MH: And you were saying something about the dynamic of two guys and the other being the--[INT: Right, being on the road.] And with the girl coming in and so forth. It’s interesting, I mean you can interpret these things in so many different ways, and that’s why critics get paid so much and we get paid so little, because they are able to find some way, many ways to describe it, but the thing that’s interesting to me, and this is obviously nothing that we ever thought about at the time, but probably the single most important artistic event of my life was directing Joey Faye and Jack Albertson in WAITING FOR GODOT. And just by accident, you know, Rudy’s [Rudy Wurlitzer] re-interpretation of TWO-LANE BLACKTOP kind of fits that pattern, in the sense that you have the two guys, you know, the driver and the mechanic, or the two bums, and then you have two other characters. And in GODOT, it’s you know the landowner and the slave, and in this it’s GTO and the girl. And you know, it’s fun to play with these things, but you know it’s not stretching it too far to see a similar dynamic between WAITING FOR GODOT and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP. [INT: Wow.]

INT: There’s such a depth to these characters, almost precisely because of that economy once again. It’s not that they’re being vacuous and we’re putting something onto them, but they’re oddly aware of themselves without showing it. It’s a strange kind of a thing.

MH: Well, I mean it’s, again it’s kind of fortunes of the game in that, you know, here we have a story where they don’t, the dialogue has nothing to do with what’s going on. I mean I always thought the dialogue was kind of like another sound effects track or another music track because it’s not… it doesn’t propel the story in any way. And I, you know I love stories and I love to do pictures that have more of a story than TWO-LANE BLACKTOP does, but at the same time I hate exposition, and there are so many movies where it’s just all exposition, and it’s, and there is nothing natural about exposition. Exposition is only there for the author to explain something to the audience, and so it’s like totally, you know, unnatural. Yeah. [INT: Right. And even when you encounter it in real life it’s a little bit annoying. When someone says, “Let me tell you to catch you up to speed.”] Oh yeah. And I just, you know, a half a dozen movies that I’ve seen recently have just like, “God, if they’d just you know hadn’t been so intent on telling it…” It’s like my daughter says, "TMI." Too much information. And we don’t need to know. And that’s what’s so great about Melville [Jean-Pierre Melville], I mean Melville is you know great because he doesn’t feel obliged to give you, you know, too much information or even some people would say not enough. I prefer it. I’d rather have too little than too much.

INT: Well there’s also something about the tone of this movie that so… When I look back on my experiences as a kid, well wanting to be someone like Laurie Bird, and in fact for a while I was that character. I was hitchhiking across the country myself at 16, a couple of years later, but when I, if I look to a movie to say that’s how it was, that’s how I experienced things, that’s how people I knew were like, EASY RIDER doesn’t do it for me. I mean there’s a lot of movies that don’t really, that were movies at the time that were supposed to be the youth movies, but something about this period with these characters driving across the country and, there was that myth of the road that had been rekindled in the hippie period when you were making this film, that I think that we all had such a romance about it, but at the same time it was like the last, it was like grabbing it for the last time. And in fact it really was the last time that it was safe to be a hitchhiker and to go across the country like that.

MH: That’s right, that’s right. Well, I mean, I think, you know, EASY RIDER is you know historically a tremendously important film. [INT: Right.] But it’s also true that EASY RIDER is kind of caught up in romanticizing itself, and it’s really… it could have been, they could have shot those scenes anywhere. They just happened to pick a, you know, a scene to do here, a scene to do there. TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, for better or worse, is more really about the different places where we shot. It’s, you know, the locations are picked in such a way that the location becomes another character in the movie. And in EASY RIDER, the location, except for New Orleans, is immaterial. [INT: Right.] You know, and I’m not saying it’s a good or a bad thing, you know. [INT: No, it’s just the difference.] Yeah. [INT: And I agree with you, ‘cause it is a tremendously, and it’s a, with EASY RIDER there’s so much iconography attached to it, the way that there is Captain America and there is a lot of iconography around it that TWO-LANE BLACKTOP is more, I don’t know, it’s a more interior story in a way. It was like our state of mind at the time, instead of like us against them, and us and society. It’s more like who we are inside our bones, and I think that that’s, when I look at that movie, I just go, “That’s, that’s me.” I think that that’s why I’m so in love with those boys too, in it. Apart from the fact that they were so cute, but also I just could relate to anybody. You know, I relate to all those characters, even the guy that, the kid at the gas pump or, you know? Any number of people in that, Harry Dean’s [Harry Dean Stanton] character and--] Yeah, oh Harry Dean is so powerful, you know. I don’t, well I mean he’s given a lot of great performances. I don’t want to single you know this one out over something else because I mean he’s always terrific, but he actually cried in that scene when Warren [Warren Oates] wants him to get out of the car. And he was, he was unhappy because he knew how great he was. He was unhappy it was so dark, and he was afraid you wouldn’t be able to see him, you know. [INT: Oh he was beautiful in that.] And he resisted you know, when he came on location he hadn’t, nobody read the script. You know I didn’t give the script to anybody except Warren, Warren read the script.

