INT: Oh, I wanted to ask you about the company that you had with Friedkin [William Friedkin]…[PB: And Coppola [Francis Ford Coppola]] And Coppola. It's--wha'ts it called? The Producers? [PB: Directors Company.] Directors Company, sorry. And for which you made DAISY MILLER, which, for me, is your most underrated film. It's a beautiful film. 

PB: Thank you. DAISY MILLER and PAPER MOON were made--[INT: Oh, were both from that company?]--were made for The Directors Company. At the last minute we decided to put PAPER MOON, which is a deal already, into The Directors Company that could give the company a jumpstart. It was an idea. It was a great idea by Charles Bluhdorn who owned Gulf & Western, which had bought Paramount. It was the first conglomerate that, you know, who bought a movie studio. And Charlie Bluhdorn had this brilliant idea to get a bunch of Directors together and form a company, make a few pictures and then take that company public. So he got in touch with his… Coppola had won an Oscar, Friedkin who won an Oscar and me who had been nominated and had… I had three hits in a row. No, I had two hits in a row, two big ones. And Francis called me, and we all went to New York on a plane and played poker on the way in, and I won 100 bucks from Coppola, and on the way back I won 100 bucks from Friedkin. [LAUGH] It sounds terrible, but it's true. Played poker. And it was a kind of slightly troubled company right from the beginning because Bluhdorn wanted the company. Obviously it was his idea, and Frank Yablans, who was the head of the studio, not the head of production but the head of the studio, didn't want it. He said, "Why don't you just give him my job?" He said he came into the meeting and was very annoyed. Pardon me. But it happened. It was a great idea. We had complete freedom. If the movie was $300,000… if the movie was $3 million or under, we could make whatever we wanted, didn't even have to clear it with the studio, didn't even have to tell them what we were doing.

INT: And this brought about conversation from Coppola [Francis Ford Coppola]? 

PB: The conversation, DAISY MILLER, PAPER MOON were all made for that company. Friedkin [William Friedkin] never made a picture. He's the one who broke up the company--[INT: Why do you think he--] And got a third of my money. [INT: Why did he… What was that issue?] He didn't want, he didn't want to do it… He wanted to make… He wanted them to have bigger pictures. [INT: I see.] It was really shitty because it was a great company. Not only that could we make any picture we wanted for $3 million or under, but we could produce any movie we wanted for somebody else for a million and a half or under, which in those days was still enough money to make a movie. It still is today, really. [INT: Yeah. Yeah, sounds like a lot to me, you know, 30 years later.] Yeah.

INT: I wonder… I mean your stock was very high at that point, and I wonder if you would care to reflect on the next couple of movies you made, one of which I love, NICKELODEON, even though I couldn't run it last night. But I know that you feel it was a troubled film. 

PB: Well, what happened was, after PAPER MOON, I'd had three very successful movies in a row, which was sort of a big deal. I wasn't aware of how big a deal it was. I remember at one point we were in Paris, and Orson [Orson Welles] was there, and he wanted to see PAPER MOON, hadn't… we hadn't… we're still in the work print. We'd finished it, but it was still in work print, and Orson said, "I want to see the picture." I said, "Well, all we have is a work print." "Well, tell them to send it over." I said, "Where's… they're not going to send the work print over." He says, "You don't know who you are. Call them and tell them to send it, and they will." So I called, and sure enough they made a dupe and sent it. [LAUGH] I didn't know they would do that. He was right I didn't know who I was. I didn't know the power I had, and… Because nobody tells you, you know, you're very powerful now. [INT: Right.] They sort of try to keep it a secret. I didn't know. I thought, I thought every picture was, you know, make money. [LAUGH] That was normal. I don't know. I don't know what I was thinking. I was so busy and having a great time with Cybill [Cybill Shepherd] and having conflicts, emotional conflicts because of my daughters being… growing up and I hadn't seen much of them, and it was a complicated life, very busy.

