter first wrote the play, there were two references in it that had to be cut out of the play, because they had the Lord Chamberlain’s office in England, which was a kind of censor board that would delete any reference from a play or a film that had to do either with the monarchy, this was in the ‘50s [1950s], with the monarchy or the church. And he said, “There are two lines that Pinter had written that the Lord Chamberlain had cut. And they were questions, one by the Jewish guy, the other by the Irish guy, and the questions were, “Who hammered the nails?” And the other guy said, “Who drove in the screws?” And these were obviously a reference to the crucifixion. I said to Magee, “Those lines were originally in the play?” He said, “Yeah, and had to be cut.” So that evening, I called Pinter at home and I said, “Magee told me about those two lines that you cut.” He said, “What are you talking about?” I told him the lines, he said, “I never wrote those lines.” He said, “Magee is hallucinating.” He said, “Magee thinks more about my work than I do, and he’s hallucinating. I never wrote those lines.” I said, “oh, Jesus,” and Harold said--he said, “Look, do you have a few minutes?” “Yeah.” He said, “Stay on the phone, I’m going to go upstairs,” he lived in one of those five-story Nash [John Nash] townhouses in Regent’s Park [Regent’s Park, London] and he said, “Stay on the phone and I’m going to go up to my office and I’m going to find the--my original typed script of THE BIRTHDAY PARTY.” So he goes up, it must have been 15 minutes, I’m waiting on the phone and he comes back down, he says, “I have this script here, it has all of my pencil changes, cuts, additions.” He said, “Those lines were never in the play. These are my--this is my original typescript.” I said, “Oh no.” He said, “What’s the matter?” I said, “Well, I just think they’re great.” He said, “You like those lines?” I said, “I thought--I think they’re fantastic.” He said, “Well, put ’em in.” And this was Pinter, whose reputation was, “You cannot change a word.” Then later we’re sitting around at another rehearsal and Magee said to him, “There’s a reference also to an event that took place in the Christian faith centuries ago, and Pinter referred to it as the Albigensian Heresy,” and Magee said, “Look Harold, now that we’re filming the definitive version of this play, why don’t you get the reference right? It’s the Albigensenist Heresy, not the Albigensian Heresy,” and Pinter said, “Well, look it’s been like that for eight years, let’s just leave it alone.” So that he didn’t change for accuracy, the other, he changed because I guess he thought those were good lines too, even if Magee made them up. So what you find is that even someone with a unique voice and a genius like Harold Pinter has a way of working that is almost prohibitive. You can’t enter the temple unless you’re willing to play by the rules, but even Pinter is open to those doors letting in air and ideas coming from the outside, which is very important as part of communication for a Director. You have to listen to all the voices that may come in from the outside.

INT: Now you’re reading a script, what is it that hits you first like--

WF: I have no idea. [INT: But, okay.] I have no idea, it’s different scripts. I mean, one of the best scripts I’ve ever read that I directed, which is not successful, but I think it’s terrific, I may be alone, is a script by Paul Brickman that I did called DEAL OF THE CENTURY, and it was widely routed by the critics and not successful with audiences, and I love it. I think it’s great. I think what makes it great is the script. I think the casting is fine, it’s Chevy Chase and Sigourney Weaver and Gregory Hines and Vince Edwards--and I saw it, it was recently on television and I was shaving and I looked at it and I--"This is good. This is really good, and what’s good is the script.” But the people are fine in those roles, but again, you know, the critical gods did not smile upon it, or the movie god but-- Now, that’s different from anything else I had ever done. It’s a flat-out comedy. [INT: Comedy, yeah.] It’s a black comedy, but it’s a comedy, and I thought it was fine and it hasn’t worked. Someday, I think it will work.

INT: When you were reading for example, FRENCH CONNECTION [THE FRENCH CONNECTION], in terms of your dealing with--[WF: We never had a script of THE FRENCH CONNECTION.] What did you have?

