MH: Just to digress for a second, you know, this is the first interview that I’ve ever done where I’ve answered any personal questions. [INT: Really?] I just, you know, I just don’t answer them. And it’s very funny, because there’s a book that’s coming out in a month or so called “Monte Hellman, His Life And Films.” Well, I mean, it’s a lie, because it’s not my life, you know, and I don’t answer you know those kind of questions. And not because, maybe someday I’ll--you know, if I’m, I think I’m too lazy to ever do it, but if I weren’t so lazy, I would, you know, I might do an autobiography of sorts, you know, more of a kind of philosophical and intellectual autobiography than a you know, you know, I never talk about my personal relationships or anything like that. But the you know they had the audacity to call it “His Life and Films,” but you know, surprise, surprise. [INT: God, I don’t think I--did you answer something personal? I guess you did.] Yeah, at the very beginning, I told when and where I was born, you know? [INT: Exactly. I love that.] But this is family, you know, this is... [INT: Right...]

INT: When we were talking about authenticity and how for me watching your films I always feel like I, you know--like with the westerns, I feel like those were you know, I believed them, that’s why I asked you about the construction, because I believed them so much to be where people existed and where they lived, and--

MH: I remember, what I was thinking to say. I mean, not to shock or to you know, hopefully not to call attention to itself, but you know it’s why I had Harry Dean [Harry Dean Stanton], you know, take a piss at the beginning of RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND. I just, you know, I want, and why the family wash up all the time. I think, I just like to relate it to everyday life. I mean, even if you’re totally inauthentic in every other way that makes the audience feel like there’s some kind of authenticity. And in terms of the cinematography, which is where we were before, you know, I’m very, I mean, I had the real luck to work with I think with some of the greatest Cinematographers in the world. I had Gregory Sandor on my two westerns [RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND and THE SHOOTING], and on TWO-LANE BLACKTOP. I had Nestor Almendros on COCKFIGHTER, I had Giuseppe Rotunno on CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37. I mean, these are, you know, these are masters. I mean, I was in awe of them. That was, Rotunno was the only one where I actually, you know, kind of broke my rule, and you know, he liked to make suggestions, he says, “You know we could do the shot this way or...” you know, I had three shots planned in one scene, and he says, “You know, if we do a zoom in here and then change the focus here, we could do it all in one shot.” I says, “Okay, let’s do it.” And then, so that kind of gave him a little more courage, and he said, and the next day he said, “Well, why don’t we...?” And I said, “No, I think we’re gonna do it this way.” So, even with Peppino [Giuseppe Rotunno], you know, you finally have to draw the line, you know.

MH: Oh, I forgot to mention my other great Cinematographer, I can’t leave him out, is Josep Civit [Josep M. Civit]. And I’ll explain how I discovered him, but… I think you know outside of Arthur Hopkins and Strickland [Francis Cowles Strickland] at Stanford [Stanford University], you know, the other great influence just for one thing was Folmar Blangsted, one of the great Editors. And I was his assistant on a picture called BUS RILEY’S BACK IN TOWN, and in the middle of the movie I got hired to go to the Philippines. And so I told Folmar that you know I had to leave, and you know the picture was mostly edited and you know anybody could’ve take--but he was furious. He says, “You’re gonna leave me in the middle of the movie? How dare you do that?” You know, he was absolutely furious. In a similar way, I was editing also for Peckinpah [Sam Peckinpah] once and I left to do an episode of BARETTA, and again you know, I’ve done all the work, I mean, there was no reason for me to even--he was furious, you know, “You’re gonna desert me, blah-blah-blah.” But Folmar after he got over the anger at my deserting the ship, he says, “Okay, let me give you a little bit of advice.” He says, “Carry a little pad. And on a separate page write each of the shots of the day, and then when you finish a shot, tear it off, crumble it up and throw it on the ground. And when you’ve gotten down to the end of the pad, you know you’ve finished the day’s work.” And that’s absolutely the best advice anybody’s ever given me. [INT: That’s awesome.] It’s very simple you know. And when Quentin Tarantino said, “Well, how do I direct RESERVOIR DOGS?” I said, “You have a little pad, and you make a list of your shots, and you tear them off and crumble them up, and throw them away.” And that’s--[INT: And it gives you the structure for the day and it gives you, even if you change, as somebody giving a suggestion to make three shots one, you still got that.] Yeah.

