INT: I’m Allison Anders, today is February 5th, 2003, I’m conducting an interview today with Monte Hellman for the Directors Guild of America’s Visual History Program. We are at the DGA in Los Angeles, California.

MH: My name is Monte Hellman. My name at birth was Monte Himmelbaum, if you can swallow that or pronounce it; I can’t. My nickname is Mont or god, what did my mother call me? I don’t know. Anyway, people call me everything from Montrose to Montpellier. In high school I was called Handlebars, at Stanford University I was called Hemoglobin, which is one of the reasons I changed my name. And my birthdate is July 12, 1929 and I was born in Greenpernt, Greenpoint, Long Island, New York. Never lived there. My family was visiting and I was born a week early. And… that’s it. I’ve answered all the questions. We can go home now?

MH: Just before we start, I just wanted to say that one of the most interesting taped or filmed interviews I ever did, not because it was an interesting interview, but because it was interesting for me to see it, was a film that Paul Joyce did and he had an idea, he had a bunch of extra rolls, he was doing a thing on BBS [BBS Productions], and he had some extra film, and so he decided to do a documentary with me in which he would just shoot a roll of film, I guess 10 minutes, you know 400 foot, whatever, and never cut, and between rolls he would show the last shot of one of my movies. And so, he wound up throwing out the first roll, because it was terrible and we were all nervous and everything, but then from then on it was like in sequence with no cuts. And he shot it over two days, and somewhere in the middle of the first day we started drinking vodka. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen yourself drunk on film, but it’s a fascinating experience just to watch yourself getting drunk. I mean there’s no way to describe it. It’s something that you could never normally see, because you’re doing it, you know? And I just wanted just to interject that. That was, you know, probably my single most interesting experience doing an interview. [INT: God, that sounds so good, I got to see that. And I’m glad I never saw myself getting drunk. But, god, that sounds cool. Also with the way that he did the taking your last shots at the end.] Yeah, yeah, and he just photographed them on my TV screen. [INT: Wow.] And he had a great title for the documentary, called PLUNGING ON ALONE, [PLUNGING ON ALONE - MONTE HELLMAN’S LIFE IN A DAY], which is the quote from Rudy Wurlitzer’s novel “Nog,” which led me to hire Rudy to do the screenplay of TWO-LANE BLACKTOP. And I met, while we’re there, I’ll just tell you that story. In the novel, there are these three characters, two guys and a girl, and they’re out in the woods, you know, far from civilization, and they need to build a fire. So they, they get one of the guys, who’s the “I” in the story, who’s telling the story, to go off and get firewood. And he comes back, and he finds the other two fucking. And he said, “First,” oh, so he decided to join them, so the other guy was you know screwing her from the front, so he decides to go in the back, and he says, “First, she came, and then he came. I plunged on alone.” And, I mean, I mean it’s funny, but it’s such a sad, you know, comment on the human condition that I just said, “Oh, this guy, I’ve got to meet him, and I’ve got to work with him,” you know, it was incredible. [INT: Wow, that’s amazing.]

INT: Now how did that come about? So, after you read the book [Rudy Wurlitzer’s “Nog”], how did you go about finding him [Rudy Wurlitzer] and…?

MH: Well, I mean, I read the book because somebody had recommended him, I forget who, and so I knew how to get a hold of him, and we talked a long time on the phone, and I can’t remember if we actually met in person before I hired him. I think I just hired him based on the book, and talking to him. And then I sent him the script that we had by Will Corry, and he read the script, and he read five pages, and he says, he called me up and he said, “I can’t read this.” And I said, “What? That’s okay, you know, it’s just basically the storyline of a cross-country race, you know, you don’t have to read it.” He said, “Good.” So, he never read the original script, he just wrote a new script just based on the concept. [INT: Wow. Wow.]

INT: How did you work with him on that [Rudy Wurlitzer]?

MH: Well, I went to New York before he started to really kind of spend some time together and I also decided to try to do some casting and to try to find some candidates for the girl. So, I mean, we had an idea of who the characters were going to be, and so some people recommended a number of girls, you know, most of whom were models. And one of the ones that I met was Laurie Bird, and she had never acted. She was, god, she may have been at that time 16, and--[INT: Yeah, she looks very young in the film.] I mean, she was 17 when we started filming, and this was you know quite a long time before that, and she was so interesting, and I particularly, she showed me some stills and I do a lot of casting from stills, more than anything else, because if a still captures, you know, something interior, if I can see into the person, then I’m intrigued and that kind of leads me into you know wanting to investigate that person. And so I saw some stills that really intrigued me, and then met with her, and she was so interesting, and had a life so similar to the kind of character that we were thinking about, but I never thought that there was a chance in the world that I would ever hire her. But what we did was we interviewed her on tape for about three hours and that was the basis for the creation of the character. [INT: Oh, amazing.]

