INT: Some of the principles of improvisation that you learned from Second City [The Second City], what can you, you know, like--because you said focus was one of them, but I’m curious what else?

WF: Well, a lot of the times when an Actor memorizes a role, they become so set in it that it’s frozen. To do improvisation you have to free up your mind, it’s based on trust, it’s the same principle as a high wire act in the circus, and--or guys who are on the trapeze and you have to trust that the person that’s going to catch you will catch you. You see it at basketball games all the time, tumblers and cheerleaders going way up in the air, in free-fall, and allowing themselves to be caught by their partners. That’s the principle of improvisation. First of all, it requires among other things a great sense of humor, a firm, if unique knowledge of human nature, that is how people behave, a strong sense memory, so that you can relate certain incidents and events that are supposed to be in someone else’s life to your own, and then on the spot distill them into what is called a performance. That very often works and sometimes does not, but it’s the principle of the trapeze artist and the high-wire walker. [INT: One of the things that--] Now a lot of Actors don’t want to go to that place at all so then comes the desire to go there. “Yeah, I’d like to do something like that,” you know instead of, “My name is Katharine Hepburn, I--," you know, “--I need a script,” you know, or, “I’m Sir Laurence Olivier, what do you want me to say old man?” You know and that’s great acting too, and then there are improvisers whose work is so sharp and polished and clean that you’re not conscious that this scene wasn’t written and guided. But the other thing that happened in Second City was after we would do these scenes, and the Director’s role was simply to suggest, “Look, you know, you’re supposed to be sweeping the floor of the stage. Why don’t you start sweeping something toward the audience,” you know or, “Why don’t you slip on a banana peel--,” whatever it is you’d make suggestions that would then trigger off something in the Actor’s mind, and then those scenes that worked you would keep and polish and set. They still seemed improvised but after a period of time you could present them to audiences while still creating new material, the old material became classics, because they--by the second year of it, it was no longer improvisation but even within those scenes, which became classic Second City scenes like a bigot in the back of a cab that Burns [Jack Burns] and Schreiber [Avery Schreiber] did, and later did in Vegas [Las Vegas, Nevada], the routines were polished and set, but still had the feeling of improvisation because the Actors knew that they were able to create these characters, get some funny lines in them, although you never thought about funny lines, you thought about realistic behavior, and they could then be free enough to rely on what they had created and now set and they could open it up from time to time too. It’s--you know in many ways if, to me I think of a doctor, a surgeon is working that way, because I don’t know anything about surgery, but it seems to me that if a heart surgeon is going to go in and repair a valve or whatever, he has to be able to improvise as well as know his skills, because he’s likely to see something for the first time in a patient, and he’s got to be able to have an answer quickly, and that’s a life or death situation.

INT: Do you think also for you jazz has also allowed you to--[WF: Absolutely.] Understand what improvisation is?

WF: Yeah, the jazz music that I loved as a kid growing up and still love. Yes, the--these guys would have a line, six bars, 14 bar of a--[INT: Standard.]. [SINGS] Da-da-da… They had that. You know somebody had come up with that melody, Miles Davis Sextet goes out and every night it would be different, but they’d fall back on that riff. That’s what improvisation is, falling back on a riff that you have thought up and set.

INT: Challenge for you though in terms of if you’re going to shoot an improvised scene, like the scene that you just talked about in the--with the cops, with Sonny Grosso playing the chief here, giving the wire--[WF: No, Egan [Eddie Egan] played the chief.] Egan, yes, what do you do with--your challenge as filmmaker, storyteller, editing pieces, coverage, getting things that in fact will cut, because if you’re shooting something that’s improvisational, then take two is, you know…

