INT: A time when this kind of material is a little bit risky for Actors to be associated with, or identified with, or "I can't play that kind of part." How did you get your guys, because it's got terrific performances [for THE BOYS IN THE BAND]?

WF: Well they--many of them did have misgivings, some of them were gay, three or four were not. And there were Agents and people around who said, you know, why do you want to do this as a film? They had all done it as a play, but that's no advantage at all, especially the way I was working, where I would throw out everything they did in the play. First of all, because when you're doing it on the stage, you have to pitch it toward the last row of the balcony. Your performance is way up. In film, it has to be way down, subtle, because the camera magnifies emotion, magnifies gesture, magnifies expression, everything. So the work that I had to do with them was to bring them down to a normal level, but they were wonderful, the whole group of them, and I worked with a couple of them again; they did smaller roles for me later. [INT: Did you rehearse that play then as well?] I rehearsed that as well, and it wasn't so bad as the rehearsals of THE EXORCIST.

INT: By the way, why had you done the rehearsals of THE EXORCIST? Why had you done them?

WF: I just thought it was the right thing to do then. I had a 12-year-old girl who had never acted. I had Jason Miller who I've told you was not an Actor, was a playwright, and I also had two or three of the greatest Actors in cinema at that time. [INT: Lee J. Cobb.] Lee J. Cobb and Max von Sydow and Jack MacGowran, and Ellen Burstyn, working with two people who had the leads who were not Actors. And so I wanted to create an atmosphere where they all felt comfortable with each other, and all felt that they knew what each other was going to do. I turned out to be wrong, and the way I've worked ever since is, I'll just talk to the people, we'll have an understanding of who they are and what they're supposed to be doing, and then I'll do it. And if I want to make changes after a take, I'll make the changes there, but not in rehearsal. [INT: Lee J. Cobb, I'm curious about, because he gives a great performance.] Oh, he's great in THE EXORCIST, and in everything he did. [INT: But it's a very different performance, because you--exactly, how did talk about them, how did you evolve? 'Cause he could have used those same lines, done--] No, I said, “Lee, you know what you're doing and you're a very skilled Actor and you know what bullshit is, and you know when you're really delivering it, and I want to forget all the tricks, forget all the ways that you could throw your voice and this and that, and just bring this guy down to a subtle level, because I think that's where your great power lies. Not when you get angry and scream,” and he doesn't do that at all in THE EXORCIST, “but I want this guy to be laid back and sort of world weary; he's seen it all, he knows it all, but not this. Not what he's seeing here.” So, anyway Lee agreed with that, but Lee was a very cooperative Actor; didn't resist at all. I imagine if I had told him something that made no sense he would have destroyed me, but it made sense to him, and he saw that I was playing everybody that way, that the film had a certain reserve which, let's say most horror films don't. They have no reserve! Everybody's over the top. But then I told him, I didn't see THE EXORCIST as a horror film. I saw it as a film about the mystery of faith, and it was based on an actual case, that occurred and Blatty [William Peter Blatty] took certain liberties with it, but he based his script on that case, the 1949 Cottage Park, Maryland [Cottage City, Maryland] case, which is one of three cases that the Catholic Church authenticates as demonic possession in the 20th century. Three in the United States, and that's one of them. [INT: By the way, did you--] So we had long conversations about the actual situation and about human behavior versus “actorial” behavior. And I did, not just with Lee, but with Von Sydow.

WF: And you know, Jeremy, I've been directing operas recently as well, I've done I don't know--[“Wozzeck?”]--how many operas, and I have found--people ask me what's the difference between directing for an opera and directing a film? Basically, the only difference is there's no camera when you direct the opera, but you still have to try and focus the audience's attention on what you want them to see, so you do that with staging and with light, but I have found that the very best singers, the people I've worked with, great singers, and there's only a handful of them in the world for each part, that can sing these roles, and the best Actors I've worked with, also want--they all want the same thing, which is, a psychological underpinning for their character and a staging that works. And that's how I approach it. We're gonna do a script about this, well let's have a conversation not about backstory, but about who this person is. Who this character is in terms of your playing the character. You, not somebody else. What you as an Actor would uniquely bring to it. What I see in you that led me to cast you. And then I'll try and do a staging that works.

