AH: When I was working in the film TOBRUK, I had a problem with Nigel Green, the Actor. He just couldn’t see it my way, something I wanted particularly, and we discussed it. I tried ways to get him to see it my way, to make him think that he was coming up with the idea, nothing. And he finally just said, “Arthur, your way isn’t possible. Nobody could do it.” And I said, “Of course they can.” He said, “You do it.” And I did it. And that got to him, and he did it. I didn’t know I could, but that just, I didn’t do it, as we say, at the level that he could do it but just showed him that it could be done, and...

INT: Have you ever worked with an Actor going through any personal problems during a film?

AH: I’m sure I’ve worked with Actors going through problems a lot of times, because we all go through problems, and we have to work around them. George C. Scott was an alcoholic, and... but he would, well, it didn’t happen, should we say, on the set. I think once, because I remember him coming over to me and saying, “Arthur, how do you play drunk when you’re drunk?” But basically in the whole time I didn’t feel his alcohol problem, and as I say, if I could’ve done the film [THE HOSPITAL] in one day, he could’ve. I mean, just so unbelievable. If I directed him three times in the picture, it was a lot. But there would be days when he didn’t show up because he was just out. And so, I had to always be thinking the day before, “What would I do tomorrow if he didn’t show up?” Fortunately, we were working in a hospital, and so it worked. I could make moves, but I had to be prepared each day. And when he would come back on another day, I could... he never said anything, but I could feel his determination to make it up to me, that he felt so badly that he had given me a problem, but he couldn’t help it. It’s an illness, and he had it. But he would just hold himself together all day to give me what he could.

AH: And I remember on TEACHERS, my Producer saying to me one day, “Oh, boy, your Actor kept me up all night drinking.” And I thought, “You’re the Producer. You should’ve got him home to bed.” Because Nick Nolte was into a lot of drinking then, but it didn’t really, again, it didn’t show. Peter O’Toole was a drinker, but only one day did I notice. They, somehow, could control themselves on the set. We did have one day on the set of TEACHERS where they came to me, and they said that Nick must’ve been on something. He was just sort of out of it. And I went to see him, and indeed they said, “You just have to call it a day.” And I thought, “No.” And I spoke to Nick, because he’s really, terrific guy and terrific Actor, and I talked him into doing a particular scene. Why? Because that scene needed him to be, sort of the world going on around him, and he wasn’t there. It was his feelings about having heard about a young boy in the class who’d been killed, or who died, I’ve forgotten. And I thought, “That look, that sort of not quite being there will work for this scene.” And we did the scene, and it was wonderful. But the rest of the time, I mean, he was just as cooperative and as helpful and as creative as you could ask, you know, just they’re terrific, but you know we all have problems. And as long as it’s a good person, I forgive those problems, and my friends have problems; I don’t get upset. You have to, if it’s not a nice person, then no, I...I would fight it. But in each of the cases, it was good guys and terrific talents. [INT: Did you ever have Actors having tantrums that you had to deal with or anything where things were difficult in that sense?] Not, I don’t recall an Actor ever having a tantrum, no. I’ve had, yes, the problem of Actors being very late, or worrying about their, what shall I say, their trailer more than what they were doing or busy on the phone. Yes, you have those problems all the time, and you have to work at them, and work around them, yeah.

INT: Moving on to the photography, how do you select a Cinematographer? What are you looking for in that?

AH: You’re looking for someone with a visual talent who will, who shares your vision of, and who will complement your vision, not just complement it, but will bring something to it to give you even more of what you’re looking for. And obviously somebody you feel comfortable with in working. You know, you want the Cinematographer to come up with ideas on angles or various ways of doing things.

INT: How do you... is it like casting almost in terms of your different films, working with different Cinematographers. Is it...?