WF: There was a book [“The French Connection: A True Account of Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy”] that I never read by Robin Moore that Phil D’Antoni [Philip D’Antoni], the Producer, brought to me. I was never able to read the book but I went back with D’Antoni to New York and met the original cops who had broken this case. [INT: Popeye Doyle or whatever?] One’s name was Eddie Egan, may he rest in peace, and the other is Sonny Grosso, who’s still with us, and I met Egan and Grosso at Al & Dick’s Steak House in New York and they started to tell me THE FRENCH CONNECTION story and I saw the film, and so then we went out and tried to get a screenplay written. We had a script written by Alex Jacobs [Alexander Jacobs], who we--D’Antoni and I--[INT: POINT BLANK, Alex Jacobs?] POINT BLANK, he had written, and D’Antoni and I knew him socially and really admired him. He wrote a script that we couldn’t get off the ground and then there was another marvelous Writer called Robert E. Thompson, Rob Thompson who wrote THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? among other--and he couldn’t get a script that we liked or could sell. [INT: Now were the--when you say “we” just in even the process with when you were working with Alex Jacobs or Thompson, was there a process for you? Did you sort of tell them the story and walk away?] Yes, I told them the story that Grosso and Egan had told me, I gave them my vision of it, and from time to time I would look at scenes, pages, whatever and it wasn’t happening. It wasn’t translating. Either, I wasn’t communicating or it wasn’t getting through their screen. [INT: And in--I don’t know if you remember this, but in your dialogue with them, when it wasn’t working, do you--and this has obviously happened with other scenes and other movies, do you remember how you--not before you say, “Thanks Alex, we’re moving on,” but while you’re working with the person and you’re still trying to develop, do you remember some of the dialogue, either with--let’s say with those two as an example or we can go to any other movie where you can say--] Yeah. [INT:--the process, because that’s really what we want to know.] Well sure I mean I would always say, “Look, this is how these cops would talk,” and by the way it was very Pinter-esque [Harold Pinter]. The way they would interrogate somebody was similar to the interrogation in Pinter’s play THE BIRTHDAY PARTY. They would choose, if they had a suspect, they would choose both specific incidents that they knew this suspect had perpetrated or they would ask him non-sequiturs, questions that he couldn’t answer like, “Did you ever pick your feet on Poughkeepsie [Poughkeepsie, New York]?” And the suspect would be so rattled by the questions he didn’t understand and couldn’t answer that he would start to drift toward the questions pertaining to his guilt and answer those because you know it’s the devil you know, as opposed to the devil you don’t know. So I would try to impart the attitude of these cops, who these Writers had not met, to them, and it wasn’t coming back.

WF: I also, because of my interest in foreign film at that time, specifically Godard [Jean-Luc Godard] and Fellini [Federico Fellini] and Alain Resnais, the French New Wave, I was interested more in an ambiguous approach rather than a spot-on by-the-numbers approach to construction of a script, and I wasn’t getting through, and we had been turned down by every studio that existed then, twice. Then Phil [Philip D’Antoni] read the galleys of a novel, Phil D’Antoni the Producer, read the galleys of a novel called “Shaft” by a crime Writer for The New York Times, he wrote about local crime for The New York Times, his name was Ernest Tidyman, and may he rest in peace, and we paid him $5,000 to write a script, and I went through the same process again and the script was a little better than what we had before, but not that much and by then we had gone in and tried to sell it to Richard Zanuck [Richard D. Zanuck], who was then head of 20th Century Fox and he turned it down, and his partner David Brown, who was in New York and Zanuck was in Hollywood, they reluctantly turned it down and it, by then this had gone on for well over a year, probably a year-and-a-half. We just kept trying to sell this movie and--[INT: By the way, were you working during that time as well?] No, I had done THE BOYS IN THE BAND and my next picture was going to be THE FRENCH CONNECTION no matter what. We couldn’t sell it. Finally, one day out of the blue, after about a year-and-a-half, Dick Zanuck called us in. He said, “Look I have a hunch about this thing you’re doing.” He said, “I don’t know what the hell it is really,” he said, “but, you know, I have a hunch that it could be something.” He said, “I’ve got a million-and-a-half dollars hidden away in a drawer over here and if you guys can make it for that, go ahead,” he said, “but I’m not going to be around when it comes out because I’m going to get fired over here very quickly,” and he was, but he green-lit the picture at a million-and-a-half dollar budget. We had made our own budget of $3 million but that sort-of was based on the idea that we were going to get Paul Newman or someone of his ilk, there’s no one really of his ilk, but we wanted Paul Newman to play the lead and Zanuck--and Paul Newman was making a half a million dollars a film then, which was a lot of money, and Zanuck said, “You’re not going to get Paul Newman for this. He’s not going to do it. First of all, he doesn’t want to make a film where he has to hold a gun anymore and he’s not going to do this.” He said, “You don’t need Paul Newman either, you need just good Actors, people who fit the role.” I said, “Really?” He said, “I don’t care who you put in the picture as long as it’s the right guy.” And I said, “Well, you know, the original cops want to play themselves.” He said, “Well, test them.” I said, “You’d go with that?” He said, “Sure.” So I tested them and they had a different vision of themselves that I did, and then I knew this guy in--