INT: Now with Max von Sydow, here's an Actor with enormous respect, I'm sure you had, and you had not worked with him before, do you remember what kind of things you were saying to him?

WF: Yeah. When he--I treated him the way I told you I worked with Tommy Lee Jones, at first. You come in the door, you go over here, you sit down, you say the line. “Got it.” Before that, I had shown him pictures and gave him a biography of the very famous French-Catholic philosopher priest, Teilhard de Chardin [Pierre Teilhard de Chardin], and the image I had of Father Merrin in THE EXORCIST and the underlying philosophy was that of Teilhard de Chardin. And I gave Max his books and Max saw his photograph, which was by “Karsh of Ottawa” [Yousuf Karsh] so it was a very telling, descriptive photograph. And then, we set out to do it and the first couple of weeks, smooth as silk. One take, film, as I told you shot for 10 months, but Von Sydow comes in and now everything's one take and up to a point. Up to the point where he has to, it's just early into the exorcism scene, and he has to scream at the top of his voice to the demon, "I cast you out, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost." And behind him I had a special effect rig where the ceiling would crack, and objects in the room would move, and Max has to say these lines and all of these special effects would come into play on cue. And one take, first take didn't work. Effects worked, Max was not believable in that moment. Well, he wasn't believable for about 25 takes that day, and we ended the day, without getting a scene. Come in the next morning, start again. Same thing. All morning long, maybe another 20 or 25 takes at the most, because they had to re-rig the ceilings and now we're running out of ceilings that are pre-rigged to crack, we've got to make more. And I've done 40 or 50 takes with Max von Sydow, and it hasn't worked. And so I stopped, and cleared the set and just went into his dressing room with him, and said, "What's wrong Max?" and he said, "I don't know," he said, "I don't really understand it, but I think we'll be all right. I think I know what you want." And "Let's just take a little breath and then I'll go back out and try it again," which we did. Went out again, two, three, four takes, no good, and now I've run out of set.

WF: Now Bill Blatty [William Peter Blatty] who was on the set [of THE EXORCIST], the Writer, who was on the set a lot of the time, was not on the set for any of this. There was a Writers Guild [Writers Guild of America, WGA] strike, and he was in Washington [Washington D.C.] or Aspen [Aspen, Colorado] or somewhere else, and I called him, and I told him about this problem. And he said, "I don't believe it." And I said, "I don't either, but that's what's happened." He said, "All right, let me come in." And he was not supposed to come in, because of the Writers Guild strike. So I said, "Well put on your Producer hat and come in." And I showed him some of the selected takes. He said, "You're right. This is awful, what's happened?" I said, "I don't know." I went with Blatty back into Max's [Max von Sydow] dressing room. “Max” “Max von Sydow”, that's how it's pronounced, and I'm not being ironic, that's how his name is pronounced, [INT: Got it.] “Max von Sydow.” We sit down and I said, "Max, I don't know what to say to you anymore. I've told you--" and I've tried to give him corrections after each take. I said, "I've run out of things to say." [INT: Do you remember what kind of things you would say?] What? [INT: Do you remember what kind of things--] It was the way he was doing it, Jeremy. It was completely inappropriate. He was trying different things, but it was like ludicrous performance. I said "I'm totally at my wits end and if you want, we will get in touch with Ingmar Bergman, to come out here, and I'll ask him to direct this scene with you. And happily, see if he can do it, because I don't know whether you're aware of it, we're doing this over and over again because it's not working. It's not good." He said, "I know, I know this." I said, "Well, why? What's happening?" He said, “Look, this is not a matter of Ingmar Bergman or anybody else." He said, "The truth of the matter is, that I don't believe in God." And I said, "Well, what did you do when you played Jesus in THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD for George Stevens?" He said, "I played Jesus as a man. I played him as a man, not as someone with the power of God, because during the period that I was playing Jesus, he was not the son of God, he was a carpenter, and he had all these claims but they were all fulfilled later, if you believe this story," he said, "And I don't believe the story, and I don't believe in God, and these words have to do with the strictest of belief in the Catholic--Christian faith." I said, "Well let's try this; come on out, and just play Father Merrin as a man. Forget that he's a priest. Let's forget all about the words themselves, and let's just have you say to this character that thinks she is a demon, whether she is or not; she thinks she is. And you're doing what you can to help, as a man, as a human being. Forget all the preparation you've done to invest yourself with the trappings of a priest, and let's simply have you do it as Max von Sydow, or, let's say, the butcher you know, back home in Sweden, or the guy who fixes your car." And he went out, and we did it, and a couple of takes and then he got back on smooth sailing. And I don't know whether it was what I said to him, or that he just had to get that out.

