MH: I think the Director is probably the only person on a set who is not necessary. They could make the movie without him, and for that reason a lot of people think that anybody can do it. And I think the first part is true, that he’s the only person that’s unnecessary, but I don’t think that anybody can do it. I think it’s probably better to have nobody than to have anybody. But it’s, I think ideally that the Director is the closest thing that movie Actors have to an audience that they would have in the theater, and I think that without a Director they could do it, but with a Director they get that kind of stimulation that an Actor gets from an audience. And most of what I do, in terms of directing Actors, is I try to make them confident. I try to make them feel like it’s going great and that they, you know, and if it doesn’t go great then I’m going to protect them, and that they can try anything and we can throw it away, and I do tell them that. You know I try to make them not feel precious about every moment. I want them to experiment; I want them to try things. And not just in terms of trying different interpretations, but in just, you know, trying to find ways to find the emotional core of the character or whatever, you know. And so I don’t say a lot and I don’t you know ask them to say a lot. I think sometimes you can talk a thing to death. But if it’s funny I laugh, and if it’s sad I cry, and that’s 90 percent of it, I think.

GINA: I’m curious about something. I’m curious about that very intriguing statement that you made about how the Director is the only person on the set that really doesn’t need to be there. I’d really like to pursue what the Director does then, because most people outside of the process of filmmaking have no idea what the Director does. And that’s what we’ve been trying to get at through these interviews, but maybe we can distill something from that, because I’m interested, starting from the point that you are starting, in some ways, that’s the least necessary person on the set because he is not actually putting something on the screen.

MH: Yeah, he’s not one of the technicians. No, the Director, I guess the closest equivalent would be a general in an army. I mean certainly he’s not necessary to fight, but maybe if you want to win the war, it’s a good idea to have a general. And I think if you want to have something that makes some sense, it’s probably a good idea to have a Director because he has to you know bring all these people together and make decisions and come out with something that is cohesive, that moves people and, you know, maybe instructs people, if that’s you know your, part of your intent. It’s, you know, certainly you know the most important thing is to you know make people cry, make people laugh, make people think, make people feel, and I think without the Director, you know, maybe you know a computer could put it all together in some way that would make some sense, but certainly a--you know, I think you’ve got a better chance if there’s someone who has some kind of vision about the whole thing. [INT: I agree. Boy, how I agree.]

INT: Are there lonely times?

MH: Not for me. I think that, again, for somebody who’s not necessary, I think the Director is the only job that’s not boring, because everybody else is waiting a lot. The Director is never waiting. The Director is, you know, needs more time, you know? It’s just he uses up every minute of the day, and I love all of the different aspects of it. I love the working with the Actors, I love the fact that it’s photography and we’re making photographs. I love the fact that it’s a story that is told on the set, but then it’s retold in the cutting room and that… you know, really a Director, if he edits, or the combination of the Director and the Editor in movies, is the equivalent of the Director in the theater. That the two together make up the one. [INT: Oh that’s really interesting, that’s amazing. It just occurred to me that you’ve got, that you’re a Photographer, an Editor, a Writer, and you’ve been an Actor.] And I also am really good, even though I suffer doing it, at sweeping up the stage, and I think you really, I mean I have had, you know I’ve always picked up stuff and you know helped load the truck and stuff, and everybody said, “No you shouldn’t do that, you’re the Director,” you know, I can’t think like that. [INT: That’s awesome, that’s awesome.]

INT: Is there anything that’s frustrating about being a Director for you?

MH: Yeah, I think it’s dealing with the non-creative people. I never, there’s nothing frustrating about dealing with creative people, even if you have differences. You know, the fact that you clash in a creative way is constructive, and it makes you grow, but dealing with non-creative people is frustrating. You know, first of all, you don’t speak the same language. So it’s like going to a foreign country and being frustrated because you can’t communicate. And then beyond that there’s a certain point where a lot of them don’t want to have a dialogue. They just will say, “No, this is the way we’re going to do it. Do it this way,” you know. And that’s very frustrating. [INT: Yeah, absolutely well put.]

INT: Let’s talk about the Guild [DGA]. When did you become a Guild member?

