AH: Well, again, I read the script and read the script and read the script, and the characters start forming and the visuals start forming, and you get thoughts. Sometimes you immediately get a thought. You’re reading it and just somebody hits you and… But basically in terms of the star of a film--and this was true in television, too--the studio or production company is very involved because of course they’re interested also in the marketability of the person. And often when the film comes to me the lead may be already in it, or certainly the studio will have the right to veto people that you suggest and that. But beyond that basically you’re left alone, and you have ideas and you’ll go after people, but... and you also work with a casting person. And they will come up with thoughts, or obviously Producers come up with thoughts, and you know, various ways. But in casting, in the areas, let’s say of where you may not be familiar with the whole market, I think I can best explain it by saying if the casting person brings in four people for a role, and you work with each one a little bit, and you do that for all the roles for a day, at the end of the day the casting person says, “Who did you like here? Who did you like here, here?” And he gets to one and says, “Who did you like in that?” And you say, “It was the third person.” And the casting says, “No, it was the second one who gave that wonderful reading.” And you say, “Yes, but it’s the third one I want.” And he says, “Well, why do you want the third one? The second gave the terrific reading.” “Well, because I felt that that was it for the second, that was what I was gonna get. Something said to me that the third person, that working together we were gonna do something more interesting.” So you go a lot by that kind of feel. And I also say to the casting person, I explain what I’m looking for in the characters, in the secondary, usually, characters, the kind of character I’m looking for--excuse me--and say, “Bring me people like that. But if you see it differently, feel free to bring in a couple of people that are differently.” And sometimes you’re more intrigued with their thinking than you are with your own.

AH: I’m remembering on MARRIED TO IT, a film I did that sat on Orion’s [Orion Pictures Corporation] shelf for a year and a half when they went bankrupt. We were three weeks from our release date, and all of the press had been on; everything had been done. They had to pull it because they just couldn’t afford it. It finally played about a year and a half later, but when we were doing it, we were doing it up in Canada, and there was one very important lawyer who was written as a sort of street front hippie lawyer. You got the feeling of a Josh Mostel, a sort of round Jewish hippie who cared about the people and didn’t care about the money. And Stuart Atkins, who was the casting person, brought in people like that, but he also brought in a totally WASP-ish character, a man who was blonde with a ponytail who was still a hippie, who had been a hippie, an Actor, who left acting and went out to western Canada and worked for 15 years with an Indian tribe, spend--and then came back to acting. And that’s who I ended up casting and just loved him. It was so totally different from... So you never know where it’s coming from. Even in leads, the studios will come up with ideas when we... for instance on SILVER STREAK, it was Alan Ladd who came up with the idea of Gene Wilder, and when he said it, I thought, “Of course, that’s perfect, I hadn’t thought of Gene for that.” And Richard Pryor was a thought of, I forgot, my Producers Tom Miller [Thomas L. Miller] and Eddie Milkis [Edward K. Milkis], one both of them or both of--they came up with that idea, and I thought, “Yes, I had seen Richard on stage,” and I remember thinking, it was about three weeks after Betty Ford had her mastectomy, and he made a joke about it, and I thought, “Boy, if he can make a joke about that and I can laugh and still feel for her, that man’s an Actor.” And so when they suggested it, I thought, “Great idea,” and we brought Richard in. It was at the time he wasn’t interested in particularly in acting in films. He was a nightclub comedian and... But he came to see me because he had seen MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH [THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH], fell in love with it, had seen it like 14 times, and as we talked, he found out I also, that I directed HOSPITAL [THE HOSPITAL], and he just signed. That was it. He loved both pictures. And we had, you know, people say, “How, what’s it like to work with a comedian?” And I said, “No, I was working with an Actor with a great comedy sense.” And I’m just remembering a story that after we did SILVER STREAK, Richard directed a film, and after that film, a couple of months after, I was... my wife and I were at dinner at a restaurant, and Richard walked in the door, and we saw each other, and he walked over to our table, dropped to his knees, got up and walked away. Obviously, we then got together and chatted, but here he was saying, “Now, I understand what a Director does.” You know, a wonderful way of saying it. But as I was saying, anyway, in those leads, like, I think it was Jeff Katzenberg [Jeffrey Katzenberg] who after we were arguing a lot about OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE, who should play the lead. We were disagreeing, came up with the thought of Bette Midler, and we just latched onto that. So you get your leads sort of that way. And often you just know, you know, that Jack Lemmon should play, you know, THE OUT OF TOWNERS, that George C. Scott should play HOSPITAL, you know, that Alan Arkin should play anything. You know, you get that... Or like in THE IN-LAWS it came out of Alan Arkin and Peter Falk wanting to work together and going to Warners [Warner Bros.] and saying, “We want to do it.” And they said, “Fine.” And they suggested Andy Bergman [Andrew Bergman] to write it, and Alan worked with them on the script. So it comes about in so many ways.

