INT: My name is Jeremy Kagan, today is March 27, 2009. I'm conducting an interview with Andy Davis [Andrew Davis], the Director. [AD: I'm so lucky.] You certainly are and so am I. At the Directors Guild of America Visual Histories Program [Visual History Program], and we are at the DGA in L.A. in California.

INT: Andy, give me your full name.
AD: My name is Andrew Davis. [INT: No middle name?] They couldn't afford it. I have no middle name. [INT: And, did you have any nicknames when you were a kid?] My kids gave me a name. [INT: What?] They call me Droogie, and I said, "That's out of [A] CLOCKWORK ORANGE. 'Me and the droogies are down at the milk bar.'" [INT: You got it, friends, Russian word for friends, 'droog.' When you were a kid did they ever call, did you ever get called Andrew, or you were always Andy?] I was always Andy. I worked in the steel mills, there was Yago and Yorgo and I was the college kid they called Yoyo. I never, I never had any nicknames really.

INT: Birthdate and city and state?
AD: November 21, 1946, Chicago, Illinois. [INT: Got it. So does that make you a Sagittarian?] AD: I'm a Scorpio. [INT: What are the qualities of a Scorpio that you know are true?] A great leader or a pervert. [INT: So a perverted great leader?] I won't commit to either. [INT: Who told you this, or did you read it?] I read that someday. [INT: Any other qualities that a Scorpio's supposed to have?] They're very, you know, they're very take charge, and, you know, sort of fits, I think somebody said all of my moons are in Scorpio except for one.

INT: Were you a take-charge kid?
AD: I think so. Yeah. It's interesting because people said, "How did you become a filmmaker?" you know, and I sort of look back on it and my parents were in the theatre, they met in the theatre in Chicago in the Chicago Rep. Group [Chicago Repertory Group], which was the, sort of the group theatre of Chicago with Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren, and Haskell Wexler was a periphery of it. And, when I was a kid, my, I remember my mother, you know, she was a mother and housewife, later went back to school, became a teacher, got a degree, a graduate degree. But she said, I said, "Mom, you know, what would you have done? What would you like to do?" and she said, "I would have liked to have been a journalist, a photojournalist." And I think that rubbed off on me. I look back when I was 8 years old I was the president of the South Chicago YMCA Photo Club. [INT: That's pretty young.] Very young. And, and I took photographs of the Chicago skyway being built. Those were my first, those were my first pictures. And I was back there a few weeks ago, actually scouting, and that, and that structure's still up there. And it was about the Y that I went to was a block and a half away from where Harrison Ford hid out in the Polish lady's house in THE FUGITIVE.

INT: Did you have favorite photographers when you were that age? Do you remember the names?
AD: Well, I was very involved with documentary imagery. Dorothea Lange, the stuff from the WPA [Works Progress Administration]. And I remember seeing books about the history of the Jews, you know, these big books about Auschwitz and them being taught the history of what happened with Nazism. And I was sort of taken with that reality. And I remember getting up early in the morning and watching THE BIG PICTURE. You know, I didn't... fantasy and comic books were not so much a part of my life. And then, one of the earliest films that impressed me, my mother took me to see the LITTLE FUGITIVE, which was directed by two still photographers. And Ruth Orkin and, let me check his name, one second.

INT: Do you remember what it was about that film that stimulated you?
AD: Oh yeah. Morris, Morris Engle, Morris Engle and Ruth Orkin, Orkin directed the LITTLE FUGITIVE [directing credit also shared with Ray Ashley] and it was an incredible story, done with an Arriflex and no sync sound, about a kid whose brother's supposed to take care of him, a latchkey kid. And they wind, and the older brother doesn't want to take care of him, so he fakes with a cap gun and some ketchup that his younger brother has shot him. And the poor, young 6-year-old is left alone thinking he's killed his brother and runs off to Coney Island. And it would, it was devastating emotionally, and it was real. It was a real kid, and real locations, and a harmonica soundtrack. And years later, when I did PERFECT MURDER we used some of Ruth Orkin's photographs on the walls of Michael Douglas's apartment. And Ruth Orkin is famous for that photograph of the, of the American college girl walking down the street in Italy and all the men ogling her. [INT: Oh, sure.] And they both were very famous New York, sort of documentary photographers.

INT: Now I'd heard that that photograph was actually a staged photograph. Do you know anything about this?
AD: I don't. [INT: 'Cause this is really a fascinating subject because I, I know the photograph, you know, it's a classic photograph, they're all looking this way and it has that kind of Cartier-Bresson-in-the-moment stuff to it.] Right, right. [INT: And later I'd heard, and I may be, this may not be true, but that it in fact wasn't, you know, that it was set up, but, to look that way, which is an interesting set of issue about, you know, when you're young and looking at a picture, how much you believe it and how much you don't.] Right.

INT: And when you saw LITTLE FUGITIVE you, believed it?
AD: Right. I believed that, you know, it was emotionally wrenching to me and the style of the filmmaking was very real, it was very different than the kind of staged, lit Hollywood things with a shadow on the wall, you know, or the, the bad television we had in those days.

INT: Did you watch some TV when you were the, a kid?
AD: Yeah. [INT: And what'd you watch?] I watched GUNSMOKE, I watched PALADIN, I watched SHOCK THEATRE with MARVIN [Terry Bennett], I watched the Friday night fights with my dad. What was the famous one with Alistair Cooke? YOU ARE THERE, or something like that. [INT: OMNIBUS.] OMNIBUS, yeah. [INT: Yeah, I remember that one.] But, you know, I watched all, I watched Dick Clark [NEW AMERICAN BANDSTAND] and I watched MICKEY MOUSE [THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB], and, and Annette Funicello was the cutie I liked, you know. I was a normal kid. Roy Rogers [THE ROY ROGERS SHOW] was my favorite. I used to sit on the back of the couch and, and I'd be a young cowboy watching Roy Rogers.

