INT: What was your first professional job?
MR: My first professional job, actually, was not in movie making; it was a copy boy on the San Francisco Chronicle. [INT: Did you expect that you were going to get into movie making?] Not at all. And I went to Harvard, studying to be a teacher, and as it happened senior year, I fell into an opportunity to direct a play, which was brand new and had never been done anywhere before. It was written by a young man named Arthur Kopit, and it was called OH DAD, POOR DAD, MAMA'S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I'M FEELING SO SAD. And, to jump forward, it became one of the hits of the avant-garde theater of the early ‘60s [1960s]. [INT: And was this the first--] Not in my production. My production was a huge hit at Harvard and got me a job in show business, which I'll tell you about. [INT: Was this the first time that you'd ever directed anybody?] I had directed lunchtime productions. I had directed a Christmas skit, and you'd say, “Well, how does a guy get to direct a brand new play by someone who turns out to be an important American playwright?” And the answer is, I was available. Nobody else was available. The people who had credentials and could’ve directed it, John Hancock [John D. Hancock], for example, who is a feature filmmaker, curses the day he was unavailable to direct OH POOR DAD [OH DAD, POOR DAD, MAMA'S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I'M FEELING SO SAD], because our careers could have taken different tangents. But he was not available. Julius Novick, who became the critic at the Village Voice, was a prominent Director in Harvard circles; he was not available. Steve Aaron, who actually wrote a book about directing at Harvard and was so prominent that he as a graduate student would be paid to be a consultant to the Loeb Drama Center when it was built, just after I had done my play, not available. So it fell onto me and no one basically saw the future of the play. It was perceived of as something that was unstageable.

INT: Who would you say your mentors and teachers were?
MR: Well, the mentors that I had were really Bob Saudek [Robert Saudek], who gave me a job on OMNIBUS, which was a cultural variety show. That was my break out of Harvard; it wasn't in theater. I wasn't allowed to direct the inevitable theater production of OH DAD, POOR DAD, [OH DAD, POOR DAD, MAMA'S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I'M FEELING SO SAD]. That went to Jerome Robbins. My chance was to work on this cultural variety show, which was hosted by Alistair Cooke. Recently PBS did a tribute to that show and to Saudek [Robert Saudek], and I had a chance to appear on it, and was very proud of, you know, what I had to say and how important the show is in the history of early television. I say early, this is 1952, when I was not involved, to 1960, which was my first year. OMNIBUS’ last year and my first year. [INT: I remember the show well, it was my favorite shows, and Bob Saudek founded the Institute of Film and Television, which is where I went to graduate school, so I remember Bob.] That's right. Exactly. [INT: What were the things, if you tried to isolate what he taught you, or what, you know, important messages or ideas that you got from Bob Saudek, what would you say they are?] Well, I think he taught--Bob Saudek taught me that there's a truth and a curiosity that has to be answered first when you make a decision to do something. The challenge of the truth is, you know, what is the reason for doing this? Why is this something anybody else wants to see? And if it's a lie--and you could do a lie, but you have to decide what the reason of telling that lie is; you have to have a very good reason for it. It's a lot easier to have a reason for telling the truth. And I think that's what I learned from Bob Saudek, and that's why seeing the truth in the most paradoxical situations, whether it be a beauty pageant or political contest, was, for me, the challenge. [INT: And do you know where he got it? I mean his…] Well, he got it from working in radio back in early ABC days; that's an interesting question. Natural curiosity. I mean, when you have this gift that comes to a few reporters, and comes to a fewer number of people in the arts, this gift of wanting to tell the truth and seeing the multi-layers of the truth. It's an extraordinary gift and, you know, we are all honored to be mentored by people who have that gift, because if a little bit of it rubs off, then we can hope to have it reflected in our own work.

INT: This is a philosophical approach to work, which obviously Saudek [Robert Saudek] really did give you a serious example for. Look at it in another issue, which is the, let’s say, the skills of or the technological abilities both in human relationships as well as the machinery that we do as Directors. Were there mentors for you in that as well? And I know for Directors, it's an interesting question, because I realize most Directors go out and learn how to direct on their own.