AH: In a sense it is, and other times you don’t. I work with people I feel comfortable with, so I did most of my films with David Walsh [David M. Walsh] and Victor Kemper [Victor J. Kemper], which is funny because David then married Victor’s daughter. So, I was working with the father and the son-in-law. But it depends what you’re looking for. Like, in THE BABE, what I wanted and that Haskell Wexler could give me and gave me wonderfully was in a sense an almost black and white feeling, even though we were in color, and who could deal with all of the problems of, “How do we work on the baseball field when Wrigley Stadium [Wrigley Field] says you can’t put a camera on the grass or do anything on the grass?” You can... the limitations, and for instance, on THE BABE, long before, not that long before, but before we were near filming, I had to work out every angle I was thinking about on the baseball field. And then had a meeting with Haskell Wexler, with Jimmy Van Wyck [Jim Van Wyck], my Assistant Director, and with, I’ve forgotten, the gentlemen from the optical house, and I went through all of the shots so that they each could work out what equipment they would need, or how they could do what has to be done. For instance, in simplistic terms, when we got them all worked out, when I... then Jimmy Van Wyck then took them and scheduled them so that... I didn’t go in order. We kept me, let’s say, looking down the first base line, because we had 750 to 1,000 extras. Well, if you’re gonna move them every shot, you’re gonna spend a lot of time. So we would do everything in that direction, then we would move home plate. You know, we would work around that way. But also then by laying out the shots and what the fields were, the optical house knew where they had to take people and place them somewhere else, or to create, how do you create 50,000 people? Well, the optical house would do that. They would get their shots, or how are we gonna get cameras in places when we couldn’t have the grass? You know, Haskell would work on that. And Haskell is very good also at coming up with interesting angles that you haven't thought about, you know, to better tell your story.

AH: And I lucked in with Jimmy Van Wyck [Jim Van Wyck] who I love to work with. Anyway, but when I told them I was doing a film [THE BABE], and he was so excited, 'cause we hadn’t worked together for a while, and we liked working together, and it just, oh, he said, “It just works out right. And, oh, Arthur, we’ll be together,” and I said, “But, Jimmy,” I said, “There’s a problem.” And he got so upset, “What? What? What’s the matter? What?” I said, “It’s a baseball picture.” He’s an ex-pro ballplayer. He played in the minor leagues. But, so you can imagine how much more help I was getting from my Assistant [Assistant Director]. I mean, he knew, you know, I would say, print sometimes, and he would say, “Arthur, that’s fine for the general public, but for baseball players,” and we would finesse it a little and do things, and he knew, he could work with, help me with working with the players. They were just, you fall into it sometimes. So, everybody, and for instance at Wrigley Field in Chicago, where were worked, that had to be four different fields. Well, that meant we would finish it as one stadium, and now it would become another city; overnight the Production Designer would have to come in with his group and change the boxes to make it the other stadium, to do various things like that. Or I would have to be careful at the angle I was shooting, because that’s where the optical house would extend the bleachers so they would look differently. And I would have to watch what I was shooting, let’s say, over the fence at the outfields, because I would use one angle, because that would be one field, I’d use the other angle. You know, all those... you had to do all of those things, because you were doing four different stadiums, and all that movement, all that playing, and it... So you’d prepare. But I do that, basically, with the Cinematographer and the Production Designer ahead of time, explaining what I’m looking for. If I’ve thought of the shots and things, I go through my shot list, and the kind of shots I wanted in each scene, and maybe what I’m doing the cut on, and you know, they may say, "That’s...why didn't you do this, and it’ll do that?" or you... And sometimes, with a Production Designer, I will roughly outline a set, not… but to show that I need a door in this area, or a cupboard here, or a window, or I need these two rooms to look at each other--things like that. Then let the Production Designer, you know, design or the Production Designer will come up with a different.