INT: Was there a time when you, even when you were young, particularly because you already dealt with the still photography, that you thought, "Oh, I, I would like to make this kind of stuff," or did that come later?
AD: Well, I was interested in sort of being able to have a job, I think at a very young age, where I could travel. And see the world. And get, you know, and be involved in exciting things that weren't [unintelligible]. My dad was a, an actor who became, after the war he came back to Chicago, had to support a family, and he became a wholesale drug salesman and he was basically Willy Loman. And he was, he was in a rut. He, he didn't like his work and he always did the theatre on the side, you know. And I didn't want to get caught like that, I wanted to try to find something that I really cared about. So, the, the journalism, the politics and my parents, and the idea that you could travel and see the world and be part of that was, I think, in my system. When I was twelve or thirteen I became the head projectionist in grammar school. And we could watch all these films that were coming in from the Chicago Board of Education each week. [INT: Anything strike you?] Oh, the ones in Africa with the women showing their breasts was very striking, you know. But, I remember seeing, you know, Eskimo documentaries [may refer to documentaries about Inuit, Inupiaq or Yupik peoples], and just sort of being excited about all that. And how things work, you know, industrial kind of stuff. And I think, you know, I was, I went to college and studied journalism. And it was during Vietnam. And I very quickly realized that we were mouthpieces for the government. You know, I was, I was on WILL [Illinois Public Media TV station out of the University of Illinois], first starting behind the camera, putting up magnetic numbers for the stock markets and clouds and things like that. Had a great teacher named Henry Lippold And then I became on-camera, doing, you know, the first draft-card burning in Illinois, SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]/SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] kind of stuff. And, but, we, you know, "The State Department announced today," and it was, we knew they were lies. And so I said, "I don't know if I want participate in this," because we were all involved in the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement. And, matter of fact, I went down to Selma, but before that I went to Greene County, Alabama, and I, because I was a journalism major, they put me in touch with a guy who was the head of CBS Atlanta and Peter Goldman who was the managing editor of NEWSWEEK. And my job was to drive them around in a little Volkswagen to these polling places with the Klan [Ku Klux Klan] following us. I didn't know what I was doing. It was very scary. So, I sort of was interested in journalism, but because of what I felt the restrictions were going to be, and in fact, that was the end of an era, when Walter Cronkite said, "The war in Vietnam is no good," everybody said, "You're right, Walter we're outta here." It took, because there were only four networks, everybody watched Walter every night. And as you look now as to what has happened with news and there are, there are some exceptions, but it's basically been, you know, doing what the government tells you to do. So, I, I got interested in photography more and more. I had a darkroom in the art department and a darkroom in the journalism department. And started shooting, working as an assistant cameraman carrying cable and being taught by a guy named John Weir who was a graduate of Brooks Institute, who's a Canadian, and he gave me some real skills in terms of how to be an assistant cameraman and how to be organized. I wasn't sure what I was going to do when I got out of college. And I had an incredible classmate by the name of Tom Holman who became the creator of THX and he was a genius, he was an electrical engineer who would... [INT: He still is.] He was also, knew how to light, he introduced me to Gunther Schuller and he, he lit THE VISITATION, which was a big thing that was going on, and Philip Glass, and all kinds of things. He was involved, so Tom [Tom Holman] was a real mentor to me. He said things like, "You know in Germany you can't run an auger unless you know how to take it apart and put it back together." And I never got that far into it, but I remember graduating from college and not knowing if I was going to be an Assistant Cameraman or a Still Assistant. Knowing I wanted to be involved in documentaries, but there was other stuff that was sexy: commercials and fashion and stuff like that. And I wound up getting a job through an old girlfriend of mine who introduced me to a guy named Gary Sherman who was, he became a Director later, who was doing a documentary for the University of Chicago about 6-year-olds with reading problems teaching first graders how to read. Sixth graders teaching first graders how to read. And they were, the sixth graders were getting so much out of it. So it was an educational documentary, and that's where I sort of began being an Assistant Cameraman.

INT: Your work itself, and I'm jumping ahead, but we'll backorder, but a lot of your pieces, even the ones that, let's say are more into the mainline, you know, sort of entertainment adventures, oftentimes you're going to have a political tone to it. There are oftentimes characters that are dealing with stuff that is of this nature. Your parents had, certainly, a point of view about this, [AD: Right] and you lived in a time when it was real clear that there was injustice right in front of your face, in terms of the social realities of what was going on with a sense of equality in terms of racial issues, and obviously a war that made no sense. [AD: Right.] Was there a part of you that said, "I have to do something outside the system." Was that part of your own dialogue?
AD: Well, yeah, the idea was you make films that change the world. And, you know, which is antithetical to, what is it, "If you want to put a message in a movie," what is it, Goldwyn [Samuel Goldwyn] or somebody... I was able to, because I started off in documentaries really in some ways in Chicago, and then I got involved in commercials. And then by the time I came to California and was working as a young DP [Director of Photography], hadn't become a Director yet, I started shooting all these action pictures. So I had these sort of tough-neighborhood-background action stuff, you know, into that stuff. So, when I became a Director, I very consciously took the action genre and gave political themes and ideas to them that allowed me to say things that normally you couldn't get to say. But if it was exciting and you had Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal involved, you could get away with it.

INT: Was there a part of you, that before you did that, when you were young and looking at the fact that the system itself didn't work, was there a part of you that said, "I need to not be in it," or "I need to find another way of work, of employment," or was that never a choice?
AD: In terms of making movies, or not making movies? [INT: No, in terms of just living your life. Like saying, "Okay, the system itself is corrupt," you're seeing it, as a journalist your were even seeing that you were a mouthpiece for it, so you said, "I'm not going to do this anymore." Now, some people said, "I'm not going to do this anymore and I'm going to part of creating a whole new world," and, unfortunately, that essentially failed with its utopias, or, sort of the darkness [unintelligible] by becoming inevitably weathermen as a most extreme, and other people said, "Okay, I'm going to figure, I'm going to find a place within the system." Was this part of your...] I felt, I was never that pessimistic. And I think having role models of people of who were involved in trying to do good things and making a living at it was very important. There were ways to do it. And, you know from, if you go back to Chess Records, you know, there were people making music, and it was interesting music, and you could talk about something. Either the dilemma of being poor and living in Chicago, or, as The Beatles came along and social issues became part of pop music, there was a way for you to expand, you know. And, I felt that, you know, especially because of my connection to Haskell Wexler who was from a wealthy family, but was in California working on great movies. You know, he was working with Norman Jewison on IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, and they were involved in issues that could be paid, you could make a living in Hollywood doing films that were relevant and about something. And it was getting better and better. There were more and more films coming out like that as I was getting out of college. So there was hope. There was hope that we could, we did stop the war, you know. When Johnson [Lyndon B. Johnson] took over, you know, there were more black kids in college than ever in the history of the country, you know. A guy who was in a, could work in the mills and be in a union and have two weeks vacation and his wife didn't have to work, and he had a pension plan and a car and a house, I mean it was a different world we were living. America was a great place to be.[INT: Got it.]