INT: Well so that’s incredible that you didn’t have--They hadn’t seen the script. They knew the concept of the characters they were playing [on TWO-LANE BLACKTOP].

MH: Yes. They knew, we shot--I mean we had the luxury, uniquely I think, of shooting exactly in sequence because we were driving across country, so there was no way to shoot out of sequence. And so I had, you know, I said--every once in a while I get a crazy idea. You know, I just say, well, you know it’s not going to hurt anything to try it, and I decided to, you know, make a picture where the people didn’t know any more than they would know in real life. They didn’t know what was going to happen to them tomorrow. They just knew what had happened yesterday, and so we did preparation about who these characters were, where they had been before the movie started, but once the movie starts, all they know is what happens each day. They get the script the night before and then, and they know what’s going to happen that day.

MH: You know, one thing that’s interesting that’s come out of my experience, this guy, his name is Brad Stevens, who’s written the book [“Monte Hellman: His Life and Films”], and I’ve never met him. We’ve exchanged maybe 500 emails over a couple of years’ time, and he, you know, part of what the book is about is all the movies that I never made, and believe it or not, you know, I’ve made 10 films, plus a half of one here and, you know, a fifth of a one here, and so forth, but I have been involved in 60 projects. [INT: Oh my god.] And I mean I was amazed. I was totally blown away, because he kept prying and prying, and then we’d talk about a certain period, you know, what I was doing during this period, and we’d you know kind of piece together the projects, and then a day later I’d say, “I just remembered another one,” and we would keep adding to it, and I’m sure we’ve forgotten some. I’m sure that there are some that are you know, like, you know, the editing I’ve done, like on a Jonathan Demme movie, I can’t even remember the name of it now. But, not only the ones I’ve edited, or the ones I have you know played a small part or whatever, but all the projects that I’ve tried to do, or that I was hired to do or whatever, that never got made. [INT: And those are important because we learn certain things along the way. I mean we actually are working--it’s hard to work on our craft as Directors. We’re always, you know, it’s like once we get up and go that’s, you know, that’s when we get to practice, because it’s hard to practice otherwise. But at least with the development process, and trying to raise the money and working on the script, we do learn so much.] Oh yeah, all of the scripts I mean that I’ve, but… you know I… on the one hand, I feel bad about not being able to hone my craft as often as I would like, but I think that there’s another aspect to it that people forget about, and I think there are a lot of filmmakers, as brilliant as they may be, who suffer from a lack of life experience, and you know we--with me, I mean I, you know, I’ve gone, even at the beginning, I’ve gone three, four, five, eight, nine years between pictures, and you’re not in a vacuum during that time. [INT: Right.] I mean if you don’t make a picture for nine years and you suddenly you know have the good fortune to have somebody give you money to play with this great toy that nobody’s ever created a better one, you’ve become a different person during that time and you have that experience to draw upon when you do the next picture. [INT: I so absolutely agree, and that oftentimes it takes that downtime to do the work that you need.] Well, I wouldn’t go that far, I wouldn’t go that far, yeah. No, I--[INT: Yeah, but you do the work that you need to do… inside, to be ready to do something else.] Yeah. [INT: I often feel that way. I feel like some projects take longer to make because I am not quite ready, even though when I think I am. I’m--] Yeah and there are some that, you know, that they take so long that you’ve already, you’ve experienced them and you don’t need to do ‘em you know. [INT: Exactly.] You move on.