WF: Max [Max von Sydow] is Swedish, and his whole philosophy, everything that he grew up with has to do with existentialism, which is a kind of rejection of organized religion. Much more so than what most of us know in this country, where there are people who call themselves Catholics or Jews or whatever, but just sample the faith a little bit. They just sample it. They go to church on Sunday. Or they go to Mass, you know? They no longer bother, let's say, to eat fish on Friday. They used to, but they don't. The Mass is now said in English, instead of Latin. The Mass in some churches is danced, by a modern dance group. [INT: Yeah.] Not even spoken, and so--but, here's a man whose upbringing has to do with a total rejection of the Catholic faith, and he's being asked to play the rock upon with the faith is built. And it was a very interesting problem that I have not encountered before, or since. But I think that he had to get those words out. He had to tell me, and we had to hit rock bottom, for him to say to me, that he did not believe in God. And so, playing this part [in THE EXORCIST], he was fine when he'd just come in the door and say, "Good evening, Mrs. MacNeil, I'm Father Merrin." and "Father Karras, go get your copy of the Bible and bring it over here, and bring a copy, and bring a set of garments for me to wear." He was okay with that, now he has to call upon God to drive out a demon? I can only put it to you this way; it would be the difficulty of a white Anglo Saxon Protestant portraying a African American from the ghetto. It would be the equivalent of a man playing a woman. It would be the equivalent of a very straight man, playing gay.

INT: Now, did you have that issue with BOYS IN THE BAND [THE BOYS IN THE BAND]? 'Cause you said a couple of the--

WF: There were a couple of times when a couple of the characters who were straight had difficulty giving it up to play gay, but you see, my approach to that, for example, is not--I mean, I know there are some characters who happen to be gay, who have a flamboyant nature, but I don't look at gay people as stereotypes, so I wasn't interested in them being gay or fey or flaunting something. The characters--I did THE BOYS IN THE BAND because it was a great script, a great love story, with wonderful humor and then pathos and drama, in which I recognized and understood all of the characters and their emotions. And so, with the exception of one character, Emory, who was played by Cliff Gorman, who was straight by the way, he was the only flamboyant, gay character. And he had no trouble doing that. For him, it was an acting role. But I didn't ask anybody else in the show, "Oh that's not gay enough." or "You've gotta be gay." Well, what's that? I don't know what that is. I know you can get somebody to do a lot of stereotypical gestures, but that's not what I was after, and that's not how I see gay people.

INT: In your belief system yourself, it's interesting, because here's Max [Max von Sydow], dealing with "This is what I believe, and therefore I can't really give any truth to this." [WF: Yeah, this is what I don't believe!] Have your belief systems changed over the years yourself, as you've been working on various subjects and watching and being exposed. One of the great things about filmmaking is you get exposed to so many cultures. I mean you've shot war scenes in Bosnia, you've shot a number of scenes that have to do with political issues, you've shot with Muslims in that world. Have you shifted in your attitudes? Let's say if you looked at yourself and what you believed in, when you were starting out as a filmmaker?