PB: And then I decided to make DAISY MILLER, which, in retrospect, although it was a good picture, was a mistake, commercially a big mistake. I thought that it would not be a very commercial picture, but I thought we'd made three in a row; what's wrong with making one that wasn't so commercial? This is not a good way to think. [LAUGH] Howard Hawks had warned me, "Peter, make pictures that make money," is what he said. It seems fairly obvious, but I should have listened to him. [LAUGH] So I made DAISY MILLER knowing that it was… We made it for very little. It only cost $2.3 million. But… so we made it without any interference because we… it was under $3 million. It was substantially under $3 million, so we just made it. My partners, Coppola [Francis Ford Coppola] and Friedkin [William Friedkin], were annoyed that I made it 'cause they saw it as a vanity production from my girlfriend. I thought it was rather a touching story. In retrospect, I should have probably done RAMBLING ROSE, which was a possibility at that time, which was made years later with Laura Dern. [INT: Yeah, with Laura Dern, yeah.] We should have probably made that, but I remember watching dailies of DAISY MILLER in Rome or Switzerland and thinking to myself, saying out loud, "This is beautiful, but I don't know who's going to want to see it." And boy, was I right. Don't forget, this was before the Merchant Ivory [Merchant Ivory Productions]. [INT: Well, I was just going to say it anticipates of a formula that worked for Merchant Ivory successfully. So I'm not so sure that it was obviously going to be a noncommercial film.] Well, it just wasn't a movie that anybody was making in those days. [INT: Right.] It was a, it was a--we made the book. We actually did DAISY MILLER. It's a 90-page short novel, the first success Henry James had, his most popular book, a short novel. We made every single page, all 90 pages. The movie's 90 minutes. There's a line of dialogue in the book that we didn't use. I actually wrote two scenes that are not in the book, but… I mean not dialogued in the book but that are described in a paragraph. I actually put dialogue to them. That's the only thing. Freddie Raphael [Frederic Raphael], Freddie Raphael got credit for the script. He had nothing to do with it 'cause we didn't use his script. That's a whole story too. [INT: Right.] So that picture, the failure of that picture… I remember when we showed it to Paramount, and Frank Yablans came over to me afterwards. He… I said, "So what'd you think?" He said, "It's all right." I said, "That's all you have to say? It's all right?" "Well," he said, "what do you want me to say?" I said, "Well, what'd you think?" He said, "Let me tell you something. You're a Babe Ruth, and you just bunted." That was it. [LAUGH] [INT: That must have made you feel wonderful.] You're Babe Ruth and you just bunted. Well, I thought, you know, I'm proud of the picture, but I could see why it was not a commercial picture. Also, it got very good reviews. People forget, think it got bad reviews, 'cause it didn't do much business. In fact, the truth is, PAPER MOON got mixed reviews, and DAISY MILLER got mixed to excellent. PAPER MOON got mixed to excellent too, but THE NEW YORK TIMES, for example, panned PAPER MOON but raved about DAISY MILLER. Go figure. NEWSWEEK gave it a rave. THE SUN did… the Leon Edel, who's the foremost authority of Henry James, said it was the best Henry James movie ever made. Gore Vidal liked it. A lot of people who knew Henry James thought we'd been very faithful to the intention and to the spirit of the book.

INT: So it's interesting because I've never read the book [ADDIE PRAY], but I think it's, I think it's certainly your most underrated, and it's a lovely film. 

PB: Yeah. It's a sad film. Thank you. But the failure of that did not help us on the next two pictures because they… now I was the miracle wonder boy who had stumbled as opposed to done a picture that I thought was interesting to try… Was they don't… Hollywood is not interested in experiments. [INT: Right.] So then I had written… While we were finishing DAISY MILLER, I wrote LONG LAST LOVE [AT LONG LAST LOVE], which Fox [20th Century Fox] agreed to do, and that led to a bunch of compromises that brought us down. That picture was a disaster. In retrospect, it was my own fault because I didn't know enough. You know, when you take a musical…when you do an original musical comedy on Broadway, they take it out of town for six months and try it all over the country, or certainly a few months before they bring it to Broadway and get it ready. Well, we had, we had two previews. The first one was an unmitigated disaster. I re-cut the picture. We previewed it again. It was successful. Then I re-cut the picture and didn't preview the re-cut and opened it. Disaster. It was cut wrong.

