INT: You mentioned that the D’Antoni [Philip D’Antoni], and the casting, but you also said Jerry Weintraub, and in terms of CRUISING how also there was his version versus your version of--but I don't know what the specifics was in terms of that.

WF: Well, there was Al Pacino, one day, went out and decided that he should get a haircut that made him look more gay, like the gays of that time, and it was 1979, I guess. And Pacino decided that he should get a gay barber to give him a haircut, and he went out and he got his hair cut short, really short, and he came into our trailer where Jerry and I were playing blackjack. And he walks in, and he looked like Sonny Bono, may he rest in peace, and we suddenly realized that the Pacino look is about hair. Al Pacino is about that hair and that big head because he's otherwise a short man, and if you study his features, they're not particularly, I mean, you're not looking at George Clooney or something, but there's a certain strength to his features, and he's handsome in a way, and it all comes from his hair. And now his hair had been shorn like Samson, and he had lost--[INT: His strength.] We were not looking at Al Pacino, and now we got to start the picture in a week. And my memory is that we shut down for six weeks. We had to shut--and Jerry and I were on completion. While Pac--we called in every barber in the city who was supposed to be an expert, and they all, you know, they showed us what pieces would look like and this and that, and then one of them finally said, "Look, his hair will take about six weeks to grow back to where I could style it like what you want as the Pacino look.” And Jerry remembers that we didn't shut down at all, that we gave him a piece, and he, and Jerry remembered--he said, "Well, you told him to go get a haircut, and you sent him to this gay barber, and you said they'd make it short, and then when you saw it you didn't like it." And he doesn't remember at all that I had no idea that Al was going to do this, you know, that Al, in trying to get into the role, was talking to people who told him, "Al, in the leather bars now nobody comes in with hair like that. It's all about short hair." [INT: Right. Was Al receptive to “We can't do this with this?”] Oh, he could see that he didn't look good. [INT: Got it.] He came in and his first words to me in the trailer were something like, "Billy, look at this." He had a hat on, and he took off his hat, and it was a cap, and he said, "Look at this. They've ruined me. They're ruined me." I said, "How could you let this happen? You're sitting there." He said, "Well, I don't know how far they're going to go." And there was no point in taking this any further, but yeah, they had shorn him of what it turned out was his strongest feature, which you're not conscious of, but Jerry remembers it a completely different way. I remember how hairy it was, because I said, "We can't film him this way." You know he was a giant star, and you couldn't show him that way with his, you know.

INT: Tell me about, one of the things that I'm so fascinated about is your understanding of interior space and how significant it is in, you know, most of your movies. I mean, not all of them, obviously, FRENCH CONNECTION [THE FRENCH CONNECTION] is more outside than inside, but certainly the house in THE EXORCIST, certainly the space in BUG, the house in JADE… [WF: BOYS IN THE BAND [THE BOYS IN THE BAND] is all basically in one room.] Knowing that you see things--[WF: As is BUG.] Exactly. What's your process of communicating that to whoever has to either find a place or build it? For example, in BUG, I assume the exterior you found and that's where you, I assume, the interior you built. But the nature of that interior, knowing you're going to be in there for such a long time, knowing it can't be a rich space and a lot of space because it's inappropriate. Talk about the process of let's say dealing with BUG in that space.

WF: Well, you have the Designer [Production Designer], and we talk about the fact that this all takes place in a motel room, but that I have the chance because it's a motel room where she's set up a living environment for years as a hideaway that she could have a small bedroom, that she could have a small sitting room and a small kitchen and bathrooms and closets. So, this--and all the walls are wild so that I could move walls out of the way, but I still set myself very strong limits about how wide the shots could be, no wider than the width of the precepted--the precepts of the width of the motel suite itself. And so we found an actual motel that was out near Bear Mountain [Bear Mountain, California], and but we shot the interior in a high-school gymnasium during the summer break, just before, we finished just, before Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, in Metairie, New Orleans, in Louisiana. And we built this space so that it would--it looked like the interior of the rooms we saw at the actual motel, plus the needs of the script, you know, that there'd be certain things discovered in the closet, that the faucets had to work, that the paintings on the wall seemed to change in character during the course of the story. The Writer had a very explicit description of what one of the motel paintings would look like. [INT: The one that gets referred to looking at the people, but there are no people, that one?] Yeah, yeah. And so there's a lot of clues in the script, and then we start by going out to find such a place to see whether it exists, and you start by sending Location Managers all over the place, and before you send them you talk to them and say, "You know any places like this?” Or, “Where are we likely to find them?" And a guy will say, "Oh, yeah, there's a place out there--let me go out and take some pictures and I'll show you." And he brings back seven or eight pictures of motels, and hopefully you see one, and we did, that we decided to pay a visit to. So, it starts with reality.