AH: In LOVE STORY, we did screen tests. That’s the only time I can remember really doing screen tests for the leading man. We had Ali MacGraw, and we weren’t sure, and Ryan O’Neal, of the six people, gave the best performance. And I had worked with Ryan before and liked him. And then I went over and I saw, at Fox [20th Century Fox], they let me see some dailies of a picture he was doing there. And I watched a couple of things and thought, “Gee, that’s not right for that, but if he can do that he’ll be terrific in LOVE STORY.” And you’d go with him that way, or I was thinking also on OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE that the Associate Producer Scott Kroopf came up with the thought of George Carlin. And I thought, “What a wonderful idea.” So your ideas can come anywhere or you just... you see people on the stage basically, like Dustin Hoffman I gave his first film in TIGER MAKES OUT [THE TIGER MAKES OUT]. Well, if you saw Dustin on the stage, I mean, we’d all seen him, and there’s just no question what a wonderful Actor and… It’s funny, I was just thinking I gave Tommy Lee Jones his first role in LOVE STORY because he was a Harvard [Harvard University] guy, and I got a call from Ed Scherick [Edgar J. Scherick] who was a Harvard graduate and a Producer, saying, “You gotta meet this kid; he’s very good,” and I said, “Fine.” He said, “No, he’s wond--” I said, “It’s okay. I’ll meet him.” Well, you met him and of course, you could feel... or David Paymer’s off the stage, you know, you say, but he’s brought in by casting, but I gave him his first role in THE IN-LAWS as the taxi driver. Stockard Channing had her first role in HOSPITAL [THE HOSPITAL]. You just... Because the casting people like Lynn Stalmaster and Marion Dougherty, you know, they would check out the stage people, too, and, or you had been seeing them. So, you can find them every which way.

AH: I cast once... I went to a birthday party, and the husband surprised his wife with a little entertainment, a comedian that she liked very much. And as I watched I thought, “Oh, that’s who we’ve been looking...” a role that we’ve trying to fill for weeks. We couldn’t quite decide, and when I saw him, I brought him in the next day; he read. The Producer and I, we both said, “That’s it,” and we hired him. And I went out... As he left, I went, I followed him out and I said, “Do you know why you’re here?” And he said, “No,” he said, “I wondered why you brought me in,” and I said, “I was at Suzanne’s birthday party when you entertained.” He said, “I knew it wasn’t my Agent.” But you just never know where you’re gonna find people or how. And, but the basic thing is that you go by a feel that working with that person you’re going to, something will come out of it. And almost always it does work that way. [INT: Have you ever talked an Actor into a role?] Actually, when an Actor turns me down, I feel, if they’re not caught up with it, I just forget it. I think the only one I ever talked into a role was John Marley. I wanted him to play Ali’s father in LOVE STORY, and he didn’t want to do it. I think at the time he was doing the Cassavetes' [John Cassavetes] pictures, when Cassavetes was doing more sort of one after the... and I think he saw himself becoming a star from that and didn’t want to play a secondary role. But I felt so strongly, and I had worked with him and he was a friend, and so Erich Segal and I had lunch with him, talked him into it, and of course he felt that made him a star. You know, he’d go, told many stories of getting off a plane in Chicago and people coming up to him, you know, that sort of thing. So, again, you just never know.