INT: Have you worked on that film [AT LONG LAST LOVE] since? Did you re-cut it one more? 

PB: I re-cut it again after it was a disaster. I re-cut it and I thought did the best version, but it was too late, though it was shown that way in Europe and on television, and that's why some people who see it say, "Why… what's wrong it with it? It's a nice movie." I saw it recently. I don't like it that much. I think it was… I think it was probably… it was… nobody quite understood what I was trying to do, and I'm not sure I understood what I was trying to do at the time. I see now quite clearly what I was doing. I was making a movie about people who couldn't talk to each other. It was about people who couldn't communicate, so they talked in greeting cards. They bought greeting cards in the form of songs, and they sang songs 'cause they didn't know what to say to each other. It wasn't really a musical in the conventional sense, which is why we did everything live. I didn't care so much about the musical part of it. I wanted it to seem like people talking, only they were singing. [INT: A lot of very long takes in that film too.] Enormously long takes going on for--

INT: Yeah, I mean there's a lot, a lot of experimental things in that movie [AT LONG LAST LOVE] that I think is very adventurous and very interesting that you were trying, and I wonder if you could talk a little about that, about the long takes, recording it live, doing the songs the way you did. 

PB: Well, I remembered I had seen the Lubitsch [Ernst Lubitsch], early Lubitsch musicals that in fact people forget, but Lubitsch was the first one to make the first all talking, all dancing, all singing musical, THE LOVE PARADE, 1929, and Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald and Lillian Roth and all those folks did everything live. There was an orchestra right off the camera. I just love the idea that they did all that live, and you can feel the spontaneity in the pictures still today. ONE HOUR WITH YOU, THE MERRY WIDOW, SMILING LIEUTENANT [THE SMILING LIEUTENANT], all those early Lubitsch… those had a tremendous impact. I mean, basically, that's what I was trying to do was to try to recreate that kind of sad, funny, melancholy, silly feeling of those early musicals and do it live and make it feel spontaneous. The trouble is, both Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier were accomplished singers. I didn't have accomplished singers or dancers. This was not a great way to go into it. Originally, I had planned to cast Elliott Gould, which would have been a lot easier because he was a singer and a dancer, and Cybill [Cybill Shepherd] worked quite hard at it. Burt Reynolds held us up quite a bit because he was not natural with it. I was talked into Burt, and I liked him, personally, but he was not the best choice, and it held us up a lot and screwed us up a lot.