INT: You mentioned something about films making a difference. When you were young, were there films that you would have said qualified? Whether American or European, where you say, "Ah, I think this film has made a difference?" Documentary or dramatic.
AD: Yeah. [INT: Which ones?] Well, STRANGELOVE [DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB] was a film that was fantastic to me. Because I love black comedy, and it was about the insanity of the world we were living in. And you got to go behind the scenes, it took you someplace you'd never been. Into the war room. And you saw this incredibly-hyped super-reality that was done on a shoestring actually, it was an eighty eight-minute movie, you know, it was so perfectly done, the casting, the writing, you know, the shooting. And I said, "This is, this is what I want to do." It was very inspiring to me. You know, in college, we'd go see foreign films every Sunday night. Roger Ebert was in school there. And they had this big auditorium and all the hippies and the foreign students would get together and we would see Buñuel [Luis Buñuel] and Fellini [Federico Fellini] and Lelouch [Claude Lelouch] and Jan Troell and all those different directors, and it was exciting, it was inspiring. You know, you were seeing cinema in a style that was fresh to the American eye, and you were looking at lives of people that you hadn't seen before, and you know, so. I felt like there was a lot to learn, I was interested in the world of movies, and I felt there was a place for me. Later on you get more cynical, you start taking films apart, you see them, you understand the deal, you understand the process, you get, you, it's not as exciting, and still I know there are great films being made today. There are great foreign filmmakers we don't know about, unfortunately, because they don't have the thirty million dollars to open their picture in America. And, there's a lot more to look at and we have access to the older films, but I think we're sort of bamboozled today.

INT: When you were looking at those foreign films, were there any that stood out, were there any that sort of, like, grabbed your attention, that you would say, "I remember this Buñuel [Luis Buñuel] or this Godard [Jean-Luc Godard], or, really, this one struck me and stayed with me."
AD: Wow. Well, you know, part of that whole group, GRAPES OF WRATH of course, which is not one of those films, was something that really resonated with me. When I think ab-- [INT: By the way, I'll share something as you're thinking about this. I met, I was with Tavernier [Bertrand Tavernier], I don't know, about eight months ago, last August, something like that, I don't remember, and I was asking him the question, what movie really influenced him. GRAPES OF WRATH was the one he picked. I was surprised because of his incredible knowledge of filmmaking, but he picked that. And as I think of that movie, that may be one of the most socially responsible films made, and obviously made by a master, a master storyteller. And that speech at the end, you know, is just an astounding speech.] And I think the shooting ratio on that movie was like three or four to one. Because they were done, masters, you know, and everything was sort of there. I think, I remember seeing ROMA, which I really liked, and then years later, I remember Peter Weir did a scene in THE LAST WAVE, which was a complete rip-off, where the dust, the moisture comes on the wall and the faces disappear, you know. But, Fellini [Federico Fellini] was really out there, and then a little bit later, I guess, after THE SPIDER'S STRATAGEM, a Bertolucci [Bernardo Bertolucci] film, really. It was the first time he collaborated with Storaro [Vittorio Storaro]. And that was a television, a film made for television, and that was really interesting.

INT: So, when did you say to yourself, "I want to be a Director?"
AD: Well, it was almost by default. I wanted to be a DP [Director of Photography]. I came out here and I had a really… I first came out in probably '69 [1969] or '70 [1970], after I had worked on MEDIUM COOL with Haskell [Haskell Wexler], which was a seminal experience for me. And I saw Haskell and I said, "You know, I really want to be a DP," and he said, "Man, it's so hard to get in the union, are you sure? They're making this movie FUTZ! up there. Why don't you go hang out on the set," you know. And it turns out my to-be-future wife was working on that with, at the time, and my girlfriend and I didn't go up there. And I went back to Chicago and said, "No, I want to be a cameraman," and I put together, I was offered a job to shoot a Duke Ellington commercial for ZENITH when I was twenty years old. I worked with a guy named Walt Topel. And he saw how hard I was working as an Assistant Cameraman. I was, I would order all the equipment and get the truck filled up, and be on the set and I was out to prove, you know, that I could do it, and I had my manual and my diddy bag and I'd worked with Haskell that summer, you know, I was really into finding out how it all worked. And he had been an agency Producer who had started his own production company. And he had a classy little brownstone on the north side of Chicago, and he was doing good stuff. And he said, "You know, I think, we don't need to hire a cameraman, you and I can do this" And I said, "Really?" "Yeah." And he designed this set with all this Mylar and this sort of, it was a white-on-white piano with Duke Ellington in a red tuxedo. He had played Grant Park the night before to twenty thousand people. And he came out there [singing] "Da-da-da-da da," SATIN DOLL. And he talked about seeing the circle of sound, which they later pulled because when you put the needle on it, it wasn't really the song that was playing, it was, like... truth in advertising. So, anyway, I had this, I ran a couple Cleos as a cameraman. I was very young in Chicago, one for the gas company where, you know, we did some night shooting, and then I said, "Walt, we don't have it. We've got to get, make it more real." And he said,""You're right." And we brought some real nuns and kids in and we did documentary shooting of them with available light. And it was, that was cool. So I came back to California, and Haskell had a company called Dove Films, he was making commercials. And Hal Ashby was there. And so Haskell said, he said, "Hal, look at this." And he showed Hal Ashby my commercial reel and Hal said, "How'd you like to shoot second unit on HAROLD AND MAUDE?" And I was like, "Whoa," you know. And so I really, you know, so I wanted to be a cameraman. Well, I couldn't do it because of the union. They wouldn't let me do it. And John Alonzo was the DP [Director of Photography] on HAROLD AND MAUDE. And Alonzo [John Alonzo] heard from Haskell [Haskell Wexler] that I had some chops. And he recommended me to somebody else, to Menahem Golan to shoot LEPKE, which was my first big feature in those days. But anyway, I wanted to be a Cameraman, but you couldn't get in the union. You had to start as a Second Loader Assistant, become an Assistant, be an Operat--, like all the other guys did, work your way up through the system. Well, what was happening is, I started off moving from Chicago, with this cool sample reel, to San Francisco. Haskell said that, you know, "AMERICAN ZOETROPE was going to be the new American cinema." And he was coming out there to help George Lucas shoot 1138. Dave Myers was the cameraman. And Francis [Francis Ford Coppola] had just bought this huge KEM [Keller-Elektro-Mechanik, flatbed] system. And it was, you know, and I got to start working up there. I was working with a guy named Slick [Jerry Slick], Grace Slick's husband. And he was a really nice guy and I shot the letter 'C' or something for SESAME STREET, you know, and we did commercials like that. And, eventually my girlfriend, Mary McGlone, who became a really well-known Assistant Editor later, worked with Ronnie Howard [Ron Howard]. She was in graduate school in Berkeley, and we decided eventually to move down to L.A., and I was recommended by Haskell to Roger Corman's brother Gene [Gene Corman] to become a Cameraman, to shoot a feature. And it was a great story because Gene Corman met me and he saw my commercial reel, and was very impressed, he says, "Do you ha ve any footage of a bus in Beverly Hills at night?" And I said, "What?" So I went back to Haskell, I said, "He wants me to show him the footage, you know, in the movie so I can get the job." So Haskell hands me this Eclair CM3 [Eclair Cameflex CM3 35mm/16mm Camera]. And it had marks, marking strips on it from [A] CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Kubrick [Stanley Kubrick] had borrowed it. It had a French instrumentation lens, an Angenieux, a 0.095, less than f1 lens, that he had built for IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT for available light, because the film was 50 ASA [film speed set by the American Standards Association] in those days, you could push it a stop. So he gives me this camera, and a short end, and he says to Tak [Tak Fujimoto], "You guys go out at night and shoot some footage on a bus in Beverly Hills," so we did it. And it, I have the reel at home still, I have the negative and the positive of me shooting Tak sitting there riding this bus. So I showed it to [Gene] Corman, I got the job. So the night we were supposed to shoot the night bus sc-- the camera jammed, the tachometer, so I wound up using a Nikon lens on a 2C, on an Arri, but, the point is, I was a cameraman. So I had this, I was shooting films for Roger Corman, remakes of MGM. Danny Melnick and [Roger] Corman had a deal. GET CARTER, ASPHALT JUNGLE, all these MGM scripts were being turned into black action projects, under the table, three-hundred-thousand-dollar budgets. Jack Fisk was the Production Designer, Sissy Spacek used to sit on the grip truck, right. And different directors, Paul Bartel did one called PRIVATE PARTS, Jonathan Kaplan did one called THE SLAMS, George Armitage did one called HIT MAN, there was another one called COOL BREEZE, was working with Pam Grier, Jim Brown, Bernie Casey, Thalmus Rasulala, it was really interesting. So that was graduate school.