INT: But you still really didn’t have a script though [for THE FRENCH CONNECTION].

WF: No, we didn’t. I’ll tell you--I’ll get to that but… [INT: All right.] We didn’t have a chase in the script--[INT: Well, I know the story about that.]--and so now there was a guy I knew in New York, he was a Writer, a newspaper Writer, a real character in New York who knew all the other characters, his name is Jimmy Breslin. And he was a good friend of mine, and he was a big dark Irishman, which is what Eddie Egan was. And I thought this guy, if I could capture this guy, he’s like a bull in a china shop. He would be great, so I called Zanuck [Richard D. Zanuck], I’m in New York now, and I said, “Would you make the film with Jimmy Br--you know, who Jimmy Breslin is?” “Yeah,” he said, “That’s a great idea. Test him,” so now I go to Breslin and I say, “You want to be in a movie?” And he says, “Well, yeah, what is it?” And I tell him, he said, “Well, you know, I don’t like the cops.” I said “No, but that’s why you’d be good because, you know, you’re not going to play some stupid heroic figure. You’re going to play a street cop all right, so let’s see if you can do it.” So on a Monday, we start out improvising scenes and he’s pretty interesting. On Tuesday, he forgets everything he did on Monday. On Wednesday, he’s drunk and doesn’t show up, and on Thursday, he shows up contrite ‘cause he was drunk Wednesday and I’m now ready to just get rid of him as a--you know, this is not working. And we try it again Thursday, It’s not working and then--[INT: By the way, where were you meeting him? Were you--] We were using the 20th Century Fox offices, but I would, I had a Cameraman, I’d go out in the street and shoot him doing different things. And on Friday, I’m going to fire him, but he comes in and he says, “Doesn’t this movie you’re doing--isn’t it supposed to have a car chase?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “I got to tell you that when my mother was on her deathbed I told her I would never drive a car, and I don’t know how to drive.” I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, it’s truth.” I said, “You’re fired,” and so I was able to get out of it that way, but it just wasn’t working, or I couldn’t make it work.

