INT: What homework do you do each day before the next day of shooting?

AH: Actually, I do a lot of homework not just the day before the next day's shooting. As I've commented, I prepare way ahead, but that doesn’t mean you don't have to keep thinking about it, because you, so many things changed as you're going along, and I try every day to be sure that by the end of the day before we leave, everybody is aware of what I'm looking for the next day. Probably they have been informed, probably the Prop Master or the Set Decorator, they've been prepped ahead in costume design, and the Cinematographer--yes, you've gone through it all within your AD [Assistant Director]. But you, again, you talk to your AD and your DP [Director of Photography] as to what the shots are the next day, and which order you're thinking and make sure that everybody's comfortable and that that's the way… You remind Props of special things that you're gonna need that they were supposed to get ready or have ready. Or set dressing. You do all that to prepare your, just to make sure what it is that you're going to be doing the next day, and then the next day you do it. That's one of the hard parts of directing. You gotta do it. You can't keep putting it off, the pressure of the budget, the pressure of the schedule, and it's a pressure I need. I could be, keep thinking about who knows how long, but because you have a schedule, and a budget and often an Assistant Director at you, and you have to keep in there and do it.

INT: How do you prepare for the visual imagery? Storyboard, shot list?

AH: My visual imagery is always in my mind, and I will talk to the DP [Director of Photography] about it, and I will talk to the heads of departments. As I said, with SILVER STREAK, had them out, you know, climbing on the trains, so I'd lay out all the difficult shots. You do... you prepare, prepare, prepare and communicate, communicate, communicate. Try, so that everybody knows what's upcoming, so that the Crews can get ready and cut down on your time spent by having things set that you will be able to use, and it keeps your day going. Plus, the fact everybody feels they know what they're doing, and that's, I think, very important in teamwork, too.

INT: If you have special effects in a film, how do you do those?

AH: When you have special effects, it depends, I guess, sort of what you call special effects, but something that's unusual. Well, for instance, on NIGHTWING, we had a lot of bats flying and through the caves and that. I worked with a person, I've forgotten his name now, from Italy who had moved here, and I'd worked with him in Italy, who was skilled at creating the units that would make the birds look like they were flying or doing things, and it's, I think, the only time I can remember doing storyboards. I didn't even do storyboards when I did battle scenes in TOBRUK or in AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY [THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY]. But in, when I needed that in NIGHTWING, these special effects was the only time I can remember doing that. It's funny, again, with special effects, I was thinking, when I say in AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY, again, you have to prepare and prepare, and you have to think of safety, safety. That's true in effects and true in stunts. Very much that you must be so, you can't be too careful, because there's always something that can go wrong, and you don't want that to happen. Like on AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY, for the D-Day landings, I went out on two Saturdays before we were to film, with the special effects person, and laid out exactly where on the beach to have the explosions. So what I had to have done was I had to know exactly where I wanted the camera out in the water, how far away, how much of the beach I was going to see in the shot, where the Actors would be, so that the explosions would be visually helpful, but not obviously causing any problem. And as I say, worked two Saturdays for about four or five hours, working just with him, and got it all laid out so carefully. And I was saying, you know, you never know, because when we actually filmed everything was going fine, fine, and then we got to a point where part of the story is the first dead man on Omaha Beach must be a sailor because the Admiral wants PR for the Navy. And James Garner, who is our coward, inadvertently, through all this, suddenly becomes the person who's going to be the first man on the beach. And when we did the particular shot where he goes along, running in amongst the explosions all, and then gets shot and falls, as we did that shot, and everything worked fine, and then bang, and he reacted to his being shot and fell, he sort of did a little bounce when he hit and I thought, what happened? And I felt something happened, I said, "Cut." And the still photographer was jumping over me running, 'cause he could realize it. And what had happened was despite all this precaution, my spending two Saturdays with special effects, and all the care we took, what did we forget? He was wearing, as part of the uniform, you had a little metal flask, and when he fell, he fell on that metal flask, and it cracked his rib.

