INT: Well in '72 and '73 you did three pictures. Three M.O.W.s [Movies of the Week] back to back and you mentioned CLASS OF '63, THE PEOPLE, and then there was GO ASK ALICE. And in there you did THE MUSIC SCHOOL as well. And then in '74 you did JANE PITTMAN [THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN]. And then you had this run, right? In '76 you did, at least in terms of when they were released, was FAREWELL TO MANZANAR, ALEX & THE GYPSY, WHO ARE THE DEBOLTS? [AND WHERE DID THEY GET 19 KIDS?], and OLIVER [OLIVER'S STORY].
JK: Sounds like I was pretty busy. [INT: Yeah. You were very busy. And so what it looks like on paper is that you sort of did the last of your private work in GO ASK ALICE and THE MUSIC SCHOOL and then all of the sudden you were in the mainstream.] Yeah, but you know, it's a little misleading because, for instance, the DEBOLT film was shot over three and a half years. [INT: Ah.] And I was not on location for ninety percent of that. It was my concept. I got the idea for making the film originally – [INT: Why don't you say what that film was?] Okay. [INT: We'll talk about it briefly.]

JK: WHO ARE THE DEBOLTS? [AND WHERE DID THEY GET 19 KIDS?] owes its beginning to a San Francisco Chronicle writer named Herb Caen. He had a column. It was called a gossip column, but it had a lot of good information in it. And I read about this family two or three times in the paper and they sounded very interesting. And so after the third mention in Herb Caen's column, I just went to the phone book, found their number, called them, said I was a filmmaker, would like to see if there was a possibility of making a film on the family. And Dorothy's [Dorothy DeBolt] very outgoing. She said, “Well sure. Come on over. We're gonna have our Fourth of July picnic.” And I had worked with Richard Chew recently so I got Richard to help me. We took a Claire [Eclair] sixteen millimeter camera and we went over and ate with them and filmed their Fourth of July birthday party; and I did a little on-camera dialog thing to try to sell the movie. And I thought, “God this is a natural, you know. This is such a natural film. I mean, we should be able to get sponsorship anywhere.” So we started looking and we got an arrangement worked out with a larger company and they had a guy that was supposedly a hotshot on this, and meanwhile we were attached to the family. We got to know them and they were already telling us about the next social event, or so and so was gonna have an operation and did we want to photograph it. And we just started making the film. Big mistake when you have your own company. We just started making the film. Renting cameras, buying film stock, etcetera, out of what we had in the bank account. And meanwhile, the guy was looking for sponsorship and it went on and on and on and we could not find anybody. We would show them what we'd been shooting and invariably the red light, the signal that they didn't like was that it was handicapped kids, and these big corporate sponsors were saying, “Well we'd love to do this, but you know we don't know if the audience wants to watch handicapped kids. It's just too upsetting.” And so forth. So essentially we made the film out of our own pockets. Out of Korty Films pocket, because I was doing other films at the time and shuffling money into this. And actually finished, we finally got a deal with a Japanese greeting card company because of some political pressure from the corporation that we were involved with. I don't want to go into details but we got the budget. Now the problem was to get it on the air. And we had showed the fine cut, before we were final print, we showed the fine cut to all three networks: ABC, NBC, CBS. They all turned it down. Then we went ahead and we finished the film and we showed the mix, the final print with color corrected, sound was mixed, I thought, “Now this looks so much better. They'll take this.” All three networks turned it down again. Then we had the idea of entering it for the Academy Awards. We entered it, we won the Oscar as Best Feature Length Documentary. We thought, “This has done it. Now we're okay. Anybody will broadcast this.” We took it back, all three networks turned it down for the third time. They still had the same argument: "It's too upsetting. People don't want to watch handicapped kids." So my associate producer, or my producer on the project, Bill Couturié [uncredited] was in LA [Los Angeles] and for one reason or another showed it to a group of people and Charlie Hay [Charles Hayes], the actor, was in that group. And Bill said, “You know, we have shown this to all three networks three times. Nobody wants to put it on the air.” And Charlie said, “You know who would really like to help you on this is Henry Winkler?” And he called up Henry, we sent him a tape, Henry called up Fred Pierce [Frederick S. Pierce], head of ABC, and basically said, “Fred, you've got to put this on the air.” And Fred said, “Of course. Are you in the movie?” And then of course they wanted us to re-shoot some stuff, putting Henry Winkler in the context of the family. And they wanted this 72 minute version to come down to 54 [minutes], which was quite a cut. So now the film exists in two versions: the original 74 minute version, which is narrated by a wonderful actor named Sydney Walker who was in his 70s at the time. And I wanted was a kind of older, weathered voice. And then there's the 54 minute Henry Winkler version, which is a good film but to me it doesn't have the power of the longer version.

