Moderator Lehmann listens as director Michael Ritchie tells of making The Candidate. Photo by Robert Hale

"The political process is a lot like directing a feature film," Michael Ritchie, director of The Candidate (1972), said after its screening at the DGA theater on June 12, 2000. "You're constantly being assaulted. Everyone comes up to you with a question."

The sixth installment of the Guild's series, "Under the Influence: A Dialogue About Films of the '70s," started off with a welcome by DGA Assistant Executive Director Elizabeth Stanley. George Hickenlooper of the DGA Independent Directors Committee went on to rank The Candidate with Citizen Kane (1941) before introducing Ritchie and moderator/director Michael Lehmann.

Michael Lehmann:  This movie really holds up incredibly well... But there was more presence of the left than you see anywhere these days.

Michael Ritchie: This movie inspired two people to go into politics and they couldn't be more different: Jerry Brown and Dan Quayle! We didn't set out to make a left-wing film but simply an accurate film. We picked a Democratic candidate because at that time, Nixon was still president, we were mired in Vietnam and it really was our intention to make a film that was about the political process rather than one which said you should pick this way or that way. And to do that, we didn't structure the film like a normal film. I worked on John Tunney's Senate campaign and the associate producer of the film was the manager of Tunney's campaign, and a lot of the people who worked in the movie were political people, doing what they really do.

Lehmann:  It has such a documentary style. Had you worked that way before?

Ritchie: The first films that I did were documentaries. I admired the work of [Richard] Leacock and [D.A.] Pennebaker. They really started American cinema vérité... There's an obliqueness [to The Candidate] and a trust that the audience would fill in the gaps... We shot the film in 33 days for $1.5 million, so we didn't have a lot of time for rehearsals.

Lehmann:  It's amazing how well the comedy played.

Ritchie:  I have a theory and I still use it a lot. You take a set scene and then introduce elements that don't belong in it.

Lehmann:  Can you talk about your relationship with Redford?

Ritchie: Redford elected to keep the business position, and he gave me artistic control. We had very few editorial disagreements. From the moment I finished my cut, Bob and I were working together in the editing room through everything, all the looping. [And there was a lot of] looping because of all the handheld work [which] had to be shot with an Arriflex. We did not have the technical tools to make this film. We'd find a real event and just put Redford in it!

The evening was gratifying for Ritchie on several counts. He announced that The Fantastiks, a film he made five years ago, would finally be released (September 22). Multiple remarks confirmed The Candidate's relevance 28 years after its release - Jeremy Larner, who wrote the Academy Award-winning script, had hoped for a "shelf life of ten years." And Ritchie was especially happy with the quality of the DGA's Candidate print. "It's as good as Bob's!"

-Lisa Mitchell