INT: Now, why did you think that you weren’t gonna hire her [Laurie Bird for TWO-LANE BLACKTOP]? [MH: Because I just thought that I was gonna try to find an Actress.] I see. And then, going with that, why did you end up hiring for your two leads in TWO-LANE BLACKTOP the rock stars?

MH: It was, you know, sheer accident. I wasn’t, I mean, I literally, I met with I think every young Actor in America at the time. I met with Jimmy Caan [James Caan], I met with Al Pacino, I’m not sure if I met with De Niro [Robert De Niro], but it’s probable that I did. What was his name, Michael--[INT: Moriarty [Michael Moriarty]? No.] No, anyway, I can’t think of his name, but you know, literally I met everybody that was possibly within the age-range. And I thought that I was gonna hire an Actor, and I just, I didn’t meet anybody that I really--I didn’t want somebody to act the part, so that made it difficult because Actors like to act, you know? I want GTO to act, but I didn’t want the guys to act, you know? [INT: Right. Right.] And, so finally one day I was driving on the Sunset Strip, and I saw a billboard with an advertisement for James’ [James Taylor] first album. And I said, “Oh. That’s an interesting face.” And I called Fred Roos and I said, “Is there any chance to meet this guy James Taylor?” And he says, “I’ll see what I can do.” And so he brought James in, and I said, “Wow, very interesting.” And we screen tested him. And he had a moustache at the time, and the screen test, part of the screen test consisted of him shaving his moustache. That way I figured I could get to see him both ways, and if we wanted the moustache he could grow it back, and if not, you know, I had two versions of James Taylor. And it was a lot of fun to do the screen test. [INT: Well, I know that every time I talk to any rock survivor of the ‘60s [1960s], almost everybody came, they go, “Oh, I never acted, but I did go in for a movie called TWO-LANE BLACKTOP.” So, it’s always interesting to me to see that.] Well, Kris Kristofferson actually came in, and then of course I got his music, his song, “Me and Bobby McGee” for the movie, but so when I called him in New York when he was at a club, 2:00 in the morning his time, he of course you know knew me because we had met when he came in, and he was so thrilled to be even a little bit, you know, a little part of a movie. He said, the way he said it, “Oh, to be part of a James Taylor movie.” [INT: That’s fabulous.] Kris and I then had, you know, had been friends ever since. [INT: Wow, he seems very like he’s had like a humble path, too, which is interesting, a very different.] Yeah, well, he’s a great guy, he’s very, very smart, obviously, and I think he’s you know maybe you know along with Dylan [Bob Dylan] and John Lennon is probably the you know one of the three greatest songwriters of the 20th Century. [INT: Yeah, I fully agree. Beautiful work at that time and continuing. And then was a movie shortly after TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, right? He hadn’t done anything at that point, I don’t think. CISCO PIKE, I think was his first, but it was around that time.] Yeah, it was around the same time, yeah, that’s right.

MH: When I was a little kid, I used to go to the movies every Saturday afternoon. And I literally became a fanatic about THE LONE RANGER. I saw THE LONE--the two things that really made me want to, you know, make movies ultimately, I wasn’t thinking about making movies when I was a little kid, obviously, were THE LONE RANGER serial, and I just got, they lost two of the 12 chapters, but they’ve just put out, I think two or three years later, they made a feature out of the 12 chapters of the serials, so I have the feature, but I don’t have the serial. And the other thing was TARZAN [THE NEW ADVENTURES OF TARZAN]. I mean, I was, you know, I learned how to do the yell. I mean, I was just, like, I was Tarzan. I mean, you got to realize I was this really puny little kid, you know, but I was still Tarzan. But I fell in love with the movies, but I was besides being a puny little kid, I was very shy. And when I was, I don’t know, maybe six years old, my parents decided that the way to bring me out and to give me a little bit of personality was to give me drama lessons. So, I went into this little kid’s drama class where I had to get up in front of the kids and, you know, give speeches and you know, whatever, bullshit, but--and you know I don’t know if it made me less shy, but what it did do was kind of I think planted a seed. So, that by the time I was 10, I went to a Y [YMCA] camp, and I remembered writing and directing a 10-minute play. [INT: Wow.] And that was it, you know. From them on I was involved in drama all the way through high school, junior high school and high school, acted and ultimately, I didn’t start directing until I got to Stanford [Stanford University], and then I directed a one-act play, and then I started doing some other things. And then after, after Stanford, I did a little bit of film at graduate school at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles], and then I got a job, then I did a trip to Europe with a couple of buddies of mine, came back, did one more semester at UCLA, and then some of the people at UCLA and also from Stanford started a summer theater, and so I spent three years doing summer stock, and they asked me if I would join the company as an Actor, and I said the only way I would do it is if I could direct. And so I began directing in summer stock. [INT: Oh, wow. Now at UCLA what was, was there a film program at that time or was there...?] There was a film program, I think it was Robert Dyhrenfurth [possibly referring to Gunter Oskar Dyhrenfurth] who was a famous mountain climber and documentary filmmaker, I guess. I don’t know if, I’m not sure his first was Robert, anyway, Dyhrenfurth. And then Kenneth Macgowan became head of the department.

