ES: Just to link how things happen, in my earlier days at Yale [Yale School of Drama] I was fascinated with Greek classical drama and the function of the chorus. And, of course, then as I told you, and I did, Brandeis [Brandeis University], I did LYSISTRATA with a chorus and I also later did THE TROJAN WOMEN with a chorus and then I staged the version of THREEPENNY OPERA, which has a little street singer going through it and it has a chorus. When I read CAT BALLOU, it had two singers who were part of the environment of the town. It had street singers that Walter Newman had created. And I saw an opportunity to do something with them that I enjoyed, because I've always loved music. I was, well took ballet lessons when I was a kid for six years and I was in, played a number of instruments. And so I loved the idea of these musicians. And I turned them toward the camera and made a direct narrative, treated 'em as a Greek chorus in and out of the movie. Well this created another storm of difficulty with a Producer who said to me, "This embarrasses me when they look at the camera. It won't work." I said, "It's the oldest trick in the theater, Harold [Harold Hecht]. This is not new. This is older than movies. It's older than Broadway. It's 2,000 years old and it's always worked." "Well..." But I'd already shot some, you see. So there was a debate going, at least some were in my, in support of what I was doing. And I had tied it in, which was another thing I'd learned to outwit the forces later, to tie in a shot with something that I particularly liked that might provide some controversy so they couldn't be separated. So there are a lot of shots in that in which they are tied directly to other action. [INT: Like the opening.] Like the opening, yeah. The opening where they walk down the street singing to the camera and other people walk by them and they don't see, they're invisible. [INT: Right.] And the, a number of other scenes also similarly where they sing and then they move out and Kid Shelleen [Lee Marvin] and his carriage comes in from the background, things of that nature. So, and that set the style of the piece for me. Once I had managed to get that, I knew that the rest of it would, that it gave me license to go very far with the rest of the characters and be, gonna be funny. And Mike Frankovich [M.J. Frankovich] was wonderful because I didn't really know how to cast those singers. And at, that was a period of time when there were very few blacks in movies in any kind of substantial role. And he said, "Let me get Nat Cole [Nat King Cole] to do one. And we'll get Stubby Kaye to do the other." Well, that was terrific. 'Cause they're upside down, black and white, thin and fat. And one had a guitar and the other had a banjo. And I, there's secret stuff going on. One had one kind of design or the other. Very subtle stuff, but it had some meaning for me. It was, it was a, kind of a finger as it were. It was a wonderful opportunity for a black guy, a wonderful artist, to be, play a foreground role in a movie. And that was a change from the script, which Walter Newman was very upset by. 'Cause he called me and screamed at me, after the movie was over, about doing that. And I couldn't understand why that was. I really couldn't understand why.

ES: There was another part of the movie [CAT BALLOU] which was a relatively famous shot in which the script described, describes the drunken Kid Shelleen [Lee Marvin], gunfighter, who was supposed to be on the wagon, suddenly is seen at a critical moment to the script on his, on his big galumphing horse leaning against the side of a wall. And the script said, "Kid Shelleen and his horse are leaning against the wall." Well I remember standing on the set on the Columbia ranch with my ankles crossed, I was standing up looking at this and wondering what I could do to make this funnier. And I looked and I looked at my crossed ankles and I said to the wrangler, I said, "Have the horse cross his legs." [LAUGH] [INT: [LAUGH]] The wrangler said, "Sir, horses do not cross their legs." And I said to him, "This is my first movie and when I first came to Hollywood, I was told a Director can have anything he wants. I want the horse to cross his legs." He said, "Well, sir, all right." I said, "How long is it gonna take?" He said, "Take me about three days." I said, "You got an hour." He said, "I'll do my best." "Okay." And what he did was put the horse in position, give him sugar, cross his, cross his leg and give him a piece of sugar. And he'd uncross his legs, he'd rap the shin, cross his leg again, gave him sugar. He kept that over and over, and over and over, about half an hour. And the horse got the idea, cross my legs, I get sugar. So Lee was in the dressing room at this point. And finally I was ready to shoot, 'cause all I needed was 10 seconds. And what they had done is also put a piano wire on the horse's bridle and lowered his head, took the piano wire around the corner of the building where the horse was leaning so that they could hold his head down. So Lee said, "What..." I says, "Just get on the horse, do exactly what you did, Lee." And I had him lean against the building a little bit to kind of create the sense of leaning. And we silent rolled the camera so not to spook the horse and the guy on, around the corner, lowered the horse's head with the piano wire and then we rolled the camera and the wrangler came in, showed the horse the sugar, crossed his legs, backed out of the camera and then the guy off camera took a little fly spray, went [MAKES NOISE] and the horse went...with the piano wire. And that was a classic shot. And I'm very proud of that shot. And then, just that moment, just before we were shooting, just as we shot, just as we shot, Producer walked by. And I said, "Did you see that? Did you see that, Harold [Harold Hecht]?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." And he walked on. He was very nervous about the production as a whole 'cause I was like half a day over or something like that, something, I mean a more experienced Director would laugh at now, but I was jumpy because this was the first movie and I couldn't afford to be over time on it.