INT: In dealing with, since you built the inside, but there are a number of times we see inside out, not a lot. [WF: We built the outside of the inside.] Got it. So, there was on the set-- [WF: You couldn't get way back, but you could be just outside the windows or outside the door, and that was on the set.] And the evolution of this set, both when it becomes all the foil and also the colors in that, it seems to me, did you try something? Did you know where it was going to go because it has so much power by being in such a unique, bizarre space?

WF: Well, it's in the script again that they--in order to keep, and, in fact, you think that they put up this silver wrap paper to keep bugs out, they're doing it in their minds to keep the bugs in, so they won't be turned loose on an unsuspecting world. In their minds they're humanitarians, and their motel room is infested with bugs, and they've used up all the bug spray and all the, you know, fly paper and everything else, and that hasn't worked, and so they put up silver foil all over the place. Now, that was one of the things that drew me to this script. I mean, the transformation of a funky motel room into what looked vaguely like a space station. [INT: In fact, you even made it fly, in essence, by shaking it and moving it.] Well, it moves, but that's probably a figment of their imagination, and they hear--she, there is a situation where if somebody loves--a weak personality loves someone, that they tap into their loved one's insecurities, and that's what happens there. She is so vulnerable and so pained by past experiences that this guy who shows some kindness towards her, she falls in love with him, or thinks that she does, and she picks up his idiosyncrasies and his paranoia. And this is what happens in a lot of relationships. [INT: And you want the other to be right, at least in the early stages of love rather than finding the faults of them. So, what they think they're saying all this stuff, but she still wants that to be right, and that's what she convinces herself.] Yeah. [INT: In that space, were you concerned about what was going to happen to light?] No. I thought it'd be great. [INT: And then was it at all, because it looks like you also added kind of a neon feel to it as well. Was that--?] Yeah, we added a neon feel instead of--there were neons like, or there were fluorescent lights in the kitchen, you know, of a cheap motel. It was overhead fluorescents, and going from that and the fact that they were turning lights out because they didn't want to be seen too much by the outside world, and they were lighting the interior with a few candles and a few fluorescents, so that was able--that made it possible for me to give the film another look at a certain point from this funky rat's ass motel room to something that was only lit by candlelight and soft fluorescents.

INT: And here's an interesting thing that you're confronted with. You're confronted with this in that movie [BUG]. You're also confronted with it to some degree in 12 ANGRY MEN, and yet it doesn't feel like you are limited by it, and some people might say, “It's going to be too claustrophobic, I can't handle it. I don't know how to keep it visually interesting if I'm going to be in this one space for a long, long time.” Do you find it actually relatively easy?

WF: Well, it adds to the sense of suspense or terror that you're going for, to have it in an enclosed spaced where the people basically can't go out the door. [INT: But where are you--] I mean, the first time I did this was in the third film I made, which was THE BIRTHDAY PARTY by Harold Pinter, which is mostly shot in one room, but it's all shot in one house with just a few exteriors in a little town called Worthing, in England, which is a beach town near Brighton. But it was Pinter's use of a small room and a claustrophobic feeling to create suspense that inspired me to do that in that film and over and over again. It's a challenge. Almost anyone can go out to the Old West, you know, or to the Utah, Nevada Desert, or to the Saudi Arabian Desert and get beautiful pictures. They're just waiting for the camera to snap them, you know, but it's much more difficult a challenge, to make something interesting for an audience in one room, whatever the room is.