INT: And that won the Emmy?
JK: Yeah. I guess that won the Emmy. And the seventy two minute one. [INT: And then the longer version won the Oscar [Academy Award]. So you had one film, two different versions. One wins the OSCAR, one wins the Emmy.] Yeah. [INT: Yeah. For Documentary.] And I'm not sure, but maybe the only film that's won both an Emmy and an Oscar. [INT: Oh yeah, I bet it is.] I don't know. Anyway, that proves, you know, how much the right person is crucial to getting things done. [INT: Right. Right.]

INT: GO ASK ALICE. That was a little bit ahead of its time too, wasn't it? I mean, it had to do with teenage drugs and family.
JK: Well, there was this book and there still is a controversy about it. It was supposed to be the diary of a fifteen year old girl who died of a drug overdose. There are other people who say, no it wasn't really. It was done by a professional writer. Nobody knows. But it was an important film and I'm glad I made it; and as you know, when you make a film and it gets into any kind of distribution or broadcast, it's like having a child and saying, “Goodbye.” They go out in the world, you have no idea what happens to them. And on GO ASK ALICE I got several of these wonderful letters from families about how important it was to their family, and how it saved one of their kids from a drug problem and so forth. And it's always fun to get those, but in my whole career I think I've gotten fifteen or twenty fan letters. I mean you don't get hundreds of them.

INT: Who wrote that and who was, do you remember the actress who played it? Who was in it?
JK: The actress was Jamie Smith-Jackson who I don't know if she's still acting. And talk about casting processes. I think we saw two or three hundred teenage girls for that. And all kinds of people came in and Jamie came to the audition barefoot, wearing blue jeans with a rope for a belt. But she had this kind of innocent, hippie-like face. You know? Very blonde and very plain and simple. And as soon as she walked in, we knew that she was it. And she was the kind of girl for it. [INT: And who wrote it?] God, you know, I can't remember the writer's name [Ellen M. Violett].

INT: Alright, well that, now THE MUSIC SCHOOL you did in that period?
JK: Actually, THE MUSIC SCHOOL was '76. [INT: '76. So that was around the time that you did MANZANAR [FAREWELL TO MANZANAR]? Because MANZANAR aired in '76.] Right. Well, then I must have done MANZANAR first because, you know, it takes awhile before something airs. I think we shot MANZANAR in '75.