INT: How do you work with an Editor, considering that you’ve been an Editor yourself, you are an Editor, how do you do that?

MH: Well, I have a unique way of working with the Editor. First of all, I want to sleep with the Editor, which I do because I am the Editor. I have never let anybody edit my movies. [INT: Really?] Yeah. [INT: So you edit every single--] Yeah, I edit all my movies, yeah. [INT: Wow, do you have, do you have a--how do you… [LAUGHS] that is too funny, Monte. I had no idea of that. I never knew that you edited your films.]

INT: How do you, not that you need it but do you, what do you do? Do you screen them at different times for various people or…

MH: Well I mean sometimes, I always have to have somebody to bounce it off. And when I was doing IGUANA, I had a, I did the editing in Rome, where I also edited CHINA 9 [CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37], 10 years earlier. And I had a wonderful woman who barely spoke any English, but she was an Assistant Editor and I was kind of trying too hard to please with the movie, at certain times, and, even though it was a very harsh subject, I was a little bit afraid of having too long a scene without intercutting or something, and so I would then try different things, you know. And there was one long scene that I decided to try and intercut, and she looked at it and she said… I put it back. And I had a great collaborator on TWO-LANE BLACKTOP. I mean Gary Kurtz is everything. I mean he knows every single aspect of filmmaking, and he worked on the soundtrack and getting all that complicated sound montage at the racetracks and stuff like that. And we had to cut the movie down from three-and-a-half hours. We were contractually obligated to deliver a picture under two hours. That was, we had final cut as long as it was under two hours. And so, took it from three-and-a-half down to two-and-a-half, down to two hours and a quarter, got it down to under two hours, and then I just kept going. I brought it down to an hour and three quarters, even though I didn’t have to. And we lost a lot of stuff that we really loved, and Rudy [Rudy Wurlitzer] was very upset because he didn’t understand the process that much, and he was kind of, he got, there were a couple of people who got in his ear and made him feel like his baby had been destroyed in the editing room, and we didn’t really, you know, talk for a number of years, and about five or six years ago there was a screening at a theater in New York, and Rudy was in New Mexico and I kind of got a hold of him. I found him and told him about the thing in New York, and he met me in New York and we saw it in New York together, and he was blown away. [Siren] He had just… he didn’t have any idea that the movie was there, you know. And since then we’ve just been really close friends. I mean we almost write every day. [INT: Oh god I love that, that’s so exquisite.]

MH: But it’s hard because I mean, I don’t know who, this is a famous, you know, saying, but “The most difficult thing is to give up your darlings.” And there were just so many darlings. I mean one of the great scenes that Gary [Gary Kurtz] forced me to give up really, was a scene [in TWO-LANE BLACKTOP] where they’ve been escaping the police in Arizona or New Mexico or someplace, and they pull into a driveway and they get out of the car and they kind of peer through the window of this house, and there’s a family having dinner. And it was Gary and his wife and kids, you know, and so, you know, he would have liked to have had that scene in the movie, but he was smart enough to realize--he said, “No we, it, we have to let go if it because it just, you know, stops the flow of the movie.” [INT: Yeah, that’s like the toughest--] Oh yeah. [INT: It’s a very painful process.] Yeah, but literally half of Rudy’s script had to be thrown away. But not as difficult as one thing that I did, which was a profile of Francis Coppola [Francis Ford Coppola] for a documentary video thing, and they originally asked for an 11-minute profile and I shot about, I don’t know, somewhere between three and five hours of footage of Francis, you know, talking, making omelets, you know doing all kinds of things. And I went to Paris to edit. And that was the only time I shot 16 mm, that was I don’t like editing 16 mm film, but anyway… Cut it down from three hours let’s say to 11 minutes, and then they said, “No, it has to be seven minutes,” so that’s--talk about you know throwing away all of this good stuff, it, but you know, it was fun. It’s an interesting process. [INT: It’s a good discipline I think, and it is a process to get to that.]