INT: Now, one of the things I've noticed that you do a number of times when you're shooting in these spaces is you're able to create depth by part of it in terms of your staging. You will have a character in your foreground, sometimes a big head, somebody back here. You do it in BUG. You do it a number of times in 12 ANGRY MEN, and I'm interested in sort of your knowledge--and you are always able to get an organic fluidity of the characters moving around, so it doesn't--you get them, I mean, you don't, how do I put this? You do feel claustrophobic, but you don't feel claustrophobic.

WF: It's not static. That it's not static. [INT: Yeah.] Because that's the challenge to have movement that is believable either by the camera or by the people. And you know there's a lot of places people can go, even in a bedroom, a lot of places where they can sit or stand. And so you, the challenge is to find those. And I've always for some reason found that challenge, maybe because I grew up in one room. When I was a young person, my mother and father and I lived in a one-room, very small, apartment where they had a bed, and I had a small--their bed came out of the wall, and I had a small cot, and we had a small kitchenette and a small sitting area, and there was a room, I would say no--the ceiling was about 8 feet high, and the room was probably maybe 15 feet by 20 feet.

INT: And here's an interesting question, did it feel small, or was it--

WF: No. [INT: That's my, I’d say, that's probably why you're able to do these.] No, that was my world, and I created a world within that room. I had no brothers or sisters, so it was my world, and I had a radio. And then when television came in, we had one of the first television sets, where there was really nothing to see, and the image was horrible. But it was a miracle in our room and in the rooms of all the world. I remember people sitting up for hours in the early morning when the stations, before they would sign on at about five in the morning, you'd get the image of a Buffalo Indian, like the imagery was on a nickel. And you'd line up your set on this profile of a Buffalo Indian, and we used to get up in the morning to see this. There was nothing else to see for maybe seven hours, but people were staring at an image of a drawing basically in their houses, in their rooms. And you know this is very much like a biblical, magic realism. [INT: Well, listen, it's, I think it, that's the only thing he doesn't say in his speech in BUG about what the buildings from, the conspiracy of conspiracies is I don't think say, and television is one of the parts of it. He doesn't say that. Choosing that space in JADE, because that house plays a major, major role, in fact, that opening--] That's a pretty big space. [INT: Yeah. Exactly, and that opening sequence where you move all through the house, actually, all through the house.] That's the Getty House in San Francisco, and they're friends of mine. [INT: Now, did you stay in there for all of it, or were you able to, or did you have to build some stuff to replicate, or what happened in terms of that?] I didn't use their bedroom, but everything that shot downstairs and around it is in their house, except other parts of the house that aren't shown in the opening, like the bedroom and the bathroom where the death scene occurred, and her dressing room. That we did in another house in Beverly Hills that's very isolated up on a hill, and it had similar decorative properties, and then, we matched what was in the Getty House because we had so much to shoot there we couldn't put the Getty's out of their house. I only shot the Getty House for two days, and the exterior of it, at night and by day. [INT: So, that last sequence at night is another space?] I sort of chase around the house. Yeah, that's a house in Beverly Hills. [INT: Got it.] The attic is a set.

INT: Do you--and I’m just going to go to a couple of other films and spaces. THE EXORCIST house in Georgetown [Georgetown, Washington D.C.], built, some built? How did you deal with that?

WF: There was an actual house that the Writer, Bill Blatty [William Peter Blatty], had in mind. It was at the corner of 36th & Prospect Street in Georgetown, which he describes as being there, and it's a particular kind of a Federalist house, and it's supposed to have big, it's supposed to be very adjacent to this five flights of stairs leading down. When I got there, I realized that the house was, the flight of stairs was about 20 yards away from the side of the house where the bedroom window was, where the priest jumps out at the end and is supposed to come out the window and land right on the stairs. So, we, through the good offices of Jack Valenti, who was a dear friend and lived in Washington, he knew the woman that owned that house. She was a woman named Florence Mahoney, and she was the largest contributor to the Democratic Party at that time, and George McGovern was running for President, and while we were shooting at night, McGovern would come in off the road, you know, and she'd make him a cup of hot chocolate. We're filming outside and, but we had to build an extension, a false extension from her house to the stairs, which contained the girl's bedroom, which was nothing more than a platform that was later interiored on a set in New York, but I had to bring the house closer to the stairs and use a long lens to show like Lee J. Cobb going up the stairs, and then you'd see the window very close to where he's standing. But that's a long lens that's bringing the window closer to his body. He was maybe still 15 yards away from that window.