INT: Were you aware that you were personalizing a form at that point?

ES: No. No. I wasn't aware of anything. [INT: Just...] Just to get through it. Survive it. [INT: Right. Right.] Because I knew that I had no support. I mean, I know... I was fired five times on that movie [CAT BALLOU]. [INT: Really?] I was told I was fired five times. And I know at one time he went to the cast and the, to see whether they'd work with another Director and they wouldn't. And they went to Marvin [Lee Marvin], and I'm told Marvin said, "And he's got some kind of an idea. I don't know what it is, but he's got some kind of an idea and I'll stick with him." So they were very courageous. And the other times were because I, at, the first time's I talked to Harold [Harold Hecht] and told him, you know, that take eight incident. Because he, I didn't do exactly what he wanted me to do and then I told him he couldn't sit on the set. So I was, I was, I didn't know I was a... I found that out afterwards. It was very nerve wracking to have these, this guy around and suits, you know, the usual suits in the shadows. [INT: Was it within the power of the Director at that point to keep a Producer off the set?] No I, well, I don't know. I wasn't George Stevens for God's sake. [INT: No.] You know, this was a first movie. [INT: Yeah. But it is in the contract now to keep a Producer off the set?] Not to my knowledge. No, you're an employee and he represents the employer and he can literally do anything he wants. It's a power game. You know that, Bob. It's--[INT: But a Director can close a set.] Yeah. Sure.

INT: Your experience and feelings about working with Writers, you can start with CAT BALLOU, and do you usually stay with one Writer? Do you have feelings about changing Writers and so on?

ES: Sam Spiegel, who was one of the great Producers, told me once when I was doing a picture for him and there was a concern about a Writer and about replacing him, and he said, "Idiot." He said, "This man has made all the mistakes. He knows all the mistakes. You fire him, you hire somebody else, he'll make the same mistakes before he comes to the same point. Don't fire." And he was right, you know. I don't, I look at this, I believe there is one Director to a film, very strongly and I believe that unless there is a, some extraordinary reason, that there should be one Writer. If the right choice was made initially, it should go all the way through. And I can't ever understand the arguments ab--that has arisen between Writers and Directors. I don't know what, I don't know a Director who is hostile to Writers innately. They're just hostile to the same thing that I guess I was uncomfortable about, being forced to do something. The, I've always loved to work closely with Writers. Frustrated, angry, I'm sure that's just the same way they are with me. Or what Producers have been.

INT: Well, but talk about the goals of the Director and the Writer and how that evolves and where you think this, if there is a source of conflict and if not, how, with the best intentions on both sides, how that evolves in terms of lifting the text to film.

ES: I don't think the problems have arisen on a personal level. I don't think, if you look at the relationships between Directors and Writers, I would war--I would guess that they've been very good on a personal, professional level. Where the difficulty comes is in public acknowledgement and the differing goals of the Guilds [Directors Guild of America & Writers Guild of America]. As the prestige of a Director has risen, the prestige--the Writers have become angered because it appears to them that their contributions to the movie are being belittled. Now if they have n--is this what you'd like me to talk about? [INT: Yeah.]

