WF: After years of making films and practicing what I've just told you in terms of dealing with Actors and even people on the crew, psychologically and professionally, suddenly I read the autobiography of Elia Kazan, which is called, “A Life” [“Elia Kazan: A Life”], and I can tell you that that needs to be the only textbook in a school that anyone should require for learning the art of directing, and it's the most brutally frank, self-analyzing, painfully honest book that I've ever read let alone about -- it compares to “The Confessions of St. Augustine.” But along the way, along the way, he gives you specific examples of how he found the note and tapped into Actors like James Dean and Marlon Brando and all of the other great Actors he worked with and on how some of the great Actors couldn't work that way, he could never reach Spencer Tracy, or Katherine Hepburn. And he talks about how he was looking for a sense of reality in this film he made with them, SEA OF GRASS [THE SEA OF GRASS], which was his first feature film. He's looking for a realistic context for this story, and they were unable to provide it. They had become such a product of the MGM [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer] system of what a movie star was, not what an Actor was, but what a movie star was that they couldn't go there. He tried to get Tracy, for example, to--he was coming into a scene that was shot on a soundstage, and it had to look like Tracy had just gotten off a horse and was coming inside, winded from riding a long distance, and he would prepare Tracy for this moment, he would ask Tracy to run around the set for a while, whatever. Tracy would say, "Yeah, I got it. I got it," and then just get the prop man to give him some dust to put around on his jacket and then come in and fake it. And at the end of this long description of working with Tracy and Hepburn on that movie, Kazan says, "If you're ever unfortunate enough to run across it on TV or something, just pass it by. Don't even look at it because it's no good. It's dishonest." And he is very self critical, but he gives you specific examples of how he reached each of these great Actors and helped them define something within their own makeup that they could draw on to portray these indelible characters that they did for him.

INT: So, this issue of finding within the Actor something that is personal to their experience, like with Ashley [Ashley Judd] [in BUG] that would have been experience too in terms of getting her to get to the place where--it was interesting because her transition from being someone who you feel is in control, she's kind of tough, you feel like she's this tough independent girl. Now, when the husband comes in and you've got, or the first lover comes in and beats the shit out of her... [INT: That was her, her ex-husband.] That's, you realize she's not in control. And then when you go through this transition of this relationship with the character Peter, she has none at all, and that sort of decay is spectacular. And the question is, you know, getting her to be able to be that vulnerable, and now I use the word seriously, which is an overused, meaningless word, but here she is totally vulnerable. She, she is, she's totally malleable. I'm, I'm kind of curious what went on?

WF: We talked a lot about her own prior relationships and those of her mother. She knew and had experienced very abusive relationships, which caused her to grow as a woman and as an Actress. And unfortunately, because she's so beautiful, so good looking, she would seldom be able to get roles that would draw on what she could do as an Actress. They would rather draw on her physical experi--appearance. So, I knew her socially, and we had met a number of times and had conversations that became below the surface, and when I went to cast her it was because I knew that she was prepared to go beneath the surface and could. She was prepared to and could. But you're not going to do it in the, in an average film that where the characters aren't real, where the situations are just contrived, and it's simply an entertainment with nothing on its mind. So, I was able to learn from her certain code words that would provoke a certain response, and I would use them sometimes before a shot. [INT: Got it.] The same with all of them.

INT: The--I want to jump back to, this has to do with performance again, but it's interesting because of honesty. You know, they, you know, sometimes in a movie you'll see a kid, and you'll know the kid's not being truthful, and it'll ruin that sequence, sometimes even ruin a movie. There's a moment in RULES OF ENGAGEMENT where the kid is--they're running out the, Sir Ben Kingsley and his wife, they're running out with the kid, and they're about to get on a helicopter, and either the kid's afraid to get on a helicopter, or something, and that moment of his, that kid's fear was so real, and I'm curious if you even remember it, and I'm curious if you remember how you got it.

WF: Well, that was fairly easy to arrive at because it was a young child, and it was easy to get this child to make the moment real because it was real. He was being carried at great speed through an area where they're benign shot at, and he's not thinking these gunshots aren't real. A child is more prepared to pretend and play and make the moment real than an adult. An adult's best instincts tell him or her that this is only a pretend moment. A child, if it hears the blades of a helicopter, if it sees people threatening his family and himself, or herself, is going to respond realistically because to a--and I learned this many, many years ago as a small boy myself. I remember sitting on the stoop outside my apartment building, and there were a couple of--I must have been eight or nine years old, and there were a couple of young girls I used to play with, and just to experiment, I started to make-up stories. But they were stories, they were boogeyman-type stories, and I found that the more detail and the more realistic I was able to make those stories for them the more of a response I was able to get for them, from them, just through the act of telling them a story and making it real. And so you can provoke that in a child much easier than you can in an adult. The adult is aware that all this is make believe. The child is not if you make it real. Now, I imagine that would be a lot more difficult today when they shoot so many things with computer-generated imagery in a bare studio.