INT: Can you talk about the casting in THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY, and how James Garner got the lead and how you chose Julie Andrews for the part?

AH: We had a lot of interesting casting in AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY. I’ve told the story that I was like the seventh Director, and when William Wyler, who was supposed to do it, left to do something else, and finally Marty Ransohoff [Martin Ransohoff], the Producer, said, “All right, kid,” he’d said, “Kid, you’re too, you’re not ready. You’re not ready.” Finally he said, “Okay, you’re ready,” and he let me do it. But that Bill Holden [William Holden] pulled out of the film; he was supposed to play the lead, because he didn’t want to work with a new, young Director. And James Garner was to play the James Coburn role. And we talked about it and felt he really belongs in the William Holden role. He’d be better there. And we moved him to the Holden role. I’d worked with James Coburn a couple of times and thought, “Ah, that’s the person who should be playing that role,” and brought him in. Then, I think the Producers had thought of Melvyn Douglas, and I thought that was a great idea, and it was. And I had worked with Keenan Wynn and, oh, I’m blanking the other... fellow, Sandy, what, I forgot, played with Keenan, I had seen, also in a little play once, and thought in my mind, “I’d like to work with him sometime,” and brought him in. You do things various ways. In the Julie Andrews part we were thinking about three different people: Julie, Julie Christie, and I’m blanking on the third, Diane--another British Actress who had just did a perfect American accent, not that we needed it for this, but I remember seeing her once being 100 percent American, and just felt finally that Julie was the right one. And Disney [Walt Disney Pictures] let us look at some of the MARY POPPINS dailies when she was just against a blue screen, and it just, I thought, “Just, that’s it.” And it was so, so right. She just, not just a wonderful Actress, but all I had to do in a sense was touch buttons, you know, and that’s a nice way to direct. You don’t have to do too much and just very easy to shape that performance. [INT: Right.]

INT: How about in casting THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH? How did you come into that?

AH: It was not too easy sometimes to get the people you wanted to play in a particular role. I’m thinking back to television. And I was doing a series, an episode in the series THE BLUE AND THE GRAY, and it was a story about a coward, and I wanted this young kid that I liked: Robert Redford. The Producer said, “No, no, he’s too handsome, too all-American. We need...” He wanted somebody like a Rick Moranis, smaller with glasses. And I said, “No, that... the power of the story is that what you think is Mr. America, who would never be a coward, is a coward.” And I finally talked him into it. He also didn’t want me to use Carroll O’Connor to play the lieutenant. He said, “He’s too British.” But again, talked him into it. But it happens when... and we had a lot of discussion on MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH, in the film, because that was a series of taking plays that, and making them into films. The kinds of plays that wouldn’t necessarily be popular films, but they would bring theater to the rest of the country, so to speak. And the Producer, Ely Landau [Ely A. Landau], wanted Donald Pleasence, who played it on the stage. And I wanted Maximilian Schell because on the stage it was very intellectual the way Robert Shaw had written it, and I felt that on the screen, for it to reach the audience, we had to make it a little more emotional. Yes, keep the intellectualism, but we needed a certain amount of emotionalism, which I felt Max would give us better, and which Eddie Anhalt [Edward Anhalt] was writing in that way. And it just, I think, Max was unbelievable. I ran the film a few years ago at Berlin, at a festival, and I watched it because I hadn’t seen it for years, just because I knew I’d have to answer questions and that. I was so bowled over by his performance, I phoned him from Berlin. I phoned him over to here and got his answering machine, I remember, and just sort of verbaled on into his answer machine on how wonderful he was. [INT: That’s great.]

INT: You’ve worked with children Actors, kids a lot. [AH: Yes.] How do you cast kids?