AH: And so I'm saying, you just, you think like in THE OUT OF TOWNERS, we had, there's a scene where Jack Lemmon is out on the street, and he's in the middle of Central Park West and he's screaming to the city of New York about all the things that are wrong with it, and the troubles they're causing him, and as he's saying that, a manhole cover beside him blows up. Well needless to say, we created our own manhole cover; it was rubber and plastic. And I worked, again, with special effects and the Prop Man and you know, with trying the explosives to get the amount of explosives for it to go up, and you know, for all the safety factors. In fact, I think Jack was there, one day. And he watched it too. And then now we come to the scene, and we're at that point, and he's screaming out to New York, and then Sandy Dennis says, you know, "Watch out. Watch out. The manhole cover's sizzling," or some... and, "What? What?" he says. And it blows up. And it just blew up beautifully, but what did we all forget? It's going to come down. And it came down and hit him. Now fortunately it was rubber and plastic, but you think, we're all reasonably intelligent. You know, special effects were in on it. Prop was in on it. I was in on it. The Actor was in. Not one of us thought it's going to, you know, we didn't think of that sort of thing. And so you can't be too careful with your, with the stunts and that. Of course, and that's why your Stunt Coordinators are so important to a film, because… And you have to say to them, too, "Think safety. Think safety." And they can do more than that. They, yes, they can work out your stunts for you and Second Unit things and do wonderful things, like, I was just thinking how sometimes come in so handy. Mickey Gilbert, who was our Stunt Coordinator on SILVER STREAK, not only was Stunt Coordinator, but was the Stunt Man who, he looked like Gene Wilder, and he did all Gene's stunts. So, we ended up, you know, double use, but or somebody like Conrad Palmisano [Conrad E. Palmisano], who not only would do the stunts, you know, we would discuss them obviously. You'd talk and talk and the safety, all those things, but Connie, I worked with a couple of films with him, often would come up with ideas during the scene that led to the stunt, with certain stagings that would enhance or certain ways, excuse me, certain ways that I could film it, so that I could keep my principals in the shot, longer, and yet give the feeling that it's already into the stunt before we cut to it. So again, it's that sort of wonderful teamwork of being able to do things, and you never know where you'll get help. Like, I've told this story at another time, but when we worked on TIGER MAKES OUT [THE TIGER MAKES OUT], there's a sequence where Eli Wallach is walking down the street in New York with the whole world sort of rushing, everybody's you know going to work, where I've forgotten, 42nd and Broadway, or something. And what he's saying is, “Everybody gets up in the morning and they're, you'll rush in and you brush your teeth, brush your teeth, and you run to the table, grab some breakfast, get your briefcase, rush to work, rush. You're all going to get heart attacks.” It's a comment on that there's more to life than just rush, rush, rushing. And I thought, “Gee, I'd love to have him doing that at normal speed and I would, it'd be wonderful,” Yes, I had loads of extras going, going, but I thought, “I'd love if they were going at double speed.” I thought, “Ah, rear screen or blue screen, or, no, then there's nobody in front of him, or he, they're all behind him.” It didn't, and I finally sort of gave up thinking about this idea. And then as we were gonna film it, I had a thought and I said, "Eli, could you act at half speed?" And Eli did. He walked and talked at half speed, and obviously we under cranked and we got a shot with him, feeling normal and everybody else, and it got sort of the shot that I want. So you never know, sort of, where you'll get your effects from.

AH: Well look at SILVER STREAK, and building that, to do the crash, building the train, my Production Designer coming up with the thought of build the train full-size; three sides of a train on a truck bed with a Stunt Driver, driving, and it could only, cameras in certain places. But out of that concept, we got this wonderful train crash, in a time when you couldn't do opticals. We did have optical on, in OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE, the Shelley Long character at the end does that wonderful leap from one mountain cliff over the big chasm to the other mountain, and it's like almost impossible, if not just impossible leap, and she makes it. As you lose, you're panicking, and the villain, Peter Coyote, doesn't make it and grabs and then falls, and that's finally her victory over the bad guy. Well, I remember that for that, Second Unit picked up the shots of a couple of areas that I liked, for cliffs with space. Then, I filmed with a ballerina who could do a beautiful long leap, and she was on the top of what was the equivalent of a trailer, you know, the kind you could give the Actors to, to live, you know, to be on, on set, kind of huge, but on the roof about that height and to another one with obviously padding, and you know, what have you, below. But we just filmed her, so we got her floating, you know, through the air. Then we got on a balcony at the studios, and we filmed Shelley Long not full-size but leaping, as if she were doing, and she was doing that sort of thing, when we got to top half, but against the sky. Then all that was taken into the, I don't know what you call, mat department, or optical department, at Disney [Walt Disney Pictures], and they put it all together. I'm just remembering that the head of this opticals was showing me, as they went along. You know, I was checking on it all, and it was keeping me, and he showed me, and I said, "Wait a minute. You've put my clips too close together." He said, "Well because what you had was not possible for anybody to make that leap." I said, and I'm saying, "But that's the whole point that we're building to, that she makes a magnificent leap that we think is that possible? Is it, Ah, ah, ah, oh." And we need it that wide so that you're nonplussed and yet not too wide, so that you think “Oh, come on, nobody could do that,” just at that right distance of ah, she did it, and he didn't. And we got it, and it's in the film, and it works. But so even people sometimes involved in the film doesn't, mean that they understand what a film sort of--they can do their job terrific, but that does not mean they understand the overall, or what's going on. You need all those kinds of things

AH: And we did lots of like special effects in THE IN-LAWS. I've talked about driving the car backwards with what looks like Peter Falk driving backwards but on the freeway with all the cars going around. Well, it's all Stunt Drivers and in that car they, a Stunt Driver in the trunk of the car, actually, doing the steering, looking out the back way, through two little holes. So you never know, sort of, what way you will do a special effect. Or I talked about at the baseball stadiums of how we optically and how the Production Designer overnight would change the stadium to make it a different stadium. We shot four different stadiums at Wrigley Field, and it looks like four different stadiums, and that's all done with effects. Gee, it sounds so simple when I say it, and I think how much work goes into that, you know.