INT: So after, once you started directing, you were in the theater, and then how did you make that move from theater to film?

MH: One of the, I mean, I knew I wanted--I mean, I’d already done the studies in film at UCLA, but I guess after our third season of summer stock, and we had one season of winter stock as well, where we actually just did one play near, outside of San Francisco, because we were trying to build a theater. We had, we had a great design, we had one of the really great architects of America design a circular theater that was gonna be on Strawberry Point in Marin County [Marin County, California]. Just incredibly beautiful theater. But one of our company was offered a job for ABC, American Broadcasting, as a kind of an apprentice film Editor, which the job consisted of cleaning out the film vaults, which had been there, you know, since the beginning of time. It was, their studio was where I think were THE JAZZ SINGER was filmed, you know, over at Prospect and Tallmadge. [INT: Oh, amazing.] And so, he had no interest in it and he asked me if I was interested in the job, and I went in to see about it, I got hired, and I have you know asthma from childhood, and cleaning out those film vaults was, I mean, you can’t imagine the amount of dust, and it was just horrendous. But fortunately, it only lasted a week or so, and then I started working in film shipping, and then I started working cutting… at that time TV shows were on 16mm, and they would cut in new commercials every time the show was replayed. So, I had to, you know, insert commercials into 16mm prints. So that was my beginning in film editing, and then I became an apprentice on the MEDIC TV series, and that’s I think, that’s where I really started to learn, you know, first time I began to learn something about film directing because I had a terrible Editor named Bob Seiter [Robert Seiter], whose brother was a Director, William Seiter [William A. Seiter], and he was, just a great guy. He was totally you know he was the most vulgar person you could imagine, he was cursing all the time, and he was so, he had no respect at all for the film. It was just you know, didn’t matter, it was just a work print, you know, so he was, you know, he would be pushing the film through the Moviola and then he would just toss it aside and he would be stomping all over it on the floor. And I had to go run around, but I got to stand over his shoulder, and I would, you know, pick up everything, and you know take care of the trims, and it was a great experience because even, you know, without even trying, he just would explain things. And explain, you know, just simple things like that you would never learn in film school. Such as, you know, you cut, you spend time before the person talks, but not after. Either you cut away in the middle of the speech, or you cut at the end, but you cut it, cut instantly at the end. But if there’s gonna be any time for a pause, which you don’t have very much of, it’s the time on the Actor’s face before they start to speak. And you know, it’s kind of obviously but you’d never think of it unless somebody pointed it out to you. [INT: Right. And often people who have that information don’t think about it until the question is asked. It’s just something that they know how to do. So, it just kind of, that they’ve learned with experience.]

INT: Well, that’s... so, he was a bit of a mentor [William A. Seiter] for you in a way.

MH: He was absolutely a mentor. And I should say that, you know, among the other people in the my life who were mentors was, one was a directing professor at Stanford [Stanford University] named F. Cowles Strickland [Francis Cowles Strickland], and he’d like to say, “Cowles as in bowls, not Cowls as in...” and he never finished it, you know, he didn’t have to. And I think, also I think you know maybe the single most important influence on me was, not from having met the person, but having read a couple of his books was Arthur Hopkins. Arthur Hopkins was a great stage Producer-Director who discovered, maybe he didn’t discover them, but he created them by the fact that he worked with them at crucial points in their careers, John Barrymore for HAMLET, I guess, he did WHAT PRICE GLORY?, he discovered Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and one of the most interesting ones was Humphrey Bogart, because Humphrey Bogart was a juvenile, who you know, his most famous line up until the point that Arthur Hopkins came up on him was, “Tennis, anyone?” And he was doing all these kind of silly comedies, and Arthur Hopkins went into a theater where a play was being rehearsed, and Bogart was in the play. And at that time instead of doors between the lobby and the theater, they had little, a little kind of small vestibule with curtains. Where you’d open one curtain, go in, and then, so you didn’t light into the theater, so it was like two sets of curtains, like a little, you know, confessional. And when he was in that kind of in-between world, he heard the voices of the Actors rehearsing the play, and he heard Bogart. And he said to himself, “God, that’s Duke Mantee.” And then he goes into the theater and he sees it’s Humphrey. He said, “No, Humphrey Bogart?” You know, but that was his first impression from the voice. And so he cast him as Duke Mantee in THE PETRIFIED FOREST and that was the beginning of Bogart’s persona. [INT: Wow.]