INT: Do you think, do you remember, I mean, this is actually, I think it's almost a close-up, or a medium close-up, on the kid. Do you think you also had the helicopter going, or something else, as you were saying, providing for Sam Jackson [Samuel L. Jackson] to be able to look at stuff so that it was not all pretend or imagined, but it was here. Do you think you did the same thing for that kid, or do you remember?

WF: Yes, I always made the moment real. In order to get the most realistic response, you've got to put that character in a realistic situation. And that's why a lot of the CGI work that I see is effective in terms of what it's portraying graphically, but in which the emotional level is almost completely fake, because it's done in a completely contrived surrounding. Now, that doesn't really matter to audiences today who are much more interested in computer-graphic imagery really than in the basics of storytelling.

INT: Well, it's an interesting issue, ‘cause with kids, as you said, they're willing to suspend their disbelief because their, their world of imagination is as strong as quote "time and space," at least for a certain amount of time. So, I'm wondering, do you think, and you may not remember how you actually got those shots, but do you think that you also would have been saying something to the kid? Or do you think that you'd just--?

WF: Oh, yes. No, I'm, I'd be saying something through the whole shot. All of the sound that you hear is put in afterwards. The only sound that you'd hear going on through something like that is the shuffling of the footsteps of the crew moving around, the blades of the helicopter, and my voice yelling at all the people in the scene stuff like--“They're right outside the door. The minute you get out that door, if you don't get into that plane quickly enough, they're going to fire at you and kill you. They're going to kill you. Do you understand?” And I would put that squarely into their mind's eye, and then call, “Action.”

INT: So, you might have been a good silent film Director, because I assume in silent films they talk all throughout the shot.

WF: They talk throughout every shot in silent film. “You're doing this or that. You see your lover. You haven't seen him for 10 years. You remember the moment of the last time you saw him. You remember how you felt.” And talking these Actors through it, and the Actors are trying to fake up the responses because, in those days, I'm sure they didn't do a lot of takes either. In those days, they went with whatever they were given. [INT: So, will you talk as after you said, “Action,” will you still talk?] Absolutely. I'll, I'll talk to the cast and often to the crew right through, "Okay, pan over there. Pan away from them. Go to the helicopter. Now come back." And I make the crew as responsive to what I--and I'm doing that as a kind of photojournalist. I'm using the camera and the people to create a situation that is like truth, induced documentary, where it looks real, and what I'm interested in, as I told you, is spontaneity, not perfection. I don't care if the camera has a little movement in it. I don't try to build that in. I just try to provide a situation where the camera is not sure itself where it's supposed to go. I don't build in the jiggle like I see on a lot of TV shows. “Let it jiggle here,” you know, or “Do a snap zoom and then refocus.” I'll make a situation where that's the only response possible. The Cameraman often doesn't know what someone's going to do, and they have to really pay attention, you know? And very often you'll find that the people on camera who are used to rehearsing a shot and knowing precisely what's going to take place in that shot will not provide an element of spontaneity, because they want to keep the shot perfectly framed, perfectly composed and lit, and I'm not interested in any of that.

INT: Looking at the physicality of working with Actors in terms of sex scenes, I'm looking, thinking about the stuff in JADE. By the way, those, those quick jump cuts against the wall with her hand stretched up, which was very stylistic, really, really effective, but also in BUG, the close-ups of the breasts and the arms, they were something so both--it was beautiful and it didn't feel I'd actually seen it before, which is so rare. I'm curious as you are dealing with photographing, you know, a sexual, sensual scene, how you can keep it so that it is original, and what do you do with your Actors so that they're comfortable?

