INT: So the next, I think, important picture of this period was THE NARROW MARGIN. How many days did you have to shoot that picture?

RF: THE NARROW MARGIN took all of 17 days to shoot. And it was a wonderful experience working on that film. And I like very much solving limitations of the screen, and that was a film that was full of limitations, mainly to keep the feeling of claustrophobia during the photography. And to come out with a film that had a claustrophobic feeling to it, because almost the entire picture takes place aboard a train. And it's full of excitement and wonderful dialogue. It's a good picture. [INT: It is a good picture. You were given less time to shoot THE NARROW MARGIN?] Yeah. Well they figured it's a, it's not a big location picture, you don't have to travel anywhere. And that, of course, was the whole charm of the picture, was that it was, it looks like it was shot on a train. Practically none of the picture was actually shot on a train. It was all some sets, and also I used a very daring thing, again, for that period, was the hand held camera, using that in the major sequences. And it really helped so much; it looked like a newsreel, because the camera's unsteady. It doesn't have that artificiality of being rigid. And we had used the handheld whenever we could. And it made it possible for us to track and dolly up and down the very narrow aisles of the train. So it was a wonderful handy tool, but nobody was using it much. [INT: Was that your idea to use that or was that the cameraman's?] Yeah, oh sure. I thought of the way that, really no other way to do it. I was determined not to take the walls out of the train to give us more room to work. I wanted to work within the confines of the set. [INT: Did you have any studio interference about wanting to do that?] No, no. They said, “Go ahead.” I'd been there long enough by that time; they were, gained their confidence. But, it's a fun picture; it's really interesting to look at. [INT: Was that script assigned to you?] It was offered to me by Stanley Rubin who was the Producer of the picture and Stanley Rubin, and of course my, practically my partner, Earl Felton the Writer, had come up with that story and had taken it to the head of the studio, and requested me to do the picture. But once I read the script, nothing could keep me from trying to make that movie. It was a great opportunity and I was really delighted to do it.

INT: In those years, how much time did they give you to prepare the film?

RF: There was very little time. I don't really remember. We had as little preparation time as was possible. Usually a couple of weeks, as I recall. I maybe wrong, it's a long time ago. [INT: Right. The selection of your crew, were you assigned those people, since they were all working for the studio or did you have an opportunity to select people?] The whole effort and effect of B-pictures, and the studio made pictures at that time, so called “Golden Age”, was that the studio had say over everything. And they hired the Actors, they told you who was going to be in the picture, who you're stars are going to be, who the cameraman was. Everything, the head of every crew and department, you did not select, you got that from the front office. Now, they may, you may have not wanted to use some of those people, and you could object, but that's all. Sometimes they listened to you and you had your way, but if they said, “No, he's working, or she's working somewhere else,” they weren't going to take them off another picture to work with you. And so, it was some ways, it was easy because you didn't have to go through all the trouble of putting a crew together. On the other hand, you may be stuck with a lot of people you didn't want to work with, so there you go.

INT: What about the casting? At least of the minor players, of the supporting cast.

RF: Well the studios had their own Actors that they were training, and in many of my beginning pictures and very low cost films, they assigned the Actors to you that were going to work in the picture. And, you know, they weren't trying to hurt the film. I think it's stupid to think that. And a lot of people do. They're not out to ruin the picture, they're out to help the picture, but the help had to come from them, for people they'd already contracted and were paying. The idea was not to pay for something that, and not use it. So, but they were able to write off some of the acting costs by using people who were already under contract and already being paid. Makes sense, but you may not get the results you want. [INT: Now this was your last picture at RKO?] THE NARROW MARGIN was, yes. It was also part of the reason that I left RKO. But that's another story, I don't know whether you want to get into that. [INT: Sure if you'd like to.]

