INT: This voice, that screen, her voice, now that's also going to be--this is an interesting issue about making a scream.

WF: Well, should I tell you about the demon voice in THE EXORCIST? [INT: Sure.] 'Cause this--this is all part of it. [INT: We're talking about sound.] Right. So in Bill Blatty's [William Peter Blatty] novel, he talks about this little 12-year-old girl is now speaking in the voice of the devil. What is that? She's a 12-year-old girl. She's been possessed. The film was based on one of three cases in the 20th Century that the Catholic Church authenticated as actual demonic possession. And so, but how does the devil sound? You know, what is that supposed to be coming out of a 12-year-old girl? There was this guy in Chicago who I know named Ken Nordine, and Ken Nordine was a brilliant guy who used sound for commercial and advertising purposes. He did the Levis commercials where he'd multi-track his own voice, and he did a series of wonderful 33-1/3 long-playing record albums called “Word Jazz,” “Word Jazz 1, 2 and 3.” They were done using the principles of old radio, sound effects and stuff, and his voice, which he was able to technically distort from time to time, and he had a beautiful voice. So I went to him and I said, "Ken, it's all yours, you know. Do the--give me some examples of how to do the demon voice." And he recorded a bunch of stuff, and everything he did sounded like a man's voice, a man's voice coming out of this little girl. And I listened to it, and some of it was brilliant, but it was a man's voice. And now, I'm thinking, "Well, what do I want? If you don't want a man's voice for the--what do you want?" And I--and it occurred to me that what I wanted was a voice that was neutral, that was neither male nor female, but that was enhanced with certain sound effects. And I'm thinking, "Well, who in the world sounds like--" and this is all a dialogue with myself. Who in the world sounds like what you're describing? And I remember the radio actress called Mercedes McCambridge from the '40s [1940s] and '50s [1950s] who had this great, almost masculine voice on a very sexy woman, and she was a big star in dramatic radio. And then she won an Academy Award as an actress in GIANT. She won Best Supporting Actress in Giant, and she'd made a lot of other films. She's in TOUCH OF EVIL, playing this sort of lesbian gang leader in TOUCH OF EVIL.

WF: And I said to my Production Manager, "See if you can find out if Mercedes McCambridge is still around," and I didn't know if she was or not. And it took us several days to find out that she was not only still around; she was on tour. She was in Dallas, Texas doing, WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLF on the stage. And so I called her, and I introduced myself on the phone, and I said, "I'm making this film." She wasn't familiar with the book. I told her what it was and I hear her voice on the phone, and it's perfect. And I said, "Would you come in and look at the film and maybe think of…" so she said, "All right," but she said, "I'll be on the road for another three weeks." So I wait three weeks, and we're now in post-production and three weeks where I'm doing other stuff, sound effects, and then she comes in, and I meet with her at Warner Bros., and we go into a sound stage, and I show her the picture, and she hears the little girl saying these most horrific things, "Your mother sucks cocks in hell," you know in a little girl's voice, and she gets it. And she said, "Okay, you want me to replace her voice?" I said, "Yes, and then I'll do some…" She said, "Let me tell you something." She says, "I was raised a Catholic. I have a deep memory of my Catholic upbringing." She said, "I then became a serious alcoholic. I was in AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] for X number of years. I screwed up my career and my life. I fell away from the church, but I still have two friends who are priests, and if I were to do this, this is going to take me to places that I don't really want to go. So I would want you to have my two priest friends in the room with me at all times, number one." She said, "I think I know what to do with my voice to give you what you want." She said, "You're going to have to tie me to a chair, like a torture situation, and I'm going to have to eat raw eggs, and I'm going to have to take straight shot glasses of whiskey like this on top of the raw eggs." And she said, "That will do things to my voice that will sound in-human, and I know that's what you want." She said, "I will start to breathe, and you'll hear like the sound of a wheezing when someone has a bad cold. You'll hear several strains of a voice. You'll hear, 'Eh-heh, eh-heh," all at the same time coming from the throat, which is bruised," and she said, "I can produce that sound, but I'm going to have to go back on the booze and smoke cigarettes, which I gave up 10 years ago and eat raw eggs and be tied to a chair and have my two priests there." We did this for three weeks, totally experimental. Totally experimental. And all kinds of great stuff is happening, and we would do it over and over again, and I would make the ropes tighter when I wanted her to show that she--when the priest sprinkled holy water on her and she'd go, "Ah, ah," the sound, and then I would tape the various sound takes she did and play them one over another so it sounded like multiple voices as well.