INT: What did you learn from those other Directors, as you think about it? Because now here you are, I realize you've got a lot of responsibilities as DP [Director of Photography], and you may not be learning anything about directing, because you got to, obviously, figure out how to shoot what you got to shoot in the limited time that you have...
AD: Thirty days. [INT: Yeah, so, it's not like, it's not like you're able to suddenly relax and watch the, watch the Directors work, but, by being a DP [Director of Photography] you've worked with an, lots and lots of, or at least a lot of Directors. And also the names you mention, they're all good guys, talented guys.] Well, well it was great because we were learning together. You know, it was like an incubator. They gave you a script, or you, the director worked with the script, I didn't have much say with the script. And the, the cast was put together based upon who they felt they could sell the movie with. And you were sent off to find locations and figure it out, and, a lot of the times...I mean I remember the first time, I shot a lot of commercials, but I didn't really understand screen direction too well. And Tak [Tak Fujimoto] had gone to London School of Film Technique. He knew more about screen direction than I did. And I finally got to understand the lines and where you could break the rules and all that kind of stuff. But most of the directors weren't very visual. They were people who had been involved in student movies or, or avant-garde kind of stuff, but they didn't have a, a sense of what a 50mm lens meant, you know. Or how to put different cameras together at the same time. They were learning, we were all learning. So, because I was learning with all these different Directors, at some point I said to myself, "You know, if you can't get in the union..." Because what was happening, Jonathan Kaplan would go on and get a studio job and he'd want to hire me, but he couldn't because I wasn't in the union. So, we started a class lawsuit. A class-action lawsuit. And, to go back to your question, I learned from what they knew, and what they didn't know. We had to figure things out together. And it was very collaborative, and it was a good experience to do that. It wasn't like, you know, "Put the camera over here, put it here, we're going to do this," we had to work it out together. You know the scene would sort of get set up and I would, I was able to come up with ideas and recommend things to the Directors and they were very receptive and open to, you know, "Okay great," you know, "I'm having enough trouble dealing with the Actor or the Producer or the schedule, help, however you get me to shoot it, great."

INT: Now, interesting enough, since your visual orientation was so strong, that that, you know, was a securer place for you to work, even though you were learning then about issues, where the line is, and stuff like that. But you're also watching them work with, particularly some of the, some of, like, semi-star actors and how one handles that. Do you remember anything, any sort of like, moment, with Director and Actor that you got to witness that gave you a lesson, that, and, got, allowed you to apply it later?
AD: I remember, I remember being in a hotel room, on COOL BREEZE, and Thalmus Rasulala who was a, he was a great guy, became a very close friend of mine, put him in THE PACKAGE, had a role in THE PACKAGE, several other films of mine. There was, it was, it was about a, you know, a guy who had gotten out of prison, and he wanted to pay tribute to this older, black con [convict] who had sort of told him how, what to do when he got out of jail. And it was very important from a kind of African-American historical-mentorship part, and Gene Corman didn't care at all about this stuff, you know. And so there was a political point that an actor wanted to make in the story, and I remember sitting around talking about that. And I knew that, that, there were going to be battles about issues about substance down the road when you're in the movie business and not the idea of selling, you know, political ideas. But, I know, I don't think we, I remember one day was very funny when Jonathan [Jonathan Kaplan] was trying to show Jim Brown how to dodge the spotlight as he was escaping from prison. This incredible runner, Jonathan [Jonathan Kaplan] was explaining to him how to do it. But, I don't remember any big issues or, you know, problems with Actors on the set. Pam Grier was always lovely to be around.

INT: You know, why I'm asking is because one of the things that, you know, we sometimes learn from watching other Directors is how to handle an Actor in a situation where, I mean, most of the time we don't have problems. Most of the time people are all working together to make it work, but every now and then you do, and it's those moments where the lesson comes and say, "Ah," you know, "I'm up against it and I'm going to learn about it." We're going to talk about your learning with, you know, obviously, ca--, a lot of Actors who are not, essentially, skilled performers, and very powerful characters in terms of their personalities, and how to handle them to get the best out of them, which you've been able to do. So, it's really an interesting question about where you learned that skill, if you learned that skill.
AD: Well, I think, first of all, I came to working as a Cameraman on the set with a background of parents who are Actors. So I've been around Actors all my life. And I think that I was a pretty well-adjusted, gregarious kid. And so, I was always comfortable with adults, I enjoyed talking to them. And so, I had a respect, and, for their vulnerability. And for what they could contribute. Because whenever I was with my folks they would always start doing their old skits and bits from the plays of the thirties. And they had a ball, and they creative and they were fun, you know, and there was always music involved in it. So, I liked that. You know, it reminded me of the good times at home, you know. And, I was a kid, when I was in college I worked at a theatre camp, I washed dishes and taught waterskiing, and before that I had been, like a junior counselor, matter of fact I found out recently Russ Feingold was one of my campers. But, this was a camp that Piven went to, Jeremy Piven went to, and Bruce Block all kinds of different people. And, I was on the stage, I was in a few plays as a kid, you know. So I just, I was always very comfortable with the idea of putting on a show or taking direction or giving direction, people, being, seeing people do that.