WF: And then there was an Agent called Sue Mengers who called me up and said--we had nobody and we were getting to a point where we had to start the movie [THE FRENCH CONNECTION] or Zanuck [Richard D. Zanuck] said, “The people coming in there to run this place will just cancel everything.” [INT: And you were working with Tidyman’s [Ernest Tidyman] script then?] We had Tidyman’s script but it didn’t really work, I have to be honest. And she says, “Will you look at Gene Hackman?” Now, Gene had never played a lead in a film that I had seen. The last time I saw him was--he played--well, he was very good playing Warren Beatty’s brother in BONNIE AND CLYDE, and then, he made a film where he had played the lead and it had just come out, it was called I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER with Melvyn Douglas and, you know, it was soft kind of a film, not an action picture. I looked at that--so we met with Hackman and I wasn’t sure that he could do it, but we had to make up our minds by the following Monday or the picture was off, and I remember going to the Policeman’s Ball with Phil D’Antoni [Phillip D’Antoni] and Phil said, “Let’s go with this guy, what do we--we want to make the picture, let’s do it,” and I had strong reservations. I didn’t see--Oh, before that I wanted to use Jackie Gleason after Breslin [Jimmy Breslin]. And I called Jackie Gleason, who I didn’t know, I called him out of the blue, and I said, “I’ve got this thing,” he said, “Send me the script.” I sent him the script, he calls me back and he says, “I’ll do this. If you want me I’ll do it,” so I go to Zanuck and Zanuck says, “No, we don’t want Jackie Gleason.” He had made a film for them about a year before called GIGOT. It was a silent movie, no dialogue, where Gleason played a clown, a sad clown and it was the biggest disaster in the history of 20th Century Fox. So he said, “We don’t want Gleason,” and my heart was broken because Gleason would have been perfect, so then we meet Hackman at the suggestion of his Agent, and I wasn’t--he was not Jackie Gleason. And on the weekend, a Saturday night, Egan [Eddie Egan] and Grosso [Sonny Grosso] invited us to the Policeman’s Ball. We went and Phil brought his wife, I was single at the time, and I remember looking at Phil across the table from me, while the entertainment and the speeches were going on, and Phil was really sad, because Phil believed in me and there were a lot of the studios that didn’t want to make the film simply because I had no track record as an action Director, and Phil stayed with me. And now I’m sitting there with the fate of this movie in my hands and saying, “I’m not sure about Gene Hackman,” and Phil, you know, at one point Phil actually had tears in his eyes, and I took him aside, I said, “All right Phil, you want to do this with Hackman?” He said, “I think we should or we ain’t going to have a picture.” I said, “Okay, let’s do it with Hackman,” and that’s how we backed into Gene.

WF: In the meantime, this Casting Director that Phil [Phillip D’Antoni] brought to the picture, he’s a guy named Bob Weiner [Robert Weiner], who was not a Casting Director, he was a guy who wrote theater and film reviews for The Village Voice and a strange guy. And he knew every Actor in New York and a lot of Actors in regional theater, and he had a very small apartment where he saved everything ever written about anybody. It was like Melquíades’ studio in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, and Phil said, “Let’s have Bob cast the picture for us, because he knows every Actor, more than the casting--" and I remember I met with some of the casting agents in New York to get their ideas, and they were lame. Now I meet Bob Weiner and Bob’s was a strange, may he rest in peace, aggressive guy, hot-tempered, jumpy, thin as a rail, but he said, “Let me bring you some people before you hire me. Let me bring you some people and see what you think.” He comes into my office the next day with Roy Scheider, who has never done anything that I--Roy was appearing in an off-Broadway play by Jean Genet, I guess it was “The Balcony”, but he was playing a cigar-smoking nun and he walks into my office and sits down and he talks and I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “Well, I’m playing a nun in this off-off-off-Broadway show,” and I’m listening to him talk and 10 minutes, I said, “Okay, you’re hired. You’re the guy,” he was Sonny Grosso. He was--I knew--I had never seen him act, never saw anything that he--I didn’t go to the play, I hired him on the spot. And he was spot-on, so now I had Hackman [Gene Hackman] and Scheider and I decided we had three weeks before we had to start shooting, so we were in preparation in New York.

INT: And they had all read quote “Tidyman’s [Ernest Tidyman] script [THE FRENCH CONNECTION],” that’s what they read.

WF: They read the script and they weren’t jumping up and down, but they had never starred in anything. We paid Hackman [Gene Hackman] $50,000 and Scheider [Roy Scheider] $25,000 and I decided to let them go out with Egan [Eddie Egan] and Grosso [Sonny Grosso], who were still on the job in New York as New York City cops. They had been split up by then, Grosso was with the 28th Precinct, which was Harlem, and Egan was with the 81st Precinct then, which was Bedford-Stuyvesant [Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn], and I let Hackman and Scheider go out with them as I had done. I had been out with them where Egan would give me a policeman’s special, a .38 to go into one of those all-black bars that he used to bust regularly and he’d give me a .38 and say, “Stand in the back, watch the door,” and I’m standing there with a .38 and about--[INT: Loaded?] Yeah, and about a thousand years of parole time in the room, and he did the same with Hackman and Scheider and they picked up his dialogue, and they would come to me every day after a day’s--a day out in the streets busting drug dealers with Egan and Grosso and they’d bring me dialogue and stuff, and I decided to improvise all the dialogue in the picture, which is what we did.