INT: And that’s really, I mean, you know when you were talking about casting on TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, I’ve been talking with my daughter about, I mean, it’s something that we talk about often, the lack of faces anymore in film, and you know that people tend to have to put on a fake nose or whatever, you know, in order to have a face anymore. [MH: Right, yeah.] And Humphrey Bogart was certainly, you know, I mean, he was a face, you know, I mean there was character there, there was… And I think about Warren Oates so much that you were so, you were both blessed to work with each other and how blessed you were to be with him.

MH: And also, he was a great friend. But let me just continue with Arthur Hopkins and then we can move on. There were two major things that I got from Arthur Hopkins. One is the idea that nobody on a production has the right to do anything to call attention to himself. Everything should be for the play, and they should all be devoted to that and anything you do to call attention to yourself, to wave a flag or whatever, you’re taking away from the play and for the audience’s involvement. And so, he loved, I mean, one of the designers that he worked with was Robert Edmond Jones, and he loved Bobby Jones because he was so self-less. He never created a design that would say, “Oh, wow, that’s such a great…” “Isn’t Jones great?” You know, he said, “That’s the last thing that anybody should do is try to do something, to make them stand out, because want it to all be invisible. So that was a great, great lesson. And along the same lines, he would say, he would you know, he would never ask an Actor to move unless it was absolutely necessary for them to move. I mean he had a scene, maybe in WHAT PRICE GLORY?, I don’t know what, where they had four people playing cards. And you know, everybody said, “Oh, you got to create some movement here, you know, get them up...” He says, “It’s not necessary to move, they you shouldn’t move. You know, they’re playing cards. You know, if somebody needs to the go bathroom or this and that,” but nothing that was extraneous. Nothing that was just because you thought, you know, maybe it would be a good idea. It’s just, you know, “Only what’s necessary.” So, he was, I mean, I was so profoundly affected. He wrote two books, one, one is called “Reference Point,” and the other is “How’s Your Second Act?” And they were both published by Samuel French [Samuel French, Inc.], and I think initially I think I paid a dollar fifty or two dollars for the book. Well, recently and the price went up over a period time, but recently Samuel French sold their whole stock, they’re not carrying the book anymore, and I went in and I bought 18 of them, at the old price, $2.50. And now I give one to, every time I do a film, I give one to my lead Actors. [INT: That’s fabulous, yeah, I was already calculating like, I’m gonna go on eBay, find these books.]

INT: Well, that certainly, that’s amazing that like really an insight because, I mean, not only for you to share that with me, but also that when I think about your films and I think of what is so… it’s amazing how emotional it is when you don’t extraneous movement, and this includes a camera movement, you know. I wonder did you also take that in as far as moving the camera?

MH: Absolutely. In fact, I dislike… I mean, I’m getting to, you know, styles change and after a while you say, “Well, maybe that’s a good idea.” But generally, I dislike moving the camera, unless you’re moving it with an Actor. I don’t, if the camera moves by itself, it has a mind of its own, then you see the movement. And that’s one of those things, you know, it calls attention to itself. I like the camera moves to be invisible. [INT: I do too. And I think that that’s where we connect on such a big level.] Yeah, I must say that, you know, on occasion you know if I’m doing something farcical, which I did in some of the extra scenes that I did for some of Corman’s [Roger Corman] movies, where I was hired to expand the movies from 60 to 80 minutes, if it was absolute out-and-out farce, I might do a camera move for comic purposes like a quick zoom-in or something like that on somebody’s eyes, you know. Just because--there you want people to notice it because it’s, you know, it’s for a joke, but otherwise no. [INT: Right, exactly.]

INT: Well, after you left the theater--so you’ve got your mentors giving you this nurturing, and when did you… when did the stories start to come to you that you wanted to tell? How did all that, how did that process start to work? From the editing room into working with Actors on a set?