INT: One of the things that we deal with, is sometimes, you know, for some people, they can't deal with an actor's iss--, personality because it's so dynamic. I mean, most of us as we get socialized, we get pretty, you know, what you see is kind of what you get and it's easy to deal with most of us because we've already allowed ourselves to be pigeonholed in terms of a kind of personality and that's, you know, that's the way we are, and something may, you know, jar us and then "bam," we suddenly explode. An Actor is purposely open to far more varieties of feeling, because that's, that's their instrument. [AD: Right.] But for some people, that's can make, get them uncomfortable. I mean, were your parents volatile in this sense, I don't mean volatile in the sense that they were violent, but, I mean, just in terms of, so that you saw, early on, that kind of wide range of expression as determin--, as contrasted maybe when you went over to somebody else's parents' who were kind of like [makes noises]. I mean, did you see a difference?
AD: Well they were, they were young and they were alive and they were, they, they had an interest in life and they had been through a lot. You know, they, from growing up through the Depression, and my dad in World War II, and going, he was landed in Normandy, D11 or something like that, you know. There was all these stories and history and the grandparents and everything. But, no, I wouldn't say they were volatile, they were just a lot of fun. They were, they were able to use ideas and theatre and music as a way of entertaining us. You know, I mean, we were going to Weavers concerts and Pete Seeger concerts when we were kids. I play--, I started playing the guitar when I was eight or nine years old. And so, I was always very comfortable around that type of creative thing. At the same time, I had an appreciation for regular people who were interesting, you know, and we, and I, the area I grew up in was a real hodgepodge of humanity. It was a Serbo-Croation-Mexican neighborhood by the steel mills on the south side. Which had, you know, tract houses where GIs got loans, and that's how we bought a little house there for fourteen thousand dollars, you know. And, it was a, you know, kids were on bikes, riding all through the South Side, playing baseball and, you know, and the slag would get dumped and the sky would turn red, and we'd write our names in the soot on the windshield in the morning. It was a, it was a real interesting blend of humanity, and I think that, being able to deal with keeping myself from getting beaten up, and not getting run over by a truck, and how to have fun without any money, those are all good things in terms of feeling comfortable in almost any situation when you meet Actors and stuff like that. Because I had the University of Chicago on one side of me, and the slag [by-product of smelting ore] dumps on the other. And so that was, you know, you had t--, you know, the most brilliant physicists and social scientists on one side, you know, and, and somewhat-economists. And then, and then you had this history of industrialization in the city of Chicago.

INT: Now, let's go back to how, the first directing job. Because, there was the class-action suit...
AD: So we, so we couldn't get in the union. So, there had been individual lawsuits that had sort of opened things up, but it never really worked. What was happening is, guys would come out from Chicago and there was a business agent named Jerry Smith who everybody hated. And, and he would let certain guys start companies, and sign themselves up, and they would be able to get their cards because they were working for a union company that they had, in fact, started through a lawyer. Well, he wouldn't let us do that. We were young Cameramen who were, had come up through the non-union independent film ranks, who now wanted to work in the studio system, and he's saying, "No." You know, the old guys aren't working," which was legitimate, and, "Who are you guys? You haven't paid your dues, you haven't done this, you don't know..." But, they were talented people. They had good eyes, and the young Directors who had worked with them on this mo-- wanted to hire them. So, we started a law--, a class-action lawsuit. And, it was Davis [Andy Davis], Deschanel [Caleb Deschanel], Daviau [Allen Daviau], Tak [Tak Fujimoto], Steadman [Robert Steadman], a few other guys. And, wound up, and some Assistant Cameramen and Operators and stuff like that. And we found one attorney who represented us, and made a deal, but sort of sold us down the river. Because we were group three, there was a roster system. And then you, the threes couldn't work until the twos were working, you know. So, we were never going to work, because there had to be full employment, there hadn't been full employment for a long time. So we were sort of stuck, and in that time, I said, you know, "I don't know how long this is going to take. I really gotta move on, I can't keep working on these little, tiny non-union movies," even though it was, I was surviving, but I wanted to grow. So I said, "You know what?" I saw MEAN STREETS and I saw AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and I said, "These guys made movies about their growing up. I'm going to make a movie about my growing up." And my brother was the last white kid on the block on the South Side of Chicago, who was a young musician, and he had now gone off to college, and I thought, "If I do a movie about Richie [Richie Davis] and his friends, and what he went through, and set it in the South Side with this big, rich, musical heritage." And, and did a story about a kid who wants to put a band together.

INT: Had you ever directed before?
AD: No. [INT: What gave you the chutzpah, which is a technical term that I'll define if you need to, to make that leap?] AD: Well, I had made these little three-hundred-thousand-dollar movies with Corman, with Gene Corman, and I'd even forced myself to work on some smaller movies. I did two films for a Producer named Charles Band, one that Michael Pataki directed, with Richard Baseheart and Gloria Grahame and Vic Tayback called EYES OF DR. CHANEY. And another one with Sue Lyons and, and that was the one with Baseheart [Richard Baseheard], and, and they were little, tiny one-hundred-eighty-thousand-dollar movies we shot in L.A. And I said, "I, if I can raise a couple hundred thousand dollars we can make a movie." And I met a woman, who was the writer on LEPKE named Tamar Hoffs, whose brother was also from Chicago, who had done the same thing, it was a white kids lost in the blues story, like Butterfield and Bloomfield, her brother was older than mine. And I told her about this idea. And I had taken all these pictures of Chicago, and she got it. And she was a, her husband was a successful psychiatrist, and she was beginning to be a screenwriter, and she grew up at the University of Chicago, her father was a very prominent rabbi in Hyde Park. And she and I sat down and wrote the script. And then we started figuring out how to raise the money. Well, this was when tax deals were going on. A couple guys in Chicago went away to prison because of those tax deals. Anyway, we spent a year or so just trying to put together a tax deal. They fell apart, and finally we said, "Okay, we'll sell six thousand dollars a point, we'll raise three hundred thousand, three hundred thousand dollars." And we did it. And I had to learn about SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] filings, going across state lines to raise money. I had to learn to be a businessman. And I could, had terrible handwriting on legal pads, scribbles, no typewriters, no assistants, anything. And it took a long time to raise the money and we finally did it.