WF: Well, let me put it this way, film is--filmmaking is an education and an adventure. It is both. And you're inevitably going to learn from these other cultures, from the various stories and characters, you're going to learn more about life and understand yourself and other cultures. What's happened to me, is over the years things that were sort of in the back of my mind or intelligence, for example, a profound belief in God, have deepened over the years. I strongly believe in God, which doesn't mean that I believe in this God as opposed to all others. I believe, I think--I don't want to call myself an agnostic, but the definition of agnosticism is someone who believes that the power of God and the soul are unknowable, but you allow for the existence of God and the soul. And that's sort of where I fall in. I pray, twice a day. [INT: Twice?] What? [INT: Twice.] Twice a day, in the morning, and at night. [INT: Now is this something you've been doing for a long time?] No, only in the last few years, but I've always had in the back of my mind, a belief in God, but it has strengthened, it has gone further. I believe that there is a power, which I don't understand, that controls our lives much more than anything else that we do. Which is why I said that early in this interview, “The three qualities you need are ambition, luck, and the grace of God, to become anything.” [INT: Now, when you pray are you using anybody else's mantras? Systems?] No. [INT: This is you?] But I think, you know, I have done yoga from time to time, and used a mantra, and it's good for relaxation purposes, but I don't, while I think that the ideas of the Buddha are extraordinary, I put them on the same level with the ideas and the teachings of Mohammad, and Moses, and Jesus, and I find that there is something good to be taken out of all of the religions. I, of course, feel closer to Jesus, being a Jew. Now that might seem a strange thing to say, but Jesus was born, lived, and died a Jew. [INT: Right.] Jesus was not a Catholic, he was a Jew that they crucified. And so, I think Jesus was perhaps one of the best Jews who ever lived.

INT: All right, here let me--there's an interesting issue because you've talked about talking to an Actor about the psychology of this particular human being. One of the issues that all human beings have to deal with is the concept of evil. You made a movie that sort of deals with that concept, but you've also dealt with characters who "have evil" if to use a word, in terms of the way they behave; Benicio's [Benicio del Toro] character in your recent film [THE HUNTED]. I mean, this is a guy whose obviously gone into doing--[WF: The dark side.]--what we'll call immoral, right. What's shifted, gone, developed for you in terms of the psychology or--and also the morality of where that comes from, for you?

WF: I've always inherently felt that human beings were made up of equal parts of goodness and evil, and that what life is a constant struggle for our better angels to prevail. Before I was able to verbalize it that easily, or that quickly, I felt it. I never believed, even from the old days of watching serials on Saturday afternoon, that people were all good or all evil, although most films put it out just like that. There's these good guys over here, and the bad guys over there. There's so many things that I've experienced and I'm aware of and I've felt myself, in terms of my own emotions and thoughts, that lead me to believe that there is goodness and evil in all of us. And that sometimes the worst parts of us prevail. And people who, we're all born the same, little babes, innocent, and sometimes grow up to be Charles Manson, or Adolf Hitler. But even within the lives of Hitler and Manson, for example, if you examine them, there are some highly contradictory things.

INT: When you're dealing with an Actor, and trying to now help that Actor understand the dark side of--like Benicio [Benicio del Toro]. I'm using that as an example, possibly even Linda Blair, what are you telling them to allow them to bring up something that they may not want to bring up?

WF: You never want to talk to an Actor about achieving a specific result. You want to talk to them in the way that I just have about the goodness and evil in everyone, and finding that in yourself. I will very often focus that on someone or something, sometimes myself. I used Hackman's [Gene Hackman] anger, which it was difficult for him to portray, because Gene is really a lovely man and a great Actor. But early in his career, FRENCH CONNECTION [THE FRENCH CONNECTION] days, he didn't want to necessarily visit the dark side of himself. The prejudice that exists there, from coming from a small town in Illinois, Danville. And I would get him riled up, I'd get him angry, I would say things that would anger him, to the point where sometimes he'd do a take and then walk off the set for the rest of the day, but I had focused his anger, because when Gene was playing a scene with a young African American, that he had to slap around, he couldn't do it. There was something in Gene that resisted that kind of behavior, but now he's playing a guy who did that. A guy who treated black people, you know, disrespectfully. [INT: So what did you, how did you--give me an example.] Well, among other things, there was a scene I talked to you about, where originally they interrogate this fellow in the car, and didn't work, and so then I moved it outside, but at the end of the shooting, but then, in that scene, an Actor named Alan Weeks, the young African American Actor, Gene had to slap him around, slap him in the face. And that's one of the reasons I had to do 32 takes, because Gene couldn't do it! The slaps were all, and finally, I had Alan Weeks say to him, "Hey man, just hit me in the fucking face. You can't hurt me. You can't fucking hurt me just do it! And let's get the hell out of here!" [INT: So you told the other Actor to do that?] Yeah. I told Weeks to get him excited. He said "Look at me man! I'm a nigger! I'm a fuckin' nigger to you, that's all I am! So come on!" And he would get under Gene's skin and Gene didn't want to hear that, and he couldn't do it in 32 takes. And then I realized that, you know, it was difficult to turn around in a car and slap a guy anyway. [INT: Of course.] That Eddie Egan could do it, 'cause he was doing it for real. Eddie Egan would hit a guy right in the face, but you couldn't do that with an Actor. So it had to still come from a place inside the character he was playing. So when I freed the scene up, later and let them move around and ad-lib the scene, Gene actually hit Alan in the face. And it was done in one take with two cameras. [INT: So this is an interesting issue about how you--] And then they hugged! You know at the end of it, Alan hugged him and said "Thank you, man," 'cause Alan didn't want to do 32 takes either at that high of an emotional key.