WF: I had the confidence of Godard [Jean-Luc Godard], whatever I shoot will cut, because everything cuts, you know. It’s like that line by Jean-Pierre Léaud in LAST TANGO IN PARIS where he plays a young filmmaker filming his girlfriend all around the city of Paris, and she says, “What are you doing? I’m just living my life, why are you filming me?” And he says, “Everything is cinema.” Everything is cinema, and I believe that and I believe that everything cuts, and now more than ever, everything does cut. Look at the television series 24, all the old principles of someone looking left to right in this shot, the answering shot has to be right to left, that’s out the window. They don’t do that anymore, they don’t even bother with that, and when I was coming up into film there were Script Supervisors who, if you changed the screen direction in a couple of cuts between a left to right and a right to left, they would yell and scream like they’d been stabbed. “Wait a minute; he’s looking left--" “Huh? What do you mean he…” “Well, she’s looking…” “Well, where was he looking?” And you’d stand around the set forever and talk about this. “Yeah, but it’s a better shot if he looks this way.” “I know, but in the last shot…” and now that stuff is gone. It’s out of there, everything cuts. They now have become aware of that. The audience gets it and the only thing that doesn’t cut is if they’re shooting me and then they’re going to shoot you, and then they shoot me and then they shoot you, if suddenly they replace me with another Actor that might not cut. [INT: Unless it’s Buñuel [Luis Bunuel], then maybe it does.] That’s right. If it’s Buñuel it cuts. They change the Actor--[INT: Exactly.]--in the middle of a cutting sequence. Well, you know, so you have to have, that’s the faith of the trapeze artist that it’s going to work; sometimes it doesn’t.

WF: We had a scene in THE FRENCH CONNECTION that didn’t work because I went against that precept [improvisation]. [INT: Which one?] The first scene we shot was an interrogation scene that I had seen Egan [Eddie Egan] and Grosso [Sonny Grosso] do with a suspect. There was a young black Actor named Alan Weeks who they had chased down into an empty lot in Bedford-Stuyvesant [Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn] and then they rough him up a little and they start to question him. [INT: And then they do the “Poughkeepsie” line with him for the first time.] Right and I shot that the way I had seen it done, where they would take the suspect and the three of them would sit in the front seat of a car; Egan on one side, Grosso on the other, the suspect in the middle squeezed between them, and they would put all these non-sequitur questions to the guy and I shot it that way, and I did 31 takes; the largest number of takes I have ever done for anything and it wasn’t working, it just wasn’t working. I didn’t know why but it wasn’t working, and I thought it was Hackman [Gene Hackman], and he looked at the rushes that day and he quit the picture. He quit because he thought he couldn’t do it, it wasn’t working. But then we went on and started to shoot some other stuff and about 10 days into the film, the film was shot in about 40 days including a week in Marseilles [Marseilles, France], about 10 days into the shoot it occurred to me that I had staged it wrong, that even though the scene was actually played in a car where they were static, in order to get what I was looking for in the scene, they had to be free. Now in those days you couldn’t--you had to get permission to reshoot a scene from the head of production, in this case at Fox [20th Century Fox], which you could never get, especially on a film that took up--[INT: They might not have even wanted it.]--a year, a million-and-a-half dollars and they didn’t want to make it, so I didn’t even bother to ask for permission. I just went out at the end of the shooting of the American sequence, I said, “Let’s do the scene again, only we’re going to do it in this empty lot against this corrugated aluminum wall with a garbage fire over here and you guys know what they would say. You guys know what the scene is, go ahead and do it.” And I put two cameras on it and I just let them go anywhere, the same as I had done with the scene in the police station. I let them go anywhere, one take, they did it, it’s on two cameras and that’s what’s in the film. [INT: Now interesting note--] And I let them improvise it. [INT: Two cameras, had--I’m jumping around but had you shot with two cameras before?] No. [INT: So this was the first time, now by the way were you putting these two next to each other, you had a long lens and wide or--] No. [INT: Or were you more across?] No, they were both on fairly long lenses, one was perpendicular to another. One camera was--they were at right angles to each other; one was over here, the other was over here, and the action was around here, so I’d get a lot of people’s backs and moving through the frame, and I urged them to move a lot through the frame and I said to them--by then they had, they knew my technique with the rest of the film and I’m thinking, why hadn’t I shot this scene this way to start with? It was the first thing we shot and--but now, I said, “Look, don’t worry about where the cameras are or don’t hit any marks,” because I was prepared for the Camera Operators to grab focus, which is documentary technique; grab focus and they did and the Actors, again it was like improvisational theater. The Actors now had the faith of the trapeze artist and they went out and did it in one take, and I--because the 31 takes I was--I still had a carryover from Pinter [Harold Pinter], and getting the dialogue exactly right, and I wrote that scene but I wrote it from having taken notes on what Egan and Grosso did with a suspect.