WF: And then, I had become friendly with some priests with the--high up in the Jesuit order, which was headquartered in Milan [Milan, Italy], and the head of the Jesuit order was a man called Father Pedro Arrupe, who believed totally in what we were doing. And through one of the Jesuits, he sent me a recording on an old Wollensak tape recorder, a cassette tape of an actual exorcism that was done in Latin in the Vatican, in the basement of the Vatican. And I get this tape and I'm listening to it, and [MUFFLED TALKING] talking like this in Latin [MUFFLED TALKING] and then all of a sudden it was a boy, "Ah," an absolutely outrageous scream that could not possibly be reproduced, that just leaped off the tape. And I took that and re-recorded it and put that into the soundtrack of THE EXORCIST. So there's an actual possessed boy on the soundtrack with McCambridge [Mercedes McCambridge] and with various other effects, but it's largely McCambridge's acting and her ability to throw her voice in various directions to produce this. [INT: When she said “eggs,” did you have any idea why she was saying--] No, but she knew. [INT: I got the liquor. I got the cigarettes.] No, but she knew because she was a radio Actress, and she often had to produce certain sounds to her voice to make her voice sound differently, and she knew how to do it. I would never have suggested that to anybody. First of all, a woman tells me she's an AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] and has quit drinking and quit smoking. She's got to go back on it --and I understand that she had certain routine rituals.

INT: Now that you brought this up, I have to ask you a piece of urban legend about the making of this movie [THE EXORCIST]. Somehow, I heard stories that there were incidents of real mystery that actually happened during the making of the movie. Is this pure urban legend?

WF: A couple of things come to mind. I mean, the interior of the house was built on a soundstage in New York. It was a three-story set. And the camera was able to go up, as it did often, three stories seamlessly. And it was built inside of a refrigerated cocoon so that when we wanted--we had restaurant size refrigerator units over the set that would take it at night down to 32 below zero, so that when we came in the next morning it was 30 below zero to show the cold air when people spoke. And one morning at 4:00 in the morning, I got a phone call from my Production Manager, David Salven. He wakes me up at four in the morning, and he says, "Don't bother to come in this morning." And I said, "What's wrong?" And he said, "The whole set burned to the ground." I said, "What?" He said, "It's…" "Why? How?" He said, "We have no idea. He said there was a night watchman sitting outside the soundstage. He saw some smoke, he was alone in the building.” It was an old building. “He saw smoke coming from underneath the stage door. He opened the stage door, and the whole set's in flames, all of it." [INT: How much had you shot?] We'd shot just several opening scenes. [INT: Oh, that's it?] Yeah. And we needed it desperately for all the rest, and so we had to shut down the picture and rebuild the set. And the insurance company paid off on the theory that because it--that was an old building, this soundstage, called Manhattan Sound, West 56th Street and 9th Avenue. The theory was that there were pigeons up there, and that a pigeon flew into a light box and set off an electric explosion causing this, but that was only a theory that the Warner Bros. lawyers offered and the insurance company paid off, but how in the hell that whole set caught in flames, I have no idea.

INT: Now did it get, you know, it's an interesting question. Did it get exploited in the marketing [for THE EXORCIST]? Did these stories get exploiting in the marketing?

