INT: Can you tell me about who signed you into the DGA, and when you joined, and all that? 

PB: Well, I joined, I think I joined for TARGETS, I guess. I don't know if that was the signatory to the DGA or not. Well, maybe it was PICTURE SHOW [THE LAST PICTURE SHOW]. One of the two. I had to join, and you have to get three signatures from members of the Guild to become a member, even if you have a job. So on my application, I got the three signatures, one under the other, and it was John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Howard Hawks. It was quite something. I think probably the only document in their lives that they all signed together. [INT: That they all signed. That's very funny.] It was pretty impressive, I must say.

INT: A lot of the work that you've done in the last ten years has been for cable and--[PB: And network.]--and network, and I wonder if you can talk about how you approach working under much tighter budgets, much shorter schedules, and if you enjoy it. Is it a challenge? Is it something that you... Do you approach it with goodwill? 

PB: I feel a little bit like Allan Dwan who said, you know, “No matter what--" I think it was--I think John Ford said it, "No matter what the picture is, I enjoy being on the set." He said, "I really wouldn't be--," Ford once said he'd be quite happy if that's all he did in his whole life, was get up every morning and go on the set, be around the crew and the Actors. I find that to be like home. I always am a little anticipatory, a little bit anxious, before I go to make a movie. And the minute I get to where the trucks are, and the cables, and the lights, and the crew and everything, I say, “What was I nervous about? This is home.” It's like coming home, and I lose any tension that might have had. It's every time, it happens, whether I'm acting or directing. It's like home. Feels familiar, feels like fun. So I don't have a problem with it. I don't like being rushed, but it's a challenge, so the big difference--people say, "What's the difference between doing a movie for television or cable or theaters?" I say there's no difference, it's just you have less time to do it. So you--and you--so since you have less time, you should even know more clearly what you want, only shoot what you need, and shoot as little as possible, as few times as possible. That's it. The other thing is maybe you don't--if you're doing a wide shot, a long shot, maybe you don't have it quite as long. Maybe you make it a little tighter, so it's not quite as far away, because television's smaller. But then, everything ends up on television, so you end up, even for features now, you say well, move in a little bit. [INT: Right.] So…

INT: It seemed to me, when watching the Pete Rose movie that you weren't--[PB: HUSTLE.] HUSTLE, sorry, that you had found a way, if I'm completely wrong about this, forget it, but did you find a way to stage things so that you were not turning around much of the time? [PB: Sometimes. Sometimes, yeah.] And yet, it worked. You sort of, that film has terrific pace. That's a very-- 

PB: Again, we were in a hurry. We kept it going. We shot the whole thing in twenty days, I think. It might have been twenty-one, but it was short. And I broke some rules on that for myself. I had to, because it was so fast and there was so much to shoot. And there were a couple of scenes where we had long dialogue scenes. Like there was one I remember where we had the two Actors, Pete Rose [played by Tom Sizemore] and the other Actor, the guy playing his buddy, washing a car. Pete was washing a car and the guy comes up and they talk, and they walk around the cars. And I said, I said to the camera Director, the Director of Photography [Cinematographer] who's a very good, very fast Canadian Cameraman, I worked with him before, I like him a lot, James Gardner. He's very good. He's fast. I said, "Jim, I don't know. This is gonna be bitchy, tricky. Why don't you watch what I do with the Actors? I'm gonna stage it without thinking about the camera, and you see what you think you can do with this, how we can shoot this fast." So we staged it the way we thought it ought to be with the Actors, the movement, what would be most interesting. And I didn't think about the camera. I just thought about the Actors like a stage play, like I didn't care about the camera at all. I just--and Jim was watching, and he said, “Okay, I think we can do it with two cameras. We'll have to shoot it twice. We'll shoot it…” he suggested this, put a camera here steady, and the other one moving. You know, you can grab all this stuff from here moving, and the other one you get the close-ups, and then, you have to then switch the cameras and we'll do it again. That's what we did, and we shot it haphazard. Grabbed it, whatever we got. And I liked it. I thought it was totally unlike anything I'd ever done before, but I liked it 'cause it created some certain shots that you never would think of. That's an interesting shot. I mean, it would go from here to there, and things. And I said to the Cameraman, “Just grab it.” So it was like, in a way, it was absolutely apropos to the subject matter, 'cause it was about shooting, because they were baseball players, and sometimes you don't know what the baseball players--you don't know what the baseball game's gonna do. You don't have any idea what's gonna happen, so you grab it. Shoot it! He's running, get him! So we did the same thing, we shot it like a sporting event, and we shot it.