INT: Now here’s an interesting thing, part of it also is that you took that scene, which was a static scene, and you turned it into a cinematic scene. Okay, now dealing with Writers, let’s go back to some of that subject matter, you’re going to get Writers who write fabulous scenes with two people sitting here talking and sometimes it can be as interesting as MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, but most of the time it’s not cinematic. How have you communicated that? And let’s use--let’s move to--I mean we can move to THE HUNTED, you know THE HUNTED--

WF: Well let’s go directly to your question. Joseph Mankiewicz’s [Joseph L. Mankiewicz] script for ALL ABOUT EVE is all dialogue. It’s a great movie, it’s cinematic. If you can write dialogue like that and put it in a picture, to me it’s as cinematic as the most action-filled action picture. It’s interesting. What do people want to see when they go to see a movie? They want to see something I think, about people that they are interested in. Now Scott Fitzgerald [F. Scott Fitzgerald] had on his wall a little note that he wrote to himself that said, “Action is character.” What you--meaning what you do is what you are. What these characters do is who and what they are, and you don’t need a lot of just character scenes, but you take a movie like ALL ABOUT EVE, where the dialogue is so rich and brilliant and wonderful, the movie you would have to say is relatively static but I’d--there’s no movie that I enjoy more to be honest with you, but then you get some films that are able to encapsulate both good action and dialogue, like THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE. The dialogue isn’t as filled as--[INT: Sophisticated.]--ALL ABOUT EVE, but it’s wonderful. And what’s interesting to me in that film is listening to them talk and inter-react as much as it is seeing them shoot, get in a shootout with bandits. So there are many forms of cinema, it’s difficult to write dialogue that is so rich and brilliant that that’s all you need, like ALL ABOUT EVE, but it is occasionally done. There are no “Joe Mankiewiczs” among us now; there just aren’t, but ALL ABOUT EVE is cinematic and every scene is just dialogue-laden.

INT: Looking at--let’s pick a couple of your pieces both recent and older, let’s look at the piece with Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro [THE HUNTED]. The script, what stage was it when you got it and how did you work with the Writers on that?

WF: Well, the script came to me by the Producer and I thought it left a lot to be desired, and I found a young man named Art Monterastelli, who had written some television shows for HBO that I liked, or he had re-written them. He was like their bullpen Writer. A young guy, I liked him very much and I brought him along, he was on the set every day and he would rewrite the script virtually every day. We had the basis of it, we had the foundation, and then I had a guy in Tommy Lee Jones who was an extremely brilliant man, he’s more than just a guy who shows up to read the lines, and I’ll give you also some idea of how differently I’ve worked with Actors, and with some Actors you sit down and talk to them and go over the whole past life of this character. Like Benicio, wanted to know who is this guy that he’s playing? Where does he come from? Benicio needed a whole map of the guy’s past in order to play his present. Tommy Lee Jones, on the other hand, never wants to talk about any of that. It’s assumed that when you cast him you know why you’ve cast him and what he can do, and so he becomes in a way your partner in creating his character, but he doesn’t want any of this bullshit about backstory. If you’re not filming the backstory, why should he know it? So the way I work with--I would sit with Benicio sometimes for an hour and talk about the psychological state and this and that, all bullshit but helpful to him because he’s now beginning to see a foundation for a character, whereas with Tommy Lee Jones, he would say, “What do you want me to do here?” “Well, you come in that door, you walk over to this chair, you sit down you talk to this fellow over here. Then you get up, you walk over there. Turn your back, I’ll follow you, or I might let you out of frame, then you come back in and then you sit over here, or you stand up,” and you give him a staging plan. He says, “Okay, let me see if I got that right,” and he will repeat what you’ve just told him. “I come in that door, I do this and that,” “Yeah, yeah, that’s it.” He said--sometimes he would say, “What if I keep my back turned to him? What if I just--” and I’d say, “Yeah, that’s okay, do that for a while.” He’d say, “Good. Okay,” and then he called the Assistant Cameraman, he would say, “Son, give me a mark over here, put a mark down on the floor there, put a chalk mark over there, put something over here. Okay, I’m ready.” Go out, one take, that’s it and brilliant, brilliant. Him and the character, any of the talk of the backstory or any of that other stuff, he has no tolerance for that.