MH: But working with, I mean, working with DPs [Directors of Photography], I mean, [Siren] I’ve been lucky to have people where we had absolutely you know one way to see, and Nestor [Nestor Almendros] is so fanatical about this thing of reality that you know he doesn’t even, he says, “The only good art is the art from the warm countries, and the only good Cinematographers.” He doesn’t like, you know, any German or Scandinavian cinema, “Forget it,” you know, “If you’re not Italian or Spanish, or French maybe,” you know, French is on the border. [INT: South of France, yeah.] “Forget it, you know, you can’t be a good Cinematographer.” But he was absolutely, you know, everything had to, the light had to be motivated. In so many Hollywood movies, I mean, I worked on, you know, I was a dialogue coach on THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE for Corman [Roger Corman], and the Cinematographer, you know, would have the light coming from one source for the long shot and then a different source for the close-up. And I went nuts, you know, I would, you know, if I were directing I wouldn’t permit it first of all, you know, but I would want to work with someone who thought the way that I did. And Nestor, I wanted him to do IGUANA and he wasn’t available. And he said, “But you’ve got, you know, perhaps the greatest Cinematographer in the world in Spain, and you should look him up.” And he said, “He shot a movie called THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE.” Well, I looked at the movie, and he said, “Absolutely, it’s the greatest cinematography in the history of the movies.” And so I looked at the movie and I was absolutely blown away by the movie. I’d become like a fan, I mean, I sent fan letters to Victor Erice, and you know, he’s my idol, you know. And he said, you know, “The Cinematographer was named Cuadrado [Luis Cuadrado], and you know, you should look him up.” And so I get to Spain and I looked up Cuadrado and he had died. And I find out that he had a brain tumor, and he shot… I’m gonna cry because I get emotional about this. He says, “He shot SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE when he was 95 percent blind.” And he would have his assistant describe the set to him, and where the windows and so forth were and then he would tell him where to put the lights and what intensity for each light. [INT: Oh my god.] It’s unbelievable. [INT: Wow. I know that Gabriel Figueroa was going pretty blind toward the end of his career as well, which is incredible to think.] Yeah. [INT: Wow, that’s a beautiful story.] So, anyway, I tried to get Cuadrado’s [Luis Cuadrado] assistant, I’ve blanked out his name now, but he’s a great Spanish Cinematographer now. And we actually hired him and then the production got delayed, and he was no longer available. So, I went to what the equivalent of the Cinematheque in Madrid, and I looked at a reel of you know, 30 different Cinematographers and that’s how I found Josep [Josep M. Civit]. [INT: Wow.]

INT: And in the process of working together [working with Cinematographers], how do you go about that in your prep and then… Well in prep for example?