AH: You just never know, like on MAKING LOVE, every time I found a house that I liked for the exterior, it was a single-story house, and we needed a two-story. And one that I just loved its placement on, sort of the edge of a hill, and you’re looking out at... and my Production Designer, Jim Vance [James Dowell Vance] said, thought “Well, what if I design...” and what he designed was, you’re coming in, you’re on the second floor. And you go down the big stairs into the living room; it was two-story living... and so I got the two-stories and we got a more interesting, unusual set than we would’ve had, and yet it was very real. So you have, you just talk a lot, and they come up with ideas of how to do things, or you come up with them yourself in terms of sets design or the... for instance in HOSPITAL [THE HOSPITAL], in the hospital that we were using, the nurses’ station was against the wall. And I thought, “We’re doing so much at the nurses’ station. It’s limiting my angles,” and I suggested to the Production Designer, I said, “Why not build a nurses’ station in the middle of the room, and we’ll just make the nurses’ station just another office or something,” and we did. And so, that I had it in the middle and could work around it and get angles all over the place. Or when I was trying to get that semi-documentary feel, it was hard because when you’re running down a corridor with a handheld and that, it was hard at the end. There was always a door with a window, and you’d get reflections. And the Cinematographer, and I said, “Just put white on it. What’s the big deal? You know, diffuse it with...” And you do, you do things. You face your problems that way, and it’s just working with creative people who will fulfill and even give you more.

INT: You used moving camera a lot and very long, complicated shots like in LOVE STORY and in THE HOSPITAL, and when it was not as easy as it is today with Steadicam. And was that--but you never feel like the camera’s in a place it shouldn’t be. It’s just always right where it should be. Is that something that you bring to your films?

AH: If, only if I feel the need for it. In LOVE STORY, the long camera shot is because I felt the need to see Harvard [Harvard University]. It was so many of the scenes were in the dormitory, and I put three scenes together, and fortunately I could and went outside and repaved the crosswalk, so that the camera could slide along smoothly and walked the Actors to the camera as it dollied back and then they were off the sidewalk, on the sidewalk. You didn’t notice as a viewer because you were seeing them from the waist up and got more visual out of it. In HOSPITAL, I did it a lot because I wanted that just frantic feeling of running from here to there and going there. And also because I wanted that semi-documentary feel of what I call “messy good”.

AH: And I created shots where an Operator [Camera Operator] couldn’t help but be messy good [for the film THE HOSPITAL]. Or you do it in a wheelchair with a handheld [referring to giving his films a semi-documentary feel]. We did in OUT OF TOWNERS [THE OUT OF TOWNERS] when they’re running through Boston Railroad Station, rushing out to the train, and I wanted the camera to lead them, and there was no way you could do a shot like that. Well, we put the Camera Operator in a wheelchair and Eddie Quinn [Ed Quinn], the then Dolly Grip who I said who has done so many wonderful things, he would, he lead them. He ran backwards through the station, swung around through the frame doorway, out onto the platform, along the platform, swung them around, then on their backs and as they came to the train and got on the train. Now, on the take that is in the film, when he swung through, around and through the frame doors, he hit his hand. When you saw how much blood, how it was... I thought, “How could he not have gone, ‘Ahh!’ and stopped?” He hung in there until that shot was over, and then this bleeding hand we wrapped, it’s just how people will... But we got the shot I was looking for. So you do them, but you talk ahead of time. As I say with THE BABE, I wanted that feel of black and white even though it was in color, that Haskell [Haskell Wexler] could give. On W.C. FIELDS AND ME, I wanted a feel of period and old, and David Walsh gave me a little diffusion all the time, just a touch that gave it a style. Obviously, pushed Victor Kemper [Victor J. Kemper] into who knows how many problems on HOSPITAL [THE HOSPITAL] with those shots, but he worked them all out. I’d say the five-and-half page scene in motion, imagine lighting and that, or the four-hour lighting job to do the impotent scene, because I didn’t want to have poor George [George C. Scott] go through those emotions 10, 12 times, you know, so that I could do it all, mostly in one shot. Those are... or sometimes you find things in a funny way or do things like when I was filming on POPI and we needed a hospital, we went... I liked Flowers 5th Avenue [Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital] because the corridors went off in sort of nice angles. And they were agreeable, until they found out we were gonna shoot for 10 days. And they said, “No, no, that’s not possible. A couple of days is okay.” And indeed later, I shot LOVE STORY for a couple of days there, but... and I felt badly, because I liked it so much. As we’re walking away, I said to the Production Designer and the Location Manager, I said, “Find out who the architect was. Maybe he built another hospital that laid out the same way.” And everybody laughed, but we found out in the Brooklyn Stuyvesant area, an older one, done the same way, and they let us do it 10 days because they were desperate for money. They needed our money. They really didn’t want us, but they... And it turned out, though, they were so happy that we were there, because they said the patients kept their eyes on us and weren’t bothering the nurses. So it worked out, but you have to... you must keep your mind going. Whenever there’s a problem, you have to try and think of... don’t just give up. Think of some way of doing or finding. And sometimes it’s ridiculous, and it won’t work, or when there’s--there’s a coffee shop in LOVE STORY, and I thought, “I don’t want to just be against a wall,” and I said, “Why not? It’s to do with a skating rink.” I said, “Let’s do it here,” and they said, “But there’s no coffee shop at the rink in Central Park.” I said, “It’s gonna be a simple shot.” I said, “Just give me a glass frame as if it was a window, and we’ll put it where at the end of the hockey rink where you go into the building so to speak, and so it looks...” and I said, “And they’ll just sit 50/50.” And that’s what we did. It looks like they’re in a coffee shop, and yet you’ve got a nice background. But you have to sort of... [INT: That’s great.] Yeah. [INT: The simplicity is so wonderful in that shot…]