ES: I have a theory as to what has gone wrong, where the initial virus entered the body of relationships [between Writers and Directors]. And we can talk about this maybe later when we get to creative rights, but essentially, Writers made a mistake. Their Guild [Writers Guild of America] made a mistake initially when they allowed them to be seduced by the notion of piecework. That is your treatment, they can be hired to do a first draft. They can be hired to do a second draft and a polish, and so forth, so on, and so piecework. Instead of doing what the, what we did, it was set up initially by some of our great Directors, traditionally but not contractually, one Director to a film. One person carries this through, not piecework. Not somebody to prepare it, somebody to shoot it, somebody to cut it, somebody to do the music, somebody... One person all the way through, it is, to me, a foundation stone of the Directors Guild [Directors Guild of America], which has been assaulted by some of our own members, by the way, in the various Directors council meetings, particularly new members who don't understand that tradition of this. And the Writers Guild, having suffered under this piecework concept, one finds that there are a number of Writers assigned to a movie. And that has an effect, not only on their psychology, of both acknowledgement and paternity, but it also has an effect on their sense of competition. It also has an effect on the credits. Five Writers, one Director, 20 Producers, one Director, 50 Executive Producers, one Director, 12 releasing companies, one Director. They resent that. And I can understand that resentment. I sympathize with it. The most difficult thing in the world it seems to me to do is to sit with a blank page and to start a story. And then to have 50 different people, most of whom don't know anything, telling a Writer how to change or how to fix a problem, must be torture. It must be such an assault on the soul, that by the time the movie's finished a Writer is screaming in agony and lashing out at everybody and everything. And because then the Director picks up the results of that agony and then goes on and adds something else to it when the Writer's out of the picture. I can well understand. But I think it's a, it's a difficulty of their own making. Because of that initial error that they made, and because we came up with the notion of creative rights in the Directors Guild, they didn't until years afterwards, when we had already gained the momentum and gained most of the essential clauses and protections. But if you're asking me what I would like to do or what I have done in the past, with the possible exception of one or two instances, I love Writers. They're just magical people. How they can come up with things that I couldn't dream of coming up with. But they can't come up with things that I come up with. And I've thought that maybe the proper description is that no building exists without a foundation, and a good foundation, but the foundation is not the super structure. People don't go into a building to enjoy or use the foundation. They go in to enjoy the super structure and the building itself. And they make the foundation on which the film stands. And there isn't, I don't think there can be any argument about that. But we make the super structure. That's the way it is.

INT: Let me ask you a creative question in that regard because it also involves Actors. Whose character is it anyway? Is it, is it, is it the character written by the Writer? Is it the character that the Actor delivers? Or is it what the Director evokes from the Actor?

ES: It's a combination of two things. It's a power play. One is who has the power to speak and enforce and encourage. And the other thing, it's deterministic. That is to say it's the action off-screen. If Director A works with Actor B the result is gonna be different than if the Director C works with Actor B. And it's gonna be different again if E works with Actor F. The combination of intellects, emotions, personal interplay is gonna come out with a different result each time. So once those decisions have been made off-screen and prior to anybody going to the set, somewhere in cyberspace that film has been finished.

INT: Well let me ask you more, but in a more singular, personal level, and that is it's you, it's Actor, whoever you want to pick, and it's a piece of material, the written character, and in that process, are you trying to fulfill a concept that you already have in your head? Or are you trying to fulfill something that the Writer wrote? Or are you trying to see how the Actor can create still another level to this character that will be more satisfying?

ES: Whatever the situation calls for. It's totally pragmatic. I usually have a, I've had a clear idea of what I wanted. Broadly speaking. Within that I can find, or an Actor can find various ways of realizing that. The ancient Greeks used to call the Director the didaskalos, the teacher. They'd teach the play to the Actors. But you have to know what the play is that you want to teach, or what it is. And I spoke before about that white plume. I've often seen that in my mind as the goal, that you figure out what the vision is and you try to communicate that to other people. And one of the nicest lines an Actor can say is, "Oh I see what you mean." That's a great sound. And then to see an Actor go and take that and embroider it and put all kinds of wonderful clothes on it, and a new face and so forth is wonderful. The difficulty will come if an Actor has a totally different idea than the Director. And then there's a problem of communicating and there then becomes a power play. Whose idea is it gonna, is it gonna be.

INT: Will you want to talk a little bit about your experience on A MAN CALLED HORSE? In regard to the evolution of that project, particularly creatively in terms of the script and casting and the evolution of the story?