MR: Yeah. I mean I had a lot of wonderful people because of working for Saudek, who I was privileged to work with before I became a Director. I mean, Alistair Cooke is certainly one of them, and he's a reporter. That's interesting. But I guess, it was the reporters that always interested me in one form or another, the SAS… I mean he had on his staff Walter Kerr, who was a foremost drama critic and reporter on the arts. He was certainly an influence, he had to be; I had an office right next to his. Mary Ahern, who was his right hand woman, and is not given enough honor and praise in this OMNIBUS show, is an enormous gift to this search for the truth. She would work on the Leonard Bernstein concerts and hold Lenny's hand to some grindstone of truth; I'm sure I've created a horrible metaphor there, but the idea was that Leonard Bernstein, when he did those shows, wanted to just go off in every direction at once, he was such a genius. And she would try to hold his focus and make sure that he didn't depart from his initial idea. What he wanted to say would remain the same after four hours of a script session with Mary. And with anybody else, it could suddenly get so hopelessly mangled that Leonard would walk away from it. Leonard, everybody called him Lenny. [INT: This is an interesting issue, because you're bringing up an issue of focus, which is to some degree what I think a Director has to do, because you have so much to choose from, and you still have to focus your and everybody else's energy. And you were watching, I mean I'm not putting words in your mouth, but you were watching other people who had the ability to do that with creative artists.] Yeah, and I think that some of it has to rub off. I mean these are people who I worked with when I was 21--very important period. Some people are in film school then gaining their credentials. I was, you know, earning $100 a week, gaining credentials, as an Assistant to the Producer. It was just another form of film school--except that what I was getting to do was eventually documentaries, and that's another chapter of my education.

INT: Were you seeing either in, and this is sort of covers all of it, but were you seeing or did you ever hang out or be on the set of other Directors where you learned something from them?
MR: Not really. Not in the way that probably the other people that you interview will. Yes, I watched some nifty Directors do their thing. Gower Champion, for example, great hero of mine in the American musical theater, did work for Saudek [Robert Saudek]; I watched that. Some Directors still working today, David Green, English Director, who works in television a lot; watched him work. He did some episodes of various Saudek projects. But my education really came from the documentaries that I was plunged into. And when I say plunged into it, it was in early 1962 that Saudek got a commission to do a documentary about President’s, President Kennedy's [John F. Kennedy] physical fitness program. And as with the good fortune I had on directing the play of OH DAD POOR DAD [OH DAD, POOR DAD, MAMA'S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I'M FEELING SO SAD], I had very good fortune to get to direct this documentary. Who was around to direct this documentary for no additional salary, since I was being paid my $100 a week? Ritchie! “We've got him, we've got him under contract, we've got a real low budget, he wants to direct, let's make him a film Director.” So that was kind of… Bob Saudek said to me, “Make this film. Make this documentary film about youth physical fitness.” And I wanted the film to look different. And I had already been steered to the very different looking work of Drew Associates--Pennebaker [D.A. Pennebaker] , Leacock [Richard Leacock]--the founders of American cinemate [Cinema Verité]. Movies like PRIMARY and in particular a movie--they did a series of movies for ABC, that were on every week. And one was about a dog show in Kenya. This was at the time of the upheaval, and so a dog show was the symbolic last vestige of the old guard, the old British landed gentry. So you can see the comedic possibilities, long before Chris Guest [Christopher Guest], and the political possibilities in this, and it turned out that the bulk of the work on this documentary was done by Albert Maysles and his brother, David Maysles, who had just been fired by Leacock/Pennebaker in a combination of cost, cutback, and I think just because they were too rebellious. [INT: Right.] Too difficult for the Drew/Pennebaker. And I never thought that anybody was too difficult, which is probably why I've worked with a lot of difficult people in my time. I've always felt that if you approach people with a rational plan, that no matter how difficult they are, and we can talk about some of the difficult people in my career; I mean I worked with David Merrick; I worked with everybody. You can somehow strike a chord and get the job done and everybody, no matter how difficult, has the talent that got them there and should be rewarded, and the reward for me was being able to share some of the luster of the Leacock/Pennebaker operation through the Maysles brothers, who shot my first film.

INT: Rational approach. Define this a little bit more, because you've said it applies, and obviously it applies to Actors, it applies to Producers, applies to everybody you're working with. And you said with that, you can approach problematic--
MR: Well, you keep hearing stories about, “I won't work with him he's too difficult.” And then you have to get to the root of it. What is the difficult nature of this person? Is he a perfectionist? Does he just insist, you know, like Albert Brooks on take after take after take? And if he's insisting on extra takes, does he have something in mind that he wants to do differently? Or is it just like, I hear, I haven't worked Al Pacino, but I hear that he can be that way, just because he thinks that if he goes three or four takes, that somewhere in there there will be something better, at take 34 then there will be at take 12. I mean, you have to find out what it is that's created a person's reputation for difficultness and then work with them. And I've certainly worked with a lot of difficult people. [INT: And you find that--but you use an interesting phrase, you use the phrase rational. And I'm curious to explore it a bit more. I mean, if you've had an Actor, for example, that has been problematic or here you were dealing with, you know, you were dealing with the Maysles [Albert Maysles and David Maysles], as an example.] Oh, I see. I see what you mean. I’d forgotten what I'd said, yeah. If somebody has a reason, legitimate reason for being difficult about something, then you can discuss it with them. If the reason comes from just petulance, arrogance, power, whatever, that's a different situation. But most people who are difficult, initially come from a rational position, and you have to, first, as a Director, do the job to find out what that position is. Is it rational? [INT: Do you find that out by talking to other people who have worked with them? Do you find it out from talking to them separately?] Each one is different.