INT: And there’s a shot in THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY that I really love in a bedroom with Melvyn Douglas and the other men, and it goes on and on and on, and the Actors, the camera stays still, but the Actors are choreographed through the scene in such an amazing way that it keeps changing.

AH: Yeah. When you try to do sort of what works right for the scene, you really have to think, “How best can I tell my story with the visuals?” Because you’ll find there are visuals in EMILY where we’re, you know, behind the Melvyn Douglas character, and we come around, around and you are, you know, almost 180 [180 degrees], and the Garner [James Garner] character comes in. But as you say, there are other times when we’re just totally still, and it’s the birthday party, I think, I’ve forgotten. So, and then I got just the Actors, because I wanted them to be the party, and so kept them in motion and enjoying, and getting a drink, and doing this and jumping the bed, and... Or at a table meeting, get it with one camera moving all of the time just so it wouldn’t be too static a meeting, and yet you have to be careful because are you giving emphasis to the right people at the right time? And you just, you come up with these things and amazing how a Cinematographer will enhance it or suggest something, or you know the Production Designer can work out a way, you know, because you have to know ahead of time when, let’s say when you’re on a set, I mean, why are you on a set and not on a location? Sometimes because you need the whole wall moved, and you can’t move it on the location because of a certain shot you’re doing, or you need space, or... each, it’s storytelling.

INT: Why do you hire a certain Production Designer, and how do you begin that process with them?