INT: When you want--this is the real challenge of a Director, 'cause you're the only person there that's going to help performance, that's it. When you've had to, I don't know if other examples come up for you, where it isn't what you want, the Max [Max von Sydow] one was one, this one here with Gene [Gene Hackman], anything else where it wasn't what you wanted, and you were able to apply something of the directorial skills, to be able to get what you want?

WF: Well, it's not always directorial skills, some of these things are just common sense things most of which were developed by other Directors long before me. I remember seeing in Life magazine many years ago, during the filming, I guess it was in the ‘50s [1950s], of THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, George Stevens, the Director, sitting on top of the set, which was an enclosed set of the attic where Anne Frank and her family were kept, and their neighbors. And George Stevens had a shotgun up there, and he was shooting the shotgun to approximate the sound of the Nazi sirens in the street, because they're on a sound stage. They're not in an attic, in Amsterdam, where the Nazi's have occupied the country, and are looking for every Jew they could find, and this family is cloistered in a tiny attic that I've seen, that is so small and unc--have you seen it? [INT: Yeah, I have.] You know the room and it's a horrible existence, they're hidden up there, and periodically there are [MAKES SIREN SOUND], the German sirens out in the street. Now, those Actors, the idea of the siren itself was not as frightening to them in those circumstances, but a gunshot going off, was. That was shocking, so in order to put the camera on someone's face or a group of faces, hearing this sound and going into shock, Stevens used a gun, and so I've used that many times, especially in THE EXORCIST. I owe it all to Stevens, and periodically, you know, to get an Actor to come in at, let's say, eight o'clock in the morning, to the set, after about three or four hours of makeup, in the case of Linda Blair and Max von Sydow, and then, show on von Sydow's face or on her face real fear from a standing start, because unlike a play, you don't get to work your way up into this deep or high emotion. You put a camera over there and right back there, where the whole cast can see as a crew, not the Nazis. There's a crew over there, with lights, there may be a guy back there eating a sandwich, while you're performing, somebody else is scratching his balls, a couple of guys are trying to get focus in the shot, and what you're looking at is not the other Actor or not a demon, but a crew, and lights, and artifice. And the Director says "Action!" and you've got to look like you've just seen the appearance of the devil. And even for some of the greatest Actors, like Lee Cobb [Lee J. Cobb] and Max von Sydow, I would use that gun off stage--[INT: So they wouldn’t know--]--when they would least expect it. And but, later they sort of got used to it, like Von Sydow would come in to the set in the morning, Owen Roizman, the DP [Director of Photography], would tell me, later, many years later, Owen told me that Max would come in and say "Good morning Owen." "Good morning Max." "Do we have any hidden weapons on the set today?" And Owen would say, "Yes, we do sir." He said, "Oh, okay, it's just good to know."