INT: Did you use multiple cameras throughout the shoot? [PB: I'll often use two cameras.] When did you start that practice? 

PB: I was using two cameras for a number of shows I did for television. I directed an episode of THE SOPRANOS. We often used two cameras to avoid having to wait. So we'd use two cameras and get the medium over shoulder and the close up at the same time. You compromise a little bit, but it's not enough to, not enough to really worry about.

INT: THE CAT'S MEOW is a film, again, feels like you were waiting to make. I wonder if you could talk about, you know, how many years you had been involved with it, was it developed by someone else prior to you, and how it came to you, 'cause it's so much your film, and it's something that I think of as a personal film of yours. 

PB: Yeah. It's interesting, because it wasn't. But thirty years before we made it, thirty, three-zero years before we made it, I was interviewing Orson [Orson Welles] for the book [THIS IS ORSON WELLES] and he told me this story about how Hearst [William Randolph Hearst] shot Thomas Ince [Thomas H. Ince]. He had heard the story from Charlie Lederer [Charles Lederer], the Screenwriter, who was Marion Davies', Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies' nephew, was Charlie Lederer. So it was something he grew up with, and he told the story to Orson, because when Orson was doing CITIZEN KANE, Mankiewicz [Herman J. Mankiewicz] told him the story, because they wanted to put it in CITIZEN KANE, that Hearst/Kane, was jealous of his mistress' affections that Chaplin [Charlie Chaplin] was showing his mistress, got angry, decided to shoot Chaplin, or in a fit of anger shot Chaplin, thought it was Chaplin, turned out it wasn't Chaplin, it was Ince, he may shot the wrong guy. I said what a story. Now at this time when we did this, we thought it was too risky to put it in the book. [INT: Still? Even twenty years after Hearst's death?] At that time, many years after, still we thought well, you know, we better not do this. And at the time when it happened, I just thought when he told it to me, I thought that's a wild story. And he said that's how Louella Parsons became a famous columnist, because she saw it happen. And in order to keep her quiet, he gave her a lifetime contract. So poor Tom Ince took the fall for Charlie Chaplin. That's the story. Weird. I went on an ocean--and the thing plays on an ocean--on a yacht cruising from San Pedro to San Diego. Well the Telluride Film Festival had a one year decided to extend the festival by giving all of us celebs a free trip on the Queen Elizabeth to Southampton from New York, and all we'd have to do would be to talk to the passengers once. So I said fine, so we went. On the ship, along with me on that trip was Roger Ebert, and he was deconstructing CITIZEN KANE for the passengers. So one lunch, we were talking, and I told him this story, and I think it was probably the first time I'd ever told the story that Orson told me. And he said, “That'd make an interesting movie.” And I said, “That hadn't occurred to me.” I get home to New York from that voyage, and on my desk is a script called CALIFORNIA CURSE, about that incident. And I thought that is weird. And I called Roger and said, "You won't believe what's on my desk." I told him, he said, "Sounds like you oughtta make the thing." And that's how it happened.

INT: So it was--it came to you via a Producer who was trying to put it together? 

PB: A Producer who thought I'd be right for it, since I know about Old Hollywood, thought it'd be perfect for me. I was the first person he sent it to, they'd never produced a movie. They just sent it to me out of the blue. It was based on a play that the guy had written called THE CAT'S MEOW, and all I did was change, I said, "I think that's a better title than CALIFORNIA CURSE.” And turned out it wasn't that great a title, 'cause nobody knew what it meant. I just thought it was a good title. It means “the best,” but nobody knew that. And we did quite a bit of rewriting, both before and just before--before we took out the first forty pages, and restructured it a bit. And then, Eddie Izzard had some very good notes on the third act, which we rewrote just before we started to shoot. We shot the whole thing in Berlin and in Greece. [INT: Was it a fast shoot?] Yeah, thirty days.