PB: To do it live [AT LONG LAST LOVE] was an extremely difficult thing, unless we'd had the full orchestra off camera, which we couldn't afford. What we did was we had to figure out a way to keep the vocals separate from the music and record it separate. Well, there was no way to do it, so I asked Fox [20th Century Fox] to develop for me… I said, "Isn't there some way we can create some kind of little speaker that they can stick into their ear, and we can play the music in their ear, and they can then sing, and we can have a separation?" "Yes, but it costs $25,000," which was a lot of money in those days to create this little thing, an ear wick, which they now have. [INT: Right.] But they didn't have it at that time, and they created it for me, and it fit into the ear, and they could comb the antenna into the hair. [INT: I had no idea you were responsible for that development. That's funny. Yeah.] Yeah, yeah, they did it for me for that picture. And we solved the problem of how to do it, 'cause I wanted them not only to sing live, but for somebody off-camera to follow them, not for them to have to follow a given… 'cause we did an orchestration. We played it in their ear and nobody could do it. So I said, "Let's have a pianist." And then somebody thought of it, get an electric piano, turn off the speaker, and they… he can play live. Follow them on the set and just play it, and they'll hear it in their ears, but this… we won't hear it on the set." And as Mildred Natwick said when she was doing it, she said, 'It sounds like grasshoppers in your ear, little grasshoppers." [LAUGH] And that's how we did it. In theory, it was terrific. In… occasionally, in the movie, it really paid off. There were moments like when they were in the pool, and Cybill [Cybill Shepherd] takes his nose plug and pulls it, and it springs back and hits him, and he… they keep singing, and Cybill completely breaks up. And you can hear ‘em. I mean she… that's what we used is the track, where she's singing and then she completely breaks up laughing. That's what I wanted, that sort of thing. We didn't have that much of it, but that's what I wanted, that it would be on Burt, for example, on YOU’RE THE TOP or one of his songs, he was like 11 beats off, you know, and in doing the orchestration we would fix it. The band would… you know, the arranger would then do the arrangements after the singing had been done. [LAUGH] And he'd fix it, you know. They'd fix it. They'd put beats in to make that work that he was off. Anyway, it was a, it was an adventure, and it almost worked because if I'd been able to cut it right the first time for the release, if I'd gotten it right, but we were, they were--the studio loved the picture. They thought it was wonderful. When they were seeing dailies, they loved it. But then when they saw it on the preview it was a disaster. Then we had another preview, which is where I had fixed it up and it was pretty good. Then I screwed it up. I made certain cuts that I shouldn't have and didn't check it. And then it opened. And then I saw it, and I said, "Oh, no. This is not right." And I re-cut it again, but it was too late, they'd written it off. It did make money at the Radio City Music Hall It was quite successful there. People liked it there. But the rest of the country, they hardly… they really… got such bad reviews. They… Judy Crist, the critic, Judith Crist, told me… she said, "How is the picture?" I said, "It's okay." She said, "It'd better be good." I said, "Why do you say that?" She says, "They're waiting for you."

INT: That's so curious. Did you feel… why… what was going on out there? 

PB: Too much success. [INT: Yeah.] Too much success. It's American story; they build you up to tear you down. Too much success. We weren't exactly modest. Cybill [Cybill Shepherd] and I were flaunting living together. It was not a time when celebrities lived together without being married. We were doing it openly. The first issue of PEOPLE MAGAZINE that went to a million copies, the first issue, it was the 12th issue, it was--the cover was Cybill and me, and the headline was something to the effect, "Living together is sexier than being married." And I remember Orson [Orson Welles] looking at it and saying, "I don't know what I think of this," [LAUGH] but he was being polite saying he thought it would backfire, and it did. I remember Cary Grant calling me up and saying, "Peter, will you stop telling people you're happy, and stop telling you're in love." "Why, Cary?" "Because they're not happy and they're not in love." "I thought all the world loves a lover." "Now, don't you believe it. Let me tell you something, Peter, people do not like beautiful people." "Really?" Well, anyway. [INT: That's very interesting, because he kept him… he kept himself out of the limelight in a curious way, didn't he? He was…] By the personal life, yeah. [INT: Yeah.] He tried. [INT: He somehow sensed that it could turn…] Well, it really turned, and they just… I mean they killed Cybill. They killed Cybill and killed me. You know, "Directed, written, produced and ruined by Peter Bogdanovich." [INT: Oh.] That was Gene Shalit, I think. Cybill "Shepherd cannot sing, dance, act or do anything." You know, it was like, that was kind of, those kind of reviews. [LAUGH]

INT: And yet, here you sit and kind of I feel like you have a perspective and a sense of humor, even, about something as difficult as that. How do you survive that? 

PB: Yeah, Cybill [Cybill Shepherd] and I called it the… Cybill and I called it "the debacle." I don't know. It wasn't much fun when it happened. But you know we had a home in Bel Air. We were in love. Little did I know what was really going on with her life or mine. It was all kind of you know… I said somewhere that success is much more difficult to deal with than failure. You can cuddle up to failure, but success, you know, it really is deadly.