INT: All right now, using that as an example, there's a moment when Ellen Burstyn's in the attic [in THE EXORCIST], and it's early on, and she's going through and she's got this candle in her hand. And all of a sudden, there's this, you change a light--[WF: Burst of flame.] She gets really scared. [WF: Burst of flame.] Now, do you remember, I mean, was this one where she was able to do this? Or--

WF: Oh, of course, because it was an actual burst of flame! Now today it would be done with--[INT: CGI, yeah.]--computer-generated imagery, but that shot was rigged so that the candle she was holding with a tiny little candle that she had lit in another room, on another set, and it was a real candle, that she walked out with. And then she's walking through the basement with a real candle looking for the origin of a sound that sounds like rats in the attic, but then when I changed the angle, I replaced that candle with one that had a hollowed out interior, that the camera couldn't see, with a line running down her hand and up through her nightgown, and then down to the floor, where a special effects man was able to juice up the gas to make that light go up from here to here. Now, we did it in one take, because it scared the hell out of her. She didn't know what to expect. I didn't show her the effect in advance. I told her what was going to happen. There was something of a risk to it, it was somewhat edgy, because it was actual flame, but it was caused by an off-camera stuntman pumping gas up through her arm to where the flame was, like turning up a pilot light. [INT: Now here's an interesting thing, if you were to talk to your people today about doing this, they would potentially say to you, why not use CGI?] Well, you'd use CGI. [INT: But, would you have gotten the same reaction that she gave?] I don't know. I don't know. I would be the last to know that because I don't see that many films that are dependent on CGI. I know that the ones I have, like the James Bond film [CASINO ROYALE] that just came out, with Daniel Craig, the effects are great, I mean, most of them aren't habit. And now when you see explosions or big balls of fire, they don't have to do that anymore, they can do a little bit of fire and then enhance it, with computer-generated imagery; and it's effective, but some of it isn't, but most of it is. [Oh, no question about it.]

INT: In terms of Linda Blair's becoming the monster that she becomes every now and then, was this—now, clearly from when you cast her, I mean, in that session you saw that she was going to be open to it, and you did rehearse this. [WF: And threw out the rehearsals.]--And now she has to wear oodles of makeup at the time, was that something that became a bigger challenge for the two of you? Or was she able to get there easily?

WF: Here's the way I worked with her, I worked with her--I became a surrogate father to her. We would start in the morning, and all during the shoot I would hug her, and hold her and her mother and father had been separated. She loved them both, but they weren't always around at the same time, sometimes they were. But I became like her father, and I didn't just do it to direct her, I was crazy about her as a kid. I've always wanted a little girl, I have two boys, but I've never had a little girl, and she was the most perfect little 12 year-old girl you can imagine, and bright, and so, I had a very close--And with her mother on the set all the time, I had a kind of a familial relationship with her. And I used to whisper to her and talk to her. I'd say, "Now you're gonna say this, I'm going to come to you, you'll have this makeup and I'm going to put something on your tongue, and you're going to go “ahh, ahh,” and your tongue will be really long when you do it." And she'd laugh, she'd laugh. And then I'd say, "And then you're going to say this phrase. You're going to say, ‘Your mother sucks cocks in hell.’" And she'd go, "Oh ha-ha." She'd start giggling, she'd go "I can't say that!" I'd say, "Oh, yes you can!" And she'd say, "No I can't! I can't!" "Yes you can! Come on now," and in order to please me, she would do it. And I would explain to her, in her language that she could understand, but she was bright beyond her years, what was happening, to this little girl, that she was being controlled by some other force. And it's a game, I made a game out of it. [INT: Got it.] I'd say, "Just look at me and say it." You know, and I'll look back and you and say something, and we regarded it as a game. So after every take, and the takes had to be kept relatively short. At the end when I'd say cut, inevitably you'd see, because they don't cut the camera right away, they wait a few seconds or whatever, from off-stage the prop man would hand her a milkshake. And she'd start sucking this milkshake and giggling, and the rest of the crew would giggle, and they all did it as though it was a game, and they were her friends, and became a surrogate family as well. It was a support group, that we created for her, that allowed her to use her imagination and find this character which is almost impossible to do, by a 12-year-old girl, to find the evil inside yourself, but she was able to relate to it as a game. [INT: Got it.]