INT: Now, when you were working on pictures early on and looking again sort of at the writing of a character, the character’s action, looking at what--the quote that you just mentioned there. [WF: “Action is character.”] “Action is character.” “Action is character.” If looking at that, in terms of your work as a Director, meaning that obviously you met both guys in THE FRENCH CONNECTION, you knew who these guys were yourself, so the backstory was who they were, for you, as Director. If you’re looking at the--let’s say THE EXORCIST, at the two priests who have a backstory, do you do that kind of homework on your own? Is this part of your thinking, even though Tommy [Tommy Lee Jones] may have never asked you what the backstory was in this or in the--[WF: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT]--RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, you know, do you do that kind of work in order to let’s say communicate to your Writers if things are changing so that you have an idea of the history of this person and how this person got here? Is that part of your work in terms of storytelling or will that come later if you’re starting to work with your Actor?

WF: As you get older, it’s difficult to read a script where there’s characters that you don’t understand. When you’re younger as a filmmaker you might get a script where there are characters you’ve never encountered before, these characteristics, and so you have to do some obligatory research. In terms of THE EXORCIST, I had a ton of research based on the origins of all the characters; what drove them, where they came from, who they were, a lot of which was briefly introduced into the film itself. There was a lot of back story subtly in THE EXORCIST script, which I told you THE FRENCH CONNECTION was all improvised, THE EXORCIST was all written, every word of it, every line. [INT: Including things like for example his memory of his mother coming out of the subway, that scene?] Oh no, I invented some of the visuals, but always with the Writer. I would say, when we were working on the script to Bill Blatty [William Peter Blatty], I would say, “Bill, why don’t we have a little dream sequence here, you--we’ve got this moment where Karras goes to sleep drunk. What if I see what’s in his mind’s eye and I even tie in some things in the dream that are future references in the film, like a St. Christopher medal that’s floating through the air, which he doesn’t even encounter until the last scene of the picture?” And Bill was very gung-ho on stuff like that. Some of the things I would suggest, Bill wouldn’t understand. He almost always said, “Go ahead and try it,” or if it was really something that was counter to the traditions that he was upholding in the story, he would say, “I think that’s wrong,” but that was rare.

INT: So you--did you see a script on this initially for THE EXORCIST?

WF: Oh, the initial script Bill [William Peter Blatty] wrote. After Bill hired me to direct the picture, he said, “I’ve got a surprise for you,” one day, and he handed me a script that he had written that I didn’t know about because I had only read the novel, and I read the script and I hated it. I just hated the script, and I loved the novel and Bill had fought for me to direct the picture. Now, I meet with him and I say, “Bill, your worst enemy would not have done to you what you’ve done to yourself.” He took out the--[INT: Did you say this directly?] I said those words, yeah and we’re still close friends, I saw him last week in Washington [Washington D.C.] where I presented a life achievement award to him from the American Task Force for Lebanon. Bill is Lebanese, full-blooded, and we were together last week. We’ve been friends for 40 years now, and I said--because what Bill had--Bill didn’t believe you could take his novel and do it. The people at the studio before I got there, and there was a Producer who left had convinced Bill that some of this stuff was un-filmable. They convinced him to set the movie in Salem, where the witchcraft trials had taken place. They convinced him--Salem, Massachusetts--They convinced him that the prologue which he wrote in his novel, that takes place in northern Iraq, “First of all, you’d never get to film in northern Iraq, second what is it about? I don’t understand this prologue, what is it? Who needs it? Out.” I said, “Bill, the prologue sets the mood for the whole film.” He said, “You think we could…” That’s when I contacted the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations, and it took me six months to get permission to go film in Iraq, which we did. We filmed in northern Iraq, pretty much as he had written. That’s--I said, “Bill, I need the prologue,” and everyone at the studio said, “What is the prologue, what does it mean? It has nothing to do with anything, and then this character who’s standing on a rock looking at an image of a demon comes in an hour-and-a-half later into the movie, forget it.” And I just held out for it and--but I got him to go back to the novel. [INT: That’s interesting, you held out for it—go--] What I did Jeremy [Jeremy Kagan], look, I took his novel, I have a copy of it, if you want I’ll bring it in tomorrow, where I underlined and circled passages, and I handed him a marked up copy of his novel that has things like, “keep this,” “cut this,” “go from here to here,” and all that, and I’ll show you this--how we made the script, because he couldn’t believe that a Director was saying to him, “No, I really want to shoot the novel. I don’t want to change it or make it into something else, it’s not broke, I don’t need to fix it. Just do it.” [INT: In terms of the issues of some of the--sort of at that time for certainly incredible visual parts of that storytelling from her head going around to the beds moving, were these, because I had never read the novel, were these in the novel? Had his imagination gone there?] Oh sure, but nobody knew how to do it. [INT: Do it, right okay.] There was no computer-generated imagery, no opticals could get you to any of that stuff, it was all trial and error. So THE FRENCH CONNECTION took me 40 days to shoot in a couple of countries and a few cities. THE EXORCIST took 10 months. Largely because of trial and error, and using a 12-year-old girl in a leading role, that kind of a leading role, and then there were many strange and unpredictable accidents that took place but--