INT: The film [THE CAT'S MEOW] technically is like a textbook of how to make a movie. I remember the first time I watched it through, I thought this is just a summation of craft. And it's amazing that it was made so rapidly. Do you feel like the work that you were doing prior to that for television helped? 

PB: Yeah. 'Cause I knew the rhythm. There's a certain rhythm on television, there's a certain rhythm, and once you get into that rhythm it doesn't seem that bad. It doesn't seem like, "Oh my god, we're racing." I mean, you sort of say, "Well, we've got time to walk across the room and have a drink of water," and I mean it's just you're shooting more than not, and you have to have a good Cameraman who will get the shot ready faster. You can't wait forever for lighting. If I'd had a faster Cameraman on CAT'S MEOW, we would've finished quicker, but we had-he was French, and he was good, he was very good, but he was a bit slow. Otherwise, we would have done it quicker. It's a certain rhythm that you have to find, and a lot of it has to do with not stopping and saying okay, what do we do now? You just have to go, "Okay, here's the next shot." You always have to keep moving. Roger [Roger Corman] told me that once before I made TARGETS, and it holds up. He said, "Never say-never say, ‘Okay, let's see, what do I do now?’ Never say, ‘Okay, let me have a minute to--‘ No, the minute you say, “Cut, print,” you say, ‘We're over here.’” So it's, "Cut, print, we're over here." And so that there's no time for the crew to say, "Oh, let's take a break, let's read the trades, have a cigarette, and--If you're caught reading the trades on a Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock] set, you were fired." I can see why, it's nothing more irritating. [INT: Yeah, that's very funny. Well, start looking for another job.] Something.

INT: But the performances [THE CAT'S MEOW] were also incredibly good. I think Ed Herrmann [Edward Herrmann] and Kirsten Dunst, was that a cast that you had time to rehearse with, prior to--? 

PB: Yeah, we rehearsed for about a week, over a week. And again, the dialogue was never written in stone. [INT: Really?] No, we juggled it. We shook it up. Some scenes were pretty much the way they were, but we'd shake 'em up just before. We said, “Change this.” I do that on purpose now. And Eddie Izzard was very good at that, and he and Kirsten, virtually every scene between Eddie and Kirsten was rewritten repeatedly, and then, finally just before we'd shoot it, we did it. Same thing--[INT: And he'd come up with the new dialogue?] Yeah. Yeah. He'd say, “This is--this should start here and end here, not...” He's very brilliant, Eddie. Brilliant Actor, brilliant mind. And he had very good ideas for the overall thing, you know. A lot like River Phoenix, when I did a picture with River, I did his last film [THE THING CALLED LOVE]. That was a film that I didn't really love making it, because it was done under difficult personal circumstances, but--[INT: This is THE THING CALLED LOVE.] THE THING CALLED LOVE, but again, I had wonderful Actors, and I asked them to help me write it, 'cause the script needed work. And they were all in their early twenties, and this was a story about kids in their early twenties, and I thought, “I'm not in my early twenties, so let's all work on this.”

INT: It's very interesting that by giving an Actor, you know, their head in that sense, you're really enlisting them in the filmmaking process. You're turning over a lot of film to the Actor, and I think that shows a great deal of security on your part as a Director. 