INT: And then… 

PB: And then NICKELODEON was compromised because of the long, because… THE LONG LAST LOVE was a spectacular failure. [LAUGH] Everybody was so happy about it. The Village Voice headline was, AT LONG LAST, LOUSY which has a kind of anticipatory quality to it. [LAUGH] Well, that compromised NICKELODEON because I had wanted to make it with Cybill, and they said I couldn't work with Cybill [Cybill Shepherd] again, and that was it. They… the studio said, "No, we don't want her in the picture." So she was up to play… Marty Scorsese wanted her for TAXI DRIVER, same studio. They said… I said, "Well, I really want her for NICKELODEON." We had written the part for a girl who was very near-sighted, who was kind of sexy but innocent. Begelman [David Begelman] said to me, I'll never forget it. He says, "I don't want her in the picture. She's not going to be in the picture, and if you give me a hard time she's not going to be in TAXI DRIVER either." It was like that. [INT: Wow.] So we didn't want to… she didn't particularly want to do TAXI DRIVER, 'cause she didn't, at that time, like the script that much. She liked it later, but she had no choice. So she had three hits in a row with PICTURE SHOW [THE LAST PICTURE SHOW], HEARTBREAK KID and then TAXI DRIVER. But in the meantime she had those two heavy flops, what were considered… even though she got good reviews, some good, very good reviews for DAISY MILLER… [INT: For DAISY MILLER, yeah.] She didn't get… and neither of us got any good reviews for LONG LAST LOVE. Except NEWSWEEK, which sort of liked it. Recognized that we were trying to do Lubitsch [Ernst Lubitsch] and had almost got there.

INT: Did you develop NICKELODEON, or did that come to you already… 

PB: I had been planning… that's another reason it's so sad. I'd been planning for years to do a movie about the early days of the movies based on my conversations with Raoul Walsh, Allan Dwan and Leo McCarey, who'd all started in the early silent era and who all told me these fabulous stories. So I was going to use those stories and connect them and make a picture about that era, the Nickelodeon era. And at the same time as I was thinking about that, I hadn't written it but were thinking about it, my Agent called and said, "Well, there's an offer here for you to direct a picture about the early days of Hollywood," and it was called STARLIGHT PARADE. I read it, and it dealt with some of the things that I wanted to do, but not much, and I didn't want to do it, and they said, "Well, it's Chartoff [Robert Chartoff] and Winkler [Irwin Winkler]. They're doing it. There's not going to be two movies like this." I was talked into doing their picture on the basis that I could rewrite it however I wanted. So we did a page one rewrite and did what I wanted with it. But I don't know who would have been better. It probably would have been better to do it my own way, just start from… But it is pretty virtually entirely the way I wanted to do it. But then I didn't want to do it in color. I very much wanted to do it in black-and-white because it was black-and-white era, black-and-white movies. I didn't want to use Ryan [Ryan O'Neal] and Burt [Burt Reynolds]. I wanted to do it with John Ritter and Jeff Bridges playing the leads. I wanted it to be a smaller picture. Instead of $8 million, I would have liked to make it for $4. But the studio wanted the stars, and so we ended up having all stars. But the picture actually did all right. It made its money back, but it was considered a flop.

INT: Was it really? I remember it very fondly, and as I've told you I think when I was a kid, it was really the first time I looked at a movie and understood the history of film from it, so I think it has great value. I'm dying to see it again. 

