INT: Let's talk about stunt for a while. Do you remember the first ones you dealt with? I mean, even back in with Sonny & Cher?

WF: Yeah. The first stunts I had were doubling for Sonny [Sonny Bono] in GOOD TIMES, which was the first feature film that I directed. And there was a fight scene in a bar, and two guys getting slapped around, one of them's supposedly Sonny, and we had a stunt man who did the falls, and I'm trying to think if--oh well at one point, although Sonny did a lot of this stuff himself, in some of the horseback riding in a Western sequence, we had a stunt rider, 'cause it was a silhouette, you know, a mile away, so we had a stunt double for Sonny there and then in the bar scene. That's the first stunt-work I did. [INT: And over the years, what's your methodology of working with stunts? Because you've had some--] Obviously, I have great respect for them, and in terms of all of the different job categories in the movie business, they are quite special, because a lot of people have great skills doing various things, but they don't prepare as well as stunt people do, or Stunt Coordinators. A lot of guys will come in and contribute their skill and I've found this especially with, let's say, explosion experts, who will come in and it may or may not work, and sometimes people get hurt, and sometimes people get killed. The stunt people are a lot more careful in my experience. They prepare endlessly so that no one gets hurt, let alone killed. And they will often stand up to a Director or a Producer, which it's hard for them to do on a severely low-budget picture, and say, “We can't do this now, there's not enough preparation. Or, it's not safe.” But what I do is I--I've worked with one or two Stunt Coordinators for the most part, in all the films I've done. Two guys come to mind, a guy named Bud Ekins who did SORCERER and Buddy Joe Hooker, who did most of my other films, but early on THE FRENCH CONNECTION stunt work was done by a guy called Bill Hickman, who was a terrific wheelman. He would have been great as the wheelman in robberies and heists. [INT: He could have played Roy Scheider's character in SORCERER.] He could have, he knew how to take off fast and find the shortcuts.

INT: Now, in terms of designing a stunt, I mean, how--'cause you've gone through lots of these over the years in various films, how do you work it? I mean I'm looking at for example, I guess, in Portland [Portland, Oregon] you have the--on top of the train, using as an evolution in--

WF: Well, I envision the sequence, as I said earlier. I envision the sequence and in my mind's eye. Then I'll meet with the Stunt Coordinator before we got to a location, and I'll lay out on a piece of paper, with very crude drawings, what I have in mind. Then; and he'll sort of absorb that. Then we'll go to location endlessly, and he'll see if what I have in mind works, or if he needs to change it slightly, and then it becomes a true collaboration. We'll look at the location together and figure out what we can do that often changes my vision because he will suggest something that's even more interesting. So as with all departments, it's a collaboration. The guys I work with I respect, tremendously; I won't work with someone that I don't respect in terms of their craft, and once I feel that respect then I rely heavily on their own capabilities and their ability to see past my vision into something that could be even more spectacular.

INT: Let's do a couple specific examples and see sort of how the process [on designing stunts] works. I'm thinking again, I want to call it the cable car but it's not a cable car, it's the exterior tramway that you used, I think this is in THE HUNTED, where they climb up on top. Am I right about this? This is in Portland [Portland, Oregon]? [WF: Yeah, yeah.] All right. Now, was that particular sort of scene in the script already?

WF: No, already, no. I mean--nothing's in the script already, you know. As I said earlier, “a script is a road map, it's not the journey itself.” The journey itself is when you go to the various locations and with all the various department heads, decide what could be best for this sequence. Now, I went to Portland myself, earlier. Much earlier than anyone else did, I looked around, certain things caught my eye. I was thinking about where on a number of locations to set a chase scene, and I came up with all of those locations. And then I would think them through and make crude drawings and not finalize anything into a script, until I got together with the Stunt Coordinator, the Cameraman, various people who did rigging, the city officials, and then we would have endless discussions about what I originally envisioned and then what was possible.

INT: Storyboards?