MH: Well, I mean, Josep [Josep M. Civit] is you know as good as any of them, he’s really, really great. And he’s terrific because he also, between us, we designed the set. And we’ll have a basic set, but he’ll, you know, he’ll move the furniture around and do things that will help him design the scene cinematographically. And so he’s terrific that way. And you know when I was working with Gregory Sandor on the westerns, we didn’t quite have that kind of luxury, we were, the time restraints were so difficult and the sets were so bare anyway. But you know, what we would do there is I was very precise because once, you know, we didn’t have a dolly, so once we would put the camera down on sticks, you know, it was kind of hard to move it. So, I was very precise about framing and about lens. So I chose all the lenses, and I set the framing. But the camera was pretty static. When you get into a lot of moving stuff, and Gregory was terrific, as he operated himself; he was a terrific Operator. But I found that on TWO-LANE BLACKTOP with an Operator who was just kind of like assigned to us, because Gregory wasn’t in the I.A. [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees], so he wasn’t able to be the official Cinematographer. So we had another Cinematographer who got the credit, who stayed in his hotel room all day, and we had an Operator who was part of that team. So Gregory was really supposedly just photographic advisor, but he was actually the Cinematographer. And so I had a lot of shocks when it came to seeing, whenever there be movement, to see how the operation went. So, it was, I realized that it was just as important to me to have an Operator I can trust as a DP [Director of Photography]. And so, then I began very careful about that and… Usually the Cinematographer on some of the smaller movies was the Operator, but on TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, Gregory didn’t operate. [INT: Well now how would that work? God, it’s so weird to think that this, and this had happened during my career, you know, that we’ve got the video tap and we’ve got the--] I don’t like that. [INT: I agree. Yeah.] I mean, in the case of a complicated camera move, yes, it would be a tremendous aid. But if you have a video assist on every shot, then all you do, you spend half your day repeating the work that you’ve just done. You’re looking, you know, every take you’re running again, so you get half as much work done. I mean, I can’t--[INT: Right. And how would you see the dailies, like when you were on the road like that, for example with TWO-LANE BLACKTOP?] Most of the time we couldn’t, most of the time we couldn’t. I had somebody in L.A. on the westerns who would look at the dailies and just tell us if we had any technical problems. And I… when you don’t have a video assist, you have to have, you know, your own video assist, you’ve got to have you know, I don’t know if my memory’s still good enough now, but you had to have a good memory, and you had to know what the take was like, and what was good and what was bad, and you had to be able to give the script person notes. And so when you edit, you have some idea of you know what you have on film. [INT: Right.]

INT: And I guess it really--it’s particularly helpful that you have such a visual eye yourself that you could set the framing. I know that for me sometimes I’ll get involved with the Actors and I won’t--I’ll get involved, I’ll start experiencing the scenes through the Actors and not think about the frame and not realize what I’ve got or what I don’t have--[MH: Right.]--in frame, you know, at the time.

MH: Yeah, but when I did IGUANA, that was the first time that I didn’t, you know--I had in addition to a great Cinematographer, to Josep [Josep M. Civit], I had a really great Operator, Ricardo, Ricardo Navarrete. And I just saw, you know, I saw him work one day, and that was it, from then on I never asked, “What lens are you using? Where are you put...?” I just knew that he had an eye that was like, you know, I didn’t have to--that was one thing I didn’t have to worry about anymore.

INT: And that was shot, how did you come to shoot that movie [IGUANA]? And where did you get the inspiration for that and the location and…?

MH: Okay, this is gonna be great advice for anybody who’s watching us who wants to know how do you get a job making movies. And the way I got the job on IGUANA was it had been kind of offered to Otto De Young [PH], and he wasn’t interested, so he recommended me. But they had about three or four people who were recommended. And the reason I got the job is because I had two 3’s in my phone number. And the Producer, you know, was into numerology and he chose me because of my phone number. [INT: Oh my god, amazing.] Yeah. [INT: And they already had a script and they had the--?] No. Again, they had a script, which was a literal adaptation of the book, which is a first-person narrative, in the form of diaries. So, the script was a voice over of the diaries. I mean, it was, oh god, I mean, you know, and I basically again, you know, I’ve turned down so many movies that I wound up doing, only because, I mean, this is--besides my phone number, this is the other reason I did IGUANA is I couldn’t talk directly to the Producer because he didn’t speak any English and I don’t speak Italian. So, one of my closest friends is Leonard Manzella [Leonard Mann], who was a movie star in Italy for 10 years. He’s American, but he went to Italy, he learned to speak Italian, and he became a movie star. And so, I took him to you know a meeting with the Producer at his motel room, and I went there to him that I you know I just you know didn’t feel comfortable, I didn’t, you know, the script didn’t move me and I didn’t really feel comfortable doing this picture. Well, Leonard did not translate what I said. Instead of saying, “Well, I can’t do the picture,” he said, “Well, you know, the script needs a little work, I think if we can get it you know developed properly I’d be very happy to--” So, he just changed everything, he accepted for me when I said “No,” he said “Yes,” or “maybe,” you know. So, Otto De Young [PH] gets a credit on the screen and Leonard Manzella gets a credit on the screen.