INT: Talk about script. What's the Director's relationship to script? What's your relationship to script?
MR: Well, I think if a Director isn't heavily involved in the script for a film, then he's not really the Director of the movie, because then you're just a traffic cop. Now when I say heavily involved, you can be taking a Broadway play and adapting it, not changing a word and still be heavily involved, because, obviously, the choices for how this adaptation takes place. I've never had such an animal to direct, I've never had something where somebody said, "These are all the words; we're not changing one of them," partly because people have come to me for this kind of semi-documentary, satirical, realistic view that my films tend to have, and therefore, they want that particular perverse point of view. Now, a movie like THE CANDIDATE really only happened because all the people involved had had experience in politics and were going to bring a level of reality to the table based on their own political campaigns that they had worked in. So again, holding up the mirror of truth to everything in it, we had to say, “Could this really happen, did this really happen, and what is the building block that allows this to happen in our story, to the benefit of telling this character, Bill McKay, illuminating this character,” rather. [INT: When you look at script, scripts have come to you in various ways, is there something when you're reading a script, let's say this is not something you've been asked to write, but something that you've been asked to direct, when you're reading it, what happens to you as the Director reading the script? Are you looking for something? Is there something that will always speak to you that says, "Ah, this one is one I want to do," and obviously you've done lots of genres, but there may be something in general that happens when you read a story.] Well, when I look at a script I look to see if there's something that is unique, hasn't been done before. Now, I do a lot of films that appear to be derivatives, so I suppose anybody whose done as many sports films as I have would have to confess, “Well, okay. Maybe this one's not that unique.” You got to feed a family; you got to make a living. Frequently, they want you to repeat yourself. So if the assignment has come to you, as for example WILDCATS did, after Bob Zemeckis [Robert Zemeckis], who is the original Director, left because he got a green light to do BACK TO THE FUTURE, based on the success of the film he did with Michael Douglas, whatever it was called. [INT: The ROMANCING THE STONE] ROMANCING THE STONE. And suddenly I was the Director of WILDCATS. And they said, "Great, you know, do what you did on THE BAD NEW BEARS; it will be great." Well, obviously there were some similarities, you know, the… We, one did had to take a team of misfits from nowhere and put them at the top of their league. And you had to, and if you examine the two films, you'll see a lot of parallels, and, of course, whatever I learned in doing THE BAD NEW BEARS I was going to bring to the table.

INT: Well, let's look at the example of THE BAD NEW BEARS as a script. When THE BAD NEW BEARS as a script came to you, what--
MR: It was quite different than the finished film. Okay, THE BAD NEWS BEARS as a screenplay by Bill Lancaster, had at its core this bad kid, played by Jackie Earle Haley in the movie, who truly was a bad, drug taking, criminal misfit. [INT: And this was in the script?] This was in the script. And the finish of the big game had him coming in in the middle of nowhere, in the ninth inning and hitting a game winning home run. And I can't remember whether he was cheated--I don't think so, I think the Bears won the big game in that script. So, that was a huge difference. There was much more about the parents. There was much more--you saw Tatum O'Neal's parents, for example, and you saw the difficult homes that all these kids came from. You learned more about the kids from their home situations than perhaps what was true on the playing field. And what I said, right off the bat to Stanley Jaffe was, "No I think that everything should happen on the field. I think we should only see the lives of these kids at the baseball field." [INT: Now did this come--here, you read a script. I assume that when you sat down and read this you read it once, a bunch of times before, let's say, the ideas, now, of a way of making the script come to you? I mean, I'm using this even as an example.] THE BAD NEW BEARS is a good example of a script submission of a script that's not right, in which I saw as I read it, several times, I'm sure. I never, never pass judgment on a script by reading it just once. I read it through once fast to try to see what it would be like as an audience, and then I read it slowly and try to imagine what the potentials are for making it better, because my initial inclination will be after I read it once fast is I shouldn't be doing this. And the list of films I didn't do is perhaps as informative as the ones I did do. But every one that I didn't do, I didn't just, you know, hurl it in the junk heap and say, "No way Jose." So with THE BAD NEW BEARS, there was the issue of I had just come off SMILE. SMILE was clearly not going to be a success at the box office--[INT: Great movie.]