AH: Well, usually the casting person will find kids that... it depends, sometimes they’ve seen them already at work, or they go to various schools or what... I can give you an example. When we did the film POPI, with Alan Arkin and Rita Moreno, and needed a couple of sort of street kid feelings, Puerto Rican kids, who the father wants them in, they’re in the ghetto, and not that he wants them to leave their home territory but to be high in their shoes, you know, not get caught in the ghetto mentality. And casting, went to churches, schools and what have you. And then finally said, “Okay Arthur, I have 100 kids.” I said, “A 100?” And I went to, it was on a basketball court. I divided them in groups of 10, and I would chat with them, and just say something to one, say something to another. Then maybe misstate what I said to see if they’d pick up on it, or say it, play little games to see who reacts and who doesn’t. And out of that 100, I picked 12, two of whom I felt were the kids, but I wanted to be sure. And I had an Actor friend work with them for a few days, with the 12. Then I met with each one individually, and I improvised with them. I said, “You’re supposed to stay home while your friends are out playing ball, and yet you snuck out and played, and then the window got broken by the ball, you know, and daddy comes home and you get the blame.” But, and you know and I played a little scene with them and got a feeling, and actually did end up with the same, with the two that I felt. So again, you go that feeling is... how do you explain how many things you do by instinct or feel? And they were great kids and worked well, and really... they, well, that goes into the whole story of how much they learned from Alan. Like, when they... when they were gonna be out in the water alone, because he puts them out in a boat. He’s willing to give them up so that they’ll be picked up as Cuban refugees, adopted by an American family, and get a good upbringing that he feels he can’t give them. And for them to feel their sort of sadness, I had them stay around at a time when I was just filming Alan alone and his feelings when they were out there. And then had them watch him when he was saying, “Goodbye” to them, that sort of thing. And they picked up... But you also have to do tricks with them, to get them to go into the water. Like, they had to go into the ocean off Florida, and they said, they didn’t...it was very cold water, and they... and it was early morning. It was supposed to be just when the sun was rising and that, and of course they were saying, easy for me to say. You know, they have to go in the water. I stripped down. I had my swim shorts on, and I got in the water, you know. Well, they came in the water. So, you do funny things sometimes, but...

INT: Did you ever cast a part just seeing someone on the street?

AH: I cast, not seeing, not say seeing them on the street, but you see things that people are doing on the street. That’s why I love to film in New York. I filmed more in New York than L.A., because I see things I haven’t thought of, and it gives me ideas, and I’m just remembering, yes, I did cast on the street. When we were doing CARELESS YEARS [THE CARELESS YEARS], and we were looking for the young female lead in her late-teens, and we were going to plays and looking at--Eddie Lewis [Edward Lewis], the Producer and I--and we were outside a theater, and we saw this young girl, and we thought, “Oh, I wonder if she can act? She just looks, she’s perfect.” And I thought, “What? Do you go up on the street? You know, are you an adult going up to a child.” And fortunately she was, I think she was with her aunt or... And Eddie had his card, you know, that he was really a Producer, and we went over and talked to her, and she came in with her mother the next day, and that’s who played the lead in the film, and she went on to an acting career for a few years, then married a Producer and… Natalie Trundy, yeah, who played with Dean Stockwell in the… So you never know where it’ll come from and… Well, you cast from, like when we did HOSPITAL [THE HOSPITAL], there’s a narration at the beginning, a voice-over, and I felt something. I brought in some Actors who were very good, but it didn’t, I felt something was uncomfortable about them. And I realized that I needed a more sort of casual, down-to-earth, non-announcer voice. And I got Paddy Chayefsky to do the opening narration, the Writer. He was scared--No, he didn’t want it. I said, “Paddy, it’s okay. It’s not on screen. We can do it over and over.” And that’s whose voice is in there. And I think it just makes a wonderful difference. Or I lost… Harold Gould was supposed to play the superintendent of the hospital, and he was doing "The House of Blue Leaves". He finished it and he was--he’s from California, and he was waiting and waiting, and finally he came up and he said, “Arthur, I want to go back home.” So I let him go. And I moved Stephen Elliott up from the role of a doctor who was operating on the wrong patient and made him the supervisor of the hospital, and then I thought, “Oh, I had a funny idea that Barney Hughes [Barnard Hughes] who played the crazy man in it, and who’s doing, really doing the murders, and whose daughter is the one that the George C. Scott character falls in love with,” and all of that, and I thought, “I’ll have Barney play that doctor,” and everybody said, “You’re crazy, what do you mean two roles?” I said, “Well, we’ll put a mustache on him and he’ll have the green hat and nobody’s gonna know except his wife.” And indeed, he plays two roles. Nobody has ever noticed that it’s the same Actor playing both roles. [INT: That’s interesting.]