ES: Sure. It goes back a while now, let me see. I was asked to do that by a new company called Cinema Center [Cinema Center Films]. It was owned by CBS. The original script was like 190 pages and I was quite interested in it because I've always been interested in American Indians. What little kid hasn't, you know? And this was a story that seemed to be very touching, very moving. And again, for whatever psychological insights it may offer, what attracted me was the big man brought low. As was, by the way, the drunk in CAT BALLOU, Kid Shelleen [Lee Marvin], the big man, the gunfighter, who couldn't hit the side of a barn door. And here was a Lord and a powerful rich man, who was brought low by Indians, who considered him nothing more than a horse to carry wood and to do menial labor, a slave in effect. And I told Gordon Stulberg, who was the president or the CEO, that I could not do it in the time and for the budget he wanted. He wanted to do it in 56 days. Well this was a mural. This was an epic piece. And he clearly didn't really understand the production problems that it offered. I said, "I couldn't do it for that." He said, "Well, I'll give you the different--we'll shoot it in Mexico and I'll give you 300,000 dollars difference between what it would cost to do it here and do it in Mexico." I said, "You don't understand, Gordon. It's not a question of money. It's a question of time. Money will follow, but it's time. I need the time to do the..." "How long do you need?" "I need 90 days." Well there was a lot of discussion about that. And I got some backing from the late Gerry Henshaw, who was his production head. However, I had a Producer who was used to doing quickies. I'm not talking about, real quickies, you know THE CREATURE OF THE DARK LAG--OF TARAWA LAGOON [CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON], and who knows what. And when the, I agreed to do it. And then once I had agreed to come on, began preparation, word came down that it was 78 days. And I got into a brouhaha, of course, and there I was again, climbing that same mountain and being bullied, I thought, being hit on the head with a baseball bat. And I said, "You can put anything you want on the schedule." And I put this in writing. I said, "It's gonna take 90 days and I'm ignoring the 78 days. That was not the agreement." And, so we went into it, shooting it.

ES: And another lesson I learned was that while my mind was on this movie [A MAN CALLED HORSE] and this movie only, to the exclusion of everything, as is typical with all of us, my Producer's was, mind was on doing the next movie. And the result of that was that Richard Harris, whom I had heard was a very tough nut to deal with, came aboard, 12 days into the schedule and... [INT: Wait, 12, he wasn't aboard until 12 days--] 12 days in. He didn't have to shoot. We shot 12 before him. [INT: Oh, but he was cast?] He was cast. [INT: Oh, yeah. All right.] He was cast. Sorry about that. And my Producer was very excited about that and I made it a point not to be excited by it and went on shooting, for all the reasons, which you'll understand. And the first shot I had scheduled, I'd asked Richard if he could ride a horse. And he said, like all Actors, would say, "Yes." And I'd learned from a television show not to necessarily accept that. So I scheduled, as the first shot, a shot of a horse riding down a hill with Richard Harris aboard. 'Cause the question I found often happened with Actors is who's gonna be the rider and who's gonna be the horse for the production. So he said he could ride a horse. Okay. Let's take the first shot and have him ride a horse. Well he came up to me right away with a wig that I'd never seen before. A blond wig, which he put on and he said, "I like the way this wig..." Looked like Veronica Lake. [INT: [LAUGH]] Which was, you know, blond hair, like a woman. And I said, "You can't do that. You gotta test with that." And he says, "Well you gotta [MAKES NOISE.]" So I said, "All right, we'll put a band around it,” which was not necessarily archeologically correct for that group, but it got him back to work. And I said, "All right, first shot is up the hill." And he said, "No, I want to talk about something else."