MH: I became, I almost became a Guild member on a picture called EXPLOSION, one of the 60 that didn’t get made. Now that came really close, I mean we got canceled on Friday and we were going to start shooting the following Monday, and that was an AIP [American International Pictures] movie; the only time I ever worked for AIP. It was about a black sheriff in the South, and the reason it got canceled was, again, Arkoff, Sam Arkoff [Samuel Z. Arkoff] finally read the script and he said, “You know, I’m from Missouri and we don’t have any racial tension in Missouri.” You know, he says, “Nobody’s going to believe this; there is no such thing as you know black people and white people not getting along,” and he canceled the movie. But I didn’t actually join the Guild but I was, you know, somehow it got into the works. So I joined the pension and health fund before I actually got into the Guild a couple of years later on TWO-LANE BLACKTOP. [INT: Now how did you do that? How’d you join the health fund?] I don’t know, I mean I just, you know, they--it was a DGA picture and they, I guess, they sent my name in and my Social Security number or whatever, so I wasn’t collecting anything but I was getting credits and for you know time in the Guild, and I got paid. I got paid in full, so I should have actually joined the Guild then, but I, for some reason, it slipped by and I didn’t join until TWO-LANE. [INT: Wow. Cool.]

INT: And then have you been on--what is your, what has been your involvement with the Guild [DGA]?

MH: Well, I’m embarrassed to say not a great deal, other than I’ve had a kind of unique friendship with some of the people who became Guild presidents. For instance, I went to school with Jud Taylor and directed him in the first one-act play that he was ever in. And I lived on the same street as Gene Reynolds, and we used to walk our dogs together and I became friends with him over a period. And I knew Elliot Silverstein and I knew Martha Coolidge, and you know… so I’ve had a good record in terms of Guild presidents anyway. And I do, I appreciate so many things about the Guild. I mean, just on a mundane level, I’m so grateful to have a Guild pension. I mean it’s the only pension I have, it’s the only you know thing that keeps me sometimes from starving, and so I’m very grateful for that. I’m very grateful for the health plan. And I’m very, very grateful for the involvement of the Guild in protecting creative rights. I think that’s just so important. [INT: Yeah I, it’s pretty staggering when we think how many things have been fought so hard for, you know for our Director’s cut and…] Oh yeah. And I was--unfortunately they still haven’t got us to the point where European Directors are, where they, you know, are the owner of a picture, so to speak, or the--[INT: The author.]--the author of a picture, right. We’re not--the author of the picture unfortunately is Universal [Universal Pictures] or Columbia [Columbia Pictures], which I don’t understand at all. I don’t understand where that comes from, other than you know their, you know, business need to have that, you know. [INT: Yeah and I--yeah exactly. And I wonder, you know, I also, it’ll be great, it sounds like that you’ve had a lot of, with your films, have been able to protect final cut a lot for yourself.] Well, I mean you know sometimes--[INT: That’s amazing you had it on TWO-LANE [TWO-LANE BLACKTOP.] I’ve had a worse problem with some of the pictures I’ve done in Europe, where presumably I have the rights of the author, but they don’t respect it, or these particular Producers didn’t respect it. And I’ve had pictures cut that were restored later, like COCKFIGHTER, Roger [Roger Corman] re-cut it, and it went out with his cut, and then when he sold it for video they asked for the Director’s cut, so he had no choice. And the same thing with CHINA 9 [CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37], the Producer re-cut it and actually put out, he sold an illegal video that was, you know, he didn’t have any rights to it. The picture was finally owned by Warner Bros., but he put out a different cut with a different title. And the Producer re-cut IGUANA and actually showed it at some markets, and you know, just horrific stuff. But all--everything got, all of these pictures got restored. I’ve just been lucky.

INT: Is there anything else you want to talk about?

MH: Let me think. I mean there’s just been lots of experiences. I mean, just great things like on IGUANA, I wanted--[INT: Yeah, we haven’t talked too much about IGUANA and we probably should.] No, I wanted Joni Mitchell to do the soundtrack, and we were under tremendous time pressure and I--and Jerry Harvey was here in L.A. and he… no, not Jerry Harvey I’m sorry, it was Steve Gaydos was here in L.A., who had been one of the Writers, and he called Joni. He got the video, a VHS tape to her. She looked at it, in fact, he went over to her house, she watched it while he was there. She says, “This is poetry.” She says, “I’ll do it.” She recorded it the next day, it was shipped overnight back to us, and we got it in time for the mix. It was just you know unbelievable. [INT: That was amazing for me, listening to that again, watching IGUANA. I watched it a couple of days ago, and since you and I had talked about her doing the music, I hadn’t seen it since Seattle, the film festival, when you were there and I was there with my very first movie. We were so excited that you were in the building.] And the other story was Ronee Blakley, who did the music on CHINA 9 [CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37], and she actually came to Rome and did the recording over there, and actually worked on the lyrics and did a lot of work on the song, you know, partly because she wanted to get the publication rights as well. And while there I introduced her to what’s his name Giannini [Giuseppe Giannini] and she had an affair with him, then I introduced her to Fabio Testi and she had an affair with him, and by the time she was ready to leave Rome, she says, “I should pay you for this.” [INT: That’s awesome, what year was that?] That was ’78 [1978]. [INT: So that was right before she met Wim Wenders.] That’s right, I introduced her to Wim Wenders too so… and then she said, “I should sue you for this.” [INT: Well, that’s awesome, I hadn’t thought about that you had the two Rolling Thunder [The Rolling Thunder Revue] girls there doing music for you.] Right.