WF: I almost never did storyboards. [INT: Even for these stunts?] The only storyboard I've ever done was on the most recent film I made called BUG, which is coming out May 25th, 2007, just to put a date on that for this. [INT: I'm glad, cool.] I storyboarded that because I shot it in 20 days, so I storyboarded myself the entire film, and I gave it to the department heads, to the Cameraman, the lighting man, everyone else so that they knew exactly how I was going to shoot every scene, but I've never done that before. [INT: And for the stunts specifically--] No storyboard, we would just say, he comes over here, he goes over this, we'll have a camera here, a cam--all verbal. All verbal. [INT: Right.] Like, you know, the New Testament has nothing written by Jesus. It's all verbal. [INT: But somebody's got to be writing--Somebody's gotta be down something here in order to--] Oh, they take notes. [INT: Got it, okay.] But I don't like to freeze anything into a drawing, that's the one thing that I did not pick up from Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock], which was his manner of storyboarding an entire film, and then shooting it that way. Hitchcock said that the film was over in his mind after he had the storyboards. There's a wonderful story I can tell you about Hitchcock, that was told to me by Herb Gardner, who was Writer back in the ‘60s [1960s], he wrote ‘A Thousand Clowns.’ And he was asked to come out to Hollywood to write a script for Hitchcock in the ‘60s. And he was flattered and he asked for, you know, what was the idea and Hitchcock said, just come out here and we'll talk. He goes out to Hitchcock's office, and he's presented with about a hundred or several hundred storyboards of a whole movie, and he realizes that all Hitchcock wants him to do, is write the captions, you know? Write the dialogue, what they say, 'cause Hitchcock had the whole movie drawn out. And Gardner was very disappointed, 'cause he wanted to write a Hitchcock film but not that way, so he met with Hitchcock, and he said, “You know I really don't think I can do this, 'cause I'm not a caption writer. But I do have some questions, for example,” he said--and this is a key to Hitchcock's philosophy, he said, “you have a drawing here of a guy in a blue suit and he's sitting at an outdoor cafe somewhere, appears to be Paris.” Hitchcock said, "That's correct." And then he said, “And then in the very next panel, he's falling off this bridge, which appears to be the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge [Stanton Island, New York], and Hitchcock said, "Yes, that's correct." And he said, “I don't quite understand how you--how do you get this guy from sitting at an outdoor cafe in one shot, and the very next shot he's falling off this bridge.” And Hitchcock said, "The crew goes there." And Gardner said, “No, I understand that the crew goes there and films it, but how do you get the audience there?” And Hitchcock said, I'll never forget this, he said, "Mr. Gardner, the audience will go where I take them, and they'll be very happy to be there I assure you." [INT: Great, great.] Now, that's the kind of confidence that it takes to direct a movie. "The audience will go where I take them, and they'll be very happy to be there I assure you." [INT: Love it.] Now you look at Hitchcock's films through the prism of that statement, and you get it, totally. [INT: And you do this as well.]

INT: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT stunts. Major physical stuff; explosions, bullets, the whole number.

WF: Well, there's a guy called Buddy Joe Hooker--[INT: I know.]--who was the stunt coordinator who I've worked with many times and we had to do this with a Berber population, for the most part, in Ouarzazate, Morocco. And the Berber--the film was set in Yemen. We couldn't go to Yemen at that time, I have now made strong contacts with the Yemen ambassador to the United Nations, and he's invited me to Yemen, but, I couldn't at that time, very dangerous. But the Berbers are originally Yemeni. So we found a Berber village in Morocco and shot there, and a lot of the stunts that you see in the film are done by these Berber people. They were trained by Buddy Joe Hooker. Again, I would lay out what I had in mind; there was a massacre in one seen, and the way people got hit and fell, and it's not all that easy to get a group of people who have never even seen a movie, to go out and perform in one. It was very difficult, but very rewarding. I enjoyed that experience a lot.

INT: Have you ever been disappointed in a stunt? Where you've wanted to re-do it?

WF: Almost always. Years later, I will get a better idea for something in the shower, and the picture's done. Most recently I did a DVD for CRUISING, a film I made 27 years ago, and I made--there was no other footage although there's 40 minutes missing that I had to cut for the ratings board, and they were going to put--Warner Bros. did the DVD, they wanted to put this 40 minutes back into the picture, and put it out “unrated,” but we couldn't find the footage, it's gone. And originally the film was made by UA [United Artists] and what UA used to perennially do is take all the outtakes from all their films and just burn them, throw them out. But what I did do in making the DVD of CRUISING is different transitions, I colored scenes differently, in other words I changed the lighting on some of the scenes using digital imagery. And I reexamined the picture totally, in terms of what I could do on a digital keyboard, as opposed to what was possible when we were printing the film in 35mm. I also took the soundtrack, which was originally mixed monaural and remixed the entire soundtrack into 5.1 Stereo, adding sounds, subtracting certain things, greater emphasis. When I originally mixed CRUISING and THE EXORCIST and a lot of the films from the ‘70s [1970s], there was something on the mixing panel called the “Academy Filter.” So you'd go out and mix a film to where it sounded really beautiful, and you'd sign off on it, and then the Mixer had to press a little button that took the entire soundtrack and clipped off the highs and the lows. So they wouldn't distort, so to speak, in theaters when you printed an optical track. And this was a terrible process, that was extremely limiting and unforgiving and it ruined a number of soundtracks that I'm aware of, not just my own, but these guys from the Sound Academy got together and decided what is an acceptable soundtrack, at how many DBs [decibels] of volume and how low it could get in terms of bottom sounds, how high pitched you could get, and it equalized every soundtrack in the world. It's not always noticeable, but to the Directors who mix their own pictures, it was a disaster. So in making the new soundtrack of CRUISING I had to undo that “Academy Filter” process which no longer exists. [INT: That's great. I actually remember this, and have had frustrating results with it.] It's ridiculous, you know. It was an arbitrary thing that limited great Sound Engineers and Directors with interesting ideas from pushing the envelope.