WF: No, no. But the stories got out. [INT: Right.] Warner’s [Warner Bros.] did very well in underplaying all the bad and false rumors that came out. I mean, there was a woman on the air then named Rona Barrett, and I--my wife's very friendly with her, and I've since learned to tolerate her, but she used to be on television, very widely seen, and she would report all the rumors of THE EXORCIST, and she reported that because of what she, the work she had done in THE EXORCIST, that Linda Blair was in a mental institution. And, in fact, Linda went back to school in West Port, Connecticut, where she was a straight A student, she was 13 years old when she finished THE EXORCIST. She went back, got all A’s, was a champion horsewoman. I gave her a show horse as a gift, which she called Best Director, and she was winning blue ribbons with it, and she was totally normal. And I called up Rona Barrett, and I said, "Rona, how could you--let me give you her mother's phone number at her house. You can call her mother or her father and ask if she's in a mental institution instead of just reporting this crap." And she said, "No. Well, my sources tell me, and I have to go with my sources," and I said, "You know, you're completely full of shit, and you're going to hurt this girl's career and her life." And there are all kinds of stuff like that went out. I don't even know. I mean, I guess when you're dealing with a subject like that it, and it had such a wide effect on people from all walks of life, that the imagination takes over and kicks into high gear.

INT: Had she read the book [THE EXORCIST], Linda [Linda Blair]? [WF: Yes, she did.] But she read it before she came?

WF: Yeah. Well, this is how she got cast. I thought we'd never find a 12-year-old girl to play this part, which is a 12-year-old girl in the book, in the novel. In fact, it was a 14-year-old boy in Silver Spring, Maryland, and--but Blatty [William Peter Blatty] was an undergraduate at Georgetown [Georgetown University] when this happened, it was widely reported in the Washington Post, three pages in 1949. But he couldn't get any other facts from the priests at Georgetown or anywhere else, so he--the subject fascinated him, and he wrote it as fiction, and he didn't know whether it was a boy or a girl, so he made it a 12-year-old girl, who's mother was in Georgetown to make a movie; and so that part's fiction. Now I'm--I had Casting Directors in Chicago, New York and L.A., and thousands of girls are brought in and put on a video tape, or they were brought to see me or whatever, and I personally must have seen 500 auditions, and we had reached the conclusion that we could not cast this role; it was impossible, which is why a lot of Directors passed on doing the film before I decided to do it. Mike Nichols passed. Arthur Penn was approached before me, and Stanley Kubrick. And they all passed 'cause they said, "You'll never get a performance like this out of a 12-year-old girl. It's impossible." So we're out there looking for 12-year-old girls, and now we come to a point where we think we're going to have to go find a 16-year-old girl or 14 or 15, who looks younger. And so we start auditioning them, and none of them look young enough.