INT: So you have the one person that you trust and… well let’s talk about sound also, I mean the sound in TWO-LANE BLACKTOP is really stunning, really stunning. [MH: Yeah well that was really Gary [Gary Kurtz]. I mean Gary created that soundtrack. Yeah, he’s terrific.] And how about working with music?

MH: My taste generally is to have as little music as possible. I mean it, you know, really if I, if you gave me my choice I would say only source music. But I’ve done scored movies and I’ve had good relationships with the Composer. I think the two Composers, two different Composers on the two westerns, it was very interesting. That was my first experience with that because on the three previous movies it had been canned music, so you kind of like you know have a little bit of choice and you know. But dealing with Composers, I find one of the most difficult things, because, particularly on a small budget, you just sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to get ‘til you get on the recording stage and you hear the music at a point when it’s too late, either you take it or you don’t have anything there, you know. So that’s very interesting.

INT: And then when you’re mixing, how does that go? Do you enjoy that part of the--

MH: I do, I do enjoy it. I do enjoy it, but I get a little bit, I mean on a really low-budget picture, when you have a really short period of time to deal with it, it gets a little scary because you have to make fast decisions, and it’s not unlike the process of redoing the whole thing when you make a DVD. You know, that’s very similar, and you can correct, you can kind of remix it, doing a DVD. But it’s, I’m very, I grew up on radio, so you know the idea of listening and shutting out the visuals for a while, you know, just mentally shutting out the visuals, is not difficult for me. [INT: Wow. I’m trying to think of what the--each time for me it’s always, it always feels very different. I think it took me a long time to get the hang of what the hell we were doing in there. You know, I mean I knew intuitively, but it took me a long time before I really understood.] Yeah. The hardest part of, the hardest part of it for me is the level for music, because sometimes I’ll go overboard and it’ll be too low, and then I have to bring it up, but then if it, you know, if it’s too high… the psychology of music is very difficult. [INT: Right and very, just absolutely essential, to really understanding the movie and playing the emotions correctly and…]

INT: Once the film is mixed and then you’re, you’re on--do you test your fil--how is the process, like, did you test… Well, I guess you had already said that you didn’t really test TWO-LANE BLACKTOP right, that was not--

MH: No we did, we did. [INT: Oh you did test it.] We screened the two-hour 20-minute cut in San Diego, and that was quite a different movie from the final movie, and that was interesting. And I can’t remember too much about the audience reaction there, to tell you the truth. I remember much better, we did a screening of CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37 in San Bernardino [San Bernardino County, California]. And that was, that was very exciting because this was a picture where, you know, nobody really knew these Actors very well, and particularly Fabio Testi, and it was you know, a movie that was so far off the radar that you know nobody knew how to deal with it, you know. And the audience really liked it, and it’s been a very successful movie on cable. And they really responded to--I mean, I would say half the things we would get would be, “Can I have Fabio Testi’s phone number?” [INT: So the process was the same that what we have now. I mean people think that this is like something new, this testing process, when of course it’s been around forever, from the very beginning. Maybe the thing of assigning numbers is a bit different, but I’ve--] Like LOST HORIZON, when Capra [Frank Capra], and when they tested that in Santa Barbara, the result was they cut the first reel out of the movie. [INT: Oh that’s something. That is amazing. Yeah, and I think that it’s, I mean for me, I always find testing the movie very useful. I need that kind of, though, I do find that audiences will make you ask questions that, they’ll raise questions that maybe you haven’t seen, sitting in that room.] Yeah, and I’m sure that with TWO-LANE that part of the reason I was so eager to cut it even beyond the two hours was the result of experiencing that test preview. [INT: And then as far as, do you get involved with the poster design, the title design?] Well, it depends on how much I’m allowed to be. I like to be involved with all of that. In fact, on BETTER WATCH OUT! [SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT III: BETTER WATCH OUT!], I wrote the tagline for it. [INT: Oh cool.] “When your nightmares end, the real terror begins.” [INT: Well, this one also, TWO-LANE BLACKTOP certainly had a great tagline too.] Yeah, I didn’t write that.

