MH: So anyway, as I started to say, a year later, I had a meeting at Mike Medavoy’s office, who was my Agent, and got hired to do a picture called SHATTER with Stuart Whitman, and I had to be in Hong Kong like, you know, tomorrow. And so, I no longer had the luxury of being able to take ships. And I flew to Hong Kong, and I’ve been flying ever since.

INT: When Sean Connery was then no long available, he was doing ZARDOZ, I remember that movie...

MH: It kind of like that was it, I mean I just kind of like, you know, put it aside. I’ve revived that project a number of times over the years, and one time Anatole Dauman was gonna produce it, but he died unfortunately, and so it’s kind of like in limbo now, so… It’s a very difficult project, because it’s, you know, I think I have a stigma about being an art movie Director, which is not true I don’t think. I think, you know, I always make movies that at least I hope are commercial movies. Well, LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS is really, it’s an art movie. I mean there’s no other way to describe it. Briefly, it’s the story of a guy who’s kind of like Humphrey Bogart in Hong Kong, and he’s into every kind of illicit activity that you can imagine. You know, white slavery, gambling, drugs, and, you know, maybe a hint of cannibalism in the sense of selling human flesh. You know, it’s just, it’s pretty, pretty seedy stuff. And he has his own personal prostitute at this Maison de Rendez-Vous, and he’s in love with her. And there’s a murder at the beginning of the movie, we found out, and he’s told that this person has been killed and that he’s the prime suspect, and he’d better get out of Hong Kong. And so, he goes to his love and says, “You got to come with me, I’m gonna have to, I have to leave immediately for Macau [Macau, China], and she says, “I’ll only go if you bring me a million dollars.” Hong Kong dollars, not so much. And so then he’s frantically trying to raise a million dollars, and it’s one of these circular stories. It’s like, it has no end, it just keeps going around in a spiral. And he goes to see this guy who was supposedly killed at the beginning of the movie, and he asks him for the money and the guy refuses and he kills him, and then he goes back and finds out that, you know, hears that he’s the number one suspect, goes to the girl, “I want a million dollars.” And it just keeps going around and around, each time, slightly different. So the story keeps changing. Nothing is as it appears to be. [INT: Oh, god. That sounds so good.] And it’s very, very, it’s very cinematic. I mean, you’ll have a close-up on a newspaper in the gutter, and then you, you know, suddenly it comes alive and you’re in the middle of the Maison de Rendez-Vous and it’s a stage production going on, and you know, everything dissolves into something else. [INT: Oh god, that sounds so great.] Yeah. [INT: God, I hope you make that movie.] That one I’m not so optimistic about, but you know? Anyway, SHATTER? [INT: SHATTER, yeah.]

INT: Shatter, yeah, let’s talk about that. Stuart Whitman.

MH: SHATTER was… That was, you know, very difficult. It was a Hammer Film [Hammer Film Productions]. We were shooting in Hong Kong, I mean I literally had no time to prepare. We, Hammer made it as a co-production with Shaw Brothers [Shaw Brothers Studio], who ran the biggest studio in Hong Kong. And the way they operated is they had a certain number of people under contract, both as Actors and as Technicians. And they were shooting around the clock. And so any crew was working on three movies at the same time in eight-hour shifts. And we got, we arrived at 7:00 in the morning, there’d be nobody there, and we’d have to wait until the crew would arrive at 9:30 or something, and you know, we just, it was like a very difficult situation. We got further and further behind. And unfortunately Stuart--I’m not telling any tales out of school, because you know, he’s kind of like you know proud of it I think, but he liked to have a few nips now and then, and you had to shoot Stuart in the morning. I mean, by 2:00 in the afternoon forget it, you know? And if the crew’s not available in the morning, it’s kind of a difficult situation. [INT: Oh my god. And with that was there, how was the release on that? Well, how did you work with a foreign crew for one thing?] Well, first of all I got fired, I got fired off the movie because, ostensibly because I was behind schedule. But I shot for three weeks, and shot I guess half, what I thought was half the movie. I shot all the scenes involving the European Actors, and I had Peter Cushing, who’s wonderful, Anton Diffring, Stuart of course, and just had you know some wonderful people to work with. I mean Peter Cushing is just amazing. And we finished all the scenes with all the European Actors, and I really had a problem with the Producer really about you know philosophical things in a strange way. He wanted this Actor who was playing, you know, a leader, an African leader, to do this sex scene, and he wanted him to undress quickly so he didn’t want him to wear a shirt under his jacket, because he felt that that would take too long. And the Actor objected, he says, you know, he felt it was demeaning not only to him as an Actor personally, but you know just he felt it was a racial slur. And so, and so I stood up for him. And the Producer got really upset about that, and so the bottom line was that they fired me after three weeks, had the nerve to ask me if I would stay and cut the footage that I had shot, and I said, “No,” and then it took them three months to shoot the other half of the movie that we’d shot in three weeks. And now when I see the movie, apparently much of what they shot was thrown out and the script was altered so that even though I only shot half the movie, about two-thirds of the picture is mine. But it’s a horrible movie, and I don’t want anybody to rush out and rent SHATTER.