INT: I'm going to jump to something, because if I don't ask it, I’m going to forget it. There's a sequence, I don't know if it's the same one we're talking about, but I don't think so, because I think it's a sit-down sequence where Lee J. Cobb, and it may be Ellen Burstyn, where the camera is moving in on both ones.

WF: Yeah, that's the one I was talking about earlier. [INT: It is the one you were talking about.] Yeah. [INT: How did you get--I remember when I saw it that time I remember thinking this is really interesting filmmaking, because the camera is constantly moving--] Slowly and imperceptively. [INT: And you're cutting back and forth. And so I was asking myself, so the practical question, did you, because this is before motion control cameras, you know, how did you get your Dolly Grip to know we got to go at the same speed so I can cut back and forth?] It wasn't the Dolly Grip, it was the Focus Puller, who was operating the zoom lens manually. In those days--now today, you can program the timing of the zoom and you can press a button and get a 12-second zoom or a snap zoom, or whatever length of the zoom you want, and very few people even use the zoom much any more, the zoom lens, but in those days, in order to get a zoom, the Operator, the focus puller had to close the lens in, or open it out manually. And this was a young man named Gary Muller, who is still doing focus. He's a regular on the show CSI [CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION], and he was the Focus Puller on a number of the early films that I made in New York, and he was just good. I mean, he would see one rehearsal of the scene and get a timing, and he'd say to me, "Where do you want to be when he says this?" or "Where do you want to be when she says that?" And I would, we'd have certain spots. He had like one rehearsal where they're rehearsing, and he's able to do it, and he's thinking how long he needs to extend the zoom to its fullest or pull it back to its widest. And I knew if he did it at the same tempo that they would cross cut imperceptibly, which they did. But it was very hard to do. Those shots were difficult to make. [INT: How come you decided to do it as a zoom rather than push in?] Well, it's an, you know, I wanted to keep the cameras far away from the Actors, which you want to do in a scene like that. I mean, like the camera that's photographing me now is about 9 or 10 feet away from me. If it was sitting, and it's getting probably a close shot of me a lot of the time. If it was sitting right up here in my nose, I wouldn't be able to forget about it. So, in doing a scene like that, which was very intimate, where I wanted sort of wide shots of the two of them at this table, moving into very close shots, but not too close, I decided to do it with keeping the camera still far away from them. And in those days if you used a dolly track to do it too, it was almost impossible to not have some kind of noise that would be picked up, you know, from the footsteps of the people moving the camera, or the movement of the camera itself. But more importantly, when they did that scene, Burstyn and Lee J. Cobb, the camera was far back, and it moved in electronically.

INT: Interesting. Let's talk about sound for a little bit, ‘cause sound is such a powerful tool for the Director, and for you, it clearly is, I mean, it's a major brush that you utilized. I mean, I was just thinking about the opening sequence, just the opening, the whole sequence in what I was about to call [INAUDIBLE], the whole sequence in Yemen, the sound design of that is so intense. And I mean, of course, what you did in THE EXORCIST, and even the street feel of FRENCH CONNECTION [THE FRENCH CONNECTION], you were using that, and the sounds significantly in BUG just recently in terms of “Am I hearing a cricket? Am I not?” So where and how does it enter your consciousness?