INT: And we’ve talked about distribution, and let me just back up to talk about working with Actors. We’ve talked about the casting process and your relationship with Actors, but is there any, is there anything that you could really put into words, about how you approach directing Actors in a… I mean, I know that they are all different, and each experience with an Actor is different.

MH: Well, I mean there are things that you learn, that I learn you know in working with Actors. I know that there are some Actors who give you the best performance on the first take, and there are others that keep getting better and better, and so you have to kind of know so that you… the one that’s best on the first take, you want to shoot them first as well, because they can destroy their performance by being off-screen for somebody else, you know. So you just have to learn you know the individual characteristics of each Actor. But beyond that I love Actors. I mean I was an Actor, I was not a very good Actor, but I, at least I experienced it and I also studied two different methods of acting. You know when I went to Stanford [Stanford University], I was you know at the tail-end of kind of like the style of acting from you know the early 1900’s, and, you know, to the point where you know acting exercises would consist of walking across a stage and timing it to deliver four lines, and you’d keep changing the, you know, the length of the walk and still have to, you know, finish by the time you got across the stage, and you know that’s kind of like, you know, Actors would think you were crazy if you tell them to do that now. And I thought they were crazy at the time but… So I was trained in you know, the differences whether you say the line before or after you take the sip of tea, and, you know, all that kind of real classic, you know, American theater from, you know, God knows when. And then I studied method. I had two method teachers, both of whom had worked with Lee Strasberg. One was Martin Landau. In fact, I hired him to teach at my theater, and then when the theater disbanded he moved his class, and then I became a student in the class. And so I have the background and also the inclination, because I like it so much and because I like Actors so much, to be able to communicate with Actors in whatever their language is. And one time Roger Corman hired me on THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE, because he did not feel comfortable talking to Actors, and he had some very kind of you know famous, outstanding Actors like Jason Robards and… I’ll think of it in a minute. George Segal. So he hired me to talk to them, and I enjoyed it. I mean it’s one of the things that gives me a lot of pleasure. I mean I just love that kind of… but at the same time, as a Director, I feel the less said, the better. And so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If an Actor just you know comes on the set and does you know, his first rehearsal or his first take, and frequently, I’ll shoot the first rehearsal, because if I am at all nervous that the Actor might, you know, just give it everything on the first one and never do it again, you know it, film is relatively cheap, tape is even cheaper and I’ll just start shooting, and I might not even tell them that I’m starting to shoot. I might you know do an end slate, or something like that.

INT: And how do you rehearse with your Actors, or do you rehearse?

MH: I, you know, most of the rehearsal is involved with working out the action. And once the action--and then it’s really whatever makes them comfortable, but also works for the camera, you know. And the--reminds me of Loretta Young. She was doing a TV show for a friend of mine, and at one point he said, “Loretta, would you mind taking, you know, just like two steps over here?” She says, “The camera moves, I don’t.” [INT: Oh god.] But no, I think you know the camera has certain requirements, but basically whatever works for the Actors, the camera will find a way to work around it. [INT: Love that.]

INT: And how about sex scenes? [MH: Sex scenes.] How do you deal with sex scenes?

MH: With tremendous difficulty. [INT: Yes.] Well, I’m you know very shy, and you know I’m nervous about asking an Actor to take their clothes off, just to begin with, you know? And just doing sex scenes I think is, I think it’s, first of all there’s no way that the audience ever believes it, you know, so I think the more--I mean I loved, that’s why I love seeing some of these old French movies you know, Jean Gabin. You see them after they finished, and you know exactly what they’ve been doing and you don’t have to see them grunting and sweating and all of that. But on the other hand, I had you know probably the heaviest sex scenes in CHINA 9 [CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37], and I guess you know we must have been doing something right because I would have women come to the cutting room just to see some of these scenes. [INT: Oh that’s awesome. Well--] And they would say, you know, “Were they really doing it?” And I always said, “Yes of course,” you know. “This is the movies, so you know you can’t fake it!” [INT: I love that scene in TWO-LANE BLACKTOP where there’s, where James Taylor sits outside the door and her and Dennis [Dennis Wilson]--Well it’s mostly done with the door closed, it’s done through the door…] Oh yeah you don’t see it. You don’t see it at all [INT: And it’s so beautifully effective.]