INT: Now, you had a structure of some sort [on the making of THE FRENCH CONNECTION].

WF: We had a structure which I would vary, and sometimes had to vary because we’d come to a location and it was the worst winter in the history of New York City in 1971 and we’d come to a location, it’s 30 below zero, or snow and ice all over and you couldn’t shoot so you’d have to go shoot somewhere else and I was able to--I’d say, “All right let’s go into that candy store and make a shot, make a scene,” and we’d go in and they [Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider] could improvise the scene in the candy store, because they knew what Egan [Eddie Egan] and Grosso [Sonny Grosso] had done, and also I had Egan and Grosso on the set every day critiquing them. So we go out and all of the dialogue in the picture is improvised--[INT: So in a way then, what I’m looking at is the internal content of a scene, at least in this particular movie, was really evolved by the three of you, or the five of you.] Yeah. [INT: But the--you still did have, I mean you must have, I--because I know the story about you, the two of you, Phil [Phillip D’Antoni] and you walking down the street and, “How are we going to do this chase scene and make it new?”] Yeah, right. [INT: But you must have had, I mean, the busts in the bars, you’ve got to get these locations, I mean there’s certain things that you must have sort of known that you were going to be going through the--Randall’s Island, I mean, some stuff must have you know evolved.] A lot of it came about while we were in production and our Production Manager was a guy named Kenny Utt [Kenneth Utt], and I would sit every night with Egan and Grosso and they’d tell me more and more about this case, and then I would see what they were doing in the street and so I would sit down and type out different colored pages to let everyone on the crew know that there was a new scene coming, and years later I found out that Kenny Utt went to Sonny Grosso, who was one of the actual cops, and he said, “Look, if you ever want to get this picture made, stop talking to Friedkin. Don’t tell him any more. We’ve run out of colors. We’ve got pink pages, yellow pages, blue pages, green pages.” We’ve run out of colors and we got no more money and we can’t--our budget was a million and a half dollars.

INT: All right, this is the thing, looking at for--the internal content of a scene and saying that, because you trust these Actors and I assume that in casting other Actors you cast people who could be that free to--[WF: Yeah.]--to be able to improvise with them. Okay, knowing that, I’m curious just to step back a second, because you said “No, I…” you know, working with Actors was a newer experience for you, let’s say, as you started out as a Director, because you didn’t go to acting school or any of that stuff. [WF: But I had worked with Second City [The Second City] in Chicago.] Okay [WF: And I knew how to achieve improvisation with a focus.] That’s what I’m asking about, because I’m asking about two things, I want to talk about a little bit about what you knew there, because what you learned from them and then what you must have learned as you were doing documentaries, because even if you script a documentary, when you say, “Excuse me, tell me about your life,” the dialogue is not necessarily going to be what you scripted so you see what I’m saying? I’m assuming as a filmmaker you are more comfortable with that, let’s say than somebody else who’s coming right out of the theater and never done this kind of stuff. [WF: Yes.] Or would you say that’s true?

WF: I would say that’s true and I decided with THE FRENCH CONNECTION to use my documentary experience and do what I call an induced documentary. That was the style of the film; I wanted it to look like I was just--that the camera had just happened on these events and didn’t know precisely what was gonna happen next. So the way I would achieve that is I’ll--there’s a scene in the police station where Hackman [Gene Hackman] and Scheider [Roy Scheider] go to their boss, who was played by Eddie Egan, the cop that Hackman was playing, and their boss, who’s the chief of detectives, called Simonson in the movie, they’re going to him to get permission for a wiretap on this French guy, and on this candy store owner in, who was in Brooklyn. And they’re trying to talk him into giving--getting a warrant for them to put a wire into these places. And this was a scene that had actually happened, that Eddie Egan described to me and he’s now playing his boss. What I would--we shot it in an actual police station, the old 1st Precinct in downtown Manhattan, and I--Owen Roizman was the Director of Photography [Cinematographer; DP] and he had--I never saw any of his work, I hired him basically after just having met him and all he had done was commercials and industrial films. He was a young guy, he was about 31 years old, but I met him and I liked him and I told him how I wanted to shoot the movie, and he said, “Great.”