INT: So okay, let's talk about MANZANAR [FAREWELL TO MANZANAR]. How did that...?
JK: Well MANZANAR was probably one of the most rewarding experiences of my filmmaking career. At the same time, it was the biggest career mistake I ever made on paper within the business because when MISS JANE PITTMAN [THE BIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN] came out, you know, the day, it was not only a huge numbers success with the Nielsen ratings, but for instance, in San Francisco, the radio talk shows were monopolized for three days talking about that show. For three days people called in, mainly white people, saying, “I never knew what it was like to be black.” That kind of statement. And of course, the day after it was shown, my phone was ringing all day long, very often from people I didn't know at all. COMDEN AND GREEN [BETTY COMDEN and ADOLPH GREEN] called me, all kinds of actors and writers I didn't know, and so forth. And I was really enjoying it. I just thought, “I'm not gonna do anything today except answer the phone.” And my studio had a little kitchen in it. And it didn't have a stove, but it had a hot plate; and I had some supplies in the kitchen and one of them was a can of gourmet oyster stew. And I thought, “Well, if there's ever a day to have the gourmet oyster stew, this is it. So I emptied it into a sauce pan. I'm making up my oyster stew for lunch, and I swear to God, I found a pearl. [INT: Oh my god.] I still have it. It's a little tiny, it's not a terribly impressive pearl, but it's a pearl, and I found it on that day. I went back to my desk. But, in terms of, I think I was with William Morris [William Morris Agency] at the time and I got a call the next day or so from one of the big agents at William Morris and he said, “John, this is great. Everybody's talking about your movie. Everybody knows who you are now. You'll never have to do another television film.” And I said, “Well, you know the problem is that Jim [James D. Houston] and Jeanne Houston brought me this story about the Japanese-American camps and it's really an important story, and I really feel I should do it.” And he said, “No, it's crazy. You have a steppingstone to features. You know, you don't have to do television movies anymore.” And we went back and forth and back and forth; and, you know, I felt not only a personal obligation to go on with that film, but I thought this is really an important story to be told. And if I don't do it, who is gonna do it? I mean, there was some criticism later by Sansei, the fourth [Third] generation Japanese-Americans, they were very upset that a caucasian Director did it. I got the same flack from some quarters for [THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF] MISS JANE PITTMAN. But the point is that there was no Japanese-American director at that time. And, as you know, the time for certain films comes and goes too. So, if I had backed out of FAREWELL TO MANZANAR, there's no guarantee that it would have been picked up by anybody else. Certainly no guarantee that it would have been a Director that was acceptable. And Frank Price was at Universal [Universal Pictures]. He was the executive who, NBC [National Broadcasting Corporation], we went to them and got the arrangement, the deal worked out. And, of course, essentially all the steam that I had from MISS JANE PITTMAN, a lot of that tended to evaporate in the course of making MANZANAR. And MANZANAR did well but it didn't have nearly the impact that MISS JANE PITTMAN did. So that my, in terms of my ranking in the business, I had slipped down a few notches, which was not good for me personally,I mean commercially. But it was such an important project.

JK: And we went up there with people like Yuki Shimoda. We were shooting in Tule Lake, the remains of Tule Lake, and making it stand in for MANZANAR because of all things, the barracks that had been Tule Lake, many of them had been torn down, but five or six had been left and they were used as duck hunting lodges because there was a big flat lake there and lots of duck hunters came. But Yuki Shimoda had been there when he was seventeen years old. Right in those same barracks. And so there's a lot of emotion by the actors. And one of the first things I did in terms of casting and so forth, is I said, “Look. I know there are a lot of caucasians who can't tell a Chinese from a Japanese," but I said, "This story really belongs to the Japanese-Americans.” So it was an awkward time because there was a growing sort of Asian-American consciousness and some really strong Chinese-American activists like Frank Chin who was already unhappy that I was directing it. But I felt like, "No, I'm not gonna have Filipinos or Chinese pretending to be Japanese-American. Everybody is going to be Japanese-American." And I got, in terms of the DGA [Directors Guild of America] it's interesting, there was no first AD [First Assistant Director] who was Japanese-American. There was a second AD [Second Assistant Director] Director named Richard Hashimoto and he had quite a few credits as a Second AD. So I called him and I said, “Is there any way that you can do this? How close are you to being a first AD?” And he said, “Well, I just...there's just a couple more pictures I need to do.” And I said, “Well, maybe we can get them to make some exception?” And we told them the situation, said that we really felt we're going to have a lot of Japanese-American extras, it would make total sense to have an AD. And we got the job for Richard and got an exemption. Same thing happened with Paul Chihara doing the music. I wanted Paul and Universal had never heard of him, didn't want to go with him. And I said, “You know, if we don't have a lot of Japanese-American names on this, we're going to get slammed by certain places, in the press and so forth.” So they hired Paul Chihara. From the beginning I wanted my friend Hiro Narita to shoot it; and we got Bob Kinoshita [Robert Kinoshita] to be the art director, so we had a lot of Japanese-Americans in the crew.