INT: Now, I want to stay with script a little longer ‘cause I do want to come back and--[WF: You like scripts don’t you?] No. [WF: You should be doing this with Writers.] No, no because our trip is how we deal with it. How are you going to deal with the script? Because--

WF: Sure, what script? That’s--you know, I mean you don’t need--Fellini [Federico Fellini] never had a script. He didn’t have the dialogue when he shot it, you know this. [INT: But wait. But here’s something else really important--] I’m not saying it’s not important. [INT: But wait a minute, but you also are a Writer. I mean that’s--] Only out of necessity, the way some Writers direct out of necessity. [INT: Now you tell me, if I ask you to raise your hand how many times in every movie you’ve made you’ve written a scene, now that might not be true in 12 ANGRY MEN and it may be only a couple of words in Pinter’s [Harold Pinter] play, but how many times have you written a scene in the movies that you have made?] 483--no how--I’m going to tell you exactly how many--no, the point is that’s part of directing. I have often done it where I don’t even bother to take the credit but--because part of directing is going with the chance moment that occurs, or getting an inspiration on the set. There are great screenplays and they often make great movies, but not always, but how can I put this delicately? [INT: Don’t put it delicately.] A script is like a map, it’s a guide on how to get from A to B. It is not the thing itself, and this is where the conflict between Writers and Directors will probably be never-ending, until a Writer becomes a Director or a Director tries to write and realizes that it’s hard to do a map, it’s hard to make a map, but it’s also hard to envision the entire journey. I can have a map in front of me when I’m driving, but then this road might be closed or shut down or bombed and I’ve got to still know how to get around it, or something will happen where I see a path that’s better than the one that’s on the map, so what do I do? Go the long way that’s on the map or take the shortcut? And that’s what the interpretation--Now, a Writer is still primarily the most creative aspect of the film, you know, in general, in a classic sense. He’s created the idea, the characters, whatever. And the Director is the interpretive artist there in that it’s not to diminish the Director, I mean Horowitz [Vladimir Horowitz] was an interpretive artist, and Nathan Milstein, you know, and you know you name it. Zubin Mehta is an interpretive artist, as was Arturo Toscanini--[INT: As is a Director here.]--but they didn’t write the score, Mozart did or Tchaikovsky or Beethoven. Now, it doesn’t work quite that way in cinema, although a lot of Writers would like to tell you it does. You know shoot the script, well shoot the script often and you’re fucked, you know? It’s a collaboration again. The Director has to understand the script and be on the same page with the Writer, I would think, sometimes they’re not, but still it’s the Director’s movie to make, until the Writer becomes a Director. But the best way is collaborative, in which case the Director--I look at myself as an interpretive artist. Bill Blatty [William Peter Blatty] wrote THE EXORCIST, those are his characters, you know, his story, his situations, and there’s a famous quote from Stravinsky, when he was asked, “How did you ever manage to write something like ‘The Rite of Spring’?” And he said, “I was the vessel through whom ‘The Rite of Spring’ passed.” And I say that when asked about THE EXORCIST. “I was the vessel through which THE EXORCIST passed.” Those were his characters, his story, his situation. We disagreed a lot; Bill and I went for years where we didn’t talk to each other, after the movie had come out and was successful, and Bill used to say, “You shouldn’t have cut this or that,” and I’d say, “Bill you’re a sore winner, you’re a sore winner. You know, this is one of the most successful films ever made and you want me to do something else with it,” and ultimately I did. He convinced me to in the year 2000, but so--