INT: When do you, as a Director, feel, in quote, “most alive?”

WF: Mostly in the cutting room. I find the experience of shooting a film, and always have, extremely frustrating, and the experience of editing a film, liberating. Totally liberating. And I see multiple possibilities in the cutting room, with film that I've shot than I do when I'm on the set. There are many pressures on the set. Time, light, we all know these pressures, an Actors ability to convey a scene the way the Director would like it conveyed. The compromises that are made between all of the technicians and the performers, and the Director's vision; many compromises. But in the editing room, suddenly like the cherry blossoms that bloom in Washington [Washington D.C.] in the spring, come all these beautiful possibilities of changing the structure of a scene, changing the order of a scene, moving a scene that was intended to be at this point, moving it to another point. All of which, you don't really think about when you're shooting a film. As much as I've said to you, I don't follow scripts that much on the set, you do have a script, you do have an idea. All these people are gathered in a certain place, because you ask them to be there, and you asked them to be there because it was originally in the script. So, there's a wonderful thing in Elia Kazan's book, where Kazan talks about early on in his own career as a film Director, after he'd achieved great success on the stage, he knew nothing about how to envision a scene. And so he went to one of the great Directors, John Ford, who he admired and he said, "How do you work on the set? How do you use the script on the set? What do you do?" And Ford said, "You don't use the script." He said, "I never bring the script onto the set." And Kazan said, "Well, why not?" He said, "You know the script. When you get to the set, you know the script. You have to know the script. And now tell the story in pictures. Tell the story that you already know in terms of pictures, not in terms of what it says on a piece of paper." Interesting advice. [INT: Well spoken.]

INT: Your preparation the night before?

WF: What I always do is plan a set of shots the night before, or even days before every day, and I discuss those with the crew. Well, tomorrow we're going to this, this, this, and this. My hope is that we'll get 10 setups, or whatever it may be, 20. A couple of pages of the script. I'll always go through that and get the input from the crew as well. So that, they always come to the set prepared. I've heard stories where a crew will come to the set and the camera's all set up and the lights are set to film this way, and the Director comes in and says, "I think I'd like to shoot over here today." I'm sure you've heard those stories, and you can imagine how frustrating that is. So I always try to avoid that, and when I get to the set in the morning, whatever it is, everything's set for the first shot. I might come in, look through the lens and move the camera slightly or a few feet, but that's about it. And in the last few years, I've come to the point where I don't even look through the camera. I know what the lens is getting at that point.

INT: Where do you sit though [on set]? Or stand? Are you--

WF: There are no chairs on a set that I work on, and haven't been for 25 or 30 years. I don't have chairs. You don't come there to sit down, you know? And I tell people, before you come to the set, take a piss, 'cause you don't come here to piss, you don't come here to eat, and you don't come to sit down. I hate chairs on a set. I don't have them. They get in the way. Usually, when you want to change the setup, you've got to move all the chairs out of the way. And you'll see a chair with six Producers are sitting, so I always tell the studio guys or the Producers who might be involved, “Stand up over there, behind the camera. You don't need to sit down.” And I don't want the prop man or anyone else fucking around with chairs. [INT: What do you with video village? Or do you have it?] I use video now, I stand in front of the monitor and look at it. I won't sit down. Sometimes, because I've gotten older, I'll use an apple box, if my legs get tired. I'll have an old apple box that the prop man gives me, and I'll turn it on it's side and I'll sit on that. But no one else has a chair unless they're older than me. [INT: That's interesting, and this has always been sort of--] Oh, as long as I can remember, 'cause when I first started, every motherfucker and his uncle had a chair on the set. You know, there were 20 chairs! 30 chairs! More chairs than set. And so I just--forget that, this is a waste of personnel and time and money; they all have their name on it. And this is true of the Actors too. I tell the Actors right up front, "No chairs, you've got a dressing room. You know, if you need to go sit down, go in there, but don't sit on the set."