INT: How do you deal with scheduling pressures?

AH: In terms of scheduling pressures, I guess I'm using some words that I use a lot, but you prepare, you prepare, you prepare. You think ahead. You know what your schedule is. You have agreed to that schedule. So you know what pressures are on you, and you have to figure out ways to keep within that. Sometimes, and this is more true in television, sometimes you make, what I call, minor compromises that you know you can get away with. And the trick is to know what you can get away with. It doesn't have to be quite that. You still get the effect, but yes, you could do it better. But there are certain things that you have to hang in because it has to be or you lose the feeling of the film. So, you'd have to do all that, and it's thinking ahead. It's mostly preparing and discussing with your Crew, with the heads of the department, with your AD [Assistant Director] and your Production Manager, and your Cinematographer, your Production Designer, everybody. Again, the more you let them know, the more involved they are, the more they can help you, the more they know what you're looking for. What it is you want, what you're looking for, what your vision is, or what the specifics are... Sometimes you do an effect in a simplistic way, or a, maybe it's not even an effect, but on LOVE STORY, I just felt I wanted a shot of when she [Ali MacGraw] knows she's dying, and he [Ryan O'Neal] knows she's dying, and just before she goes to the hospital, I would thought, I would love these two figures just against white, against the snow. And I thought, “How do I get that?” First of all, how do I get that much snow? Well, I thought, “Well, we're filming in Central Park,” so I said, “Let's,” we did a lot of filming there, and a lot in the snow period, I thought, “let's,” we kept a little, I don't know what you call those, bucket cranes that are about 20-30 feet high. I said, "Let's just keep one of those with us," 'cause again, we had no money. We couldn't have a real crane, but I said, "Let's keep that." When it snows, and the snow stops, and everything is fresh, at Sheep's Meadow in Central Park, there's this huge expanse, and I said, "We'll rush over before anybody walks and puts footsteps, and we'll put the camera in the crane, and they will walk, and we'll just see these two figures against white and these, just the little footsteps, you know, behind them." And indeed one day it just worked out, the timing, and we rushed over and put the camera in the crane, and you know, you only can get it once because there'll be the footprints, and got the shot. So the next day when I looked at it in the dailies, I thought, “Oh Arthur, come on. This isn't DOCTOR ZHIVAGO,” I think, “I really over did it,” and I was embarrassed. I called my Editor, Bob Jones [Robert C. Jones], and I said, "Bob, I did a little much. Forget it, you know." When he put the film together, he put it in, because in the rhythm of the film, it was right; it did work. But it's funny how you sometimes look at your own work, and you forget its context. And you're just looking at the shot and thinking, “too much,” and it isn't, it really… So you get effects in so many ways, but basically prep, prep, think, think.

AH: I worked on a film called AN ALAN SMITHEE FILM [AN ALAN SMITHEE FILM: BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN], and it was a takeoff, a satiric look at Hollywood, and in simplistic terms, was a British Director [Eric Idle] who had been brought over, and then the studio, 'cause then the studio knew they could push him around, and they started pushing him around, and they gave him so much trouble, and they took it away from him. They re-edit it and did everything. And he was so upset. There was nothing he could do. He stole the negative. And he, and then he meets a couple like, he's introduced to like the Hughes Brothers, a couple of Directors, and they said, "Well why don't you just take your name off and let it be an Alan Smithee?" but he said, "But my name is Alan Smithee," which was, that was his name. And that's the whole sort of basis of it. It was a very odd and a very risky film. And when we completed shooting and were editing, there were umpteen ways we could put it together, and I thought I put it together and thought, I'm not sure 'cause you could do this, that, and the, everybody looked. I let people, the studio, the production company look at it, and Andy Vajna's company [Andrew G. Vajna], I don't even remember the name of it, and you know, and Joe Eszterhas, the Producer, and Writer and Ben Myron, the Producer, and all the Andy Vajna’s staff, you know. And everybody wasn't sure, and I said, well I made a suggestion, I said, "Look, I have three sneaks." But I said, "What if we do a pre-sneak that would not be my Director's cut? But that we would just, with the kind of audience we think this should go to, and see if that gives us an indication of which way to go." And everybody thought, you know, good idea. Then we sort of organized, and fortunately I sent a memo that said to everybody, I said, "Please, please, please remember, this is not my Director's cut. This is rough version that we're doing because we're all unsure what direction this film should go and maybe we'll get ideas." And we ran it, and it didn't play well, but… And from then on, it sort of went downhill in the sense of I did do my version in a sneak, but what I didn't realize was they were having meetings behind my back.