WF: It comes from the fact that when I was a very young child the most influential medium for me was the radio, and they used to have dramatic radio shows in which the major character was your imagination, and it was all done with sound. There were no pictures, this was even before television, and it was a profound influence on me. There were shows called INNER SANCTUM [INNER SANCTUM MYSTERIES], and I LOVE A MYSTERY, and LUX RADIO THEATRE, and various other comedy shows, but the dramatic shows where they created, even THE LONE RANGER, where they created the sound of the hoof beats of the horses and made you believe you were listening and seeing two guys, one guy with a mask and a white horse and an Indian on a dark horse, and made you believe you were hearing and ultimately seeing those characters. And it was only by utilizing sound effects, and so that remained a profound influence on me and had I been able to work in dramatic radio right up to this day, that's the medium I would choose for myself. [INT: Interesting now.] I just love it because it calls completely on the imagination.

INT: Adding to that, the process of your adding sound, because there's the production sound itself, and I gather, I would assume without, I don't know want to substitute what does, that you prefer production sound in terms of dialogue rather than looping, but I'm not sure. [WF: No. No, I don't.] Ah, see! Talk about this.

WF: I prefer looped dialogue, because you can always go back into the looping room and do it better. [INT: But your movies don't have--] They don't feel like it, because I've learned how to loop without people picking up on it. [INT: How have you learned? There are some Actors that are good at it, most Actors are not. How do you get it good?] No, I just keep doing it with the Actor until they get it right. Most of the good Actors are good at it because they know it's a tool. You're out in the street, and you're playing a dramatic scene, and you got to shoot it from over here and from over there, whatever, or there's a hand-held camera moving around it, but in the street where you shot this thing, there's horns going off, there's elevated trains, subway trains, people shouting, noises. There was one scene in CRUISING with Al Pacino walking down a totally dark quiet street at 4:00 in the morning and about 3,000 people on the sidelines yelling and screaming at him, and I had to peel all that out and just make his footsteps very quietly echoing on the pavement. So, while you're in a street, or a location, or even a set that's built, you only have so much time there, and if the Actor looks like they're in the scene and looks like they're saying the words with some conviction, maybe it doesn't sound like it, maybe the soundman didn't have the boom in the right place, or maybe an item of clothing brushed up against a lavalier mic, which is what an Actor wears sometimes. And you can't worry about that on location or on a set, you got to get out of there. And now for the final version of your movie you want the words to sound, let's take a sentence, let's take a sentence that's in a script where a guy says--[INT: Well, let's take something, can you get a practical one? Did you have to do any looping in BUG?] Oh, yeah, a great deal of it. [INT: Really?] Oh, yeah, almost all of it. And I did it mostly for performance. I did it to like get Michael Shannon's voice to go, to be deeper, to get Harry Connick's [Harry Connick Jr.] voice deeper, because a lot of times they were very much in the scene, but the sound that you were getting would be sort of high pitched, or higher pitched than I wanted. [INT: Now there are two things that happen in looping. One is to be able to actually literally mock your--] Movements [INT: Rhythm, which for some is a real test. The other then is to actually shift and change the performance and still be within that movement of the lips.] That's part of the tools though. That's something we can do, and when you realized that we can do this, so we do it. In the old days of wire recording for films, you couldn't do this, but the minute they were able to record on tape and record multiple tracks and mix them down to one track, you realize that you could take someone's voice and alter the pitch in looping, or alter the reading. Let's say the Actor says, "I miss you terribly." And the way it comes out is he says, "I miss you terribly," and it's sort of high pitched and fast, and I see that I could play the line over his shoulder and get him to say it in a deeper, more resonant tone in a more meaningful way, "I miss you terribly." You know, whatever it may be. That you can go in and direct the voice let alone the sound effects that you're going to play, all of which is added afterwards. [INT: Let's talk about--] The whole sound atmosphere is done after the film is shot.

INT: Let's talk about your being able to get performance during looping because we're talking to other Directors who go through that frustration of it, which for some is really, really tough. Do you take-- I mean, sometimes, you know, there's a limited amount of time for looping. Do you actually make sure you have enough time?