INT: Let's talk about some more Actors, some more, because obviously it's one of the--we're the people--[WF: Well, chairs are more interesting.] I know they are, and you've got an attitude about chairs, but Actors it may shift. You may have a variety about it. [WF: May shit?] Have shift, shift. Some of them may, depending on who you're working with. [WF: Try and be clear Jeremy.] Have you ever had any that you really were disappointed with, where you've even wanted to replace an Actor in a shot? Or a scene? Or have you ever had to fire an Actor?

WF: I have. I'm trying to--I can't remember anything specific, where I've had, other than before the film started for some reason, or others. I mentioned Stacy Keach and THE EXORCIST, but I'm trying to remember if I've ever had to replace an Actor and I really can't. But, I have to say that I was extremely disappointed in working with Al Pacino on CRUISING; and for a variety of reasons. [INT: Did you know that up front? Or in the process?] No, I mean the first day of shooting, he showed up three hours late, and the Producer and I were on completion for the picture, Jerry Weintraub and I. Anything over seven million dollars… anything under seven million dollars we could keep, as part of our fee. And we had a four million dollar budget, four-and-a-half. Pacino got three of that. And anything over seven million dollars, we had to pay for. The first day of shooting, Pacino was three hours late coming to the set. We had an APB [All-points bulletin] out for him. We had cops, people looking for him, had no idea where he was, went to the apartment he was renting. Shows up three hours late like absolutely nothing was wrong. "Hey guys, how you doing?" Meanwhile, I'm sitting there with a crew that sees the whole film collapsing on day one. And he wanted to be in this picture, he fought to get in it. In fact again, we were negotiating with Richard Gere to play the lead, and Gere wanted to do it; and I liked Gere. And then I got a call from my Agent who was also Pacino's Agent, saying that he gave Pacino the script that I had written of CRUISING and Pacino wanted to do it. So we switched "Gere's" so to speak, and went to Pacino; you know, happily. And he shows up three hours late, he gets out of the car that finally located him and picked him up, and his Makeup Artist came to me and said, “Look, this goes on all the time with him. If you want him on the set at nine o'clock, call him at six. And he'll show up around nine, and whether consciously or unconsciously, he will believe that he's in control. And that he rat-fucked you and it may not even be conscious.” So we had what was known as a Pacino call. If we wanted him at nine, we called him at six. And sometimes he might show up at eight even, or eight-thirty. And be two and half hours late, but be right on time. Then he would come to the set, he would never know the pages. Never know what we were doing, although I had told him, or what the pages were that he was supposed to have memorized. He didn't memorize anything. And I said to him, early on in this process, "Why do you do this? Why don't you come to the set prepared? What do you have to do the night before, that you can't prepare tomorrow's work?" He said, "I want spontaneity. I want to be spontaneous, and I know you love spontaneity and I think I can do that if I look at the pages just before I go into the shot." Now, I had often worked that way, but I work that way largely with amateurs who were playing their own profession in a scene, or with people like Hackman [Gene Hackman] and Scheider [Roy Scheider], who had been so prepared by having hung out with the people they were playing, the original cops, that they could go out and improvise a scene the way the cops would do it. They could play it the way the cops would do it. But this was not true of Al in CRUISING.

WF: I must say, I was extremely disappointed in working with him [Al Pacino] when the whole thing was over. And now I've revisited the film [CRUISING], 27 years later, and though I see certain problems in his performance, I think it's good. [INT: It is good.] I think it's good, I think he caught not only an edge, but a kind of vulnerability. A naiveté that I didn't really see in this character when we started. So looking at his performance, 27 years later, I have a much better opinion of it, but the process itself was devastating. [INT: Got you. Could you still direct him?] Today? [INT: No, no, then? I mean obviously his sense of responsibility to just being a responsible artist, being where he's supposed to be on time, no. But when you wanted to shift or change or adjust something with him, was he receptive?] It's one of the most compromised performances I've ever worked on. It was not like you could say, you know, "Make alterations," easily. Although, we would often, almost inevitably, do 15 takes of every scene he was in, until he got himself up to speed. And you know what that does to the other Actors in a scene? They know what they're doing, they've come to the set prepared. They know who their characters are. The frustration level on other characters is just outstanding and destructive. [INT: Would you end up--] He didn't seem to care, but--[INT: Would you end up shooting the other Actors first then? Knowing that he wasn't? Like, if you had a two-shot with him and the girl, whatever.] Sometimes. Sometimes. I mean, often so much of the film was about him that you had to get him down with something. But there was also the problem that I don't believe Al fully understood, either what I was doing there, or the complexity of that character in that situation. That's my belief now, and I have no grudge against him, it's just a fact. That's how I feel. He may have a totally different impression of this. I haven't spoken to him in about 25 years.