INT: What made you think, or feel, that you were capable of, and clearly your visual sensibility was there, I know that you must have the confidence on, but, okay, now you're going to be The Storyteller. What made you say to yourself, "I can do the directing role?"
AD: I don't know, I just, you know, I'd been on sets, I'd been, I'd b--, you know, figure out how to make it go, and here's the one-liner on the call sheet, and you say, "How do you tell that, that line every day?" How do you get, you know, comes in, meets the girl, walks out, and falls in love, I mean, I, you know, you, we did it. And, the story was so close to me, and it was about kids growing up and running around Chicago, and it, I think that LITTLE FUGITIVE thing was in there, you know, and, and it was my story. And so, between my brother and I, and his friends, and asking a lot of favors, the grip/electric crew was four. You know, and, we had two trucks, a ten-ton and a van for the food. It was very simple. We had no permits, Tammy's [Tamar Hoffs] father knew Marshall Korshak who was the head of the Cook County Democratic Party, and we had a meeting in Marshall's office, and he called in the good alderman, Eddie Burke said, "These are friends of friends, and leave them alone." And we had no permits, we had no insurance, we'd just jump on the L and shoot. [INT: Got it.] So it was, it was run and gun, and, and we, and I would, done that, and, you know, doing documentaries, and stuff, and it was, was a great way to make a movie.

INT: Do you think, actually, there may be part of this, when you were a documentary shooter, there's a part of that where you are actually, in a way are a Director. Because, it's, it's different because you're in the spot, you're, you're, I don't know whether you were actually doing any interviews, or what, stuff like that, but you're actually shooting without somebody else, sort of saying, "You should be shooting this." And that, I'm wondering whether, if you think about that, whether that played into the confidence you would need to say, "Well, I could actually go out and shoot, a story."
AD: Well, you know, besides working with Haskell [Haskell Wexler] on MEDIUM COOL, which is a whole other story, I was, you know, on a, I was on a phantom second unit, shooting the riot footage. So, besides watching him do that movie which is an integration of Hollywood and 'what's going to happen verité.' I worked with a guy named Michael Gray and Jim Dennett. Mike Gray was a, another commercial-maker in Chicago, who was radicalized in August of '68 [1968], when the cops started swinging clubs in Lincoln Park. And Jim Dennett was his production guy who would come out of Niles Film in Chicago, which was a place where a lot of filmmakers came out of, Fred Niles's industrial film company, and Gordon Weisenborn and Walt Topel, who are two of the guys who helped me learn how to make films, when I was a Cameraman or Assistant Cameraman. They had all come out of Fred Niles. Well, Mike and Jim had a group called the Film Group, Chicago Film Group, and after '68 they became radicalized and they did two movies that were seminal in ter--, and I worked on them, peripherally as an assistant cameraman, THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON and AMERICAN REVOLUTION 2. And they just went out and shot, and they capped it, it was like the Frederick Wiseman school, let it happen. And they had a brilliant editor named Howard Alk, who later cut the Bob Dylan documentary, DON'T LOOK BACK, right? And, they just threw themselves into documentary filmmaking, so I was around all this, and there were guys who had been involved with NEWSREEL, SDS's [Students for a Democratic Society] thing in Chicago, and there was all these different things going on where you shot. And you looked for the story, you looked for the dramatic moment, you tried to find it, and you let things evolve. And so, I think that gave me some sense of imagery. You know, we're in the motion 'picture' business.

INT: Would you, when you were shooting those kind of things, were, were any, did any principles emerge for you? For example, a principle being like, "I know I'm looking for this moment, but I want to make sure I have a cut-away." Were there any principles that sort of emerged in that kind of shooting for you? Do you remember?
AD: I was very aware of that, after I started shooting features. But, as a young Assistant Cameraman, I was mostly concerned that the film wasn't going to run out and that the focus and the iris were set properly. But, yes, I was aware of coverage and having a reaction shot and being able to get in and out of things.

INT: And when you were shooting with Haskell [Haskell Wexler] on, now, because here's, this is interesting, I realize now, that Haskell being one of your mentors, we're talking about a cinematographer who turns to be a Director, and there's that film, there's MEDIUM COOL.
AD: And there are very few Cameramen who have made that leap. I feel very lucky. And, I think there are a few incredible, brilliant guys who started, I mean Kubrick sort of started as a Cameraman, too. But there are not that many, you know, I think some of the lions of the Guild [DGA] actually started off as Cameramen, I can't remember which ones. But, some Editors, some Cameramen. Understanding the camera, and this is one of those things I repeat a lot, I feel it's like, if you don't understand the camera, it's like trying to conduct a symphony without being able to read music, or play an instrument. Because the pictures, you know, the weight, the weight of our business is the pictures, as you well know. And scripts are indications of movies. And some of them are very specific and have tremendous visualization and the dialogue, and you don't have to touch a thing, and others are just sketches. And I've been able to deal with both, where you have, you know, something that's a real blueprint for what you need to do and other things which sort of, "Well, this is an idea and now I've got to make it work." So, the picture-telling and the ability to take a scene and compress it or expand it or focus on different aspects of it is a very critical part of it. As you get older, and you, you know, I'm jealous of people who are brilliant writers, who are, who have the focus and the ability to turn everything off and lock themselves away and write something, say, "This is what I'm going to make." I'm much more collaborative in that sense, I like to throw ideas back and forth. [INT: With Haskell [Haskell Wexler], let's go back to Haskell.] AD: So Haskell was a guy who had worked with the best, you know, I mean he worked, look at the Directors he had worked with. And he was, he was sort of this, you know, "I want to make a movie. I got, I got my own ideas." You know. And, so I think MEDIUM COOL was a real experiment for him. I don't think he, Paramount certainly didn't know what he was up to. And he, he went off and he knew something was going to happen that summer. And...