PB: Well, I know I can change it, and I can say, "No, let's not do that, let's do this." But it opens it up so that they feel like they're contributing, and they're, you know, working with them, you know? Don Segal, who did an awful lot of pictures at Warner Bros., said that he watched a lot of Directors because he was doing montages at Warner Bros. for years. So he knew all these different Directors. He said Bogart [Humphrey Bogart] was often very difficult, or disinterested. With Hawks [Howard Hawks], he was riveted. Why? Because Hawks made him a part of it. Hawks discussed it with him, included his interest, asked for his interest, you know. And so I always felt that it was important to get the Actors into it that way, by--and throw it to them, say, “How would you say it, what would you do here?” And River Phoenix turned out to be one of the most gifted Actors that I've ever worked with, and also very smart, and had a real sense of what the overall thing, of what each element meant to the overall thing, which was rare. I said to him, "You'd make a good Director." He said, "I always wanted to direct." I said, "Will you use me, 'cause I'd like to act for you?" We used to kid around about it. And one day I came in and I said, "You know, I think we should do this without a cut." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "I think we should shoot this whole scene without a cut, and not cover it". He said, "You mean not cover it at all?" I said, "No." "So we just shoot the scene and then that's it?" "Yeah." "Oh, I love that." And he wasn't a stage Actor, but he loved the idea. I said, "Just do the scene. Camera will pan a little bit." And it was about four or five very long scenes with Samantha [Samantha Mathis] and River where they don't--we don't cut. And they--River would-from then on when we did it, every day he'd come on the set, he says, "Can we do this without a cut?" I said, "No, we can't. This is cross-cut," I mean. [INT: This isn’t ROPE.] Let's do it without a cut. He loved it. That's when you know you've got a good Actor, is when they-they love doing it in one piece, 'cause Actors generally would love that. It's the Director that loves to cross-cut and cut up everything, and shoot it, and then he's got all these different options. The Actors know it's much easier to do it in one piece.

INT: How do you feel about not making any protection when you find a way to do it in one? Or do you? 

PB: I never shot protection, except for David Chase on THE SOPRANOS because he was so miserable if I didn't shoot him--give him a way out. And that was because he wanted to be able to change the dialogue. He would want to be able to shorten the scene. And I understood that, because he was--he kept writing even after it was shot, and he'd write it by saying, I don't know, “Take five lines out of this.” And if I didn't give him the cutaway, he couldn't do it. He'd go nuts. [INT: Did you like directing that episode?] Yeah, yeah. I did. I did. It's hard, because you come in, it's a hit, you know? So what are you gonna do? The Actors know what they're doing, you just try to serve the text and Actors the best you can, make the Actors look good. [INT: Is that the only episode of a show, episodic you've done?] Yeah, I did a pilot once. But when I shoot a scene without a cut, and I decide--and I don't have any coverage, I feel to shoot coverage is like doing a high trapeze, what do you call it? One of those high wire acts with a net. With a net, it's easy. But if you don't have a net, you better be good. So that's a decision you have to make. I've never regretted it. Well, I guess on AT LONG LAST LOVE, I regretted it a bit. [INT: Yeah, I think you asked that question of Joe Lewis, and he says, “Oh no, a man must have courage.”] Courage. Yes, a man must have courage. Well, that's what it boils down to, because that's it. You're making that decision right then, and that's the decision you're gonna live with the rest of your life.

INT: Do you edit yourself? Do you work very closely with the cutter, or do you like them to put together an assembly of your work and look at it? 

PB: That's changed over the years. It used to be that I would not only--at first, the first two pictures, I physically cut myself. Then the next few pictures, three, four, five pictures, I marked every cut. I would say to the Editor, "Start here, S, keep the S in, cut C. I put the C on cut. Put--take the C out," and that would be what she'd do, or he. It was usually a she. And I wouldn't allow them to cut it--[6:23:34;06 to 06:24:19;01 background noise]--unless I'd marked it. Had to do it, otherwise, I'd go nuts, 'cause I'd say, "What'd you do? What'd you do?" Then I went on for quite a while. With the advent of the computer, which was in the ‘90s [1990s], it was so easy to fix it if they did it wrong, that I let them cut it and I let them do an assembly based on my notes, generally speaking. And a lot of the time, it was fine. On THE CAT'S MEOW, I let him do an assembly, a sequence-by-sequence assembly, and a lot of the time it was fine.

INT: There's a story I once heard about Lewis Milestone, shot a film in Europe, they put it together in Hollywood, he got back from the shoot and they showed him the assembly, and he said, "Return the picture to dailies form." 

