AH: Needless to say, we all loved that addition [snow scene in LOVE STORY]. And Erich [Erich Segal] just loved it so much. He got so excited, actually, I'm remembering when we were working on the screenplay, before filming, I went to New Haven. He was teaching at Yale [Yale University], and it was easier for me to go there. And I stayed in a motel, and after class he'd come and work with me. And I remember it was about two o'clock in the morning, and we were working away on the script. And I came up with a great idea. I don't even remember what it was now, but he got so excited. He was jumping up and down, jumping up and down. And I'm saying, "Shh! Shh! People are sleeping downstairs." But to this day, he teases me about that idea because he says, "I loved your idea so much," he said, "I put it in the book when I wrote it," and he said, "You took it out of the movie!" So you never sort of know. Just thinking about adding something as you add it to the book. You add to screenplays sometimes, like when we did SILVER STREAK, and we were casting. And when I got Richard Pryor to agree to be in the film, we got so excited. And in the actual script, Richard left about two-thirds of the way through; he says just, "I'm going home," and that's it. And we thought, "Oh no, if we have Richard Pryor, we have to use him more." And Colin [Colin Higgins] sat down and re-wrote so that Richard came back into it and then went right through to the end, which of course was the only way sort of to do it. It's funny. It's taking me to SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL, which I also did with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. And there, Gene Wilder wrote the last draft. One of the Writers had passed away. The other one was the Producer, but he felt somebody fresh should do it. And so Gene wrote a draft, and I was nervous because I thought, "Yes, we discussed sort of story and that," but I thought, "You know, he's an Actor, will he be writing for himself?" No. He wrote for Richard. It was amazing. He knew Richard could do a Scandinavian accent. He wrote the scene of Richard pretending he was a Scandinavian doctor when he's checking into the hotel and that sort of thing. And it just all worked out so wonderfully, so wonderfully well.

INT: Can you talk about their [Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder] characters in that film [SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL]?

AH: It's interesting. You know, they in a sense play bad guys in the film. I shouldn't say bad guys, but they're involved in some negative things. But you accept it because you have an emotional attachment to them, and you understand what they're doing, and why they're doing it. And that's so important in a film to have that wonderful story but to have yourself emotionally attached to one of the leads, or two leads as in this case. And it doesn't matter; they don't even have to be the positive role model. If you understand and feel for them, I'm thinking even in AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY [THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY], the James Garner leading character is a coward. He's against the war, and he doesn't want to fight. But again, it's because we're showing the anti-glorification of war, and you understand what it is that he's saying. And that's so important, that emotional attachment in a film.

AH: Sometimes you have to be careful not to get too emotionally attached. You can overdo. I can remember I was working on a film called SIX WEEKS. And it was just a very nice story, and it wasn't the greatest script, but it caught the right emotions. There was a little girl, a six-year-old, who is dying. And she knows she's dying, and she accepts it. But her mother, who's alone, there's no father around, has a problem, and the girl wants somebody to look after the mother. And she meets a politician inadvertently on the street, and you see a warm relationship develop between them, and then of course he meets the mother. And the only problem is, yes, indeed he sort of falls for the mother, but he's married. And he loves his wife and his child. And we had, Audrey Hepburn was going to be the mother, and Tatum O'Neal, the child, and Nick Nolte, the politician. And then Columbia [Columbia Pictures] decided they weren't going to make the film, and so it just sort of disappeared. But when Peter Guber left Columbia, he loved it, and he took it with him; that was part of his deal. And he said, "Come on, Arthur, we'll set it up somewhere." And we tried, and we were having difficulties. Then one time he called, and he said, "I think we're okay." He said, "Sylvester Stallone wants to play in it." I said, "Oh, I don't know that he's right for that role." And he said, "Arthur, why can't he be, you know, a grassroots politician from the..." I said, "No," I said, "You're right." And so we had a big meeting with Stallone and his Manager, Herb Nanas, and his assistant and Peter Guber and his then partner, Bill Tennant, and two people from, I'm blanking whether it was Lorimar or from one of the other companies that was going to co-finance, and Stan Kamen, who was Sylvester Stallone's Agent. Anyway, and Stallone said he liked it very much, but he felt needed some rewrite, and what he felt, he didn't want his character to be married. And I said, "Well, wait a minute. If he's not married, where's the conflict?" you know, “If he doesn't have a wife that he loves and a child that he loves, why wouldn't he just fall in love with Audrey Hepburn and that's it?” Well, Stallone said, "That's not the way my audience wants to see me." And I kept arguing, and others got in and pretty soon I realized I was the only one on my side, and I finally I got up and said, "I don't belong in this meeting," and I left. And Stallone did a rewrite, and it just didn't work, and finally that all sort of evaporated. Years later they did make the film with Dudley Moore and Mary Tyler Moore, but they did a rewrite to make it better. And you can spoil a film by making it gooder. When the emotions are working, hang on to them; don't spoil those emotions because that's what keeps the audience. And what they did instead of playing the emotion of the young girl dying but trying to keep, somebody, gets somebody to look after her mother, who couldn't cope with her dying, even though she could cope with it, they played it poor little girl dying. And they kept showing the little girl and her ballet dancing and her this and her that, so. And it got too heavy emotionally and wasn't in a sort of proper... and the film didn't work. You just have to have the right emotional level.