WF: And one afternoon, when I'm at the end of my rope and I've got to start the film in about three weeks, my secretary buzzes me, and this was at an office in Warner’s [Warner Bros.] in New York. And she says, "There's a woman out here named Eleanor Blair, and she's brought her daughter with her. She doesn't have an appointment, but would you like to see her?" And I said, "Okay. Why not?" And so in comes Eleanor Blair, a lovely little woman with little Linda, who had just barely made 12. Now Linda was signed up with an agency that represented children at the time. And that agency had sent us about 30 or 40 young women, Linda's age, but not Linda. Linda's mother brings her in, and Linda had never acted before. She'd only done some modeling like for newspapers. You see little girls wearing winter coats you know and funny hats and gloves. She had done you know photo modeling for department stores, but never acted. But I see that she's extraordinarily intelligent, and we're talking--she's sitting this close to me as you are. Her mother's right there. And I said, "Do you know what THE EXORCIST is?" And says, "Oh, yes, I read the book." I says, "You read the book?" She said, "Yeah." I said, "What's it about?" She said, "Well, it's about a little girl who gets possessed by a devil, and she does a whole bunch of bad things." I said, "Like what? What sort of bad things?" She said, "Well, she hits her mother in the face, and she pushes a man out of her bedroom window, and she masturbates with a crucifix." And I said, "Do you know what that means?" And she laughed. I said, "Do you know what you're saying?" And she says, "What? You mean masturbate?" I said, "Yeah." She said, "It's like jerking off, isn't it?" And I said, "Yeah.” I said, "Have you ever done that?" And her mother's right there. And she says, "Sure. Haven't you?" And I said, "You've got the job." That was it. That was her audition, because all of the other girls that were seen could not handle that kind of a conversation, and I knew that if a girl was going to look like she was being tortured in this movie, that the crew would turn off, that the audience would turn off, that the crew would quit if you were actually, and if you see the outtakes of THE EXORCIST or one is seen, would stop, and I’d say, "Cut," you know, the camera doesn't cut right away. It rolls off a few extra feet before the Operator clicks it off. You see Linda start to giggle after doing one of these horrendous things, and you see a milkshake come into frame from one of the prop man with a straw, and she starts sucking on this milkshake, and she was totally a little girl, and she had complete belief in me, as I did in her, and I became like a surrogate father to her. I told her everything while I was holding her and hugging her, with her mother in the room at all room at all times, and often her father. And I would hold--and I'd tell her, "You've got to do this now," and she'd say, "Oh, I can't do that." And I'd say, "Oh, yes, you can." She say, "No, I can't. No, no, no." And I said, "Yeah, we got to do that." "Oh, no." And it was a game. It became a big game, and that's how she approached the whole film. And she came out of it you know completely whole and not fucked up in any way.

WF: And she [Linda Blair] got to be a younger teenager, she got to be exploited by the media and others. She--later she was paid like a half-a-million dollars to do the sequel to THE EXORCIST, and, which is a terrible movie, I have to say. And I don't often say that. I almost never will say that, but that's an awful picture. But then she did a thing for television called--for NBC, a two-hour drama called BORN INNOCENT. [INT: That's where she gets raped with a broom.] By some other girls with a broomstick. [INT: I remember the movie.] And you know and then all these wacko rock-and-roll guys got attached to her, she was growing up. Like Rick James, you know, and they got her into drugs and stuff, and for a while she had a drug problem, but she was the most innocent adorable young 12-year-old you'd ever want to know, and at 13 as well.

INT: That’s--it's the whole issue, it’s interesting, and it's the issue about you know the complexities of when we work with people who, it's the first time they do this. For example, I now wonder, we've just both seen THE SOLOIST, now, I wonder how many thousands of newspaper people are going to be running to find Nathanial [Nathanial Ayers], who obviously is down there in L.A. now, and what will happen to his life now? Because part of the process is this issue of when an unknown person suddenly becomes known to the world and how the rest of the world either is going to choose to--and you know how one deals with it. [WF: You may not have to worry about it for too much longer, 'cause newspapers are dying, you know.] That's true. But also it's interesting for you. I mean here you come out as a filmmaker and a lover of what you do, and then you become a star. You become a giant. You win an Academy Award [Oscar]. Did you have to deal with all of a sudden everybody knows who my name is now and I both like that and don't like that, and how has that affected me?

WF: No, I've always tried to avoid that. You know, I mean, I get asked to do commencement speeches at colleges. I did the commencement speech last year at Penn State [Pennsylvania State University], you know, and stuff like that. So what I know, but I don't read my--you know, I had a website for a while, and I was getting thousands upon thousand of ludicrous things, you know, on the Internet, so I just abandoned my website. I don't have one. And I'm only vaguely aware that a lot of people know who I am, you know, and you get life achievement awards and stuff like that. But I'm still the same guy I was in high school, exactly the same guy. I don't dress any better, you know. I--[INT: You don't live in one room anymore, though.] I don't live in one room, but I basically do. I live inside my head, which is one room. And I try to expand my interests, but not as you put it, as like a star or something. But, you know, I love the process itself of making films and now doing operas, and I love doing the two CSIs [CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION] I did, you know. I did the 200th show a few weeks ago. But I had done one before that which was one of Bill Peterson's [William Peterson] last, 'cause he had asked me for years to, and I had never seen this show. But it was thoroughly enjoyable, and a lot of the crew that were on it were guys I had worked with many years ago, like the focus puller on THE EXORCIST, Gary Muller.