--even though I was very proud of the film. If it wasn't going to be a hit at the box office, I needed my next job. Again, you got to pay the bills. The next job in Paramount's [Paramount Pictures] point of view, and Stanley Jaffe's point of view, was to be THE BAD NEW BEARS and why, because in SMILE I had had teenage boys, little pre-teenage boys, talking dirty, the boys who are Bruce Dern's son and his two friends. So, they figured if he can do teenage boys talking dirty, he can do, or pre-teen boys, I have to keep, because that's an important distinction, having some of my own. If you can do that, then he can do THE BAD NEW BEARS. Just do what you did--I mean again, this is a problem, studio executive mentality. That's why every time I've been given a script which is different, every time I've been given a script which provides a new challenge, I'm more tempted than one that is similar to something I've done before. Now, nobody wants to do satire and advertise it as satire, so I have to sneak that into projects. Satire is, as George Kaufman says, "Is what closes on Saturday night." [INT: [LAUGH] Here they give you the script, obviously, for this reason, you can do this, they hope.] Right. [INT: You read the script, your first read through the script was obviously a pleasant one in some aspect.] It was pleasant because I liked the idea of doing a film that wasn't apparently a star vehicle and which had potential for having kids behaving honestly and truthfully in a little league situation. And I had already done one sports film in--[INT: DOWNHILL RACER]--DOWNHILL RACER and I had really--SMILE was a kind of sports film too, so I'd done kind of one and a half sports films.

INT: Here you are now saying, "Okay, I've read this, I'm affected by it, I like the fact that, a number of things, one practical that it's not a big star driven thing, and secondly, I think just the nature of these kids and their own lives." You're second read, what's now happening? Here's now the Director, now, looking at this saying, how am I going to make this?
MR: Well the second read the Director is saying, you know, what could be fixed in the script? What is it--you try to put yourself in the minds of the people who have the money. What is it that they like? What's indispensable to them? And you have to kind of figure that out before you meet with them, because otherwise you'll have the most disastrous show and tell meeting of all time. So what do they like? Why do they want to do this? Sometimes you can ask your Agent, if you really can't get it. "Why do they want to do this?" And he'll say, "Oh well, you know, they have a commitment with so-and-so and this helps eat up that commitment." Whatever, you know. I mean, but DOWNHILL RACER was done not because the studio wanted to do a ski film with Robert Redford, but because there was a lawsuit pending on a film that he'd walked out of called BLUE directed by Sidney Furie, I believe. And because he'd walked out on BLUE--the film eventually got made, I forget who directed it. It wasn't Sidney Furie, I don't think. [INT: I don't think so either.] Terrence Stamp I think finally starred in it, talk about a weird---[INT: From Redford [Robert Redford] to Stamp.]--from Redford to Terrence Stamp. But the point was Redford, to get out of the film, owed them a film. And Redford was determined that this would be the film, DOWNHILL RACER. So that's why, when you say, “Why do they want to make DOWNHILL RACER?” They really didn't, but they wanted to collect on the deal. [INT: In the BEARS [THE BAD NEW BEARS] pictures, why do you think… You must have asked yourself that question.] Well, it was more obvious as to why they wanted to do THE BAD NEW BEARS. While it's true that there had been no film, no non-Disney [Walt Disney Pictures] films about children that had made money, it seemed as if there should be a market for a non-Disney film starring children, that could, you know, do the trick. And no one had done one, but it did seem like a reasonable gamble. Keep in mind it's still wasn't conceived of as a star vehicle. [INT: Got it. Okay so, that first issue of understanding why the financiers want to make a picture, which you were clear about here, now what else is going on in your mind in the second read as the Director now trying to say, “Is this the one to make and what can I do with this script?”] The second read you begin to say, if we could keep it all on the ball field, if we could make it just about the kids, if we could make it more honest. Really, I mean the screenplay was designed to sell; all this hype about the Jackie Earle Haley character was to get it to sell. And it did sell. Bill Lancaster was successful. He'd been around because he was the son of a famous Actor. He'd been around enough scripts to know those which sold and those which didn't and those that had that hype quality, that slightly larger than the truth quality were the ones that sold. So my role as Director, frequently, is in finding the truth or cutting away the falseness that has been necessarily put in by the Writer in order to sell his script. Which is a delicate job because clearly somebody at the studio liked all that, phonus balonus. [INT: Wow. That's a fascinating thing, because if I understand what you're saying now, you'll see, in the material, for you, in the heart, some kind of truth about human beings, human nature, a situation, the political realities of, the sport, whatever it is. And now your work is to cut away the, my word, bullshit, and get to what is more true.] Yeah, exactly. And that becomes an essential part of the screen development, screen writing process.