INT: What are the elements you bring to a story as a Director from the written page, taking it to the visual story on the screen?

AH: Well film has a language of its own. It has a grammar of its own. And you as a Director are in a sense visually writing. You have to take the words and images that have been created by the Writer, and in a sense transfer them to visuals, and tell your story visually and emotionally, and get through to your audience. And that's the task you have. And obviously to do that, it's bringing, as I've said, those wonderful creative juices together and creating a climate where they not only feel that they can do what they have to do, but where they will do it. And bring you your vision of that screenplay.

INT: Is there a particular quality that defines an Arthur Hiller film?

AH: I've been asked a lot of times by, usually in press interviews, "What's your style?" And I say, "Well I don't..." And they say, "Oh come on, do you use close-ups or tracking shots? What do you… you must have some kind of style." And I say, "No, I'm telling a story, I just do..." And they say, "Oh come on, you must have a style." And I say, "Well, if I had a style I would like it to be David Lean style." They say, "What's that? What's his style?" And I say, "Excellence." He just takes whatever the story is and tells it in whatever style best tells that story. And that's what I try to do, just find the style that best tells it. Only once did I really go after, how shall I say, a specific style. When I did HOSPITAL [THE HOSPITAL], I wanted to give the audience the feeling that they were peeking around the corner, that everything was happening right there, a sort of semi-documentary feel. And in order to do that, I created various kinds of visuals that were, how shall I say, messy good. And it was very difficult, because the Camera Operators find it very hard to be messy good. They're trained to give you that perfect shot. And so I would have to make the visuals so difficult to do, that they couldn't do it neatly, or do it with a hand-held camera, or create problems that gave it that sort of feel. I even did one scene with about five pages, over five pages. One scene. And I remember when we laid it out and everybody said, "It's just impossible," because it was in the hospital and it was at the elevator or the corridor.

AH: Well, I can best describe it by saying that when we finally did get it lit [scene from THE HOSPITAL] and ready and George C. Scott arrived, this is how I directed him, he had been at home in his apartment feeling impotent, giving up on life. You could see that he'd been drinking all night, and he got this phone call saying that a doctor had died in a patient's bed, and nobody knew why and what. And he thought, "What's going on?" And he was in charge, what? And now he arrives to find out what's going on, and I said, "George, when you get off the elevator, you go over to the desk, and they'll say, 'Oh, yes, they're down in room 812.'" And I said, "You can head down towards 812," I said, "The two women that you pass that are crying, you can pay attention to them. They're feeling sad." I said, "Head down the corridor until the young doctor comes over. When he comes over just stop and continue talking, until the assistant administrator sticks his head out of the door and says, 'You'd better get in here.' Go into the room. The nurse that's coming out, that's the one who phoned you. You can comfort her. Thank her as she's sort of going by. Get into--now play beside the bed of this dead doctor, and listen to what the administrator's saying. Then when the administrator notices that there's somebody in the other bed, he may be noticing, he's going to say, 'Let's go out,' head out again and head up, and I'll bring a whole group of students out of the door. That'll stop you. Just play against the wall in the sequence with the nurse, where you get upset and ask her, you know, about the training of the nurses in Dachau [Dachau concentration camp] and all that." I said, "Play that confusion and what the hell's going on there," I said, "And when you get to this line, just switch places with her." And then I said, "And also at the end of the scene, I want to switch the last two lines this way, so that when you go head out towards, let you head off to the elevator." Now, why did I direct him like that? Because he was supposed to be confused, and I wanted him to be confused. And he played it just unbelievably perfectly. It took us about 12 or 15 takes, I've forgotten, to get this five and a half page scene with all the... This was long before there was a Steadicam. We had to do it with a dolly and work it all out, and 'round the desk and down the hall, and then in the room, and out of the room, and down, turn around going the other way in the corridor, and all the lighting. It took a lot of time, but by noon, we had two days work done. And in the 12 takes, not one, because of George, I mean that man was just unbelievable in his acting. If I could've done the film in one day, he could've done it in one day. You say, “It just can't be,” but… [INT: That's great.] That style that I worked out in that film, because there are other scenes, many like that, that style is on television on so many series now. It was picked up first by ST. ELSEWHERE, and then I forget which, what was the first of the law ones? [INT: HILL STREET BLUES?] HILL STREET BLUES. And you know, each one has grown from that, that kind of things going on and you're right there, and it's happening while you're going on, and the messiness of it. And that's become... So in that sense, maybe, I had a style, but that's the only film that I've done that way or thought about a particular style. [INT: But all your films have such humanity, and I would say that there's certainly a connection between them, because of that. Do you...] I wouldn't say necessarily that my films are connected by style unless… I wish I could say they were like David Lean excellence. But I reach; I'm just trying to follow the way of best telling the story, and the stories… I think what my films have in common is not a style, but the fact that each one is an affirmation of the human spirit. I think that's what I feel strongly about. Yes, I would love them all to be vastly entertaining and have something worthwhile to say. But you just can't do that all the time. And you miss the boat too, but at least each one I reach for has that affirmation of the human spirit.