INT: I want to go back to sound for a minute. The opening sequence [in RULES OF ENGAGEMENT], and not--the sequence of the attack with the helicopters. First of all, finding that building, which plays a major part, I mean, it's an amazing structure, and I know it's some museum in reality. How did--did you see lots of buildings before? Were you--

WF: I went all over Morocco. We wanted to shoot in Yemen itself. The script was written as an original screenplay by the man who's now the Junior Senator from Virginia, Jim Webb. And Jim Webb was a highly decorated first lieutenant in the Marine Corps during Vietnam, and he came back from Vietnam and wrote novels. And then he--and he also became a judge advocate or a lawyer for soldier who were accused of crimes while they were in the military. [INT: Got it.] And he wrote RULES OF ENGAGEMENT as an original screenplay, and he gave, the Producer, Scott Rudin, gave it to me. I thought it was great, and we couldn't shoot in Yemen, and I kept telling everybody, "Well, gees, I shot in Iraq. I did the opening of THE EXORCIST in Iraq, and…” but Yemen was really dangerous, so I was told that there were all sorts of cultures in Morocco that were populated by Yemeni people. And so, I went and looked at the major cities, you know, Morocco was out of the question, Casablanca, seaport town, you know, we needed what looked like an isolated Berber or Yemeni town, and there was such a place. It was a Yemeni structure, and the people who lived there were all Yemeni. And it was in a town way outside of Morocco, out in the desert called Ouarzazate, and it turned out that it, Ouarzazate also had big soundstages. It had become the go-to place. I didn't do anything on a stage there, but THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST was filmed there on the stage, GLADIATOR, all sorts of movies before and after were filmed on these stages in Ouarzazate, and they have highly trained crews. I think Ridley Scott's made several films there. Almost whenever you see a picture dealing with Muslims or the Arab world, it's done in Ouarzazate, and--but I found this Berber village which needed very little sprucing up, 'cause the architecture of Yemen is unique, and this little village had the uniqueness, and it's the town of Ouarzazate itself, not out where the stage is. So we were driving forever. We drove over the Atlas Mountains, which is you know an isolated, you know, looks like you're on the moon, to get to this little town, which I hadn't really seen pictures of. I was actually going to see another town that somebody from Morocco had told me about. And now we're passing Ouarzazate 'cause they want me to go there 'cause it's got stages and they think I'll build everything, and I see this town, and that's where we shot, and they all had their own clothes, which were appropriate, and all the camels and everything else that you see.

INT: Now, that building itself is a--I mean, did you build on top of that building? [WF: No.] So that whole rooftop sequence… [from RULES OF ENGAGEMENT] [WF: That was just there.] Now, you were hitting lots of hits and, you know…

WF: We added bullet hits and a lot of stuff that we had to put on just outside of the actual old plaster, you know, so you wouldn't destroy--we were very conscious to not destroy the character of the place itself. But like even when an office inside of it is being shot up, where they're ducking under a desk, you know, Kingsley [Ben Kingsley] and his adjutant, you know, we put bullet scripts throughout that--it had been an abandoned office, so no one was using it, but it was a completely underused--it was an old government building that was underused, and so them letting us use it meant a lot of revenue for Morocco. But it also could have brought them a lot of trouble, because of what was going on at the world and heating up at the time, the whole Middle East... By the time RULES OF ENGAGEMENT came out, Bush [George H. W. Bush] had just attacked Iraq, and so the American soldier around the world was no longer… [INT: A hero or welcomed.] A hero. [INT: Yeah, yeah.]