INT: Now you know, we didn’t finish about COCKFIGHTER.

MH: We never got to COCKFIGHTER, that’s right, okay. Well, this is the lead-in, that’s why we’re doing this. So I get back to L.A., and I get a call from Roger [Roger Corman] and he has this picture COCKFIGHTER that he wants me to do. And I read the script, you know, typically said, you know, “It’s very interesting, but I’d love to be able to do a rewrite on it.” Well, this was Roger’s baby. You know, he had developed it, the script was written by Charles Willeford who wrote the novel, and you know, Roger let me hire Earl Rauch [Earl Mac Rauch] who was I think was a disciple of Terry Malick’s [Terrence Malick], to do a rewrite. And so we started to do a page one rewrite; he started at the beginning and just really just rewrote everything. And after about a week, Roger kind of saw it slipping out, you know, from his control, and so he got very, very nervous, and he said, “Okay, you’ve only got another week.” And so then, for the rest of it, Mac, which is his nickname, started just doing key scenes, you know, that he and I would choose together. And so I never got the complete rewrite that I would liked to have had, and I consequently was never really happy with the movie. I mean, I have a lot of friends, including Jack Nicholson who, you know, love the movie, but I’ve always been a little bit uneasy about it. I think, I love the documentary aspects to it, but you know, I just, it never got to where I wanted it.

INT: Let’s talk about your collaborators, the people that you’ve worked with. You’ve talked about working with Jack Nicholson, having the company with him, and also this long, longstanding relationship working with Warren Oates.

MH: Well, I guess I mean my key collaborators have been Jack, and Warren, and Gregory Sandor and Josep [Josep M. Civit]. I mean, those are the key people in my life that I’ve had a kind of a continuing, and certainly the, I guess the longest relationship, in terms of the most, greatest number of projects was with Jack. I did the four pictures plus THE TERROR, and plus the script that we wrote together, so that’s, you know, we worked together really on six movies. And plus the one that I was the Associate Producer on, so that’s seven pictures we worked on together. And with Warren, you know, once we did THE SHOOTING, he wasn’t in RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND, except he was because he was the voice of one of the outlaws that we don’t see, the one that gets shot and he’s wearing a mask, so never see his face. But Warren is his voice, so Warren was really in THE SHOOTING and RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND. And then he was in everything else I did after that, until he died. So, he did, you know, TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, COCKFIGHTER, CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37.

INT: And how did you come to meet Warren [Warren Oates], how did that relationship begin?

MH: It began with seeing him in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST and then, you know, I don’t know. I think, for some reason I thought about him in that flash when I thought about the three Actors, and then Jack [Jack Nicholson] knew him slightly, so Jack called him, and we got together, and that was it. And he was so easy to work with. We only had one argument. There’s one scene in THE SHOOTING, where he becomes very introspective, and it wasn’t that I was against his being so introspective, I mean, it’s like, he’s kind of like asked some questioned by Millie [Millie Perkins] and he kind of doesn’t really answer directly, he’s kind of talking to himself. I didn’t dislike the idea of it so much as just technically, when he spoke so softly we couldn’t pick it up with the limited equipment that we had and shooting outdoors. So I said, and I said, “Warren, I’ve got to have, you know, give me at least one take where you speak up.” And so we compromised, he did it his way once, and he did it my way once. And of course, I had to use my way, because you couldn’t hear him the other way. But that’s the only time we ever argued. I mean, we just, we almost didn’t have to talk, you know. We talked a lot on THE SHOOTING, but on the other three movies, you know, we just kind of like knew. We just you know, we would play chess and talk about other things, and just, we just knew that you know we were on the same wavelength. [INT: Oh, god. I love that. I love that.]