MH: But no, it’s the story of my life. The Producer [of IGUANA] said, “Okay, you can hire a Writer.” And so we hired my friend Steve Gaydos who’s now Editor of Variety in London, and David [David M. Zehr], what’s his last name? I want to say Gare maybe? David Gare, David Sarah, maybe, sorry about that, folks, but it’s called AADDD, Age Active--or AAADD, Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. But the way I worked on that was a process that I developed on one of my, you know, projects that hasn’t been made yet, and I say yet, you know, because I’m seriously still planning to make it, that was based on a Lionel White novel called “Obsession”. And it was for Paramount, and what’s his name, AAADD… God, Mark Peploe wrote the first script. And Paramount [Paramount Pictures] was dissatisfied with it, they wanted another draft done, so we hired Charles Eastman to write the second draft, and then finally I took their two drafts and the novel and I created a composite third draft. And I liked that process so much. I mean, that was accidental, because we hired one Writer and then we hired another Writer, and then I did the thing at the end. I liked the process so much that when it came time to do IGUANA, I hired the two Writers with the understanding in front that this is how I would work. And I says, “Okay, you know, you guys get together and you each do you know a draft, or you each do alternate scenes or whatever and then I’m gonna rewrite it. And so they, it was no hard feelings, because they knew from the beginning that that was the deal. And I loved it. I mean, I got these two scripts from them, and I took the scripts and I went to the Cannes Film Festival and I was very disciplined for me and got up every day at 8:00 and I worked until 1:00. And in the space of 10 days I wrote the script. You know, with--[INT: With the festival going on.]--a lot of help from my friends, because they had written, you know, they had done very good work. But I just put a script together. [INT: Wow.] And what I do is I wind up… I guess I make the pictures personal. I put my own experience, you know, which is something that a Writer can’t do for you, you know? If you want to do a personal story, you’ve got to put your own personal things in. So, in “Dark Passion,” which was the obsession thing, I put a lot of my kids in it, I put a lot of my girlfriends in it, experiences with them, you know, some things that I wouldn’t want to ever tell anybody, but if you make it fictional and it’s a little bit removed, you can talk about, you know, sex, you can talk about anything because it’s not really you, it’s these characters. [INT: Right.] And so that’s what I do, I just, I personalize it.

MH: So, I’ll just you know, I’ll pick certain scenes that I either write from scratch, you know, I create a new scene, or else I’ll rewrite a scene, you know, using you know, my memory, using the dialogue that I’ve experienced. [INT: That’s, yeah, I find that that’s like such a great way to go. Because then you really are the one who has the answers to all the questions when you’re on the set, in a weird way.] Well, you have some. Yeah, you have some answers. [INT: Yeah.]

INT: How… We’ve talked a lot about process and production. How were the films, each of these films, let’s talk about how they were distributed, received, how did that process go? And how do you feel about that process, like how are you, do you kind of feel like once it’s done, it’s done and you’re kind of...?