WF: Yeah. Yeah, I build it in. I mean, I've done two CSI [CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION] television shows, you know, the CSI: VEGAS [CSI: LAS VEGAS] Show, the original show, and you know they're on a television schedule, but it's a long schedule. We get 10 days to shoot 42 minutes, but I still build in looping time so I can get the performers back in a looping room and get their words cleaner. Now, I don't do this with every scene, but I do it with a lot of the scenes to get the sound cleaner. And like THE EXORCIST, you'd say, of course, you looped the demon voice, which we did, and used a number of elements. But I also looped other more simpler, just ordinary performance scenes, where two people are talking just to heighten the dramatic tension of the sound. [INT: Will you be doing like 10, 15 passes, I mean, in terms of the looping?] Well, they might hit it on two or three, but remember, I said the most important thing to me about an Actor is intelligence, and that means they understand the process and understand what it can do. It's like visually today, a Director can do anything because of computer graphics, so they do it. [INT: Do you get, I mean do you run into Actors who say I can't do my performance in looping?] No, I've never really run into that. I've run into Actors who've said, "I'd rather not." But I always say to them, "You're going to learn to love it. You're going to learn to love it, and you're going to want to use it on every picture,” because you can go back in weeks, months later and rethink what you've done and get it right, and that's a rare privilege. That's a gift to be able to improve your performance, the sound of it, the inflections, the tone. [INT: The meaning.] Exactly. [INT: That's interesting that you like it, you know, because it's, I'm fascinated in a way because on one side the visual style for you is very much what is there. Obviously, you've added to it, but that's one of the realities of environments, or even taking when you build an environment trying to make it, when if it's a set, feel like we're there. That's your visual style. Your oral style, you're saying to me is all fabricated, in essence. You're making--] Technical. Well, that comes from dramatic radio where I believed everything I heard, and these guys were standing there reading a script in front of a microphone, and a guy was making the sound of, you know, horses hoof beats, and it was totally believable. [INT: Yeah. Will you go in with the sound effects Editor and actually choose effects?] Yeah. We audition effects. Every sound you hear in all of my films has been chosen after the fact. [INT: But wait a minute, but before the mixing stage?] Before the mixings, but a lot of times I'll add stuff in the mix. I will say, you know, for example, in THE EXORCIST, I added the sound of a grandfather clock in the entryway to the house when Ellen Burstyn is showing Lee J. Cobb out the door. And then she closes the door--she opens the door and let's him out, and you hear the sounds of the street come in. And, of course, we had to add that because it was shot on the set. So, you hear the street come in, and she closes the door and closes the lock, and then, I went to dead silence, not even a presence track of the set, but absolute bias, white bias, no sound, and I added the gentle sound of a ticking grandfather clock that was in the scene, and for several moments on the screen that's all you hear. You see Burstyn suppressing a cry, and you hear nothing but tick tock tick tock. And then all of a sudden, a piercing scream from the bedroom upstairs, and she hears it and runs upstairs, and a little girl is now completely in the powers of the devil.

INT: Now, the piercing scream. Obviously, when you were doing the shot with her…

WF: With who? [INT: With Ellen [Ellen Burstyn] before she goes and suddenly looks up and reacts to the scream, you've got no piecing scream.] Right. But what I used instead often was an offstage gunshot. [INT: You actually did this?] A blank. And I got the idea--many people have questioned me about this, and they think I'm crazy and shoot guns on the set and stuff, because I've done it on a lot of sets. [INT: Sam Fuller [Samuel Fuller].] Well, I was at, I first read about it in a Life Magazine article back in the '50s [1950s] that did a pictorial on the filming of THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, all in an attic room. [INT: This was George Stevens.] George Stevens directed it, and there's a photograph of George Stevens sitting above the set with a shotgun, and he's firing it off to make the cast, whenever he wanted those people that were hiding in the attic to be fearful, you know, he felt what manufactured sound can I give them that's going to make them react? That was supposed to be the offstage sound of the Nazi sirens through the streets of Amsterdam, which became a fearful sound that he added later, but on the set, he would fire off a gun and almost anyone, not knowing that a gunshot's going to go off, will react with a horrific response. [INT: So, you're doing it--can you do it on take two then?] Sure, but in a different point in the scene. They think they're all geared up for it, and it doesn't come, so they're, the tension is there, and then I may not do it. And then I'll do it in the next take, or the next angle.