INT: Well, it really shows because no matter what the character is he’s [Warren Oates] playing, he plays very diverse characters in your films. Even though he’s still got his essence, they’re very different. GTO [from TWO-LANE BLACKTOP] is crazy, just a wild character.

MH: Well, I mean, I think GTO, it’s a great, it’s a great character, it’s a great role, you know. But, you know, it’s like people say, “Well, what would CASABLANCA have been like if it had been George Raft and Bette Davis?” You know, it would’ve been a different movie. Would we still be looking at it today? Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe it would’ve been a great movie, but it would’ve been a totally different movie. Well, I… Warren was my first choice for GTO, and he, you know, the picture got canceled and--postponed rather, and at one point, we offered it--Warren became unavailable, we offered it to Bruce Dern. And Bruce Dern was holding out, his Agent was holding out for THE LONGEST YARD or some movie, I forget what, and he didn’t get cast in that, but we only, we gave him you know, “Three days, take it or leave it.” And he didn’t respond within the three days, and before the end of the third day Warren became available again. And not that I want to compare myself to CASABLANCA, but, you know, it would’ve been a different movie with Bruce Dern. Bruce Dern’s a terrific Actor, but it would’ve been a different movie. [INT: Oh yeah.]

INT: How did the situation, like for example with TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, how did that film present itself, because you already had a concept, how did that all come about?

MH: I met, you know, another really great person, Michael Laughlin, who was the producer of TWO-LANE BLACKTOP and he actually had two scripts. He had TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, the Will Corry script, and he had a picture called, a script called THE CHRISTIAN LICORICE STORE, and so Michael offered me both pictures. And I said, “God, you know, there’s just, you know, I’d need to do a total rewrite on both. I’m more attracted to the idea of TWO-LANE BLACKTOP than I am to THE CHRISTIAN LICORICE STORE.” And he says, “You can rewrite it any way you want.” And he goes through THE CHRISTIAN LICORICE STORE script and he says, “Here, look.” He says, “Here’s a scene that takes place in Coldwater Canyon.” He says, “You can make it Laurel Canyon, you could make it Beverly Glen, you can make Topanga [Topanga, California],” I mean, Michael is you know one the funniest people that I’ve ever met in my life. He’s absolutely hysterical. Anyway, it wound up that I turned down THE CHRISTIAN LICORICE STORE and I wound up acting in it. They’d had a character that was being, that was not being played by, it was Jean Renoir playing himself. And he had two scenes in the picture, and they shot one scene and then he became ill, or I forget, I don’t know what the reason was, but he couldn’t shoot the second scene. So, I played Jean Renoir in THE CHRISTIAN LICORICE STORE, except they made it, they made it me, you know, I mean… but you know I don’t think I could, I could play you know certain skinny Directors, but I don’t think I could play any of the heavier Directors, you know? But anyway, this guy, the guy who’s just written the book on me, sent me a CD-ROM that they made from THE CHRISTIAN LICORICE STORE, and I haven’t seen the picture since it came out. Because it was never really released, it wasn’t on video, nothing, you know. And so, I just looked at a little bit of the movie on my computer yesterday, including this ridiculous scene where, totally improvised, and like the stupidest dialogue you’ve ever heard in your life. I mean I, you know, I wrote the dialogue, but I mean, it’s really stupid. And it’s like, thank god it was never released because what an embarrassment it is. But, you know, I still had hair, so it was kind of nice to you know, fond memories of the hair I used to have, and you know, a few things like that. [INT: Oh my god.]

INT: So then you took on the TWO-LANE BLACKTOP. Did you research any of the, did you… how was that process? How did you, did you meet guys who were like these characters, did you--?