INT: All right, I’m going to jump because this is great. You put in one of the issues that we really should get onto, let’s talk about cast, because you are the person who chooses who these Actors are. I mean you had your doubts about whether Gene Hackman could do this, you--Roy Scheider went in there, you talked to Scheider, you didn’t ask him to read anything--

WF: No, I never ask an Actor to read. [INT: Let’s talk about this.] That’s a different--reading a script to get a part is a lot different from creating a performance. [INT: Okay, now wait a minute.] And an Actor is very nervous. The--[INT: Do you actually never have them read at all?] Never, never. [INT: So what--] I’ll tell you how I hired Linda Blair. I’ll give you concrete examples. A lot of it was the movie god bringing me people that I had never heard of, but let’s take Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST. It’s a 12-year-old girl and we had had Casting Agents all over the country auditioning 12-year-old girls on tape, videotape then. You remember videotape? [INT: Yes I do, I remember reel-to-reel videotape actually.] Yeah and I would look at these auditions from Chicago, Bos--everywhere and I didn’t see anyone that I thought could do it, and I started to have young girls be brought to me by the Casting Director in Hollywood, and they would come in and read. [INT: They would read.] Well, they had read and they prepared something. [INT: Got it.] So, “Joanna, do this scene you prepared for Mr. Friedkin,” and they’d do it and I’d politely thank them and I thought this film cannot be cast with a 12-year-old girl, so we then started to audition 16-year-old girls who looked younger, and 15 and 14 and it was the same problem. I couldn’t find anyone with the sensibility that I thought could make this role convincing.

INT: Do you know what you were looking for [on casting Regan in THE EXORCIST]?

WF: Yes, but it’s a vibe and so this is what happened, and something else, the main things you look for in an Actor are A) intelligence, the ability to understand what they’re doing, and B) the fearlessness of a trapeze artist. That’s it. Memorize lines? Maybe. We can take care of that; a lot of ways to take care of that. [INT: Fellini [Federico Fellini], “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.”] That’s right, so now I’m at wit’s end. I’ve cast the rest of the film but not Regan, and I’m sitting in my office in New York, at Warner Bros., brooding and my assistant rings and says, “There’s a woman out here and her name is Eleanor Blair, she has her 11-year-old daughter with her and they don’t have an appointment, but would you say ‘hello’ to her?” “Okay.” Opens the door, in comes Linda Blair with her mother; bright, shiny, cute as a button, adorable and I learn from her mother that she’s a straight-A student in a private school in Connecticut, Westport, Connecticut, and that she’s a champion horsewoman at the age of 12. She had show horses at Madison Square Garden and places, she liked to ride. And so I’m talking to her and she’s very keen and interested and looking me in the eye, adorable, and giggly and I said to her, “Do you know what THE EXORCIST is about?” And she said, “Yeah.” I said, “Tell me.” She said, “Well, it’s about a little girl that gets possessed by a devil and she does a whole lot of bad things,” and I said, “Well, like what sort of things?” She said, “Oh well, she hits her mother across the face and she pushes a man out of her bedroom window and she masturbates with a crucifix.” And I said--her mother’s right in the room and I said, “Do you know what that means?” She says, “What?” I said, “To masturbate?” She said, “Yeah, it’s like jerking off isn’t it?” And I said, “Have you ever done that?” And she said, “Sure, haven’t you?” And I waited for about 10 seconds and I said to her mother, “She’s got the part. She’s hired.” I said, “You’re hired, you want to do this movie?” “Yeah, sounds like fun.” “You’re hired.” Never read her, nothing. [INT: Got it, but the guts to say, “Haven’t you?”] But she had the fearlessness of the tightrope walker and the intelligence to understand. Now, the key to that picture was if you were forcing a little girl to do some of this stuff, and the little girl was fucked up on the set, the crew would have gone crazy, people would have quit the picture, you cannot browbeat a performance out of a child, you know, and put her through some of the things that are called for in that story, but she could take it. I just knew that, I sensed it. It turns out she was with a talent agency, she had never acted. All she had done--well, school plays but small parts, but she had done modeling for like, you know, a little girl’s dress in THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, or those little coats they wear and stuff. She had done that--she was with an agency that sent us about 30 young girls, but not her. The agency didn’t send her, ‘cause she had no experience; they sent experienced young Actresses but not her. Her mother brought her in, on her own.