INT: The sound effects that are there, you've got the helicopter, you've got the gunfire from both sides, you've got the crowd cheering, all this--

WF: All recorded separately and mixed separately, all recorded wild, you know, meaning not in sync with any picture, and all mixed separately. [INT: Did you record the actual chants on location?] Yeah. [INT: So you got that on location?] Oh, yeah, the sounds of the people, oh, yeah. [INT: And the chant, and that whole sort of the whatever, the anti-American chanting that you got.] Yeah. [INT: So you got all them to do that on location, wild.] Yeah. [INT: But everything else is sound effects and added.] Yeah, we recorded the helicopters out there too. And we recorded the gunshots out there, you know, the rifle shots and the automatic weapons. [INT: And you also added to them too, right?] Well, I added resonance to them, and a lot of it is done with various levels and adding slight echo, or slap, as we call it.

INT: How long do you take to mix? I mean do you--are you--? [WF: Longer than most people, but now it's a shorter process because of the equipment that's available. THE EXORCIST took about four or five months to mix, and we mixed it right up to the day of release, the day before release actually, when we had to send it out to get printed. But we only needed 26 prints, 'cause it opened in 26 theaters.] So in the mix, are you--do you find yourself, I mean, do you go through levels? Are you first into--I mean what would be your process in the mixing room?

WF: Well, the first thing we'll do is listen to all the dialogue recorded on location and see what works and what has to be replaced, and we'll mark what we have to replace with looping. Then the next thing I'll try to do is clean up the dialogue I'm going to keep from location, which is not considerable, but it's some scenes, and then we start auditioning the sound effects tracks. First of all, I, you have people who are, who are called Foley Artists, and Foley is the name of a man who invented this process [Jack Foley]. [INT: Do you go to the Foley sessions?] Yeah, and I often do some of the Foley myself. Foley is where they add to or replace the sound of body movement. So let's say, for example, if someone's talking in a shot, and the microphone's right up here, folks. You want to tilt up and show them where the mic is here? [INT: There's two of them.] There's two of them, and the mic is recording what's going on here, which is my voice, but it's not hearing much of my body movement, which, on the screen, you know, you would want to account for body movement and footsteps. So you make the footsteps of a character. There's a--the mic is placed at a Foley Artist's feet, and they walk and sing and make the sound of those shoes on the different pavement. [INT: By the way, have you seen the short, there's a short that was made in those years. It was a split-screen short. It's about eight minutes long.] No. [INT: And it's a fight. On one side it's the fight that was filmed, on the other side, it's just the Foley Artist.] It's just the Foley. [INT: It is hysterical.] I'm sure. [INT: It's just delicious.] But you also, so you record the shoes of every character on the different pavements. And then, you go in, and I often do this myself, I'll record the body movements, like this, the sound of someone like moving with a suede jacket, and that makes a sound. You're not conscious of it, but if you're watching a movie and it wasn't there, you would know that the sound is too clean of the dialogue. So you add the footsteps, you add the body movement, which is called Foley, and then, you add things like whatever extraneous sounds there are, traffic in the street, helicopters, gunshots, all layer on layer on layer.

INT: There's a time in which, when you've got all these layers, and you've also got music, which is, I think, the next--[WF: Sometimes. That's the final step.] But my curiosity is that sometimes you create a world of, an emotional world with the choice of the sound effects that you're using, and, of course, you create an emotional world with music. Sometimes they overload, and then you suddenly say, "You know what? I've got to pull this one back." Or… [WF: Right.] Talk about this a little bit.