MH: I mean, what Rudy [Rudy Wurlitzer] did was he bought a lot of car magazines; so that most of his research was from magazines. And so the script was written from car magazines. But I did my research talking to the guys. So, that’s what I did. You know, once we were making the movie, then I went out with the L.A. street racers and watched them, and I kind of, you know, picked up the feel of what that was all about. [INT: And where was that? Where would you research with these guys? Where were they racing?] They were, they would meet down at that big supermarket at the corner of La Cienega [La Cienega Blvd.] and La Tijera [La Tijera Blvd.], or I think there’s one there very close by there. And then they would go off to, you know, downtown, they would race in the streets downtown, all over, you know? [INT: Wow.] They would race on Mulholland [Mulholland Drive], but we didn’t shoot any of that. [INT: Isn’t that funny, because I know that when I saw, I went with my son to see THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, and I said, well, TWO-LANE BLACKTOP it ain’t. But it was interesting to see the street racers downtown and to see that this was actually going on even then when you were researching.] Yeah.

MH: The picture was developed at Cinema Center [Cinema Center Films], which is CBS. And it was one of those classic cases where you know it went along, it went along, it went along; we, they let us screen test these unknowns, they accepted them, we were about to make the movie and then somebody on a little level up from where we were dealing finally read the script. You’d think they would do this before all this other process, but finally read the script and decided not to make the movie. And so, we were in turnaround, and we went everywhere. We went to Columbia [Columbia Pictures], met with John Veitch who’s, god rest his soul, was a fabulous guy, was you know one of the great studio Production Managers. And he said, I think we had a budget of a million one, you know. And he says, “There’s,” he says, “There’s no way you could make this movie for a million one,” he says, “I think, it’s a million four, at least.” So, then we went to MGM [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer], and we said, “It’s a million three.” And they said, “Nah, nah, you know, it’s a million six.” And so they didn’t, you know, nobody believed us, and they didn’t want to make it for a million six. So, you know, I went to Warner Bros., and finally we went to Universal [Universal Pictures]. And we went back to a million one. And Ned Tanen says, “If you can make it for $900,000 you got a deal.” The only place where they went the other way. And we wound up making it for about $850,000 or $875,000. [INT: Wow, wow.] So, we knew at the beginning, but nobody believed us.

INT: Where was the expense do you feel, like where was most of the budget spent [on TWO-LANE BLACKTOP]?

MH: Well, I mean, first of all it had, because it was a studio picture, it had to be an I.A. [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees] picture. So they made certain concessions in terms of the size of the crew, you know, but I mean, I think there’s certain people that they let us get away with not hiring. I think we may not have had a make-up artist, it’s possible. I’d have to look at the credits again, but I don’t recall we ever used a make-up artist. And, but you know, even then, it was a crew of 40 people, something like that, which is a lot of people. [INT: Right.]

INT: And did you have to… where were you shooting [for TWO-LANE BLACKTOP]? You were coming from…? Where do we start?

MH: We started in Los Angeles. We were literally a caravan. And generally we would drive someplace and set up shop and then we would shoot around that locale for, you know, one, two, three days, whatever. But there were a lot of days when we would drive 100 miles, stop, shoot for two hours, get back in the cars, and drive another 100 miles, and then shoot some more. [INT: Wow.] And so it was very, it was very interesting. We’d made the whole trip in advance, chose all the locations, chose some local people that were gonna be helping us. And we had an advance man, we had somebody who was always two days ahead of us. [INT: Yeah, now some of these locals in the towns, they’re absolutely, I mean, it really does look--when she’s panhandling, what was going on there?] Well, that was an improvised scene. We had a hidden camera in the window of a department store, and we had asked, we had selected some extras, some people that would be involved and we had told them to be in the square, you know, at that time. But then we didn’t tell them that we were shooting. And so, you know, after we said, “Yeah, this is the movie, and just did it, thanks a lot. Can you sign this release?” You know? [INT: That’s great.] But that was so much fun. That’s probably the most fun I had on the movie was shooting that scene with a hidden camera. And all that stuff, I mean, even the hippies in the park that try to grab her as she’s running by, you know, totally nobody knew the camera was there. [INT: Love it. Love it.] And all the dialogue with that couple that said, “Can you wait till Tuesday?” you know, “…or Monday.” [INT: That’s genius.] I mean, you know, you couldn’t write that. [INT: Right, yeah, and it just, it just floors you when you see it, it’s so, it’s so stunning, I can’t wait for my students to see this.] Yeah, and the other scene that was improvised was the Chiquita scene, you know. But otherwise… the panhandling scene we always knew was gonna be improvised. In fact, that was, Laurie Bird’s screen test. We did, she panhandled on the Sunset Strip and that was her screen test. [INT: Oh that’s great.] But the Chiquita scene was a scripted scene and we just shot it both ways. We shot the scripted scene and then we shot the improvised scene, or vice versa, I can’t remember which we did first. [INT: Right. And how about the guys, how were they in relationship to the cars? I mean, these are non-Actors, so how did they… I mean, Dennis [Dennis Wilson] I know as pretty, he was probably a pretty, you know, of all the sort of rockers, he did really surf. He did really like kind of hangout and do teenager stuff.] Dennis was the character. I mean he literally grew up with a grease rag in his hip pocket. Dennis could barely drive; I don’t think he’d ever driven a stick shift. Not Dennis, I mean, James [James Taylor]--[INT: You mean James?] James. And he nearly killed everybody. I mean, in the final scene in the car, the slow motion scene, you know, we were, I think we had one shot that was behind him, and he put the car in reverse instead of forward and he almost ran over the whole crew. [INT: Oh god.] I mean it was, it was a little scary.