INT: And what was the experience like in making the film?
JK: Well, it was a great experience. I mean, we were all very far from home and living in a pretty primitive situation. The motels and the restaurants were all pretty elemental. But there was a great spirit on the location and Bob Kinoshita [Robert Kinoshita], the art director, production designer, especially, he did all kinds of special little things. He made Japanese candies at certain times and his present to everybody at the end of the movie was little wooden shoes. You know, with the straps between the toes? And he made one for everybody on the whole crew with their name on it.

INT: Do you remember how, what the shooting schedule was on that?
JK: I think that was thirty days. [INT: And what about PITTMAN [THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN]? I meant to ask you about how long that was.] I think that was also thirty days. Almost everything else I did was twenty you know? Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. In that range.

INT: But the truth of the matter is that, I mean, didn't you go from MANZANAR to ALEX & THE GYPSY?
JK: I guess I did, yeah. Because I know when MANZANAR [FAREWELL TO MANZANAR] was on the television, Jack Lemmon watched it and talked to me about it the next day. [INT: So you did get your feature shot there.] Yeah, I did. I mean, I got ALEX & THE GYPSY, and I got OLIVER'S STORY. Now OLIVER'S STORY is a different story. But neither one of those were what you would call hot scripts. I mean, even Dick Shepherd [Richard Shepherd] who produced ALEX & THE GYPSY knew that it was a kind of, you know, out of the way script. A lot of it very funny. Written by Larry Marcus [Lawrence B. Marcus] who can be a very funny writer. And the other thing I appreciated about Larry is he was totally honest. He had an ending line. You know at the end, the gypsy flies off in the airplane with the rich guy and Jack is waving the shirt? [INT: Right.] And he had a line for her that didn't work and he admitted it. And he said, “I'm not happy with that last line.” And I said, “Well, see if you can come up with something else.” And he worked and he worked and he couldn't think of what is the last line of this movie for Maritza to say. And so I started thinking about it and finally I called him up one day and I said, “Larry, what if she looks down from the plane and says, and the guys says, 'Who is that man?" and she says, 'Oh, pay no attention to him. He's a gypsy.'” And Larry loved it. He didn't fight me at all.

INT: Do you want to talk a little bit about the experience that you had that you told me about before with that film?
JK: No, I guess not. No. [INT: Okay.] INT: You mean cast experience? [INT: Yeah.] No, I think not. No.

INT: But you were not happy with the...?
JK: Well, it was not the best chemistry in the world and I think there were maybe some other problems with it but -- [INT: You could tell the Jack Lemmon story, though.] About? [INT: The shirt and the walk.] Oh, I didn't? Yeah. Jack Lemmon was the first big star I ever worked with and when I got the job of directing ALEX & THE GYPSY, they set up a meeting. We were supposed to get acquainted. And I sat down across from Jack and he was talking about how much he liked the script and he wanted because it was different, he wanted to do something really different. And I'd just finished watching seven or eight of his movies. And I decided to be very frank with him and I said, “Well, if you really want to do something different, there are two things I don't want you to do in this movie.” And he leaned forward and I said, “One of them is pull at your collar and the other one is to take short little steps.” And there was this terrible moment of silence and he stared at me for a minute and I thought, “Oh Christ, I just ruined my relationship on the first day with this man.” And then he laughed and he said, “Yeah, I guess I do that a lot, don't I?” And then I told him that I wanted him to develop a long stride as an antidote and he did it. He actually worked on a longer stride. And he didn't pull at his collar.