PB: Yeah, didn't like it. I did that on a couple of sequences. [INT: Go all the way back to dailies?] I did that in TARGETS. [INT: Really?] Yeah. The guy cut it, I had a cutter for a little while, and he did such a bad job that I had to go back to dailies, 'cause it was hopeless. [INT: Almost as a way to reorient yourself to the--] Yeah, it was just terrible. He cut it so badly, I said--I mean, otherwise it would've had too many splices. Now, you don't have to worry about that, 'cause, you know, electronic splicing.

INT: Do you like what the computer has done to editing? Do you see any reason to mourn the loss of the flatbed, or--? 

PB: Yeah, because I think that it's too easy now. I love it, because I shoot very little film, you know. So for example, on THE SOPRANOS, I'm not aware of what I shot, but I mean on MASK, for example, the head of physical production came over to me and said, “You know, you don't shoot much movies--you don't shoot much film. You know, you could shoot your whole movie with Walter Hill short ends, was his line.” And on SOPRANOS, the head of post-production came over to me at a party in Hollywood and said, "I love your dailies." I said, "Oh, thanks." "They're so expressive." I said, "Thank you." She says, "Every Director that we've worked with on THE SOPRANOS has shot between a 100 and 150,000 feet per episode. You shot 59." So I didn't--you know, I don't shoot that much. But that all comes from cutting my own stuff.

INT: Tell me about how you work with the monitor on the set, or do you? 

PB: If it's a complicated shot where the camera has to move around, I'll watch it on the monitor. If it's just a camera set up, you know, if it's a pretty simple camera set up, I'll sit next to the camera. [INT: Do you think it affects the Actors?] I think the Actors like it if you're there. I think they perform better if you're there, if you're right there, 'cause you're the audience. The Director's the first audience, you know, for a movie--for everything. So...

INT: I realized when you mentioned River Phoenix that I inadvertently skipped that film [THAT THING CALLED LOVE], and I'm just wondering if I've inadvertently skipped anything that you'd like to talk about. I know I asked you about NOISES OFF, which I've always--and that was fascinating, the way you solved that. 

PB: NOISES OFF, let's see, what did I do? TEXASVILLE, well TEXASVILLE as I told you was really a much better film in the long version. There was NOISES OFF, THAT THING CALLED LOVE, then I did a lot of television work, then I did THE CAT'S MEOW, then more television work. THE MYSTERY OF NATALIE WOOD was interesting. [INT: That's right, the Natalie Wood film. There's an extraordinary sequence of her on the movie set, where her mother makes her cry.] Oh, yeah. [INT: It's just an amazing scene, a heartbreaking thing to see.] Yeah, with the butterfly. [INT: Yeah, yeah. And it's very beautifully shot. Who's the Director, though? Is it who you have in the movie? There's the Director of that movie, I'm trying to think.] I can't think of his name. [INT: It wasn't Dieterle [William Dieterle], was it?] No, it wasn't Dieterle, no. He always wore gloves. [INT: Was that interesting, recreating a movie set of that period?] Yeah, yeah. That was fun. We shot all of that in Australia, the whole picture. And that was fun, I enjoyed that picture. I enjoyed making it. It was tricky, but we did it, 38 days, we had a little more time 'cause they wanted a four-hour movie. What they call a four-hour, which is really three hours. And then in America, it was three hours, which is really two hours and fifteen minutes. [INT: Yeah. I'm trying to remember, did they show it on two nights?] No, they didn't. They did in Europe. Here, they did it in one night. It was interesting. We did a couple of very unusual things that nobody's done before, which is what I liked, which is that we used real people talking about Natalie, and they were talking to me, like you're talking to me. I would be sitting where you are, and I'd ask questions, and then we'd shoot that, and then we used it. We had about fifteen of those real people, and they became like narrators. And I found that you could jump time really quickly, because you'd go to a narrator, and they'd say and then she wanted to get this part, and you're into the next scene. So it was a great way of telling a cradle-to-grave story, 'cause you could jump time without the audience feeling like you'd jumped. That was one thing. The other thing we did was we used montages to bridge time, and we'd use the real Natalie Wood, the real Robert Wagner, the real Warren Beatty. They didn't talk, but you saw images. Luckily, we had Actors who looked enough like them that it wasn't jarring. In fact, it sort of helped, 'cause we decided not to show, one of the theories was not to show our Actors actually doing scenes that you could rent with Natalie Wood. We'd see a rehearsal, or we'd see you know, basically rehearsals or getting ready to rehearse, or whatever. But we didn't see an actual scene. So what happened was, the clips of the real Natalie and the real Wagner and so on, became like the public Natalie Wood, the public R.J. Wagner, and what we were showing was the backstage. So our Actors looked a little different. Yeah, well, we're backstage. It was interesting, 'cause everybody was wondering, we didn't know if it would work. The Producers had thought of trying to do that, but they said they didn't know if it would work. I said, “It'll work if we get Actors that look like the real people.”