RF: Well, after, I knew that I had made a very good picture with THE NARROW MARGIN. I mean there's no avoiding knowing that, I'm not saying without any ego, but I mean it got rave reviews. It did wonderful box office. It was the biggest sleeper that RKO [RKO Pictures] has had in a couple of years. So it was a big money maker, everything was just wonderful working with that picture, and it happened to be a very good picture on top of all that. But when I finished the picture, I had determined to myself that I would no longer settle for a mediocre script or mediocre picture. I wanted to make that step up, and get out of that rut. And sure enough the next picture offered to me by RKO was from one of the Producers, whose name I don't want to mention. Handed me a script and it was a real cornball, B-picture script that you've seen 100 times before, or more. And I said, "I'm not going to shoot this." Now, I was, at that time Howard Hughes was the head of the studio. And I had heard that Howard Hughes had run my picture, THE NARROW MARGIN, and absolutely fell in love with it. So much so that he kept it in his projection room a year before he decided to start, to take it out and show it to the public. But he took a year and he would run it back and forth all the time. But he wanted me to stay at the studio and I didn't want to because I was not getting the kind of material offered to me that I wanted.

RF: So I wrote Hughes a letter, which was a daring thing to do, if you could locate him, and said, "Just please, I'm getting pretty close to the end of my seven year contract." And Stanley Kramer, who was a very prominent Producer at that time, he still is, wanted me to do a film for him and I would, I had read. He had given it to me to read, and I loved it. And the studio didn't want to let me go, they wanted me to make this crummy piece of film, which I did not want to make. So I wrote a letter to Howard Hughes explaining my situation, and sure enough I got a response from him. And he said, "I've got another picture that needs some fixing at the end of it. The whole thing will take about 10 days to write it. You can have Earl Felton, your Writer, and you work on it with him. Fix the end, put some action into the end. And I'll release you from your obligations to RKO." And he did that because he, this other picture he wanted me to finish was a big A-picture, with Bob Mitchum [Robert Mitchum], and Russell [Jane Russell] and it was a very, very good action film, but did not have an action ending or a very poor action ending. It takes place on the bridge of a ship, of a bridge of a yacht and that was it. A fistfight on the bridge of a yacht is no place to go and one guy gets knocked out and they ended the movie. And he said, "I just need more action on the bridge of the ship." So I said, "Well,” he said, “Take 10 days, the whole thing, shooting it and all." I said, "You've got a deal." And I said, "Where is my office, where do I start?" I already had an office, of course. But anyhow, I started working on that with Earl Felton, and the strange thing was, that Howard Hughes wanted to be involved in the writing of the script. So every day or two days, we'd get a call to go either to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, or the, the Beverly Hills Hotel, or to his office at the Goldwyn Studios [Samuel Goldwyn Studios]. And we spent--I'll make a quick dissolve here for us, eight months later, I started to shoot the script that we had been working on to add 10 minutes to the, my schedule, not the picture's schedule. So, anyhow. At the end, finally came and it did me actually more harm than good because it was a Bob Mitchum picture with Russell and a lot of other name Actors. And I took A-picture time shooting it, but I had to do it over for Howard Hughes three times before he was happy with the story, not with my work. [INT: You mean you shot it over three times?] Yeah. [INT: You want to tell us the name of the movie?] Just it was very difficult. So anyhow, that's really not the story that I started out to tell, but that's what happens.

INT: I want to go back to something. During the RKO [RKO Pictures] years, how involved did you get in the post production of those pictures, given the schedule and given the way they were all...?]

RF: Well... In those days, Directors, as a rule, did not get involved with the post-production. A few of the Directors did and I observed that they were the best Directors. So, when I started making my feature films, I decided I was going to have control over everything that I could, was able to have control over. So I was in on the editing, absolutely, with the Editor all the time; I met some great Editors that way. I was in on the music, on the set construction; I was there at every production meeting. Nothing was done without me. And I spent seven years doing that.

INT: What about in the distribution? Were you involved in the distribution, the exhibition of the pictures?

RF: The distribution, I have nothing to do with it. It's a big mystery to me then, big mystery to me now. I have no idea how distribution works. Nor am I interested. I just hope that they do the right thing and do a great job. And help them anyway I can. But that's kind of another field, I think; it's really not making the movies. It's a very difficult and hard field to be in, but distribution's the lifeblood of making motion pictures.

INT: Well, so you left RKO, and the next picture I'd like to kind of touch upon is ARENA, which was a challenge to you, having been a 3-D picture.