INT: And how did those two guys [James Taylor and Dennis Wilson on TWO-LANE BLACKTOP] work together? I mean, they were such a different, they were from absolutely different, everyone thinks the rock world is all one world, but they were from, they couldn’t have been from different...

MH: No, completely different. James had a very difficult time dealing with the fact that he wasn’t in control. He was used to you know being in total control, he really, even if he had a Producer, he produced his records. And it was hard for him, I mean, it was seriously hard for him. And not only was it difficult to take direction, it was difficult to work with other Actors who weren’t as disciplined as he was. I mean, he was incredibly disciplined. And he would lose patience, when you know, Dennis was always flubbing his lines, and you know. And at one point, you know, he’d flubbed it so many times that he was like, you know, getting really angry because he thought everybody was laughing at him. You know, he, I mean Dennis would, you know, really freaked out, but James was very judgmental. And he would really, he’d know everybody’s lines and if they didn’t know ‘em, he couldn’t understand it, because he knew them, you know? [INT: Oh my god.] But it was interesting, it was very interesting. [INT: Yeah. I’ll bet.] Dennis would you know play cards with the crew, he was like one of the boys, and you know James was just like, one track, you know, straight ahead, just like the character. [INT: Right. Right. Yeah, there’s a looseness to Dennis throughout, to his character throughout, even with the girl he’s a lot looser than James’ character is with her.] Yeah. But James you know, he for some reason he’s just, he understood the subtext. You know, he knew, I mean, it’s not a movie about car racing, it’s a movie about love. And about the inability to express that love. And the influence, I mean, the picture that really inspired me was SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, which is exactly the same movie. It’s exactly the same movie. And James, I don’t know if we ever articulated it, but I think he just understood it. So, at the end when he sees her going off with the guy on the motorcycle, I mean, he, you know, he’s it, you know, he just, he’s experiencing all that pain, you know just as the guy in SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER.

INT: And it reminds me so, I mean, I know that Wim Wenders has talked a lot about being inspired by TWO-LANE BLACKTOP for KINGS OF THE ROAD. And there is something about two men together on the road without a woman, and the woman comes into the picture, and it’s a whole different deal kind of thing. And I don’t know why that is that it’s almost like the most brilliant atmosphere for talking about these kinds of things, and that inability to connect. [MH: Yeah.] Was there anything also about the road, like I know there was that show ROUTE 66, that was not, that TV show, that was not, you know, that could never get into too much, too deeply. But I always saw that in a weird way when I was a kid, I saw that as starting to touch on some of this kind of stuff. Was there anything about the road for you?

MH: Well, I mean, I used to love, I used to love--I mean, I love just getting in a car and going someplace. I mean, I love cars, I love just to take a trip, you know, it’s just… But I think that on an unconscious level, I mean, it certainly wasn’t anything that was on anybody’s mind when we were developing this, the final script, because the initial script was totally different. There was no GTO character; it was four college kids in a convertible. So the character of GTO was invented by Rudy Wurlitzer. There was a driver and a mechanic, and there was a girl, but the girl instead of being, you know, a hitchhiker, was kind of a middle-class girl, who was driving a little VW Bug and she falls in love with the mechanic, who’s black in the original story. And he keeps dropping his mechanic’s rags out the window of the car, and she comes along and finds them and that’s how she tracks them, you know. You know, it’s okay. Not exactly my cup of tea. [INT: It’s not your movie.] No.