AH: And one time when I ran I guess it was my second [second version of the film AN ALAN SMITHEE FILM: BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN], I've forgotten exactly, but ran it at Andy Vajna’s [Andrew G. Vajna] company, in their screening room, and then went out and I was talking to my Editor [L. James Langlois] and suddenly I thought, where's the Producers, the Writers, where's everybody else? And I realized they're in a meeting. And I went back in and I knocked on Andy Vajna's office door, walked in, and they were all in a meeting, and I said, "Is this meeting that I'm not part of the team or..." "Oh, no-no. Andy just wanted to get their notes and thoughts." I said, "Why can't I be in on..." And things went, as we say, downhill. And they did, they actually, they took over the film, which by contract, they could do, but after a certain number of previews. And it was a whole thing of I offered to, they couldn't afford another preview, and I said I would pay for it. And first it was okay, then backed out and said, "No, I didn't say that." You know, it was one of those things. It got to such a point, where they had really taken it away from me, changed it, so that it was no longer the film. I felt they'd made it into a SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE sketch and took out the heart and soul that they had asked me to take out. But which I felt gives the thread to hold it together. And I still remember driving from Andy Vajna's office in Santa Monica to the DGA and having to stop twice 'cause I thought I was going to pass out. I was driving to the DGA and came and said, "I'd like to take my name off," and went through the process of and removed my name from the film, very... Now, I'm not saying that mine would've been commercial, or my version or… I certainly think it would've been better, but who's to say, but still it was taken away from me, and I must say the DGA couldn't have been more helpful. When I first came in, I mean, Elliott Williams had me sitting on his sofa getting me tea because, you know, was I okay, 'cause he could, knew how disturbed I was. In fact, while I was talking, we were talking, Jay Roth [Jay D. Roth] walked in to see Elliott on something, and he suddenly said, "What's the matter, Arthur?" He could see that I wasn't, and he got upset that I was… He didn't even know what the situation was, and he was disturbed. And when I told him, of course, he was more disturbed. But you know, and it just, you sometimes… but thank god for the support of our Guild.

AH: But as I say, most times it's, you know, although, I'm remembering on OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE, when not the head of the studio, but the head of Hollywood Pictures, 'cause they were done, it was a division of Disney [Walt Disney Pictures] that we worked through. He wanted to know if it was all right if he and a couple of the other Executives came out to see our locations that we were going to film in, in New Mexico, and all that because well, because Bette Midler was four to seven months pregnant, and were they, they just wanted to see it was a safety and that... It was pretty clear they wanted to, did I know what I was doing, did I pick the spots that they would like? You know, it was pretty clear. And I avoided, but they kept at and kept at it. And finally I said, "Fine, okay. You can come out." And my, Jimmy Van Wyck [Jim Van Wyck], my Assistant [First Assistant Director], and everybody says, "Arthur, are you out of your mind? What are you doing?" you know. I said, "I have a plan." And the Producer said, "You know, Arthur, what are you...?" And about seven of us went out in the Disney plane and we got there, and we got into the hotel, and I said, "You'll have to be up at six in the morning because we have to drive way out to location, you know, and be there by eight, and then…" And I got them out to the location, all the mountains, and the hills. And fortunately, construction was even farther ahead than we expected. The little house that had to be built was almost done, and a lot of the safety things, the steps, and other things were in and everything, and they started helping with pointing things and they, I said, "Well let me tell you." They said, "What is it you're doing?" I said, "Well I'm," then I said, "Let me run you through it shot by shot." And I, up the mountain I went, you know, and said, "Here," and said, "We're doing this, and over here, we're doing this." And then climbed up here and said, "We're doing this and this." And then I said, "Come down here, we're doing," you know, and I took them… Well, they were, by noon, they were, no, it was earlier than that. I think it was about 10 o'clock, somewhere around then, they were worn out. I mean they just, they left. They just, they went back to the hotel, drained. And I did it on purpose. I knew that if I ran them around, they would wear out. And they wore out, and Jimmy Van Wyck, my AD, and Jim Vance [James Dowell Vance], my Production Designer, we stayed for the day, finished the day because we're out here, we'll do some work, and we did some more work and set up a few more things, but… And then we all flew back late afternoon, or early evening, I've forgotten.