RF: Yeah, a 3-D picture. I'm, I've always been interested in novelty and doing things differently and doing things that weren't run of the mill. And at that time, the 3-D films started to come in and were enormously successful. And as a matter of fact, every 3-D made up to that point was a big success. So being offered--having just stepped out of a job, and I had no other job to go to. The offer of a 3-D movie sounded very, very enticing to me. It sounded like it was a big money pot that… And I would be interested in doing it because it's… Also the subject matter was interesting and I've never done it before. It was a rodeo picture. So I took the job and went to work for Arthur Loew Jr., wonderful guy, and one of my best Producers ever. Great fun to be with. So, I started making that picture, but I found that 3-D movies have a peculiar history, they go up to a certain point in popularity and then it's like somebody turned the switch off and nobody wants to see 3-Ds, suddenly. And that happened to me there. I came in on the end of it, of the cycle rather than the beginning or even the middle. So the picture came out; it was a failure. And it was, it was well nicely done, and very well acted, and I shot a real rodeo and spent several weeks shooting the rodeo, so I got to know a lot about rodeos and cowboys and how they behave. Excuse me. [INT: How did you...? I'm sorry.] So that was the end of my 3-D, there was no more 3-D to make because everybody stepped away from 3-D at that time.

INT: How did you approach photographing the film [ARENA]? Setting up the angles. Did you do that differently?

RF: Yes. There are a lot of differences in making 3-D movies than there are making 2-D movies, or flat pictures. The picture was made for MGM [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer]. And the first thing that they did was showed me an instruction reel that they had made about how to make pictures, and what the limitations were on 3-D. How to make a 3-D movie. And what you could do, and what you couldn't do. Well, of course it turns out that you can do a lot less than you imagined you'd be able to do. First of all you need two cameras to shoot. The two cameras, the lenses on the cameras had to be about the distance apart of the human face, the human eye, so that that gives you the 3-D effect. So that you get two, you're getting two different pictures, but it's just a couple of inches apart as it is in your eyes; that's why we see in 3-D. That was one. The other thing is, that was peculiar, is that a very wide object, if it touches the sides of the screen that it's being projected through, the idea of the 3-D, usually the idea of the 3-D is to get things coming off the screen at the audience and into the audience. You can't do that if a piece of the picture that you want to come off the screen touches any side of the screen. The image jumps back into the picture and it looks like a regular flat 2-D movie. So my dreams of having a great big bull charging the audience with the big horns and snorting and saliva coming out, and to rush into the lens and have the audience scream, feeling that they were being attacked by a real bull. Well, it was a lot of bull, but no effect, because they're too big. You could do it if you made bulls, you know, that size, which is not very exciting. So I did the best that I could and which wasn't really enough to make it look like a story written for 3-D. And it really wasn't. The guys that wrote it were, did not know the principles behind it.

INT: Did you stage your scenes with the Actors differently [on ARENA]? And how did you think that through to compliment the 3-D?

RF: Well, I do it with doubles, most, there's no other way to do it. And you just have to be clever, knowledgeable of how you stage your scenes, so that it looks like it's the real Actor. Close-ups when they're on the bull, and you're using a mechanical bull. And handheld cameras, again of course, and--[INT: You're using handheld camera?] Yeah. [INT: What, was the camera mounted, was it a mount with two cameras mounted on it that's handheld?] No. Wait a minute. No, we couldn't do it, you're right, with… But there was two images that had to be identical, so you're right. I didn't do it that way, but what I did do was use doubles as Actors and the atmosphere of being right. That's about all you can do. [INT: What about dialogue scenes, how did you treat those?] Dialogue. Well as near to natural and normal as I could get it. They were, I'd listen to the cowboys and to the rodeo guys and heard how they spoke, and the language they used, and the linguistics of that and the pronunciation of words. And we had the script rewritten every night to accommodate this lingo. They didn't, I didn't really ask the Actors to make up any dialogue, but they were free to do so. They heard these Actors, these cowboys around them, using this kind of special way of speaking. And they did the best they could to imitate that.