ES: The story was a story [A MAN CALLED HORSE] of a man captured by an Indian tribe, brought low and gradually gaining respect for their way of life and passing through a terrible physical ceremony in which he was hauled up by his pectoral muscles in order to prove he was a man. And when he had done so and had fallen in love, he was allowed to take a wife and then he was allowed to leave the tribe when the wife was killed. Okay. So, I knew that the end of it he was, he kissed the dead body of his wife and he went off his way and the Indians went off theirs. He [Richard Harris] said, "I think I should be, leave with the Indians and be the Chief." He's saying this now. This is right after the wig. [INT: [LAUGH]] Because there was the horse, waiting. And I knew what this was. This was, you know, it was gonna do what? This was a stall. Is this what you want to hear? [INT: Yeah. Yeah.] Okay. 'Cause it has to do again, with what I found is one of the problems in directing it's not simply the artistic problems, it's the psychological, the chess game and all that. And he says, "Well I think I should, I should go off with the Indians, you know." I said, "Richard, that's 15 weeks down the line." I said, "You signed on to do this movie. I can't authorize a change in the movie now." "Well I'm not, I don't think I should make the first shot, first shot until we've made that decision." Well the gun is to my head. I said, "Okay. Call lunch." We call lunch. I got the Producer [Sandy Howard], who was suffering intestinal problems from the Mexican water, I guess, or something, and he, I went and I said, "We got a problem with Richard." "Oh, God." I said, "Please, whatever you do, back me. Chew me out afterwards, fight it out afterwards but I, in front of him you gotta back me." "Oh, yeah. Okay." Went into a trailer. He sat next to me and Richard sat on the other side and I said, "Sandy, Richard has something he wants to say." Now I knew, I'd done my research and I knew that Richard had walked out on a production in Spain, just previously and the Producer there was suing him. So I knew that was in his mind. Again, it's the same vulnerability as I noticed with the, with CAT BALLOU Producer [Harold Hecht]. I said, "Richard has something he wants to tell you." So Richard went forward and told him he wanted to change the whole end of the movie. And I waited. I said nothing. And Sandy was very sick. And I said, "Are you finished, Richard?" He said, "Yeah. Yeah." I said, "Sandy, this conference has nothing to do with what Richard wants to do at the end of the movie. This conference has to do with only one thing. And that thing is Richard Harris getting on his ass, getting up on that horse and making the first shot. That's what it has to do with. If he refuses to do that, I'm walking to the door of this trailer, and I'm gonna get in a car, I'm gonna go back to Durango, Mexico and I'm calling the studio and saying that he is in breach of his contract and refusing to work." And Harris said, "You wouldn't do that." I said, "I'm gonna count 10, Richard, and so help me God, I'm gonna do it." And he said, "Oh, you wouldn't." I said, "One, two..." And I was going right through. And at nine I knew that I had to be prepared to do it. And I was prepared to do it. I walked all the way to the door. And he said, "Well you don't have to be that rough on me." I said, "I'm not rough on you, Richard. I just want to go to work. First shot is on the hill on the horse. That's what you have to do." He says, "Ah, Jesus you're tough." [LAUGH][INT: [LAUGH]] "All right, let's do it." I said, "You're on the horse." "On the horse. With the wig?" I said, "With the wig." "All right." He got on the horse. And the horse knew what he had to do and Richard [LAUGH] didn't quite know, but it was a wide shot so he got away with it. Then he was great. For six weeks, marvelous, anything I wanted. Until he realized, when the producer started to go after him to do another picture. And then the tables, the weight shifted. And now Richard wanted to do what the Producer wanted him to do and not what I wanted him to do. So there were two other major incidents that occurred, which again, demonstrated this lesson that I'd learned that it's the administration of all of this that is almost equally important, maybe sometimes more important than the actual vision itself.