INT: Now you haven’t shot digitally yet, have you, or have you? [MH: I haven’t shot digitally, no… other than you know home movies.] Right. How do you, have you cut, have you always cut on film?

MH: I’ve always cut on film, except you know I did one picture that I worked on for a very brief time where I used the AVID, and I didn’t like the AVID… not because of the process, but because of the fact that it was a Macintosh, and I’m kind of like a PC person, so I, it just seemed foreign to me. I begged them to let me use Lightworks at the time, and they wouldn’t do it. But now you can get you know Final Cut on PC or Mac, and so I’m looking forward to it; I think it’s great. But there’s something about film and the fact that you can touch it and even--I never used a flatbed, other than as a method of viewing a reel. You know when I finished cutting a reel, I put it on the flatbed, and that’s how we view it, but--[INT: You cut on the Moviola?] Always used a Moviola and it’s just--I like, you know, the flatbed is the worst, but even… No, I’m sorry, on SILENT NIGHT [SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 3: BETTER WATCH OUT!], I used a thing called Touch Vision, where you put everything on videotape and you have like a big machine that shuffles the tapes and you know. And then you edit by actually touching the screen. And it’s a little bit like a Moviola in the sense that you, you know, it stops when you touch it, but it was very fast. I cut the picture in 10 days, but I’m very fast on a Moviola as well. And the thing I like about the Moviola, and I think it’s why Spielberg [Steven Spielberg] is using a Moviola now, is it’s precise. You know, if you want to stop you put your foot, your hand on that brake and you stop on that frame, and if you’re even if you’re in doubt, you can go back and you can, you know, you can look at the frame close and you can match frames, which you can do digitally as well, but it’s not… I think every digital movie either has you know very fast cuts, where you, you know, it could be anything, you don’t even know what the image is, or it has probably five frames too much on the end of every cut. [INT: Interesting.] It’s just not as precise.

INT: Now this is another thing, when I’m thinking about, you know, I don’t know why I’ve never really thought about this. Well, I didn’t know that you edited your own movies until now, but just the… It’s so interesting when I think about how, I mean most people would think that Editors, that a person who’s an Editor would be so gung-ho to go in and just, you know, show off the cuts. Would you say that this is another part of that philosophy that you learned?

MH: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, I think that, I think, one of the worst things about digital editing is not the process. One of the worst things is the fact that it gives the power back to those people that I was talking about, that are not the creative people, and it makes them feel like they can cut the movie and I think--and they do, and they do cut the movie, and too many choices. Just like too much information, too many choices.

MH: The passion of my life is this picture called DARK PASSION, and it’s, you know Lionel White wrote the book, and Lionel White wrote Kubrick’s [Stanley Kubrick] first movie, he wrote the book that Kubrick’s first movie was based on. And Lionel White, when he heard that Kubrick was going to do LOLITA, he begged him to let him do the screenplay, and Kubrick said, “No, I’ve got somebody else I want to work with.” And so out of frustration, Lionel wrote this book, which is his film noir version of LOLITA. And Bert Schneider was the original producer at Paramount [Paramount Pictures], and he hired me to do it and, to develop it, and it’s just, you know, it’s just, to begin with, I relate to it and it’s so close to home. And then beyond that I’ve, as I’ve worked on the screenplay over the years, I’ve just made it so personal. And it’s just, you know, that’s the one movie that I, you know, I really feel like I have to do, and it’s the one movie I can’t do until I do something else, because I’ve gotta, I have to be in a position where I can attract big enough stars because it is a movie that couldn’t be made with just anybody. Those kind of movies are so difficult. Any film noir is difficult. You have to have you know somebody who’s gonna, you know, get the picture made. [INT: Right. And how long has this been, this has been since the ‘60s [1960s] then?] No this was--[INT: ‘70s [1970s].] No, this was 1980. [INT: 1980.] 1980, yeah. So it’s a long time, 23 years, yeah. But the script keeps getting better, I mean this always happens when you stop working. [INT: That’s the good news about it.] Right.