INT: Have you ever done writing or re-writing of screenplays?

AH: No, not really. Oh, a few times I may have, what shall I say, vaguely written a scene. Not writing it, but to give the Writer the feel of what I'm looking for or to explain something. Normally, obviously, we sit and discuss and as long as I can get my points across, and the emotions across that I'm thinking and you know, we bat them back and forth. I'm just thinking a lot of times people say to me, "Have you ever written a screenplay?" And I say, "No, I haven't." And they say, "Oh come on, you could write one." I say, "No, I'm not a Writer." And they say, "Come on, you've done enough movies. You could write a screenplay." And I say, "Yes, I'm reasonably intelligent. I could write a screenplay. And it would have a beginning, and a middle, and an end. But you wouldn't want to see the movie. That's what the Writer puts in." That's the whole difference. What the Writer puts in. And then hopefully when I'm directing, I'm putting in something that's different that the Writer can't do. And hopefully when the Actors are acting, they're putting in something that I can't put in. That's the whole point of the film, that it's a group activity. It's all those creative juices coming together.

INT: What's your process for supervising re-writes?

AH: Well I sit and discuss with the Writer and give my feelings and my thoughts and my emotions. It comes in very different ways. For instance, when I was working on LOVE STORY, you know, the screenplay came before the book; many people think it was taken from a bestseller. No, the screenplay was first and Erich Segal wrote the book based on the screenplay. And when we were working on the screenplay, I went to New Haven [New Haven, Connecticut]. He was teaching at Yale [Yale University], and it was easier for me to go there, and I stayed at a nearby motel. And we were working one night; in fact it was about two in the morning, and I came up with a great idea, and I don't even remember what it was, but Erich was just jumping up and down, up and down in this motel room. And I'm trying to shush him, I said, "People are sleeping down there." He gets very excited, Erich. And the funny thing is that to this day he says to me, "You had that great idea, and I put it in the book," because he was writing the book then. He said, "I put it in the book, and you took it out of the movie." So you never know where your writing ideas will go. Or and sometimes it's not even an idea, like and this has happened to me on a couple of films, with Leslie Dixon on OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE, with Jill Mazursky and I'm blanking on his name, Abrams [J.J. Abrams]. He's still writing so well. [INT: J.J.?] J.J. And they, on TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS, they were new, and I worked with them to believe in themselves enough to argue when they disagreed with notes from the umpteen studio executives or the Producer or from me. I said, "If you feel strongly, it's your thought. Hang in. At least fight about it. Don't just show us how good you are, that you can write anything we ask for. Stick with what your beliefs are." And that's so true for everybody. That's true for the Director, to hang in and be strong about what you believe in. Not easy when we're all so insecure.