INT: Do you find that when you do, 'cause I know you also did the Pete Rose [HUSTLE], that when you do a bio-pic, you're best off forgetting that the person is real. Does that help you kind of step away from making it stiff or artificial? 

PB: Well, I think you have to kind of create, make them as real, make them as human as they can, and bear keeping in mind that you're dealing with people who were--who did exist or live. I've been portrayed in a couple of movies, and I didn't like it because they didn't have anything to do with me. So I looked at Pete Rose, as did Tom Sizemore. I looked at Natalie's [Natalie Wood] pictures. I was surprised, 'cause I had thought that Natalie wasn't much of an Actress. And when I saw her pictures, ran them for the movie, I realized she was often an extraordinary Actress. I don't know how I'd missed that. It shows you that you're often thrown by whatever is happening when you're alive--when they're alive, and when things are fresh and new, you don't necessarily know how good the people are. You miss it somehow, something, some reason you don't get it. At least, I was shocked at how extraordinary she was, and how much better she was than almost any movie she did. She was better than the movie, in almost every movie that she made.

INT: What are the ones [Natalie Wood films] that you liked best? 

PB: Well, she's amazing in LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER. [INT: That's one of my favorite films, I was wondering if you'd, yeah.] I didn't love the movie, but I loved her. I thought the movie was okay, but she was like brilliant. Steve McQueen was a little awkward, but okay. But she really caught the thing. And SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, which I didn't love, but she's brilliant in it. Even WEST SIDE STORY, which is not one of my favorite movies, she's brilliant in it. Even with that accent she had to do. She's just good. REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. She was really good. INSIDE DAISY CLOVER, brilliant performance. Not a brilliant movie. So I was kind of in awe of how good she was, and wanted to portray her as sympathetically as possible. I was on her side. I also felt at a certain point, I know what you're driving at, and I can answer that. I think in a certain way, I felt the movie was the legend of Natalie Wood. We didn't call it that, we called it THE MYSTERY OF NATALIE WOOD, but it was like, you know, who knew what she was like? How do you, you know, what do you say about somebody? What's that line from TOUCH OF EVIL? "What does it matter what you say about people? He was some kind of a man.” Well, you're never gonna get it right. Who's gonna know? But you're gonna try to attempt to get the essence of it. Maybe it's the essence of Natalie Wood. I guess that's we tried to do. And often, people that talk about somebody are reflected through the person who's talking about them, as we saw in KANE [CITIZEN KANE] or other movies like that. And as we see in life. You know, somebody goes, "Oh, Bogdanovich, he's really a prick." Well, maybe I was being a prick to that person. But I might have been really sweet to somebody the next day who would say, "Oh, he's a sweetheart." Well, how do you reconcile those two things? Well maybe, you know, you're different with different people. So it's not so black and white, you know. Some people are pricks all the time, some people are nice all the time.

INT: How do you feel about, there's an exchange in your Orson Welles book [THIS IS ORSON WELLES] where Welles insists that a film directs--a good movie gets itself made, no matter who the Director is, and I think he's exaggerating to make a point, but then that leads to the whole notion of the artist isn't the important one, it's the work. He says we're lucky that we don't know anything about Shakespeare's [William Shakespeare] life, or you know, he also mentions Don Quixote. Do you agree with that? Do you think that the artist is sentimentalized and grown out of proportion? 