AH: Very, I mean, very much like the Cinematographer. Again, you, somebody who will complement and enhance your vision, who will come up with ideas, and that’s why I’m saying are the things that Jim Vance [James Dowell Vance] came up with that solved problems or that gave me a two-story set instead of a single floor [when working on film MAKING LOVE]. [INT: Is the Production Designer the first person you bring in after working with the script, or how does that work?] Usually, the Production Designer and Cinematographer, and I try to keep them as informed, and the Assistant Director, and try to always keep them as much as informed of my thinking or my ideas as I can to make their life easier or to enhance them. For instance, when we did SILVER STREAK, we brought... beforehand, we brought the heads of, the Cinematographer David Walsh [David M. Walsh] and, yeah, the Key Grip and the Gaffer up to Canada to where the locations were so that I could take them to an actual train and show them the shots I planned. Because if you’re gonna be on a moving train on top, obviously they’re gonna have to create rigging and everything for the cameras, for safety of the people, or...sorry. So I went through shot-by-shot of what I was doing, or when I’d have somebody, when I needed a camera hanging from the side of the train so the Actors could come out the door of the, the exterior door of the train and climb outside around into the next compart--door. Things like that, so they would know ahead of time or that we had to have the stunt of the... going along, and had to hit something that the stuntman, supposedly Actor, hits and swings off. So I went through all that with them, because then when we were up filming we had to... when we came to those shots, it would be 15, 20 minutes just of, they’d have the rigs all ready. If not, I could’ve been two weeks longer filming just the time it would’ve taken them to construct all of the equipment and to bring it up and put it, just they’d have it all measured, because they’d measured when we were first up there, and it would fit up. Or if you want a camera as I did at the bottom of the engine to race along the track, I wanted to be able... So they’d created a unit so it could go there. Or, sometimes you luck into things, because on SILVER STREAK I wanted when the big villain is pushed off the train, I thought, “I’d like to see his point of view when he’s falling.” And so the Cinematographer got an older camera that we bought cheaply, because we didn’t know if it would break or if it would work. We put it in a box with an opening and set it going, you know, and just threw it off the train. And when we picked it up it was in good shape, but the shot, I didn’t like the shot. My clever idea was not so clever, but we kept that camera and did all kinds of things like when... there’s a point when the bad guy is at the engineer’s part of the train, and he is hanging out, and the train coming the other way supposedly hits him, you see. Well, what I did that I hadn’t planned on, because we had this camera, was to put the camera, this wooden camera, again, knowing it could be broken doing this, so it hung... it was on a... I wanted it just to hang over the tracks so the train would come right at it, and we would be getting a shot of the camera coming, you know, right at a person.

AH: And they [Cinematographer, Key Grip, and Gaffer] used that camera [while shooting SILVER STREAK], and the Grip cleverly put a hinge on the overhang, and so when it hit it, it swung away, so it didn’t break. And that shot is in the film. It’s as if this, you have close-up of this guy going, “Ahh!” and you see this really, in a sense, hitting him. So, it just, you fall into, you do it for one reason and then think about it. And we used it about three times, I think, in THE IN-LAWS in various places on the ground, just to get certain shots, and got away with them. And then finally, we put it in the pile of bananas, and it broke, and… But 125-dollar expenditure went a long way. Sometimes you have to have the camera somewhat stationary, shall we say. Like, you know, the big car crash, the car crash? The big train crash at the end of SILVER STREAK, in those days we hadn’t developed any of the special effects, and we didn’t, thought, “How are we gonna do this crash at the end?” And we thought about miniatures and rear screen and front screen, and nothing seemed to work, and we kept thinking and thinking, and one day my, we were about two weeks from shooting it, and I was getting very nervous, and my Production Designer Al Sweeney [Alfred Sweeney] came in, and he said, “Arthur, I think I figured out how to do the crash.” I said, “Oh, thank god.” He said, “Let’s do it full-size.” And I laughed. And he said, “I’m serious.” And I laughed again. And he described the crash. He had a whole concept. If he hadn’t come up with that concept I don’t know what… What we did was we took an airplane hangar in Burbank [California] and we rebuilt, Al rebuilt, built a train, three sides of an engine, put it on a truck bed, and Yakima Canutt, who was the leading stunt person at that time, drove the truck, and he recreated parts of Toronto Union Station where I had filmed, part of it was just black-painted velour and that. But part of it was... it’s very cheaply done, and... But once you get the idea, and they would drive through that, once you get the idea you put the posts in the right place for the train to hit, or when it’s going through the gift shop, you hang the lights low enough for it to hit, all of that. But he got that concept of full-size, and then I got an idea that like once when it broke through the wall that we had it break through, it went, the actual driving up was done at Chicago Union Station where it’s supposed to be, right up to the track almost to the wall. Then we had our own wall that it broke through. Then as it broke through that, I suggested that we put up a wall with a mirror that would be half the set and that would be designed to fit Toronto Union Station where there was a big opening and a wall, then down the stairs. And so I could do the right hand half in Toronto with people running and everything, and the mirror, the train, we’d see it again. We did that. Then into a gift shop; that’s the wall that breaks through, and then it broke through the final wall into the mid-station, where the posts were and it did that, and obviously work with the stunt person, you don’t need all the people running in that. And just, you know, unbelievable what got done. But when I’m saying still camera, because when he described it all to me, he said, “Arthur, there’s one problem.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “I can, you know, for economics I can only give you so much.” He said, “You’ll have to do long lens from, and one angle.” I said, “Al, just tell me where to put the camera.” And I could only do it on two angles at each time, and... But it, the concept came from the Production Designer. So, you know, you just say... and it worked wonders. It just... it looked so real, and I said, what was it about a year later THE FUGITIVE came out with a wonderful train sequence right at the beginning, but all done in a special effects house. Boom, boom, you know. We didn’t have that to work with.