AH: And sometimes you get an excess of help and your re-writes or your control of the re-writing situation is not so good. For instance, on CARPOOL, which I did with New Regency [New Regency Productions], they worked by committee. There was always a creative person assigned, but there were two other people working with that creative person. And they would all give notes, and then the higher executives would also give notes. So there were almost too many people involved. You can overdo the workings. And then finally they were dissatisfied, and they had a couple of Writers they had worked with that they thought could do it. And they were brought it, and again yes, I sat and gave my notes, but half a dozen executives gave their notes too. And the Writers tried, and the notes came from the many executives and from me. And again, it didn't quite work, and I got us to bring the Writer back in. But again, I think we overwhelmed the Writer with too many of us helping. And again, it didn't quite work. Then they decided that they would let Tom Arnold, who was the star of the film, work with his group. Seven of them sat and worked on the re-write. And so you've got a lot of people re-writing, and a lot of people commenting, and it sort of, it finally evolved, but I think you can overdo at times, and I feel I didn't keep the control that I should've, that it was, in a sense, letting the star do it. And it still worked out fine, but you didn't have to go through that much.

INT: What about having Writers attend casting sessions, dailies, key production meetings?

AH: Well I like the Writer very much involved. But I don't want the Writer attending casting sessions, because I don't like too many people being there. I think it's very hard for an Actor to come in for an audition or for a reading and have 10, 15 people sitting there, sort of in judgment. And so I try to keep that down to two or three, to just work one-on-one basically that way. But I do like the Writers to be at a production meeting or to… the other kinds of meetings, yes, I want them there, and I want them... I love having them on the set, so they can see the changes that come about because of something an Actor did that was wonderful, or something happens in weather and why we make changes, or a location suddenly you have to change, or you have to adjust to, and that they will understand those things. As I say, you work with them in different ways. On MARRIED TO IT, I rehearsed with the... There were three couples, and it was relationships of couples to couples, and they had recently met. But it also had to do with each couple's personal relationships. And when I rehearsed with them, I then sent each couple off alone, and let them work for a while. Just feeling how they relate to each other. And see what changes or thoughts they came up with. And when they came back with their ideas or changes, I brought the Writer back in. And we listened to it, and then the Writer and I discussed. And again, she did, Janet Kovalcik, she did another re-write based on a lot of things that they had come up with. [INT: Was that during the rehearsal process? And do you use the Writer--] That was all during the rehearsal process, yeah.

INT: And do you like to rehearse and then have the Writer involved in that?

AH: Sometimes I like the Writer at rehearsal. Sometime--it depends on the situation. It depends a lot on what you're rehearsing or what kind of rehearsal. Often I prefer, when I'm doing my first reading with the Actors, if I'm doing one, I almost always do, that I'm alone with them. And that I can talk to them about what I'm looking for in the film, how I see it. I usually prepare little backgrounds for them of their characters, which they usually do too. But to get it going, I find that that first time is better if I'm alone with them. But if I'm doing a lot of rehearsing, as for instance, I did on MAN ON THE GLASS BOOTH [THE MAN ON THE GLASS BOOTH] about 12 days of rehearsal, then there are times when I like the Writer to come and just listen and get ideas or maybe make comment on something they feel I've overdone or that I've missed. I sit down with the Writer just before we start filming, even though I'm all prepared and everything, and I say, "Tell me what you wrote." Because sometimes they'll say something that I missed or that I didn't quite understand. And when they explain to me what they meant, yes, I can make it work that way, but I just want to make sure that I haven't missed something. Usually, of course, you're fine and dandy; everybody's thinking the same. But once in a while you get a little surprise that some little thing that you went by or you say something that gives a Writer an idea, so I do one little sort of last conversation as we say before filming begins.

INT: How are the scripts or the initial scripts you've read differ from the shooting scripts finally? And what's finally in the completed film?

AH: From the script that we go into the film? Well sometimes there are differences... For instance in LOVE STORY, when I was... there's a scene where the Ryan O'Neal character, knowing his wife is dying comes home with, he's bought tickets to go to Paris. He's going to take her to Paris. And when he gets home, he comes into the kitchen and says, "Surprise," and he suddenly realizes she now knows she's dying. She found out from the doctor. And what you normally feel there is, you know, run together, hold and hug each other. And no, what I did was I kept them apart in staging terms. I wanted them to reach for each other emotionally. And I split the scene, so that they were just reaching emotionally without touching each other. And then I took the latter part of the scene, and as we cut, I put that into the living room later at night. It's dark and he's sitting in a chair, and she's in his lap and hugging. And it continues. And I phoned Erich Segal and told him I was doing that, and he liked it. And later sent me his original draft that I had never seen way back, you know, before he completed it. He had originally written it as two scenes. So excuse me, you get sometimes the feelings like that.