INT: Do you rehearse?

AH: I rehearse yes and no. I always discuss with the Performers, but it depends a lot on what kind of film you’re doing. For instance, on LOVE STORY, I rehearsed 10 days with Ali [Ali MacGraw] and Ryan [Ryan O'Neal] from 10:00 to 4:00. I wouldn’t let anybody else in, just the three of us. 4:00, yes, hair could come in, makeup, whatever it was. I did that, yes, obviously to get the character development but more to get them to like each other, to feel good about each other because that was so necessary for the film to have we, the audience, know how much they feel for each other. And, I mean, we enjoyed that, and it worked very well. But let’s say HOSPITAL [THE HOSPITAL] because I wanted that “you’re peaking around the corner” semi-documentary feel to it as if you were part of it. I didn’t want it to be, how should I say it, just too neat. And so, I did no rehearsal. Well, I take it back. Once during film, one Saturday morning, I met with Diana Rigg and George C. Scott, and we worked on two scenes that were scenes that needed rehearsing and working, you know? But basically no rehearsal on it, just to get that feeling of things just happening, just happening. And on comedy, I do very little rehearsal because sometimes the comedic part of it will, it’s used up so to speak, and it’s hard to repeat it, repeat it. And so, I will just play with it sort of at the time. I rehearsed on MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH [THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH], which was done in the American Film Theatre Series. And we had to do it for one million dollars and in 23 days. And I thought, “There just isn’t gonna be time for discussions when we get on the set. We’ve got too much to do.” So, I did 12 days rehearsal with almost the whole Cast. I was fortunate that by the short schedule it didn’t mean you can’t have this Actor, because that’ll put him on salary for too long and that... And worked and worked. Then, when we were in Los Angeles, when we were doing the indoor filming, I arranged with security at the... at 20th Century Fox, each Sunday I would come in just with Max Schell [Maximilian Schell], nobody else. Security would let us onto the stage, and he and I would work on whatever, for a few hours, on whatever was the most important scene or a couple of scenes that he had in the upcoming week. I’m just thinking we went in one Sunday, and I was gonna work with him on the scene in the glass booth that he was in in front of the judge and jury, and we go over and the door to the booth was locked. I thought, “Uh.” So I ran to the phone, and I phoned the property master. He was golfing. And I called the assistant property master, no answer. And I thought, “Ah, craft service, they... he has keys.” So I broke into his drawer. You can imagine what he said to me on Monday, and no keys. Then I remembered, I’d said to the Production Designer, “You know, that booth is gonna get very hot. Work out an electric chord so we can have a fan in the bottom of the booth so between takes we can turn on the fan and at least a little air will circulate.” And I also said, “Design the booth so we can take the top off. So, if we’re not seeing it on camera, I can take it off, and again Max will not be as hot. He can have...” So, I thought, “Ah, that’s it.” And I got on a chair and took the top off the booth, and now I’m pushing Max up, and he’s climbing up and climbing into the booth, and it took us a little time as we’d say, but... into the booth, started working, and indeed it did get hot and pretty soon his jacket flew out of the top, then his shirt came off and flew out. And we worked for about two and a half hours, and what did we forget? He’s gotta get out of the booth. Now, he’s worn out, and we, you know, trying to stop, and we both realize he’s gotta get out, and we start laughing at our stupidity of not thinking ahead, and then he got on a chair, and he... and I’m on a chair on the outside, and he’s trying to climb up and I’m trying to... It took us so long, it made me feel like, you know, the village idiots for not thinking ahead as we say. [INT: That’s funny.]

INT: When you’re actually shooting day-to-day, how far do you take rehearsing before actually rolling the cameras?