MH: I don’t feel that way. But I must say that I have had, you know, almost no distribution of my movies. I mean BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE was intended as a second feature for a double-bill. [INT: Right.] And that’s, so that got out there, you know, but nobody went to see that, they went to see the other movie. And, you know, that just happened to be filler, you know. And I don’t, maybe the same thing with BACKDOOR TO HELL, I think that was maybe released with something else. FLIGHT TO FURY, I don’t recall it ever getting a real release, and that was a funny situation, because BACKDOOR TO HELL was a Fox [20th Century Fox] movie, so naturally it would be released, and Robert Lippert was working for Fox, he was a Producer at Fox, and so he literally stole FLIGHT TO FURY. He got Fox to pay for everybody to go to the Philippines, and to make BACKDOOR TO HELL, and so with everybody there all he had to do was you know buy some film and pay, you know, a couple more weeks of living expenses, and he had a movie. And so, I’m not sure, I mean, he didn’t have the ability to distribute it in the same way that Fox did with BACKDOOR TO HELL, so I can’t remember what kind of distribution if any it had other than TV, you know. And then RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND and THE SHOOTING were never distributed theatrically at the time, because they were sold as part of a package. They were sold to Walter Reade Sterling [Walter Reade, Reade-Sterling], who immediately put them in a TV package. So, he never, I mean, I don’t know if Roger [Roger Corman] knew this or not, but Reade-Sterling had no intention of distributing the pictures theatrically. They were just, you know, kind of fodder for the TV machine. And then, a few years later, you know, somebody might, actually my lawyer bought them back from Walter Reade-Sterling, and got distribution, and this was like you know, one of those bad luck situations, because Columbia [Columbia Pictures] made an offer, and they would’ve done a nice job with them. But instead, Jack Schwartzman, who was my lawyer, sold them to a friend of his named Jack Harris, and Jack Harris tested them for one week in Texas somewhere, and didn’t like the results and so he never paid, for one thing, never, you know, just reneged on the deal, and never distributed the pictures. And so, they never really had a distribution in America. And then, COCKFIGHTER was picketed by the, you know, SPCA [Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals], and it never really got a distribution.

MH: And TWO-LANE BLACKTOP was a case where it was a one-man studio really, Lew Wasserman ran Universal [Universal Pictures], and the picture was made under the auspices of Ned Tanen, who loved it. And it had at that time, one of the biggest, largest number of theaters, that where the theater was booked, but then Wasserman saw it and he didn’t see it until way into the process after you know the picture was finished and the bookings were made, and the sales department were really excited about it, Wasserman saw it, hated it, and pulled the plug. So, they had all these theaters, but they wouldn’t, not only wouldn’t they spend any money on advertising, the picture opened in New York on Fourth of July weekend, and there was not one newspaper ad. And I went crazy, I said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Why is there not one newspaper ad?” And they said, “Well, it’s the Fourth of July weekend, everybody’ll be out of town.” And I said, “Well, why open the movie then?” I mean it was insane. It was totally insane. [INT: How did you feel about that?] Well, I was very disappointed. I was very disappointed. The picture, in a few locations where the theater owner put up money for advertising, it had a decent run. It ran, I think for 18 weeks in Seattle, and 12 weeks in Portland, and had a good run in Philadelphia, and Boston, you know, a few places. But most places it was just, you know, there was no support, and it just faded away. [INT: God, it’s devastating, isn’t it?] Yeah. [INT: It is a really--] And it got great reviews, I mean, really great reviews.

INT: How do you deal with reviews?

MH: Well, I, you know, I was trained, again by Arthur Hopkins, not to pay any attention to them, not to really read them, you know, but I can’t do that. You know? I read the reviews, and if they’re good reviews I believe them, and if they’re bad, I think they’re wrong, you know? [INT: Same here. And I remember the bad ones a lot more than I remember the good ones.] Fortunately, I don’t. [INT: I forced myself to think the other way now.] Yeah.

INT: We haven’t talked about COCKFIGHTER. [MH: All right.] Let’s do that.