PB: Well, it's all… the thing is, because it was in color, everybody thought it was all made up, and every major incident in the picture really happened 'cause Allan Dwan told me or Leo McCarey or Raoul Walsh. Every major incident, including the big overall story, which is the patents company was shooting at independent filmmakers. They'd shoot at their cameras, you know, and put a hole in them. You can't film… you can't… camera's no good with a hole in it. And that's… so the first war in movies was a real one. That's the opening line in this picture, and I thought that was so interesting. But because it was in color and because color has a tendency to prettify and objectify and nullify, it all seemed to have made up Disney-ish. In black-and-white it would have seemed real. In fact, I've looked at the picture with the color taken out of it, and it's so much better. [INT: No, interesting.] I also put some… I also took… I was also talked into taking certain things out even though I had final cut. That's the terrible thing is you sort of… you've had a couple of hits, and then there's this desperation not to have another flop. And so they'd tell you, "Well, take this out because people won't like this," and there was a whole thing where Ryan O'Neal had slept with Stella Stevens while she was living with John Ritter's character, and that was taken out because they thought Ryan would be too hateful. But that was sort of the point, that he was a complicated character. It was all just Disneyfied.

INT: I wonder, since we're talking about black-and-white versus color, if we can maybe jump out of chronology and talk a little bit about the camera and cameramen, Cinematographers you've worked with. What do you like? What do you look for? What are the ones who you've liked working with? 

PB: Well, the one I've enjoyed with working with, there's two: László Kovács, with whom I did about four pictures, four or five pictures, and he's real easy to work with and fun to work with. We did TARGETS. We did WHAT'S UP, DOC?, PAPER MOON and LONG LAST LOVE [AT LONG LAST LOVE], MASK, NICKELODEON. So we did quite a few. He was good to work with, easy to work with. We got along well. He did a nice job. Robby Mueller, who did THEY ALL LAUGHED and SAINT JACK is an awfully good Director of Photography. I liked him a lot. Those are the two best. The young Italian camera Director of Photography on DAISY MILLER, Alberto Spagnoli, was wonderful. He died very young, but he was very gifted.

INT: What makes a László Kovács, for instance… you know, what qualities does he bring to the movie that make you comfortable? 

PB: Well, you know I once asked Preminger [Otto Preminger] about cameramen. We… everybody used to call them cameramen, and I still do it. And nobody ever said, "DOP or Director of Photography. They said, "Cameramen." I have a tendency to do that. Forgive me. So I was asking Preminger what he thought, and he said, "There are two kinds of good cameramen. One is very pleasant to talk with, very pleasant socially. You can talk to him and he does a good job, but he's very nice to speak with, and you can have a nice conversation with him, and he's very pleasant. The other kind, you can't, and you don't talk to him at all. But both of them are good." [LAUGH] So it's true. László was very fun to talk to. He was fun to have on the set. He gets amused. I remember on WHAT'S UP, DOC? he just loved screwing around. He's a Hungarian. He kept going around and saying, "What's up, doc?" He loved saying it. [LAUGH] He's very good to work with. From the beginning, I always thought that it was a Director's job… I thought everything was the Director's job. I thought that the Director had to do everything, show the Actors, tell the camera, everything. So I never… I always did that. I always said, "The camera goes here. It moves here. It does this. It does that." I learned about lenses after TARGETS. I learned more about lenses after. I didn't know, I wasn't sure about lenses on TARGETS, and so László did a lot of that. I'd say, "What lens should we use, and how about a wide angle," and whatever it was, we discussed it. But I didn't know much about lens. But Orson [Orson Welles] gave me a crash course in lenses one weekend. He says, "You know, Gregg Toland, the greatest cameraman that ever lived, said you can learn about the camera in a weekend. Imagine, saying a thing like that.” And he says… and he taught me about it, and then Orson passed it along to me, you know talking about the 40 and what the 40 does and how the 28 is a great lens but the 25 isn't and the 35's not a good lens, but the 28, 27.8 is, and I… First, at first you sort of just take it on what you take his word for it. Then you… as you study it, you start to see why, and the 50 does this, and the 40 does this, and the 28 does this, and the 18 is great for this. And so since… I would say starting with PICTURE SHOW [THE LAST PICTURE SHOW] on, I've tended to call the lenses and say what I want or what I think we should go for. I tend to use wide-angle lenses more because I like it when everything's in focus. I don't understand why people like out-of-focus images, but they do. People love to have… you know use an 80, and everything goes foggy behind. I don't know why people like that, but they do. [INT: I have an answer for you because I like that, and it's insecurity. It just… it's a little foggy, and you know it's like not committing or something.] Oh, is that right? [INT: It's bizarre, but I do think Directors can be kind of divided up into those who like to see everything, those who want to…] Want to let the rest go out. [INT: And that's an interesting… yeah. That's an interesting observation on your part. On yourself. What about… well, what about…] Well, I asked Orson that question. I said, "Why did you always like to have everything in focus?" He says, "I don't know. I don't see why it had to be out of focus. Seems to me if you have… your eye sees it in focus, why shouldn't the camera?" [INT: Yeah, yeah. That's very interesting.]