AH: But sometimes your problems can be even, how should I say it, simplistic, like in MAKING LOVE when we reached, when we were going to do a scene of two men making love, that had never been shown on the screen before, and obviously I wanted to, I didn’t want to do sort of on their faces and down their bodies. You know, I wanted to be a little more careful. And I said to the Production Designer, you know, this is the first time people are gonna see this on the screen, “Can we create an opening like a window with maybe glass that’s a little thick or, you know, to... so it isn’t quite so clear a shot, and yet you realize, because we’ve seen them get into bed, you realize that you’re watching two men making love.” And he created and set an opening where he hung beads, and I’ve forgotten, but just so beautifully done, and it worked wonders. And yet, here he was with that, as we say, “little problem”, same Jim Vance [James Dowell Vance] when we were doing CARPOOL, we had to put three malls together in Vancouver to create what we needed of the cars driving through, and driving up the stairs, you know, in a mall and around balconies, and then ending with a wall that he had to build, and that Connie Palmisano [Conrad E. Palmisano], our Stunt Coordinator, obviously a lot of work, where the car goes through the wall and is flying through the air and drops down onto a greenhouse and breaks that, you know. Just so, you know, Production Designers and Cinematographers have to work on the littlest things and the biggest, but we all do. That's, again, that’s filmmaking, and you know, and why do you choose? You choose them because you feel that. Or why did I choose Harry Stradling in PENELOPE? Because Natalie Wood, who was the leading lady, wanted Harry Stradling, who knew how to photograph her. Why Victor Kemper [Victor J. Kemper] in HOSPITAL [THE HOSPITAL]? I’d worked with him as an operator [camera operator] on TIGER MAKES OUT [THE TIGER MAKES OUT] and had watched how he did certain shots that I wanted handheld around a chair, and that, and thought, “Yes, he’s the right man to do this semi-documentary feel.” Why David Walsh [David M. Walsh] to do the W.C. FIELDS [W.C. FIELDS AND ME]? Because, I thought, “Yes, he gives me that simplicity with that little bit of feel of period that I will need for that.” Why Phil Lathrop [Philip H. Lathrop] for AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY [THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY]? Because I wanted it in black and white. I felt that picture in its anti-the-glorification of war could best be told in black and white, which, by the way, gave us big problems with the studios, because they said, “Wait a minute, you can’t...” you know, black and white, color had just become popular, and “it’ll feel like an old movie.” And Marty Ransohoff [Martin Ransohoff] and I, the Producer, and we had to fight for it to get it in black and white. Actually the first day’s dailies I looked at and said, “Phil, this is grey.” He said, “Well, I thought it...” And I said, “No, I need it black and white.” And so we got sort of the black and white of it. Talking about studio objection, the studio didn’t want us to do the crash in SILVER STREAK because it was gonna cost $250,000, which was a lot of money. And they said, “Why not just forget, and you know, end without it?” I said, “We’re not... if we were doing a romance, yes, we could do it. But if you’re doing an adventure yarn, you better give the audience something at the end. It doesn’t have to be a car crash, I mean, a train crash, but it has to be something.”