AH: Or also on LOVE STORY, people said, "Oh Harvard [Harvard University], you know, it's so beautiful, and you'll have just so many lovely views," and that. And I thought, "Gee, so much of it takes place in the dormitory." So I put three scenes together. One was an exterior, but two were interiors. And I changed them a little and made one scene out of it. And I went into Harvard Yard, which is a big square, and worked out a very elaborate shot, so that by the way they were walking we would see all sides of the square and have nice visuals rather than just be in the dormitory. When I laid it out in pre-production, when the Crew was up and working with me, the dolly grip said, "Arthur, you can't do that." And I said, "Why not?" And he said, "We don't have enough dolly track." You know, we were working on a very low budget. He said, "We've got 200 feet of dolly. You're talking 600 feet." I said, "We'll get 400 feet more." He said, "We can't afford it." I said, "We'll figure out a way." He said, "Arthur, even if we did, how would you do it and not see the dolly track?" And I thought, "Oh. He's right." This was Eddie Quinn [Ed Quinn] who worked about 20 films with me and is the one person, I always say, I think the only person I worked with who was never not in the right place, doing the right thing at the right time. Just unbelievable, and always reminding me of things I did or said. I'd say, "Didn't we do that?" He said, "No, Arthur, you said this." And he'd be right, you know? Anyway, so I thought, "Ah, we'll go long lens." And I thought, "No, if I go long lens, I’m not gonna, I'll be in diffusion. I'm not gonna see that background that I want." So then I thought there was this huge crosswalk, asphalt crosswalk, and I thought, "Ah, we'll dolly on that." And we tried it out when we got to it, and it was too rough. And I said, "What about the Dyna lens?" And that was the first of the... there was no such thing as Steadicam. This was the first sort of gyro lens. And they said, "Well we don't have one." I said, "We'll get one," and they said, "Arthur, even if we get it, it's 60 millimeters," so again it was going to give me a lot of diffusion. And I said, "Oh." And then I thought, "Ah. Let's resurface the crosswalk." And everybody laughed and they wouldn't go, nobody would go and ask Harvard. And I went in, and I spoke to them. And first they thought I was a little crazy, but then they said, "Okay," they agreed, but only if we used their asphalt people. I said, "That's fine." And we had it resurfaced, and that's how we did the shot. It worked, and I staged it. The Actors aren't always on the walk. The camera is on the walk, but I could move the Actors a little one side or the other. So people think they're on the walk, because we were only shooting a waist figure at that time. And when we got to the middle section, the camera could swing one-way, and the Actors--and so we got at least three sides of... And it worked out, so. [INT: That's great. Yeah. And you really get a sense of their environment then. Intimate.] Yes, you got a little more feel of Harvard, yes. [INT: That was great.]

INT: When you're making your movies, going into pre-production, what do you feel about that part of the productions? Hitchcock always felt that that was where the film was made. Some Directors feel differently. What do you feel about that?

AH: I feel... each of us works differently. I like to have completed or know enough in my head of what I'm looking for, what I want in terms of the acting, of the scenes, what sort of lighting. You know, what I'm looking for, what props I need, everything. I like to be able to answer any question anybody's going to ask me two weeks before we start filming. Now a lot of that comes from my own insecurity. And what it helps me with is that it makes me a lot more flexible when we are filming, because I always have something to fall back on. So I'm not afraid if some new thought strikes me or if somebody comes up with a question, I know whether it works in or not. I've got something to fall back on. And so all the pre-production, I try to provide as much information to everybody. Obviously sit with the DP [Director of Photography] and work on the kind of lighting I want, and even try to tell him basically the sort of shots, or any that are unusual that would require different equipment or things like that. And you do the same with the Assistant Director, obviously, and the Production Manager. And you work with the... you try to tell the Location Manager ahead of time. The more you can give them... and the Production Designer. Or the Production Designer, sometimes I'll even do a little sketch, a little floor plan, not to say this is the floor plan, but to say, "You see, I need a door here because of an entrance," or, "I need a cubicle," or, "I need a closet to work here," those kinds of things. And then discuss the overall design, and let them design, and they will, of course, come up with it in such wonderful ways. And the more that you do it, the more that you can help. And there are a lot of, I could tell as we say a couple of good stories, like on SILVER STREAK. I brought the entire, the Crew heads up to Canada to a train and showed them. I stood and showed them exactly where I'd be putting a camera on top, what the shot was I needed, so they'd know where to support it. Or where the camera had to hang out from the side of the train, or the cables that the Actors needed, because they would be doing little tricks, or that I wanted a camera right on the track, you know, on the bottom of the train. So all those rigs were ready when you got to the shooting. You didn't have to build them then. They had them, and they would... It cut down the time immeasurably--