WF: Well, the first thing is to make them comfortable. The first thing is they understand what's going to be asked of them and how far we're going to go and how much nudity, if any, is going to be seen, and they have to trust you to give themselves to that sort of a moment. They have to understand that it's also necessary to the scene. If for any reason they feel it's unnecessary, they're going to tell you long before you get there. The idea of shooting a sex scene was something I thought about for a long time with BUG, and it occurred to me that there was a fan in the room. There was a ceiling fan that was going around, and I thought it might be interesting to put reflective material on the blades of a ceiling fan and put it close to the Actors so that I could point this reflective fan that's moving around slowly, for example, at the woman's breasts, and you would see the breasts moving in and out of the frame as the blades of the fan did. And it occurred to me that that was very similar to what happens to people when they're involved, and the same is true with anatomical parts of the man. Where you're actually seeing all sorts of things that you're not supposed to show, but they're going by subliminally in the way that they go through your mind's eye in a sexual act that is spontaneous where you're completely given over to the moment. And I like to, as I say, capture spontaneity, and I also was looking for a way to do that cinnematically, to have, for example, a sense of not only what they're doing with their hands and their mouths, but what's going by in their mind's eye. What is going by with this man when he's kissing this woman on her lips, but he's thinking about her breasts and her clitoris, you know? And so they, they are in the frame. They're running through his mind, and I found a way, with the Production Designer and the Cameraman, to make this work using a very, very simple things. No computer-generated imagery but this, the blades of a fan, which had been established in the scene earlier as a ceiling fan in a hot room. And so I found a way to use that to enhance the visual nature of the subjective act of sex. That's what I was looking for. What goes on in someone's mind when they're having sex with someone for the first time? It's quite different that what goes on after the 5,000th time. You know, there's a certain excitement, a certain adventure. Your mind is running ahead of your actions, and it's running--your mind is running ahead of your physical actions, always, in a situation like that. There's an air of excitement and, and yet you're trying to maintain a certain control.

INT: Now, they're very specific images [in BUG], and they're quite beautiful, the hands images and the back, you obviously, you just said the two were the breasts and the--I didn't notice a clitoris flying by. How are you setting these up? I mean, I get what you're doing, but they're, they're not accidental images.

WF: No, you take the blade of the fan, which is now running at slow motion. You point it at, let's say, the woman's breasts, or the woman's clitoris, and you photograph on a tight lens into that. So that what happens is these images just pass through as though through your mind's eye very quickly, and they're mixed with other imagery. [INT: Now, were you using it--] Now, none of that stuff could be shown directly, but it's all shown there indirectly. [INT: Were you using your Actors? Did you use stand-ins for this? Were they--] I used stand ins only occasionally if I had to do, take a longer time with it, but I used the two principals to establish it, and then if, if I thought I needed more because we could see playback on a video monitor, if I thought I needed more cuts I would, I had a stand-in for Ashley [Ashley Judd] and for Michael [Michael Shannon]. Michael never wanted to use his stand-in, but for Ashley, and for a woman in general, it's much more difficult to portray that kind of nudity. [INT: Except now he, interestingly enough, he's naked in a whole sequences.] Yeah. [INT: Was he like, “Oh sure, no problem?]” Yes, of course. [INT: Wow!] Because that's, he understood that that's where this character was coming from. And she's nude too for a great deal of the film, completely nude, but she knows that I'm not going to focus the camera on her private parts, that that's not what it's about, but it is about her nudity and openness with him and their mutual vulnerability to each other and the outside world.

INT: And so you, you didn't have to go through this, I'm going to, I'll take care of--with her, I get, because with women, as you just said, but with him it was, you know, “You're going to be naked in the, in these scenes, and are you okay with that”?

WF: I don't think I ever said that. It was understood. It was implicit. When he took the role, we talked about other things that pertained to that sort of thing, not specifically about--[INT: How did he, how did he do the flopping on the bed? The flopping on the bed--] He just did it. [INT: I was going to say he first referred to THE EXORCIST, looked at THE EXORCIST, studied it, and then came and did this. I'm joking because they're too--that's a famous flopping on the bed.] No, he was a guy who felt, literally had to feel that his, his body was infested with small bugs. And you can imagine what you would do if you felt that. And again, a child could have done it with no trouble at all, and Michael is an Actor who's able to get himself like a child. He's easily able to suspend disbelief and to enter into the mind's eye of a character without too much provocation. Now, can he do everything as an Actor? I don't know, but I know he was capable of going to the outer limits of that guy.

INT: There are some times when we're shooting, and I look at something that somebody was doing, sometimes it's emotional, sometimes it may be physical like this, where I'm actually very surprised. In fact, I'm thinking, I knew what I wanted and I've asked for it, and then the Actor has now done something and performed it, and what he or she has done is more than I expected. Do you have that happen to you?