ES: There is a scene in the movie [A MAN CALLED HORSE], it, the key scene in the movie in which this test of manhood was being made between Richard [Richard Harris] and the rest of the tribe. And the, we'd gone to great trouble to get these enormous headdresses, Indian headdresses, they'd never been made before--for 150 years, everything historically perfect and right. And he had to come in and make a speech to these people and tell 'em he was worthy. Just because he was a white man didn't mean that he couldn't go through this test. And they were arguing, one of them was arguing he was nothing, he was piece of crap, he couldn't do it. And all this is being translated into Sioux by a French trapper, who I had staged over his shoulder because I wanted the running UN [United Nations] translation kind of thing. “I want this and so on.” [MAKES NOISE.] Kind of an exciting, simultaneous transla--Richard didn't want that. 'Cause his instinct as an Actor was to force me into close-ups. So he wanted this guy over at nine o'clock while he was at six and the Indians were at 12. And I didn't want that for that reason. So he wasn't gonna come in the next morning. And so Sandy came to me [LAUGH] that night, says, "What are we gonna do?" And I said, "I don't know. There’s only one Director on the project as far as I know, Sandy [Sandy Howard]. You want to fire me, you can fire me. But there's only one Director here and I'll show it to you, the way I want to do it." He says, "Well I don't, I don't know what you..." Said, "Come on down there." We went down to the set. I told him exactly what I wanted to do and what Richard wanted to do and I said, "Which way do you want it?" And he said, "Well your way's better." I said, "That's the way we do it. I'm gonna be here, eight o'clock in the morning. Camera's gonna be here, put an "X" on the ground." And I put 50 millimeter... [INT: [LAUGH]] ...lens on it and I said, "The other marks gonna be right here." I had my finder. I said, "That's where it's gonna be. We're all gonna be ready to work at eight o'clock in the morning and your employee had better be there to do his job." He went back, he said, [INT: [LAUGH]] “Elliot, you're gonna win this." And I said, "Why, Sandy?" He says, "'Cause you're fighting fair." [LAUGH] And he said, "Would you talk with Richard in the morning?" I said, "I've got nothing to say to him except be on that mark." He said, "Please do it for me." I said, "Okay. I'll go in and talk with him." And I said, "But you gotta support me now." He said, "I'll support you." He said, "But I have to tell you something." "What?" "I want to be honest with you." And I said, "Uh oh." He says, "I want to be honest with you." I said, "Well how you gonna be honest?" He says, "Well, if I have any trouble with Richard, I'm gonna double-cross you." [LAUGH] [INT: [LAUGH]] "Well, okay." There I was again. [LAUGH] That's, I felt like a Director, really alone in this world. Now trying to carry that white plume and trying to administer and play chess games with all these, in order to get to that point. Well the morning came and I went and I listened to Richard. And again I said, "Richard, okay. You know something, you're right Richard. In the movie that you want to make, you're absolutely right." I said, "But this is the movie I want to make, so I'm gonna ask you, please let's go outside. Your mark is all set and we're ready to go." And I walked out. And a couple minutes later, he shuffled in, took his mark and we shot. And that was the scene that sold the movie. [INT: Right.]

ES: Now there was one other incident [on A MAN CALLED HORSE] in which a similar kind of problem arose. Again, it's the same thing of being bullied by power, in which I have to find my way around that obstacle. There was a huge battle scene in which enemy Indians had come and overrun this camp and in the course of it, one of them, one of them approaches Richard Harris in a fight and grabs his pregnant wife. And when he sees Richard Harris throws the wife off the horse and Dame Judith Anderson, who was the mother of the girl, runs to the girl. That was not in the script, but I put that in the script. Bang, stopped production. Richard was upset. Why was he upset? 'Cause a clause had been inserted in his contract after he had taken the job and during current negotiations, that he had approval over anything that affected his character. He claimed that staging affected his character because he wanted to be the first one to go to her. I said, "How can you Richard? You're gonna be busy fighting this other guy? How can you go to her? The mother is the first one that'll run to her." "I don't care." And he went on strike for three days, which started a rather--[INT: Three days?] Three days. A unique exercise in chess. Here's what happened: Judith Anderson wanted that moment. She said she had very few moments in the movie. She wanted... And he said, "No." He wanted to be the first one and to carry the body up the hill to his teepee. I said to her, "Why don't you go and see him and talk with him. You know, Dame Judith Anderson, you can talk with him." She went. He was sleeping. He kept her waiting four hours. She gave up. She came back furious to me. And I said, "Okay. Thank you. I'm sorry I put you through that. I'll find a way out." "What are you gonna do?" I said, "I have no idea." The next day, I knew he had to report for work. Remember I told you he was afraid of not reporting to work. I told the assistant to pull the trailer, his trailer, out into the center of the battlefield. And then I made sure that we had second unit and everything, cameras are going all around that trailer, action everywhere. No matter what window he looked out, we were going. He wasn't affecting us at all, you know. My gut is tight. But wherever he sees, he hasn't stopped production at all. His strike was meaningless. So for one day, two days, three days, we did all this stuff. Finally the Producer says, "What are you gonna do tomorrow?" "I have no idea. I have no idea."