INT: Okay. So that takes us – we did the DEBOLTS [WHO ARE THE DEBOLTS? AND WHERE DID THEY GET 19 KIDS?].
JK: We could talk about OLIVER'S STORY. [INT: OLIVER'S STORY. Okay, let's talk about that.] Because one of my favorite stories about OLIVER'S STORY I can tell now, I think. Did you ever do any casting with Marion Dougherty? [INT: No.] She was a wonderful casting woman and used Juliet Taylor in New York who's also wonderful. And David Picker [David V. Picker] was my producer. He actually called me up. The whole thing started when I got this phone call from David Picker and he said, “I just left the presidency of Paramount [Paramount Pictures] and my going away present was that they gave me the sequel to LOVE STORY to produce. And Erich Segal is writing his own script and I'm pretty sure it's going to be terrible.” So he said, “I'm looking for somebody to treat it like an independent film.” And he said, “I know your work and I would love to have you direct this with the idea that you'll probably end up writing a script as well, and it's going to be a six or seven million dollar Christmas release from Paramount.” So, it was like, wow. Right in my lap. So I took the job and I go off to New York, we set up offices, and we start seeing people. And Juliet and Marion brought in all the best people. I mean I have a call sheet from one of those days of casting that reads like a who's who in American New York theater and film and everything. And within a couple of weeks we had what we thought was the ideal cast for OLIVER'S STORY. It was about a wealthy young man and meeting this lady who turned out also to be wealthy and it was about love among the educated upper classes, but with complications. And I told David Picker. He agreed with the casting idea and we called Michael Eisner and told him our choices and he said, “Who are these people? New York stages actors? I've never heard of them before in my life.” They had had a falling out with Ryan O'Neal but they decided to get over that. They hired Ryan O'Neal, they hired Candice Bergen to do the movie, and the two people they turned down were Meryl Streep and Bill Hurt [William Hurt]. And to this day I think, “What would that movie have looked like with Meryl Streep and Bill Hurt, you know?” [INT: That was '77?] I guess, yeah. [INT: I mean, it released in '78. Yeah] But, Michael Eisner never heard of them, and within months Meryl was on the cover of magazines, you know? And, of course, Bill Hurt became very well-known. [INT: Right.] But that just shows you know that nobody knows who is gonna be big and who isn't. And frankly, I think unfortunately Ryan is a sweet guy and I really like him, but he had made a lot enemies over the years. The Press Association [Hollywood Woman's Press Club] gave him their Green Apple Award [Sour Apple Award] once [in 1981]. And they defined it as "to the actor who most believes his own publicity."

INT: So, what about the film [OLIVER'S STORY]?
JK: Well, the film was, I did re-write it. I wrote into it, I enlarged greatly the part of a woman who was sort of an industrial designer, furniture designer, whatever. And with the idea, the original, the book was sort of on the basis that the Ryan character could not forget Jenny and that even though he was attracted to this woman Marcie, in the end he still would pine for Jenny. So it was a downer. And so I thought, "I don't want to make this a downer." And in my version I built up the relationship of the third character, the woman. And I wrote and photographed a very upbeat ending in which, as a symbolic gesture, Ryan knocks down a wall in his apartment as a way of opening up his life and starting with this young girl. The actress we used was Nicola Pagett who is from UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS and so forth. And she was wonderful and the whole thing worked. And we showed it to the Paramount [Paramount Pictures] executives and they said, “Well, I don't know who that girl is, but I don't think we should end the movie on her. Lets just cut it before that relationship really gets going." And they made us [cut it]. It's the only time I had a serious cutting problems and you know I could have fought it. The DGA's [Directors Guild of America] rules about so many things are nice to have, but of course they can't overcome power politics. And in this case I had very little power. And unfortunately David Picker [David V. Picker] went along with the Paramount executives and saying, "Okay, that's the thing to do." [INT: He agreed?] Yeah. He agreed. Almost immediately. So the movie that came out is almost necrophilia. You know, it's Ryan on a bridge mourning the loss of Jenny. [INT: And so it didn't do very well?] No.

INT: Do you look at dailies?
JK: Oh yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't make a movie without 'em. Yeah, I not only find it necessary, but I think it's usually inspirational. [INT: Right.] I mean, if your dailies look as good as they're supposed to then you feel more motivated. [INT: Right. So even when you shoot yourself, you still look at your dailies?] Yeah, although I must admit, the last few television films I made, the schedule was so tight that it was, again, sometimes back to the issue of sleep or dailies. You know, do you want to stay up later at night watching dailies? So usually what was happening in that case is that we would look at video cassettes at lunch break the next day. Something like that. [INT: Right, right, right.] Oh, I have one story about that which is about actors and how to work with them or not. When I made RIVERRUN, we chose a non-professional person, Louise Ober, to play the girl. Never acted before in her life but she was really sweet, looked exactly right, wanted to do it. But she was insecure and I was at that stage of thinking, “Oh, the movie crew and the cast. It's all one big happy family and we're all in this together.” And we were looking at dailies in my studio at night, projecting thirty-five millimeter and so I kept telling Louise to come to see the dailies and she didn't want to do it at first. And I said, “C'mon, you can sit right beside me and I want you to see you're doing a great job. And I want you to see yourself on the screen.” So she came, we sat in the front row, we're looking at the film and we come to a big close-up of her on the screen and I said something like, “See? You're very good in this scene.” And she said something and I said, “What?” And I leaned over and she said, “Look at those ears.” I mean that's all she could see. Was that her ears were too big.