WF: So I hired him [Owen Roizman for THE FRENCH CONNECTION] to be the DP [Cinematographer; Director of Photography], and he hired this Camera Operator whose name was Ricky Bravo [Enrique Bravo] and Ricky had photographed the Cuban Revolution at Castro’s [Fidel Castro] side. He was in the Sierra Maestra mountains from when they were guerrillas up there until they came down into Havana [Havana, Cuba] and took the city, and Ricky had photographed the whole Cuban Revolution. I don’t know where this footage is but it should be interesting. Ricky was the DP, he spoke very little English, he was newly come to New York, he had left Cuba disillusioned and Owen said this--you’re going to love this guy be the Operator, and what I did, like for example the scene in the police station, I would say to Owen, “Look I’m going to have these guys move roughly from here to there, they’re going to come in a door, go over here, sit down. He’s going to get up,” and I’d rehearse the scene with the Actors, but I gave Owen only a general idea of the area I was going to shoot. I said, “I’m going to shoot up here, not over there, not back there. Right around here and over to there,” and so he would put a couple of bounce lights into the ceiling so that that area was covered realistically, but I would--and I’d run a rehearsal for him, but not for Ricky, the Operator. I would say to Ricky, “Just cover the scene like it’s the Cuban Revolution,” the whole picture. He’d say, “Well, where they going to be?” I said, “You don’t--did you know where they were going to be when you were trying to take Havana?” And he would laugh and I said, “That’s how we’re shooting this picture. Owen will rough in the lighting, pick up the camera,” it was mostly handheld, “and just capture what you see. Follow them around.” “Follow who?” He’d say. “Follow anybody.” “Okay señor,” and so we’d do the scene that way and he would cover it as though it was happening, not rehearsed. The Actors knew what they were going to do and say and where they were going to go, they were lit, and it was up to Ricky to then feel the visualization of the scene, and I trusted that process ‘cause that’s how I had made documentaries, where you’re following people around.

INT: Let’s back up to Second City [The Second City] for a second, because that also allowed you to be able to deal with the idea of, “Gee, I’m not sure exactly what they’re going to say, but I still have a scene that’s got to have a certain kind of tension in it.” WF: Well, focus. [INT: So what did--] To improvise a scene you don’t just come out and start blathering, you have to have a focus. In the old days of Second City, they would literally take suggestions, the Actors, I still guess they still do it, from people in the audience. “Give us the names of two characters, give us a situation and give us the first line,” and then the Actors would proceed to improvise a hilarious scene. That was their training and I was very young when I started to work with them and I did a television series with them live on the ABC station in Chicago, and I used to--the cast then was Alan Arkin, Jack Burns, Avery Schreiber, Dick Schaal [Richard Schaal], Valerie Harper who married Dick Schaal and later became Rhoda [Rhoda Morgenstern from THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW], a woman named Mina Kolb and the most brilliant Actor--two brilliant Actors, Severn Darden and Del Close, and they were like the--Severn and Dell were like the fathers of modern improvisation, and the founder of Second City was a guy named Paul Sills, whose mother taught improvisation--[INT: Spolin]--Viola Spolin. And I hooked up with them early and then I did television with them, so I knew how to approach an Actor about who his character was or hers, and what the focus of a scene was and then I felt that the Actors could then--you couldn’t stop and write a scene, there were no real--sometimes the Actors would come in with something they wrote in advance, and then you’d improvise on it, and that’s what FRENCH CONNECTION [THE FRENCH CONNECTION] was. So I knew how to touch the buttons that brought about improvisation and humor. I had learned a lot from Pinter [Harold Pinter] by now about how to put suspense and tension in a scene, and I had the precepts of Hitchcock, [Alfred Hitchcock] and I have a true story, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, but it’s a story that took place a couple of years before we made the film, 10 years maybe, and lasted for 18 months, and the film was only going to last for 100 minutes, so I also understood by that time about impressionism, and how I could take an impression of something that happened over a year and a half and distill it into 100 minutes.