WF: Well, I do that often. I've often, when you see a person walking somewhere, I just did this recently on the 200th episode of CSI [CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION], there's a shot of Laurence Fishburne walking down a hallway, and originally I was going to use the sound of typewriters or computers or, you know, cell phones, whatever. And I decided when I looked at the mix to use only the soft sound of his footsteps on the floor, nothing else, dead silence, and just hear the soft click of his footsteps on this linoleum floor. [INT: Do you know how exceptional is the fact that you were actually in the mixing room on a television series show?] No, I know, mostly the Directors on TV are off doing something else. [INT: Or not allowed.] But I make it a part of my--I don't do a lot of television, I've done just these two CSIs. That’s all I've done in about the last 15 years for television. But--and I like the people on the show, and I did it originally, 'cause Bill Peterson [William Peterson], who's been a friend. [INT: And a star on one of your movies.] Yeah. He, his first film was TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., and we've remained friends. [INT: Let me ask you about music.] But, so… [INT: Go, go.] I make it a point for the Producers to know that the ultimate look of the film, the color timing and the sound of the film, the mix, is my purview. I have to supervise that, otherwise, they don't need to bother to get me to direct it.

INT: Let's talk about music, which you clearly love. How do you choose your Composers, and how do you work with music? And obviously, it depends on each film, if we can you know start from way back or--you know, obviously the choice of the music that you used in FRENCH CONNECTION [THE FRENCH CONNECTION versus what you did in THE EXORCIST, which is--

WF: Well, they're all different experiences. [INT: Exactly.] And like the stories themselves, they find me. I don't find them, and this music seems to find me. I used to--around the time I was making THE FRENCH CONNECTION, I was living up in the Hollywood Hills, and I used to go to a jazz club on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, and the club was called Nucleus Nuance on Melrose. It later became a health food--[INT: Red [Bruce Veniero] ran it.] What? [INT: Red, the little guy who owned Nucleus Nuance. He was a red-haired guy. I used to know him.] And on Monday nights, they would have a big jazz orchestra there that was called a rehearsal band, so they didn't have to pay the musicians, but the musicians all went there voluntarily, 'cause the--all the music was written by and conducted by this great young trumpeter named Don Ellis. And he, Don was about 32 years old, and I used to go in there on Monday nights because it was the first time I had ever heard electric instruments. Like, around the same time, Miles Davis used an electric trumpet, and Bob Dylan started to record electric guitar, and people went nuts. [INT: Nuts, crazy.] The purists went crazy. He's destroyed everything, blah, blah, blah, and this is awful, and now it's an accepted part of the vocabulary. But Don Ellis has had an entire orchestra electrified, the drums, the brass, strings, his own trumpet, other solo instruments, and he was playing, the electric sound was making echo on echo on echo, and he was using that, the bounce, as part of the music itself. And this music was in various time signatures. You know, like waltz time is three-quarter time? Don's time signatures were 18, 19 time. It was--[INT: It was Brubeck [Dave Brubeck] taken to the next level.] Right, impossible time signatures. [INT: Right.] and very… you couldn't even say contemporary, nothing's caught up with it yet, you know, and--but it paved the way for what did come along. And so I used to go in there, and one, and it's around the time I'm finishing THE EXORCIST. I didn't know what I was going to do for music, but I'd been going on Monday nights to hear Don Ellis, and then the idea occurs to me one night to introduce myself to him and to say, "Would you be interested in writing the score for THE FRENCH CONNECTION?" He had never done a score for a movie. And he said, "Yeah, well, what's that?" And so I showed him the picture, and I said, "Look, Don, the movie is basically, it's not a big epic, it's not LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. So what would happen if you took your sound that you get with brass mostly and drums, and what would happen if you wrote it for strings and subdued it and had maybe one or two places where you let the brass break out, but other than that it's done with pizzicato strings and stuff?" He said, "Oh, that's great." So he wrote a score that way, and there's one--two places in the score where it's this far out brass, but other than that it's strings going, "Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum…" And they're just playing on the strings, and pizzicato, or just bowing softly. And so we go in to record this now, and the head of music there is a brilliant guy from the Newman family. He was, he's Randy’s--[INT: Randy's uncle. That's right.] Randy Newman's uncle, Lionel Newman. [INT: Lionel, yeah.] And he was the, I guess, the brother of Alfred Newman, who was the head of music at 20th Century Fox. [INT: The Composer.] And responsible for some of the biggest scores ever written like THE ROBE.