INT: Well how do you feel about actors looking at dailies?
JK: Well after that, then I realized if an Actor doesn't want to see dailies I'm not gonna push them. [INT: But you don't care if they do see them?] Yeah. I don't refuse to let them see it because I think that feels like you're hiding something. But a lot of Actors don't want to see dailies. So I just leave it at that. Yeah. There's some people, I mean that was the most serious repercussion I've ever had. I mean, she didn't quit the film or anything, but it made me realize that an Actor is going to see something different than what you see, you know?

INT: Well what is your relationship with different parts of your team? I mean, how hands-on are you? You've talked about the DP [Director of Photography] so we don't have to go through that, but let's talk about production design, or props, hair, make-up, wardrobe. Do you feel a responsibility to have input on those? All of it, which I'm sure you do. But the question is, how involved are you? Do you have, again, you're working off your pre-conceptions or what they present you? Do you respond to that?
JK: Wel,l when we have our first production meeting and go through the script, if I feel strongly about a location or a prop, I usually make it clear right at that production meeting. I might say, “I think it's really important that this house be this way or that.” Or on this particular prop. And it's so easy for people to go off on the wrong tangent, you know? That's why I said in my director's notes, you know, the script is the book but not the Bible. I had a funny experience in Atlanta with, there was a scene about child molestation and we did flashbacks of this girl who had been molested by her father and we were very constricted by the network about what we could and could not show, so I wanted to find some metaphors and I decided a good metaphor would be that this girl after being molested, stares at a moth that's trapped between two sheets of glass in the window, or something. And this moth is beating its wings. And I had a perfect visualization, told the prop guy that I wanted a moth for that. He goes off. We shoot the scene a week later, “So, I've been doing a lot of research. I've really worked on this," and so forth. And we come in and we get ready for the moth shot and he opens it up and he has a case of these huge, ugly jungle moths from South America. You know, that he found through some moth expert. They were as wrong as you could imagine. I wanted a little white moth and he had these ugly, huge things. And he couldn't understand why I wasn't impressed with all the work he had done. So the important thing is, sometimes I feel in communicating to a crew that you have almost as much of a problem keeping them from overdoing it. You know, people can overdo it, they can overshoot the mark. One of my biggest problems with locations very often is that the locations that the people pick for me are too nice. They're too fancy. They're too rich. They're too pretty. And it always feels like these people are picking the house they would like to live in, you know? And finally on GETTING OUT, which was shot in Atlanta, they presented to me, we were out scouting, and they made me look at three or four places that were all wrong. And I said, “Alright, just drive me down the street. Let's just look at houses.” And we drove into a sort of lower income area and I just looked out the window and I said, “Find out about that house!” And sure enough, that was it. It turned out somebody had just moved out. It was perfect for our purposes. It was really run down. All the woodwork was stained and dirty and so forth. It was absolutely perfect and we found it in five minutes. But they just wouldn't, they wouldn't look for things that were down enough. Same with clothes sometimes.

INT: Yeah, but do you sit down with production designers before they even go out and look for locations and decide what the look of the film is gonna be or, again do you wait and work off...?
JK: No, I always have a general discussion with people and you try to communicate in that general discussion what you're looking for. But so much of it is taste. You know, my favorite definition of directing is from Truffaut [Francois Truffaut].You've probably heard it. Someone went to Truffaut once and they said, “Well, we know what a cameraman does. We know what a sound man does. What does a Director really do?” And he said, “It's very simple. You just walk around all day and you say, "That's too much. That's not enough. That's too much. That's not enough. That's all you do." And it's true because with performances, and furniture, and wardrobe, very often you just say, “That's too much.”