INT: And how about any other filmmakers that have inspired you? [MH: Well I think--] Well, you see so many movies. You see more movies than most Directors I know.

MH: I think that you know probably you know the American Director who inspired me the most was John Huston. The English Director was Carol Reed. OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS is you know maybe my favorite movie of all time. But you know in recent years I’ve seen, there are other pictures that are very important to me that, they didn’t influence me so much when I was developing, but they become really passions for me now, and one is THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, the Victor Erice film. Another is Nikita Mikhalkov’s A SLAVE OF LOVE, and I’ve recently discovered a Taiwanese Director’s, Tsai Ming-liang, who did an incredible movie called WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? and now I’m discovering a lot of Melville [Jean-Pierre Melville], besides LE SAMOURAI, which I am passionate about, but you know other Melville movies that are really terrific and just, you know, I keep finding new favorites.

INT: Let me ask you, even though you were not, even though you were a Producer on the film, but what was it like working with, how do you work as a Director, as a Director yourself, with younger Directors as a Producer? For instance, how did you work with Quentin [Quentin Tarantino]? I mean you told us that great story of giving him the same advice that you were given on the shot list.

MH: Well, I mean the thing is I, you know, because I’m a Director, I treat young Directors the way I would want to be treated, which is hands-off. You know, I want to give them you know as much artistic freedom as I would expect. And so you know I try to be the ideal Producer that I’m always looking for. And with Quentin, I did you know whatever it was that--I helped in any way I could. I helped him get into the Sundance Lab [Sundance Institute], I went to the Lab with him. I kind of like you know went through kind of the initial creative, you know, the giving birth process, which started at the Sundance Lab. And then I kind of, with Lawrence Bender, encouraged him to really prepare well, you know. Not that I always do that kind of preparation to the extent that I--but I did on my first picture. I feel on your first picture you really have to know, you have to have everything, you have to have your fallback position completely worked out, so that you know if you get on the set and you don’t have any inspiration, you know what you’re going to do. Now, you know, on my first picture I never got any sleep. I stayed up all night you know doing diagrams and you know, not just shot lists but you know storyboards. And now I have, you know, I trust that I’m going to be inspired and I don’t have to do that anymore. I can sleep at night because I feel like I can be more creative if I’m rested on the set than if I come in you know with my eyes like, you know, propped open with toothpicks. But with Quentin, I tried to get him to do all that preparation long in advance, so that he had that fallback, and he did it and he was great to work with you know. And then once he was shooting, I didn’t hang over him on the set every day. I came every second day, every third day, but I was at the dailies every night. And if I saw something that, you know, if I saw a problem, I would at least you know point it out to him. [INT: Yeah. I can, I mean for me, having worked with one Director as a Producer, I found that to be a glorious kind of experience, because I, you know, fortunately I worked with someone who was sensitive like you to that, and now you’re working with another young Director.] I’m working with another young Director whom I’ve known since before he was born. His mother was Jack Nicholson’s girlfriend when I first worked with Jack, when I was the Associate Producer in Concord, California, and so I’ve known you know her forever, and… you know, literally, you know, I was there at his birth. He damn well better be good, I don’t know.

INT: Any advice you would have, just in general? Any kind of advice for…

MH: Yeah, I think that you know too many young Directors are trained to have an eye on the kind of the commercial part of it, you know. You’ve got to have a successful movie for your first movie, you’ve gotta you know do this, you gotta do that, so that you’re sure that you know it does well, and then you can go on to make other movies and so forth. I think that you know if anybody could predict, you know, what’s going to be successful… Again, back to Arthur Hopkins, we’ll end where we began. Arthur Hopkins, you know, talks about the fact of trying to be successful, and he says, “The problem is…” I’m going to get emotional again; I can’t help it. “The problem is if you do something because you want it to make money and it fails, you’ve got nothing. If you do something because you believe in it and you love it and it fails, you’ve still done something that you believe in and you love.” [INT: Wow. That’s awesome.] Thank you Arthur Hopkins.