INT: What about working with… and I don't mean just for gossip's sake, with DPs [Director of Photography] who you haven't liked, and not necessarily… 

PB: Well, Bob Surtees, on PICTURE SHOW [THE LAST PICTURE SHOW], I liked him. He was very, very good, and he worked very hard. He was an older man at the time. He was in his 70s when we did it. But it was… he said to me, he says, "You know this is hard work, black-and-white. I haven't done a black-and-white picture," he said, "in 20 years." He said, "This is hard work.” Plus, I insisted on using… I insisted on his using green filters and red filters, which Welles [Orson Welles] and Ford [John Ford] had told me about, and so that made it harder. [INT: Tell me about the green and red filters. I don't know this.] Well, the green and red filters in black-and-white will create a higher contrast between things. For example, you're showing a blue sky with clouds in it. You put a green filter or a red filter, depending on what the kind of day it is. The blue… the white cloud will stand out… again, the blue will go darker and the white will go brighter, and it looks beautiful. It looks more beautiful. [INT: That's if you put which filter, a green?] Red. [INT: A red, sorry.] A green also does it, but a green… I think the green filter you use for faces. I don't remember now exactly, but. [INT: Right. Oh, interesting.] For both PAPER MOON and PICTURE SHOW [THE LAST PICTURE SHOW], we used a lot of filters, green and red. [INT: Do you, do you--] It makes it tougher for the cameraman because it's harder to gauge the exposure. [INT: And he was not comfortable doing that, Surtees [Robert Surtees]?] He was just tired. It was a lot of work. He said this is hard work, and he complained a bit about the work.

INT: Have you ever had to replace a cameraman? 

PB: No. I've had some stern conversations with a couple of cameramen who shot a couple of things and they were out of focuses, "And what is this out of focus? What are you doing?" [LAUGH] "I won't tolerate that. Don't do that again," you know, so. No, I never fired an operator… a cameraman. [INT: Yeah, yeah.]

INT: I noticed that you used, on TEXASVILLE, Nick von Sternberg [Nicholas Josef von Sternberg]. 

PB: Nick von Sternberg. Well, that was a sort of a tip of the hat to his father, Joe. And I thought Nick would do a good job. He did a good job. He was very slow. He did as I asked, but it was hard, and though everything was in focus, but it was… took forever to get it. [INT: Was that just lack of experience?] Harder, much… lack of experience. It's much harder in color also, to get depth of field. On DAISY MILLER, that's what was so amazing about Alberto Spagnoli. This is in the midst of '70s [1970s]. We were in Rome or Switzerland, and I'd say, "Now, I want everything sharp. Tuto sharp, you know everything. Tuto." He’d say, "Si, si." I said, "Sharp," and I knew that it was impossible to have everything sharp, and then I'd see the dailies and it would be, and I'd say, "How did you do that?" He said [LAUGH]. I don't know how he did it. It was amazing. I really threw him some curves, and he was superb. He died young. What a wonderful guy.

INT: Did you regard SAINT JACK as a comeback? 