MH: COCKFIGHTER, that was another case where I tried to rewrite the script. The script of… The COCKFIGHTER, I had been to Hong Kong. I’d gone to Hong Kong twice, two years in a row. After TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, I developed a script from a Robbe-Grillet [Alain Robbe-Grillet] novel called “La Maison de Rendez-Vous,” and I called it IN A DREAM OF PASSION from Shakespeare. And I had a little bit of money from a private investor, and went to I think Montana, I think, yeah, Montana, to write the screenplay with a Writer, I hired a Writer. And after about three days, I realized that the Writer wasn’t able to do it, that he wasn’t cutting it. And so, I told him that I, you know, I was sorry but I had to write the script myself, but you know, I was paying him and I said, “You know, would you mind staying on and typing my work at the end of the day?” And so I wrote longhand and he typed it up, and I think we only had like eight or nine days for the whole process, and so three days were taken up with his false start, and then--so I had six, maybe seven days to write the script, and then I had to rush back to L.A. and get on a boat, and go to Hong Kong. Now, in those days I have to explain to, you know, people who are wondering why I’m taking all these boat trips, I didn’t fly. I had flown once before, and didn’t like it, and decided that I was gonna, you know, go along with Marianne Moore’s theory that you can get on a plane in New York and arrive in San Francisco five hours later, and not know any more when you arrived than when you left. And so, you know I just refused to fly, and it was kind of like written into my contract, and so I always had to allow enough time.

MH: So, I got on a boat, and this time it was a freighter, I learned about freighters, and I took--[INT: Tell me about that.]--a freighter to Hong Kong to prepare this movie [IN A DREAM OF PASSION]. And we were trying to cast the lead role and my first choice was Sean Connery, and for some reason, that I’ll never understand, the Producer hated Sean Connery. And so then we kind of thought of Anthony Hopkins and I don’t know why that didn’t work out. And then we settled on an Actor who had just played Macbeth for Polanski [Roman Polanski], Jon Finch, and I think he’d done FRENZY for Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock]. And so we settle on Jon Finch, made an offer, sent it to his Agent, Agent calls back and says, “Jon Finch isn’t interested. And so the picture literally, I mean, I’m doing pre-production in Hong Kong, the picture literally falls apart because we can’t cast it. So then I take a slow boat from Hong Kong to Hamburg, Germany, which was like probably the greatest experience in my life. You know, 35 days at sea--well five days in the harbor in Hong Kong waiting for the ship to sail, because it was delayed, and then 30 days actually at sea, and then two more days in Hamburg, because we didn’t want to get off the boat. I mean it was just like, it was so incredible. Only, we were the only passengers, I mean, I was traveling with a girlfriend, and we, at the beginning we thought, “My god, we’re not gonna be able to last, you know, 30 days at sea, it’s a, you know, how are we gonna survive?” And so we thought it was gonna be intolerable, and it turned out to be at the end of 15 days, instead of saying, “When is it gonna be over?” We said, “My god, it’s almost over, it’s half-over.” You know, we wanted it to last forever. And it was a Chinese freighter, and we played ping pong with the crew, the cadets, and it was during Chinese New Year, and for like four days the ship didn’t go anywhere, everybody was drunk and you know, fabulous feasts and you know huge amounts of alcohol and they were just kind of like doing a figure eight in the ocean, until they got past the Chinese New Year, and it was so great. I mean it was just unbelievable. We had our own chef who cooked whatever we wanted. Had a refrigerator filled with mangos, had a huge drawing room with a piano, and a record player and a library with about 5,000 books. And a swimming pool that they would fill every day with seawater, and it was just amazing. [INT: Oh my god.] And I was reading “Moby Dick”, and I’d look up and there would be these whales off the horizon. I mean, it was fabulous.

MH: How did I digress on that? [INT: I don’t know, but I’m in heaven now. I’m like, because I don’t fly, and I’m like, “Ah.”] Oh that was, that was it, okay, so you know… But anyway, what I started to say, casting, we take the boat, and I arrive in Germany, you know, drive to Paris and I kept going back and forth between Paris and London, and while in London, I run into Jon Finch, in a wine bar. And I said, “God, you know, it’s too bad you didn’t like that script [IN A DREAM OF PASSION], because we were already to go, financed, and so forth.” He said, “What script?” His Agent had never even given it to him. He read it, fell in love with it, wanted to do it, but by then I’d sent it to Sean Connery, and he loved it. And he gave it to David Picker [David V. Picker] at United Artists, because he had been making pictures with them. And again, I just saw David the other night as a matter-of-fact. And David left United Artists, the picture fell apart, Connery went off and did ZARDOZ instead, and that was the end of it.