WF: I have it happen all the time, and that comes from the fact that you've cast the picture well, and it's, as they say, casting your bread on the waters. And once you have the right cast, that they're in these roles and belong there, then you can give them just suggestions, and they'll come back with much more than you could ever have told them about where to go. It's--[INT: Did he surprise you? Did Michael [Michael Shannon in BUG] surprise you?] Always. But I've always told my cast, especially on intense pictures, that from time to time I might use a phrase that I think is the greatest piece of direction ever given, and it was given by the ballet master of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Sergei Diaghilev, to his principal male dancer, Nijinsky [Vaslav Nijinsky]. Before Nijinsky went out, when he was standing in the wings and he was about to go out and dance and give a performance of a particularly difficult work--it was Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." And Diaghilev grabbed Nijinsky by the shoulders and said, "Etonne moi," which means “Surprise me.” And armed with Diaghilev's instructions that he could surprise him, Nijinsky went out there and felt free enough to invent; and I remind the cast of this direction constantly, and I say, "From time to time I may just say to you before a shot I want you to surprise me." And I do it quite often once they get the hang of it, and they know that they're free now to create, 'cause I'm not going to restrain them.

INT: As you think about this are there moments that you, that you recall now, because I think it's a great direction, I think it's fabulous to hear that, are there moments that you recall now when in fact you were surprised? I mean is there anything that, that jumps into your mind from any of the films where--?

WF: Not specifically, but almost shot by shot, certainly in BUG, which is, you know, BUG is not a, a normal way of telling the story. BUG is going more inside than outside. It deals with the more psychological path of the character and the emotional path than let's say a physical path. So, that, that makes it a much more difficult place to go. But yes, they would constantly surprise me with little small details that would, that I wouldn't ask them to do, little reactions to something. I remember there was a simple shot when Ashley [Ashley Judd] is asking Michael [Michael Shannon] to, or saying to him that if he want--he has no place to go, and if he wants he could spend the night with her. He could stay there. And the moment is loaded with implication, but she avoided the implications of it and just made her seem, she made the character seem so spontaneous and so needful at the same time and trying to be blasé about it without acting, that she got that moment just perfectly. And there were maybe 50 or more ways to play that scene, but the way she played it on the first take, the little detail she--that came into her expression, came into her face and her body language, I recall as being really an honest moment to me. And from time to time--like my favorite scenes in THE EXORCIST, my very favorite scene is between Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair before she puts her to bed, before there's any signs of possession.

INT: Do you also-- the one you were mentioning earlier when they, they did a sort of improv--

WF: That scene. [from THE EXORCIST] [INT: Right.] That's the scene, and they are so honest and so real at that that that's almost--there's only one other scene in the film that I can still watch with a kind of detachment of a fresh observer. [INT: Let me guess. Is this going to be a scene with Lee J. Cobb?] Yeah, of course. [INT: And is it the scene with Lee J. Cobb, when he actually asks for the autograph?] It's that whole scene leading up to it. [INT: Okay. Got it. Yeah.] When you have a detective who is really interrogating a woman who's an Actress, supposedly, that whose films he admires, he knows he's in the presence of someone who's work he admires. He has a suspicion that the audience shares with him that this woman's daughter is involved in some guy's murder, and the delicate way that he has to go about talking to her and trying to get information from her without upsetting her, without accusing the little girl, trying to help the mother to help him to understand what might have gone on in this house when she wasn't there. To me that was screen acting at a level beyond anything I could have said to them. I just simply provided the atmosphere. By the way, that's what a Director's main job is, create an atmosphere in which the cast and the crew can do their best work, can create. You're not just out there trying to prove what a great shooter you are or put your stamp on a film. You're there to make the audience believed that these characters are real, unless it's a Marvel comic or something.

INT: You know what, was Lee J. Cobb--I mean, I have so much admiration for him for a number of reasons. I actually got to see him do something on the stage once, when I was young, and that performance, I think is one of his most wonderful performances in your movie, in THE EXORCIST. I think he's amazing in it because it totally, he plays somebody I hadn't seen before and, of course, you know his performance in ON THE WATERFRONT is, you know--[WF: Completely different.] Yeah. Was he one of the Actors like Samuel Jackson [Samuel L. Jackson] that you really didn't have to say much to, or was he one who wanted to talk, or do you remember?