INT: The style of filmmaking in MEDIUM COOL is very much a verité-style of filmmaking. I mean there's some, I mean there's sequences like, I guess it's the sequence with the Black Pa-, I vaguely remember the Black Panthers, there was a meeting and you can just feel that this is a documentary, this is not, you know, this is not staged, this is not written, this is not happening this way. And I'm curious, what, you know, because you were around this, what, what you remember from it actually, from MEDIUM COOL itself.
AD: Well, I was, I wasn't really around his unit too much. I was there during the convention. We were shooting, we were the only camera crew behind the tanks at 11th and Wabash. And we were shoo-, I was working with a guy named Barry Feinstein who was the very famous still photographer who was married to Mary Travers at the time. He shot the Bob Dylan covers, The Birds covers, you know, and he had just worked with Frank Zappa, and Haskell [Haskell Wexler] saw something he had done, and he was out there with this Eclair and this crazy sound man. And we were just shooting stuff and one day, after the first night of the violence, we had, Haskell put Studs [Studs Terkel] with Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and a guy named Cameron [James Cameron, aka Mark James Walter Cameron] who was this incredible journalist from London, and we were interviewing them about what happened the night before. But otherwise we were shooting footage, of police action mostly.

INT: Were you scared?
AD: Uh, yeah, but exhilarated. I was exhilarated because, because, you know, the whole world was watching, and all of my friends from college, everybody was out there, you know, and we were going to stop the war, you know. And I was also connected to a legitimate Hollywood icon, a two- or three-time Academy Award winner at that point, you know, who was, I didn't really know Haskell [Haskell Wexler], he was distant from me at the time. And then I went and watched him shooting some stuff once in the basement of one of the, the garage where he built a set. But what I got out of MEDIUM COOL was very significant, and I've talked about this before. There's a scene in THE FUGITIVE where Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford run out of City Hall into a St. Patrick's Day parade. Well, that was all created based upon my having made MEDIUM COOL. We, you know, the sequence needed an ending. It couldn't end right at the doorway of City Hall, Harrison had to get away and Tommy had to lose him. So, I had wanted to shoot St. Patrick's Day parade in STONY ISLAND and Richard Daley died. So I shot his funeral instead. So, I knew it was coming up and I said to Peter Macgregor-Scott, I said, "See if they'll give us permission." And Harrison and I had met with Richard Daley before the film started and, you know it was cool, and I said, "Yeah, we'll get the plumbers, get the electricians, and we're going to hide our cameras here," you know, and we, it was freezing that day and we just sort of went with it, and Steve St. John was a great Steadicam operator, we went, you know, we walked through the crowds with them, and people didn't recognize them, you know, and "Who's that guy with the funny hat?" and that's how we did it. So that was a, that's absolutely from working on MEDIUM COOL that I was able to integrate that parade in THE FUGITIVE. [INT: So the idea of being able, actually, to take a dramatic piece, that's got, you know a script and a writ--, you know, a character and all the rest, and put that piece into a real situation became something you had seen, you had done, and, therefore, you were comfortable with?] AD: Right. And, the reality was, it was free. We didn't pay the extras, we didn't pay for the bagpipe bands, I think the Musicians' Union made us redo the bagpipes for reasons, but anyway. Yeah, I think Haskell got that from Europe, European cinema too. I mean there was stuff with Godard [Jean-Luc Godard], and there was edgy kind of stylistic Lelouch [Claude Lelouch], remember Lelouch and A MAN AND A WOMAN and HAPPY NEW YEAR and all that kind of stuff, there was a kind of "be there," get the camera on your shoulder, and make it seem less formal and staged and perfect.

INT: I want to go back to this idea of, of, sort of like taking risk. Because one of the things that's, I mean, many of your movies, if you are where the camera is, you certainly are in a dangerous place. What's this about your own personality that allows you to do that? You...
AD: You mean putting the camera in a dangerous place? [INT: And putting yourself in a dangerous place.] AD: Well, it looks dangerous, but you know, you always try to be, you mean like jumping off the dam? [INT: The jump off the dam, the, the, the what do you call it, the, the, the bridge going up the, you know, in Chicago, hanging from the bridge. Now I don't know if you're down below saying, "Looks good from here."] AD: No, no, no, no, you've got to get up there and see it. [INT: Well, that's what I'm asking though.] AD: Well, I don't know, you know, I was, I was... It's, it's what it takes, you've got to get in the middle of it, you know, you... I see films today and I go, "These guys are crazy," and, because I realize what it took to do some of that stuff, you know, I said, "I can't do that stuff anymore," I wouldn't go near that, you know. But, I don't know, it's just part of the excitement, exciting part of making movies, you know, you know, the city of Chicago is going to let you open the Michigan Street Bridge for two nights, you know, and you're going to have this action sequence where the kid's going to run up there, and you're going to wire Keanu [Keanu Reeves] so he doesn't fall down and kill himself, you know, and you have to really plan it out. But I think, you know, one of the things about making exciting movies is taking somewhere, somebody a place they would never go. You know, you get to sit in this warm theatre and you're going there with them. I mean, especially THE GUARDIAN, where we got to create the Bering Sea, you know, at night in a storm, nobody had ever tried that before. And, or they tried it, but not to that degree. And, so, that's a challenge. A challenge, you know, to really take you on a journey-- that e-ticket ride.

INT: What's interesting about this idea of challenge, too, because, seems to me that you've, I mean, you can do a crash, you can do an explosion, you can do a scene in the ocean, or you can really push to do it in a way that hasn't been done. What motivates you to do that?
AD: Well, I mean, it's harder today to do that, by the way, because of digital effects. I mean, I mean, I see stuff and I go, "How are you going to even compete with this in any form of reality?" You know, you see TRANSFORMERS and stuff like that. I, you know, it's interesting because I didn't watch THE FUGITIVE as a kid. I was busy in the 60s doing other things. Harrison [Harrison Ford] didn't watch it, Tommy Lee Jones didn't watch it. So I watched, you know, when I got involved in it I looked at the, a few episodes with David Janssen. I saw the opening with the train and everything, you know. And I said, "Okay, I'm not going to study this too much. We have the basic principles: the unjustly accused man... We're going to make a, just a good thriller based upon this." And Roy Arbogast who was the special effects supervisor in that movie, I remember him saying, "I'm going to make the best train crash that ever was made." You know, and, and, and the genius behind that was, you know, how, we didn't have visual effects to do that in those days. We had, we, we, we did a couple of miniature uncouplings and stuff like that, but, we figured out, especially Peter Macgregor-Scott figured out how to get a carcass of an engine and push it from behind, and push it off the tracks. And Roy was able to do all the engineering.