AH: When, and when you’re actually filming, when you’re doing each scene, again, you treat each one differently. Sometimes you want, you rehearse it and rehearse it and make sure it’s up to a certain moment so that it’ll click right away; other times, again, if it’s a comedy, you don’t rehearse it, just sort of stage it and make sure they’re gonna be in the right places and do it casually, but then let them do it. You just, you have to go by your instincts how much to do.

AH: And, as again, in HOSPITAL [THE HOSPITAL], there was no rehearsal, not even, what should I say, lack of rehearsal, but when I did five and a half pages in one shot, very involved sequence, the George C. Scott character has become impotent, sort of given up on life; he’s the head of the medical department in one division, in the surgery division, and he, you see him at the beginning of the film with an empty vodka bottle, passed out, having watched TV, and he gets a phone call that a doctor died, has been found dead in a bed in the hospital. And he says, “Well, what’s he doing?” Nobody knows... This poor, confused man has to go to the hospital. And I laid out this shot, again, trying to keep that semi-documentary feel, and I did not rehearse this. I set up certain things but not rehearsal but... and then my instructions to George when he arrived were, “Oh, George, you get off the elevator, you go over to the nurses’ station, they’ll tell you everybody’s waiting for you in 803 or whatever it was, and you head down there, you go around the nurses’ station. As you go around, you’ll pass a couple of women crying; you can relate to them if you want to. Then head down the corridor, just keep going until the young doctor comes over and then play that little part with him, until the assistant administrator sticks his head out of the door and says, ‘Oh, you’re here, come in, come in, come in.’” And then I said, “Go in the room, as you go in the nurse who’s coming out is the one who phoned you, and you can thank her, and she’s upset, console her, head around to the bed beside the doctor who’s dead in bed, and talk to the assistant administrator who then will notice that there’s a person in the other bed and maybe he’s hearing, and say, ‘Oh, no, let’s get out of here.’ Head out with the nurse and start down the corridor. I’ll bring a group of students out of the next room, which will stop you. Just stop against the wall, play that scene where you’re asking the nurse what happened and getting upset, and whether did they train the nurses in Dachau or whatever... And on this particular line switch places, you can use that to move around her and stand on the other side, just so we get a visual change. And, oh, when you get to the end, I want to switch the two lines around so that you can walk away and head back to the elevator.” Now, why did I direct him like that? Or why didn’t I rehearse it? Because I wanted him to be confused, that’s what he was supposed to be. And it worked out. We... everybody thought when they first set up the shot I was out of my mind, because there was no such thing as a Steadicam in those days; it had to be done with a dolly. Fortunately, the floor was workable. We didn’t have to lay track. But still the lighting had to change so many times, and the booms had to work... And it took, I think it was 12 takes, not one because of George, he was... They weren’t all complete takes, but the... he was just… If I could’ve done the film in one day, he could’ve done it in, in one day. That’s how great an Actor he was.

INT: One thing that is interesting about different Actors needing different amount of rehearsal or... How do you work with different Actors who need different things in terms of the rehearsal process?

AH: You... I always say, “The hardest part of directing is the human relations aspect.” And that refers basically to the Actors, but it refers to every creative person you’re working with, and to the, I don’t mean that they’re not creative, but the Crew. I mean, everybody, your Production Designer, your dolly grip, your standby painter. You have to figure out, and that was, in television, of course, you had to figure it out right away and be right. You couldn’t change. But you have to work with each person differently the way that they will work. Some people want you to help them with every line. Other people want to be left alone. Other people want to know emotions. So depending on what you’re, what you proceed, how should we say, normally, in the explanation of character of what your vision is of where this is going, and you lead them into emotions and motivations. And if that doesn’t work, you start doing it. It’s trying to find a different way to motivate them or do it. Then often you get into specific problems, and you have to do, what shall we say, odd things. Sometimes they’re Actors where you have to give them direction in such a way that you then switch it around, and it becomes something else, and then it comes back to what you want. And by that time, either they think they have just come up with that idea, which is what you started with, which is fine, or they agree to it that way. So, you can do that...