ES: So there we were with the trailer in the center of this fight between Indians, which had gone on for three days, and we were running out of shooting things [ on A MAN CALLED HORSE]. I told the Producer [Sandy Howard] I didn't know what we're gonna do. And I went home that night and, to the house I'd rented, and looked at a blank wall, which is what I do after I have a hard day, just let my mind float. And I said, "I can't, I can't let this guy do this." Again, it's the power thing. And then I had an idea. I came in the next morning and Judith [Judith Anderson] met me. She said, "What are we gonna do?" I said, "Judith, have you ever played Clytemnestra?" Now Clytemnestra is a character from the classic Greek tragedy AGAMEMNON [ORESTEIA: AGAMEMNON], who waits at the head of the palace stairs while her husband comes back with a, with a concubine, and makes a long speech about welcoming him back and he walks up and she rolls out a red carpet for him, and he walks up that red carpet inside and she hits him with an axe. Soon as he gets inside, takes a bath and she kills him. That's where the red carpet came from. And, "You ever played..." "Yes." I said, "Okay, I'm gonna ask you to play Clytemnestra again. Here's what's gonna happen. We're gonna shoot this Richard's [Richard Harris] way." "No, you can't do that." I said, "Yes, we're gonna do it that way. It's not gonna wind up that way, I hope. But we're gonna do it that way." So we, I asked the makeup guy to bring Richard Harris' chair on and just set it on the set. And I said, "Judith, you're gonna sit over here about 15 yards away." And I said, "While he's being make up, I don't want you to take your eyes off him. You look right through the back of his skull. Don't say anything. And even if he's made up, he'll feel it." And she says, "What do you want to..." I said, "We're gonna see what he's gonna do." So she sat there. Remember the day before she had been kept waiting four hours. And she stood there. And I tell you, if you've ever seen Dame Judith Anderson act, you'll know that those eyes can be beams of destruction. And she stared at him and he began to get very nervous. And he turned and he looked over at her and he was getting more and more ner--and he called me over and he said, "What's the matter? Why's she looking at me that way?" And I said, "Richard," I said, "you know, she sees the scene one way, you see it another way." "Well I've got resp--" I said, "Yes, I know. Of course you do. You know, you know, I differ with you but we're gonna do it your way, as you can see, we got it set up like that." "Okay." She stares at him, continuous, she's just… must have been 10, 15 minutes. Finally he says, "All right, let's get going." And he stood up and he walked over to the set. And he says, "Why is she angry at me like..." I said, "Richard, you kept a Dame of the British Empire waiting for four hours." "Well I was sleeping." "But it doesn't make any difference. She went to talk to you about that. Now I suggest that what you do is maybe go over, maybe apologize." "I don't want to fi-..." I said, "If you don't want to, I'll carry the message." "No, I can do it myself." I said, "All right." So I said, "Do it and then we'll wait." I went over to her and I said, "Now he's gonna come over and apologize to you Judith. I tell you what you do. This time, don't make eye contact with him. No matter what the hell happens, don't let him look you in the eye." So Harris eventually walked over to her and she got up and she walked this way and he followed her. And he walked this way. And wherever he went, she turned her back to him. [INT: [LAUGH]] And wouldn't look at him, very casually, very subtly, it was a dance, wonderful dance. And eventually he came back to me and he said, "She won't talk to me." I said, "Richard, you're killing her. You have a long career ahead of you. She has this one moment in this film. [INT: [LAUGH]] But let's do it." "No," Richard says, "I can't take it. Is she so upset?" "Yes." I said, he said, "All right, damn it, nothing's worth that. Let's do it our way." So I called the Producer, "Richard has changed his mind..." Judith went like this and I went like that [LAUGH] and we staged it a different way. But it took three days and this wonderful act that she performed to persuade him, where I had failed. I couldn't persuade him. [INT: But when you were sitting there looking at the blank wall, did you see this whole thing play out that way?] Vaguely. I wasn't quite sure 'til I got in the next morning and I said to her, "Have you ever played Clytemnestra?" That's when I really got the idea.

INT: Well in regard to that, in regard to the writing of the script in terms of, does the writing process for you generally continue through the production?

ES: If needed. [INT: So it's different from film to film?] Sure. Whatever works. Whatever is needed, whatever… If a Writer's available and--for instance, if a Writer available who wants to be on the set, I love it if he, if he doesn't make faces and doesn't talk to the Actors. [INT: Have you had problems that way with Writers on the set...] No. [INT: ...dealing with Actors?] No. No. I've never had a problem. I never had a problem. And if, I think probably most Directors have not had problems, from what I hear. [INT: Right.] If a Writer will not intercede and immediately jump up after a take and go whispering in a Director's ear and shake up the Actors like they may have done something wrong, particularly after the Director's said it's great. You know, if there's a kind of a deportment and a discipline.