INT: Now, since in certain cases, obviously, you've written your material, in the cases where you have not written the material, how do you go about working with the Writer, the Writers?
MR: Well, usually you're starting off with one Writer. I can't remember many writing teams, maybe a couple of writing teams. And what you say is, you know, “Here's the movie that I see,” and again you ask the question, you know, tell me what it is that they see, the people with the money. I mean there's always somebody with the money. Now, there… I say, always somebody with the money; there are instances, and we can get into those, in which a project comes as an idea and then has to be sold, and that's a whole other category. We're now talking about the conventional studio film. Conventional studio film would have to be as perverse as its background was, DOWNHILL RACER. Conventional studio film would have to be PRIME CUT. Would have to be THE CANDIDATE. Would have to be SMILE. Would have to be THE BAD NEWS BEARS. See, most of my films are, begin their life as conventional studio films. [INT: It's interesting that you mention these, I mean, all three of these pictures, there is a particularly I think in terms of SMILE and THE CANDIDATE, even more so, there is a raw honesty that appears in many, many scenes, that to me reminds me of documentary filmmaking.] Right. [INT: But it reminds me, in some degree, improvisational scene making, both of which are not studio trips, because the studio wants to make sure you're going to do exactly what they all agreed we're all going to do, in the fear that they know better and the terror that they won't get at least what they thought was half, was good enough for them to say yes. That's part of some of the work that you do, clearly, as a Director. I mean I’m saying you specifically do as a Director.] Yes, yes. No, I mean it's… I just said yes, yes, no, like I have a choice. [INT: [LAUGH]] What I mean by yes, yes, no, is that yes, yes it is my job to sort out the truth; no it's not a con game. I think that somewhere along the line you have to let the people with the money know what you're doing. I mean, inevitably they’ll find out, and you have to get them on your team, because the last thing you want to do is to be involved in hijacking a movie, because that movie will get cancelled. If you aren't making the movie that they with the money think that they wanted, so you have to convince them that what you want is what they want; it's all a tap dance. It's an intricate part of making movies, studio movies today. [INT: Let's use these as examples. In THE BAD NEWS BEARS, how did you convince them to say, “Let's not go into these homes and have these dramatic, if not melodramatic, scenes between the kids and the parents and whatever, and bring it on to the field, where it's really going to be the kids and then their coach?”] Well, I had great help because Stanley Jaffe, the Producer, was on my team. [INT: And you'd said this to him?] And I said to Stanley before we talked to Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, who were the studio executives involved, "You know, this has a great opportunity to do a kind of tribute to the great American sport, to see something through kids eyes,"--keep in mind, still no star--and have an audience of young people and grownups, because nothing in it would be dumbed down to make it appear like a conventional children's film. Remember I said that there’d never been a successful children's film that hadn't been released by Disney [Walt Disney Pictures]. Part of that in my opinion was because every film had tried to go through the Disney dumbing down process, of just being for kids. And they drag their parents along. If the film could be intelligent to adults and not insulting their sensibilities, which was in part the fact of being about kids and the way kids really are, and in part being about baseball and the way baseball really is. I mean, of all the sports films that were kind of chronicled by TNT not long ago--and I had the privilege of having four or five of my films make that cut--DOWNHILL RACER was certainly credited with the most authenticity. But it was a true documentary; I mean it has a documentary with a character study. But THE BAD NEWS BEARS got tribute for being honest about baseball. Which is to say everything that was took place, including the almost real time sensation of the big game, which was something I fought very hard for, let's play nine innings. Let's have the last 40 minutes of this movie, be nine innings of the big game. Let's have people see baseball; some people say, “Well baseball's long and boring,” and, you know, I say, “No it's a game of character, it's a game of challenge,” and is a good reason that, for the pauses. Don't take out the pauses. [INT: Now here's a question. Go back into script, because we're still there, were you, is your work, does it, evolve? In other words, did you on second read, for example, say, “I know, we should really do this last 40 minutes as this game,” or as you're working as a Director with the script, is it in a process of change?] I came with a wish list to the table before I finally signed on. As much as I wanted the job, there's no point in taking a job with the intention of hijacking the film. There's no point in taking a job and saying, “Well, somehow I'll figure out later how to make it better.” You have to have a plan; you have to announce the plan. You may have some secret goodies hidden away, but you've got a plan.