PB: Well, comeback, in a way. I'll tell you what happened. After NICKELODEON, which did all right, but I wasn't happy with the picture. It got mixed reviews. It was… I thought it was soft and wasn't the movie that I wanted to make. There is a cut of it that I like, which is three minutes longer and black-and-white, which hopefully someday will come out. But I was disillusioned. I was very successful. I was being offered $1 million to make pictures, which is a lot of money, and you know I turned down THE HURRICANE and this and that and the other thing. I didn't… people thought that I was unemployable because I didn't make a picture for three years, and they thought I was in trouble, and then the next picture I made was with Roger Corman and everybody thought that's the only picture you can get. That's absolutely garbage. I was turning down $1 million offers, you know, a couple every month for a couple of years. But I felt disillusioned. I felt that two of my favorite projects, the musical [AT LONG LAST LOVE] and NICKELODEON had been compromised before, during and after, that I simply had lost touch with how it all started and what I really believed in. I felt that success had led me astray. And I had final cuts, so I couldn't blame anybody but myself, and I could have made these decisions differently. So I blamed myself, but I also felt that just… I had to regroup. So I didn't know exactly what to make. Orson [Orson Welles] was supposed… there was some talk about Orson doing SAINT JACK. That fell apart. That became a problem. There's a whole lot of things happening, a lot of things happened in that period. Cybill [Cybill Shepherd] and I went around the world a couple of times. Our relationship renewed itself, even though we had these flops. And eventually I decided to make SAINT JACK, and I thought it was going to be a very difficult picture, but again, I thought I'd like to try it 'cause I didn't know how to do it. It was the same thing. And they… Paramount [Paramount Pictures] said they'd do it with Paul Newman or somebody like that, but I didn't want to do it. I wanted to--I had decided I wanted to do it with Ben Gazzara. Nobody wanted to do it with Ben, except Roger said he'd do it with Ben but I couldn't spend a lot of money, so we made the picture for a million dollars. Roger says we made it for $2 million, but I know we made it for a million. [INT: He also, which I think is… the only time I've ever seen something this outrageous, he's quoted on the cover of the DVD complaining…] Saying, I went over budget. [INT: That he went over budget.] [LAUGH] I know. He couldn't get over it.

INT: What kind of, what kind of Producer [LAUGH] was Corman [Roger Corman] for you at that time? 

PB: He didn't even show up. I had to beg him to come to Singapore just to see how we were doing, and he did come over for two days and left as quickly as he could. But he was fine. He completely left us alone, but he got pissed off that I went over-budget, or what he said was over-budget. I don't think we did go over budget. But he says we did. All I know is he made his money back in Europe with one sale. And the picture was… We made it very inexpensively. Really went back to basics, back to the Corman's kind of guerilla style of filmmaking. We didn't do it in 25 days. We did it in 60 days, but we did it with a very small crew, and a lot of people who never have done a movie before, most of the Actors except the English and the American Actors were people who had never acted before. They were all Asians who were just people who lived in Singapore. We did it really down and dirty, lied to the Singapore government about what we were doing, didn't tell them we were making SAINT JACK, did the picture under their very noses, a different picture. We said we were doing something called JACK OF HEARTS, which was about a guy who wanted to start a nightclub. I want to start a nightclub. You know, it was kind of a combination of PAL JOEY and LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING. And I wrote a treatment for this, which we handed out, an outline, which was--[INT: But it was always nonsense? It was always intended to fool everyone?] Yeah. [INT: How funny.] Wrote an outline, which was totally bullshit [LAUGH] just to give to people. So they said, "What do you want…” “Well, we don't want to give you… we don't have a script. We sort of make it as a go along. But here's an outline," totally made up outline, because the book was banned in Singapore, and here we were in Singapore making the book. [INT: Yeah.] Not only was the book banned in Singapore, but PLAYBOY, which owned the rights, the underlying rights of the book, was banned in Singapore. [LAUGH] And we were doing it with PLAYBOY. I mean they didn't put up any money, and a book that was banned, and we were shooting it all over the town and shooting whorehouses and hookers and pimps and all this stuff, and nobody knew it. It was all about a nightclub. [LAUGHS]