INT: Now, was there a thought on your part though, "Okay, let's go for something we haven't seen?" Where's your brain on this kind of stuff?
AD: We were going to have a real train crash. We were going to make a train fall off the tracks at a speed that would look believable, and we were going to put cameras all over the place. And I think what makes that sequence so dramatic is, not only is it a real train crash, but it's the emotional build-up, and what happens on the bus before, and the, you know. It was sort of like, you know, those classic sequences you see in Russian films or Hitchcock, you know, all the elements. And I don't know why it came out so well, we just had all the goods and were able to put them together with the proper editing and James Newton Howard's score and caring about Harrison [Harrison Ford] and all that stuff, you know. So, um, yeah, we wanted to do a good job, you know, it was an opportunity where we had the support, we had the story, we had the studio behind us, and it's like, "Let's do it. Let's do it as good as we can do it."

INT: Now that's interesting, "Let's do it as good as we can do it." I'm asking this, I'm pushing this question because in THE GUARDIAN, looking at, you know, those seq--, sea sequences, they're pretty amazing stuff. There's a part of me that wonders whether you're saying, "I want to do something we haven't seen before." Whether that's even part of your consciousness?
AD: Well, I've never seen a movie set in an ocean that I felt was believable. All deference to Wolfgang Petersen. When you see PERFECT STORM, you can tell they're in a tank for the close-ups of the guy, because the water's not going like this. It doesn't have the ferocity of those forty foot waves that the, that the boat's in, they had to all marry. And so, when, when it got real, and we were going to make the movie, I said, "Okay, we've got to, we've got to put our actors in water that's that volatile to make it believable. But, how are we going to do that?"

INT: That issue, though, because we, we'll get to it actually maybe, in actual production. So the issue of believability is big for you?
AD: Oh, yeah. You can f--, you can smell it. You can smell if it's real or not. When I was a kid, I'd see Cary Grant hanging off, outside the window, "That, that guy's not hanging out the window. That background doesn't look like it belongs there." And so when I saw BICYCLE THIEF or I'd see Italian realistic films-- that's real. They're really there with those people, you know. Was a Taviani [Paolo and Vittorio Taviani] brothers film, TREE OF THE WOODEN CLOGS, you know. You feel that. And so there was that documentary reality, you know, which today with Photoshop and digital stuff, you don't know anything anymore. But even, you know, I just saw a movie the other day, this, this TAKEN movie, you know. You can tell they're driving in the car and they're not really in that car. You know, it's the level of the quality of the process. So, keeping, having a sense of reality, being on a real street, having a loc--, locations are very important to me because they give a reality to things. Right? That's, that's been a, very much a part-- So I had to create a character out of the ocean, I wanted the ocean to be real, and, and it was the most sophisticated visual effects movie I've ever done.

INT: See, that's interesting because you just said, believability is really a key for you in terms of what you want to get there on the screen. What did you learn as a Director when you did STONY ISLAND? Because, oftentimes, by the way, our first pictures, as a Director, oftentimes teach us ninety percent of what we know for the rest of our career. Now, that may not be true in this case because you've done very, very different kinds of pictures, but I'm still curious, as you think about it, what did you learn?
AD: Well I learned that non-Actors can be fantastic, if someone is playing themselves or there's a believability to who they are, which I followed through later on. I use real cops and real doctors and real lawyers, and real, you know, whatever, real Coast Guard people. And I think that that bringing the reality of, to the set helps Actors do a better job. When you have real Coast Guard people standing next to Actors playing Coast Guard people, it, they gotta measure up. And at the same time, the stars, or the Actors, make the Coast Guard guys do their thing better.

INT: And in STONY ISLAND who were some of the combinations?
AD: Well, we had, we had gifted musicians, legendary musicians playing with young kids, trying to teach them how to put a band together. We had Actors who were, I mean Dennis Franz is in that movie, he had just done BLEACHER BUMS, you know, at the, at the Organic Theater, this up-and-coming theatre group, you know, and it was his first movie, he wasn't even SAG [Screen Actors Guild] at the time, you know. So, there, there was a, there was an energy of working with young talent who had been trained in the theatre kids off the streets, and then people like my father and Oscar Brown Jr., and people like that who had been around longer and had done... So it was a real integration of things. And, and the script was very loose. I learned that improvisation and trying different things was fine. I couldn't expect these, there, there weren't pages and pages of dialogue the kids had to come and remember. We'd sort of work... I learned that you could work it out on the set. That's what I learned. If you had an idea what it was, and you, and you saw the basic, you know, conception of the scene, and, "Now, Okay, you're in the bedroom and the bed's here and you sit here and you say that and you say..." We'd play with it and tried, and it would work out. And I wound up doing that a lot. Because I haven't had that many scripts that had been tight. Perfect. And, also, it gives you an opportunity because you usually don't get that much rehearsal time, for the Actors to contribute the morning of, the afternoon of, while they're there, in costume, with the lighting, and you can, you know, I remember, one of the most important things I ever learned from Kubrick [Stanley Kubrick] reading in a book years ago, was you can plan, you can plan, you can plan, but if it's not happening, you better come up with something else. And so being quick on your feet and being willing to change things and listen to other people's ideas, I think is a critical part of what I learned.

INT: That's, that's powerful. The question here is, when you walk on a set, you know for example, if you walk on a TV set, if there's five minutes where somebody's trying to figure something out, everybody in the production company is totally anxious. That's, they're calling it a meltdown, even though you're working, you know, you're working something out, because the schedule is so tight. You had a short schedule, I'm sure, in making STONY ISLAND... How did you, how do you kind of deal with that issue, because I really love the fact that that's what you're comfortable doing, letting it work itself out when you're on the set, and the lights and camera and all the... how do you work out the issue of, "Wait a minute, we've got to be shooting?"
AD: Well, you know, to me, we, I think we did it in thirty days, the movie. But we did twelve days of solid music, where we had a multiple-track truck and all the music was done - boom. It was, I don't know, it was just, you know, I was young and we worked long hours, and everybody was jazzed to be there, and it was very cooperative. And I didn't, you know, I didn't feel the pressure that much, I didn't, I mean, because, you know, we had no money, it wasn't like there was, we weren't into golden time and there weren't union issues, and, you know, and it was like, alright, so we'll just do what we can, you know. And so there, and there was nobody really over my shoulder. We had raised the money ourselves, it was Tammy [Tamar Hoffs] and I, and you know, and a production manager, Jim Dennett, and, and a few other friends, but it wasn't like there was, "Oh my god, if you don't get this shot today we're going to pull the plug," there was none of that. So it was on us and it was, it was new territory. When I made STONY ISLAND there were six independent movies that year. You get four thousand submissions now to Sundance. You know, there was NORTHERN LIGHTS and us and a couple others. And it was fresh, it was refreshing, you know.