WF: He liked to talk, but he liked to talk about what I as looking for from him. Lee, for all of his great powers as an Actor, had a great deal of insecurity, as many of the great Actors do. They don't know how great they are. They're not aware of their public persona or how they're thought of out there, or literally from situation to situation. Now, Lee had a curious combination of shyness and an outgoing nature that was sort of, I won't say schizophrenic, but that was going on in him all the time. He was a shy man who by the profession he had chosen had to abandon his shyness and be outgoing and portray emotions. But he was smart enough, and that's the key to when you're casting, you're looking, what I'm looking for is intelligence first before anything. Lee was smart enough to understand where this scene could go and what it was about, but he would always want to be sure he was on the same page with the Director because I know he had told me he had a lot of problems with certain Directors who he felt would lead him to places where he should not have gone as an Actor, but it was their film and he had to go there. But with Lee, you would talk very cursorily around the tone of the scene, and with Lee I talked about the scene, that particular scene, as chamber music, as chamber music leading up to an orchestral outburst, because that was how the movie was constructed at that time. At the end of this very quiet but disturbing scene that should give the audience the effect of a cold hand on the back of their neck, what was going to follow was an orchestral outburst that would have done Beethoven or Shostakovich proud. And he understood that totally in musical terms, as did Ellen [Ellen Burstyn], that their scene, even though she's obviously very upset by what she's hearing, and we know it. We know she's suppressing emotion constantly in that scene. We watch her suppress it and--[INT: Do you think, did you need to say, "Hold it back," or do you think she knew it right off the bat?] I remember saying to her, "I want you to understand every single thing he's telling you. Take it in and suppress your reaction. You hear with every line that he speaks that he thinks your daughter murdered this man, and now so do you. You think so too, but you don't dare show it, and you don't know where to go. You're lost in a world of chaos and trouble, and that when he leaves this house you know that you're in deep trouble and that your daughter has murdered this fellow who was your best friend. You don't understand why yet, but you know that that's happened, and it's in every word that he says to you."

INT: Okay. Now, I'm really curious because you said--I'm curious about the process because if I were Ellen [Ellen Burstyn in THE EXORCIST], when you said to me, "Suppress that," hearing everything you said in suppress that, I got it. You went on to say more. Now, I don't know whether you're saying more because of our conversation, or if I were Ellen you would have said all of what you just said, or potentially hear everything he's saying, know that you think it's true, and suppress it.

WF: That's about all I would say. But you know you're asking me to explain their process. [INT: Well, but I'm--] And she wasn't, she understood the process, and the great Actors, or the great opera singers are eager for direction. They're eager for somebody to give them some thing to help them, a life raft. You can imagine how naked it feels to appear in front of a camera knowing that your image is going to be blown up a thousand fold and that audiences all over the world are going to see what you are doing, not what this character that you're playing is doing, but it's you. You know it's you. You have to pretend you're this other person and make her situation real, but so there's a built in insecurity when an Actor steps in front of the camera that the Director has to understand and have a life raft ready for them. “Oh, look, this will help you if you think this.” [INT: Got it.]

INT: There's an interesting thing, I was just thinking because of Lee J. Cobb, and then both of us worked with George C. Scott, and I remember, I checked with other Directors about working with George, because I had enormous respect for him. They said, "Here, you've got to understand something," and I heard this three or four times, "you can't do more than a couple of takes with him, because then he'll start to think he's no good." I thought, “What?” And in fact it, I heard them, and I, because I was, you know, I thought, well, he must know he's one of the great Actors of all, of any time, anywhere, and he didn't. So, it's interesting that you said that, and thinking of the fact that they both have Lee J. Cobb in 12 ANGRY MEN, him in 12 ANGRY MEN, having that same sort of speech.

WF: Tremendous insecurity that Scott had and that Lee had. But they also, being veterans and professionals, knew that you weren't going to get a scene any better with more takes. If you didn't construct the shot or the scene well enough in the first place to capture their performance, there wasn't much you could do to make it better. But if you thought you could, then you would go in and give them a suggestion for what to do again. And very often with George and with Lee it was a light bulb going on. I would see something. I remember saying to Hume Cronyn, who was in 12 ANGRY MEN that I did for television, I remember saying--Hume was the most prepared Actor I've ever met, and I remember saying to him when he was giving a story about an old man that he saw somewhere, and he was describing the movement and the emotions of this old man that he had observed to the other people in the room, and with Hume, I didn't say much and I let him do it, and I said, "Hume, don't forget when you start to tell this story, remember that you're painting this character for the audience, that your words are the equivalent of what a painter does or, if you like, what a novelist does." He said, "Yeah, okay, fine." And then he went out and did it, and I thought it was flat, curiously flat, and I'm thinking why is Hume Cronyn flat? And it occurred to me, and I said to him, "Hume, you painted this character, but you painted him in watercolor. I want you to paint him in oil." And he looked at me, and he, his eyes just brightened up, and he responded, and he did a vivid, graphic portrayal of his character having seen this old man--[INT: Wow.]--who was trying to hide the fact that he wore spectacles, you know.