INT: Did you get to rehearse, and in fact, do you like to rehearse?

WF: I don't like to rehearse. I did rehearse that [on CRUISING], in order to not waste film while he [Al Pacino] was learning his part. The way I work with Actors normally and have for many years, the most important thing is the casting; if they're cast right, you're gonna be okay, somehow. But then I will have long conversations with the Actors. For example, which I just did in the film BUG with Ashley Judd and Harry Connick [Harry Connick Jr.] and Michael Shannon and all the great Actors that are in it. We'll have long conversations about what this is, and who they are, and they will verbalize what they think and how they feel and the approach to the scene, and I'll tell them how I intend to shoot the picture, and then I say to them, "Don't count on a second or third take. I want spontaneity.” Doesn't mean I don't want you to know the lines, you should know the lines, but then I wanted--because I've found in my career, that if I had done 12 or 15 takes of a scene, the one I wound up printing and going with was inevitably the first printed take, that's where the spontaneity was, and you can go on and on and go for perfection, or he says the line perfectly, but there's no life in it. So I've told them, “I want spontaneity,” and that means one take. I'll do a second take if a light falls into the shot, or if the boom microphone drops in. Tilt up over there, and you'll see what I'm talking about, there's a microphone over every one of these interviews that Jeremy does, Chad just tilt it up to show it to you, but very often this microphone gets in the shot. [INT: Yeah.] There's usually a man at the end of it, now it's set on a tripod, but often the Boom Operator, this is called a “boom,” this whole thing, and the Boom Operator will have an accident, so then I'll do another take. Or let's say the Cameraman falls asleep while he's filming the scene and lets the camera drop down facing the floor. I'll definitely do another take then. Or if the Operator tells me the shot's out of focus, he missed focus on something.

INT: I'm interested in the idea of rehearsal even beforehand, before the shooting itself. Have you ever had time where you've spent four days, five days, a week rehearsing? Now Pinter's [Harold Pinter] play I suspect you did.

WF: We rehearsed Pinter's play THE BIRTHDAY PARTY for two weeks before I shot it, and could have put it on the stage. I also did that with THE EXORCIST. I took a room above a restaurant, called Al & Dick's Steak House in New York, and that room used to be the speakeasy run by Texas Guinan, in the days of the speakeasy. And guys used to go up there to drink during prohibition when it was illegal. And now it was a storage room, and I rehearsed THE EXORCIST up there for three weeks. [INT: Who did you work with?] The Actors. [INT: I mean but, all of them?] And the Cameraman would look--yeah, all of them, at various times. [INT: Including Max [Max von Sydow]?] Yes, and the script was so rehearsed, that as we came to the end of it, and I had them give full performances up there, of the film script, with stops to change the scenery; it was dead. When I came to shoot it, I knew that they were so frozen in their roles, that they were not gonna give a lifelike performance. And so I said to them, "Forget everything we did here. You got the lines, you know the lines. Forget all this crap, I'm going to re-stage it now. I'm not going to tell you where to go necessarily, certainly not going to tell you to go where we went in rehearsal, because it's frozen!" And this is often what happens if you see even the best stage plays. The Actors are so frozen into perfection, and getting the lines right, that they can't behave. If I have you rehearse 42 times, picking up this cup a certain way, switching it to the other hand, going like this, taking a sip and then speaking, and you do that, you're going to drain the life out of it. Rather than saying to the Actor, "Well, there's a cup there." [INT: Deal with it.] "If you want to use it, deal with it, if you don't, don't. You have room to get up out of this chair and walk away if you feel like it, and we'll cover it. And if I like it, I'll keep it." I want a certain danger on the set. A certain edge in the performances. Recently, Roger Ebert reviewed this film I just made, well, last year, and one of the things he said was "This is the first film I've ever seen..." this is BUG, "...where I was actually afraid for the Actors in the movie." And that to me is manna [Hebrew for food]! That's the best thing I could hear, because spontaneity is what I'm after first, not perfection. As opposed to spontaneity and perfection, I'll take spontaneity every time. Which is why I like to work with a lot of people who haven't acted before, 'cause they don't have any Actor's tricks. They don't have a technique. They haven't studied with Stella Adler to learn techniques, which are repeatable and repeatable and repeatable until they become stiff. [INT: Got it.]