PB: Well, to you know, to a degree. Orson was exaggerating to make a point, and also Orson was very, very skittish about anything to do with autobiography in his movies. He didn't want people to go there. He had an almost neurotic desire not to be connected with that part of the movie. "No, I'm not Charles Foster Kane, I'm not even remotely like that, nothing to do with me…” that sort of thing. He also thought that the Director's job was overrated, that the Director didn't have as much to do with it as the Actors. As I've gotten older, I think there's something to be said for that. Nevertheless, the movies I like best are the ones where I feel in the presence of a particular storyteller, who tells the story his own way. And the way he tells it is unique to him, and you feel that he's there. So I love to watch Lubitsch [Ernst Lubitsch], 'cause you feel his presence. I love to watch Renoir [Jean Renoir], Hawks [Howard Hawks], Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock] to a degree, Orson, Keaton [Buster Keaton]. Keaton, you see. But I mean, I love to be in their company. And I don't--I think Orson meant that for the--Orson really meant that for the average movie. He did not mean it for the great movies.

INT: Well, it certainly doesn't apply to him [Orson Welles], so it's a curious statement in that way. 

PB: He left himself out of that equation. And he left most of the great filmmakers out of that equation, because you know, he loved Hawks [Howard Hawks]. I don't think there was, I don't think he doubted that Hawks had a lot to do with every film he made, that he influenced it. And you know, people behave differently with different Directors. Actors behave differently. You know, you could tell that George Cukor was wonderful with Actors, 'cause they really work hard with him, and you can see that they're trying to, you know. I remember asking Jimmy Stewart [James Stewart] one time, what it was like working with Ford [John Ford]. He said, "Well, I wanted to please him. I wanted to please him." And I think that a lot of Actors want to please the Director, and know instinctively or intuitively or because they know, what will please that particular Director, you know.

INT: It's interesting, because I always thought that I could tell how Jimmy Stewart [James Stewart] acts differently for Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock] than he does for other Directors, do you know what I mean? There's a quality, specifically when he is in VERTIGO or REAR WINDOW. It's hard to put your finger on it, but... [PB: I know what you mean, he's different than he is with Anthony Mann or Frank Capra.] Right, right. That's interesting. Well, I wonder, I mean, you know, the most amazing thing about the last four hours of sitting here talking to you is I get this enormous sense of not just history, but how much you've survived. You're very much still there, still making film and still excited by it, and still able to go out and do an enormously difficult job, after having been through a great deal of turbulence in your life, too. Do you feel that, would you do it again, I guess is the-- 

PB: The whole thing? [INT: Yeah.] I'd do it differently. I, you know, I'd do it differently. There are certain things I--certain pictures I wouldn't do, or I would do differently, or whatever. I mean, that's it. You can't do it back. You learn from your mistakes, and then you don't do that mistake again. But you can't ever make the picture again, really. That's the sad part.

INT: Are you glad that you chose being a Director for what you did with your life's work? 

PB: Yeah. I mean, we're veering into the Jimmy Lipton [James Lipton] department now, but that's okay. [INT: I know, I'm gonna ask you your favorite color next.] But I, yeah, to be honest, which I'm trying to be, I wish I had dir--wish I had acted more. I turned down certain roles that I wish I hadn't. I would've had more of an acting career. I have a sort of a belated acting career. I've been acting a lot lately, because of THE SOPRANOS, I think. But that was a mistake, a calculated error. [INT: Not to act more when you were younger?] Should've. I should've. I was good at it, and I could've. And didn't. And, in some cases, I made that mistake because well, you know, I was in Orson's [Orson Welles] movie, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. I had a huge part, and I was very good in it. Orson loved--I haven't seen a lot of it, but Orson raved about me in that picture. He loved me in it. And he wanted to have a bombshell when he opened that picture with me in it, so he--a couple of pictures that I was offered at that time, he asked me not to do, or he warned me, he said maybe you shouldn't do it, and I should've. Like Sammy Fuller's [Samuel Fuller] THE BIG RED ONE, I could've played the Bobby Carradine [Robert Carradine] part. I should've, 'cause I would've helped Sammy.