INT: Here's an interesting thing what you just said, because you're dealing--It's actually profound. It touched me. You're dealing with metaphor, finding a metaphor for the Actor that actually stimulates that person, and it's going to differ from Actor to Actor, but to be actually able to do that, you know, one to 10 I get, you know. Suppress, I get. But now you're going into a subtle awareness and you're not, you're sort of, you literally are finding a metaphor. It's not, you know what I mean, it's not “Go do this,” or a result, actions, or whatever it is. It's not saying to them, “Oh, can you make it…” you know, “…more intense,” which is meaningless. You literally found a way of communicating on another level.

WF: That's the level at which an Actor and a Director should communicate. To tell the Director, to tell the Actor to do it like this, or do it like that, or do more of this or more of that is to regard a sensitive Actor or Actress as a puppet. The same is true, for example, with all the operas that I've done. I've watched how the conductors talk to their musicians or talk to their sections, and for me, I've never worked with this gentleman who's passed away, but the greatest conductor I've ever seen, and I've only seen him on digital video and heard stories about him, was a man named Carlos Kleiber, who was a Viennese conductor who was clearly the greatest conductor of the age. But he recorded very few works, because he didn't like the recording process. He would only be recorded live with his orchestra, and he even let himself be recorded in rehearsal. And I have, one of my Assistant Directors in Munich, when I did the opera SALOME for the Bavarian State Opera had this video of Carlos Kleiber in German talking to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a rehearsal of the opera, DIE FLEDERMAUS. And I see Kleiber, ‘cause I've now worked with many conductors, and I hear, some of the conductors will say to the string section, and they'll even do this with their hands rather than just--what the conductor is mostly doing with his hands is he's a human metronome. All of the work is really done in rehearsal of how he wants a passage played, but standing up there and giving downbeats and upbeats, and when he gives them, and indications of when a section should come in, or a soloist. He's just a human metronome, ‘cause he's done all the emotional work in rehearsal. But what Kleiber would do in rehearsal, which I thought was so profound, even though I had done this instinctively in my direction of Actors in films before this, but now to see a conductor, and this is the sort of thing he'd do. He's got the violin section playing a passage, and he stops it, and he says to the violin section, he says, "I'm not going to say to you to play it faster or slower." Now, he's speaking in German. He says, "I'm not going to say that I want you to play it faster or slower, this will occur to you. But I want you to play it as though there's a beautiful woman sitting right over there, and with your violin, which is your voice, you're trying to get this woman not simply to pay attention to you but to regard you and ultimately to fall in love with you. So, you're playing this passage to serenade this woman and to make this woman want you and see you as a desirable person." And now, he said, "Okay." Now, they go out and do it again, and you hear it as though you've never heard it before, and they play it as they've never played it before.

WF: And then this guy was so adept at process and so into it, Kleiber [Carlos Kleiber], that he could abandon it, and I advise anyone who's interested in directing to even get the performances of Carlos Kleiber on DVD with the Vienna Philharmonic for the New Year's Eve concerts and where they're only often playing the music of Johann Strauss, which is corny. It's become elevator music. But Kleiber plays it like it's Beethoven, and at one time, he's so into process and has such regard for his audience that at one point he leans back--he's got a railing behind him as conductor--and he leans back on the railing, and he starts going like this, like he's waving a salami, and at one point, even stops conducting them in performance, and they keep playing. And he turns around to a woman in evening dress, who's sitting behind him, and he says, "You see, they play better when I don't conduct." And the whole audience is having an enjoyment of Johann Strauss like they've never had before. And the orchestra is going, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, dum, dum, dum. And it's, you know, these corny waltzes, and they played like Beethoven. And he is one of my idols as a Director. But he was a conductor of music. [INT: But he was using metaphor continuously.] Used metaphor at all times, with the brass section, with drums, with--he would never say, "Play it louder, play it faster, play it slower."