INT: But it shouldn't be left unsaid that there's a very strong visual aesthetic in all of your films. Particularly in exteriors. Is there any particular influence that brought that about that you know about? I mean is it like what other Directors that you admire might've influenced you that way? Or were you a fan of still photography?
JK: More still photography, actually. Yeah, in fact, that list of questions you sent me, when I think about my influences strangely enough almost none of my influences are other Directors because I started in animation and still photography and documentary. Almost all of my strong influences were from those areas. I mean, Carier-Bresson [Henri Cartier-Bresson], you know? Photographers that I liked that captured a certain quality of life. Robert Frank. I like Robert Frank's work a lot. And so I don't, you know, and frankly, I'm not a Bogdanovich [Peter Bogdanovich] type. There are so many classic American films I've never even seen. And I guess if anything, the biggest film influences on me were the foreign films of the '50s and the '60s. Because I saw a lot of them. When I went to Antioch College, they had a small local movie theater. Only one. Probably a hundred seats or something. But the great thing is that they changed the program three times a week so every film played only two or three days and you could see three good foreign films in one week if you had the time. And I watched a lot of things and of course, I've always liked smaller films. I don't go to big extravaganzas much. And I loved the small films of Eastern Europe, like Milos Forman's THE FIREMAN'S BALL; CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS [by] Jirí Menzel. There's a nice one called MY SWEET LITTLE VILLAGE. But films that are about kind of ordinary people in small towns; and I guess in terms of the visual look, yeah I'm always more comfortable in shooting something that's a little ragged at the edges. Same in CRAZY-QUILT [THE CRAZY-QUILT] you know? The last house in CRAZY-QUILT is just perfect for what we wanted. It's a beautiful house in disrepair. [INT: Right. Yeah.] In a beautiful setting. [INT: Yeah.]

INT: So, okay. So you would say that photography was more of a visual influence than movies. Okay, I'm going to come back to that. But the few minutes that we have left on this I noticed that GEORGE BURNS COMEDY WEEK? What was that?
JK: That was kind of out of the blue. Carl Gottlieb who was one of the producers of that series along with Steve Martin knew my work from THE COMMITTEE. He'd been around Bonerz and those people. And Steve Martin was looking for Directors who had not done situation comedy before so they gave me a call and I thought, “Well I've never done an episode of a sitcom. I might as well try it.” And I liked the script very much. Pam Pettler is a very funny writer and I thought it was a very funny script, but it was, you know, literally just three or four weeks of my time. [INT: But what was it?] Well, they came up with a, it was weird that they called it the GEORGE BURNS COMEDY HOUR [WEEK] because he would only appear in the first, there'd be a two-minute intro, "Here I am, George Burns" and so forth, and then he'd introduce the story and there was no other on-screen thing with him. And they were all comedy episodes written for other Actors so it didn't go very far. I think it only lasted one season. [INT: I see, I see.]

INT: How do you go about picking a composer and how do you work with a composer? Are you musically inclined or again do you wait for their...?
JK: I'm not, I have no musical skills of my own. I've listened to a lot of music and I have strong feelings about music and the main thing I guess, overall, is I do not like big scores with forty violins. Occasionally, you have to use them or the compser feels he has to use them, but I've always been more attracted to the off-beat kind of composer. Paul Chihara was one of the first, but Paul's done some absolutely beautiful scores, both MANZANAR [FAREWELL TO MANZANAR] and RESTING PLACE I think are beautiful scores. On RESTING PLACE, all I said is “This is a very American story, you know? And I don't want it to be heavily patriotic, but just keep that in mind.” And he did a beautiful version of that. And for some films I really pushed for tiny scores, like the score of WINNIE, the film I did with Meredith Baxter, is, I think, just a few instruments. So I just go in that direction and another thing I always tell composers is that I like dissonance and off-beat things. I don't want everything to be, you know, the biggest problem with television music is it got to the point where the big names, because of their schedule and trying to make as much money as they could in a small amount of time, they'd come up with a theme and then repeat it ten times. [INT: Or farm it out.] Yeah, yeah. And it was very unsatisfactory. [INT: Yeah.]