MH: I should say that, you know, after the editing room, it took at that time and maybe still does, you had to put in eight years in the Editors Guild [Motion Pictures Editors Guild] before you could edit. And it didn’t matter if you, you know, spent that time working as an Assistant Editor or whether you decided to go to the South Pacific and grow coconuts, you know, you just had to be in the guild for eight years. So, I got, I had a couple of jobs as an Assistant Editor, and I got kind of antsy, you know, and I wanted to edit. And so I took time off to start a theater company in Los Angeles, and I produced four films, two of which I directed, and I directed WAITING FOR GODOT, and THE GREAT GOD BROWN, the Eugene O’Neill play. And at the end of our first season, and Roger Corman, by the way was one of the investors in my theater company because I knew him because and my wife at the time had acted for him. And so, I knew Roger socially and I’d asked him and he gave me $1,000, you know, for my theater company. And at the end of the year, we got news that the theater had been sold and it was being torn down, and they were gonna build a movie theater. And so Roger, you know, we were having a drink or a dinner or something, and he says and I told him what was happening with the theater, and he said, “Well,” he said, “you should take that as a sign.” He said, “It’s time to get into the movies.” And so that’s when he gave me my first movie-directing job [BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE]. [INT: Wow. And at that point, Roger, was he at American International Pictures then or where was he?] I’m not sure; I’m trying to think. You know, he did a lot of pictures, a lot of the Poe [Edgar Allen Poe] pictures and stuff for AIP, but somewhere along the line he had several other distribution companies and I think the first picture that I made, and he may have still be working with AIP [American International Pictures], but he had his own company as well, and I think it was Santa Clara Productions. He picked, every picture had a different company name, because he would always get in trouble with the unions and so he would just form a new company, so he’d started, you know, a clean slate, start all over again. So, it was Santa Clara Productions at that time, and then he got the Filmgroup, which kind of like worked for a number of pictures. He didn’t have to change the name so often.

INT: Now how did you feel being on that the first day [BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE]? Or how did you feel through the whole process?

MH: Well, first of all it was about 10 below zero in Deadwood, South Dakota, Gene Corman was producing the picture, it was his first picture, it was my first picture, Roger [Roger Corman] was testing us both, and he was back in L.A., but getting hourly reports. Well, we get on the set, we’re at the top of the ski lift, and the camera’s frozen. It just won’t work at all. You know it was 10 below zero, and so they called Roger--Roger called at 10:00 in the morning and he said, “Well, how’s it going?” “We haven’t got a shot, you know, the camera won’t work.” He says, “I’m flying out there, you’re all fired,” you know. [LAUGHS] So, by noon we got the camera warmed up and we started to get--and this was a 13-day schedule. You lose a half a day on a 13-day schedule, it’s, you know, you’re really behind, you know? Anyway, it was, it was there wasn’t time to think. So I can’t say I was ever scared, but I kind of instinctually knew something without having been told, and that was because you know I had a lot of experience to people, Chuck Hannawalt was the grip and you know he was like, he went back to the year one. And people were making suggestions all the time. And it’s not that I wasn’t open to suggestion, but I knew that I had to kind of like say, “No, we’re gonna do it this way.” Just so that they realized, even if it’s wrong, just so they realized that, you know, you’re the boss. You know, you’re making the decisions. And then after a while they kind of, you know, they don’t quite try to push you around so much. [INT: Yeah, that’s really what it has to be isn’t it?] Yeah. [INT: Where you feel like, “No, this is it.” And then later you can take those suggestions, “Yeah, maybe that’s a good idea.”] Yeah. And it doesn’t really stop even after you’ve made a couple of pictures. I mean, I did BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE in Deadwood, and then I did a lot of these expansions of Corman movies for television. They needed to be 60 minutes as a co-feature for a double-bill, but they needed to be 80 minutes for TV. So, when he sold them to TV, he had to expand them and so I was Mr. Expansion.

INT: And after this period, then you’ve moved into a whole different--

MH: Well, what I started to say, you know, then I went to the Philippines and I did two pictures with Jack Nicholson. I had worked with Jack actually just after I did BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE. A friend of mine from my summer stock company was doing a picture for Corman [Roger Corman], he was a drama teacher, a high school teacher in Northern California, and Roger got the idea, “Well, we’ll get a bunch of, you know, his students and we’ll get a really cheap movie that way.” Well, it wound up that he finally hired Jack Nicholson and Georgianna Carter to star in the movie, but he wanted me to go up and be a kind of, you know, unnamed Associate Producer, just to make sure that it went all right. And so that’s how I became friends with Jack. And when we came back from that we wrote a script together, called EPITAPH, which was kind of autobiographical, mainly autobiographical about a young Actor, you know, like Jack, and the idea was to use a lot of you know footage from you know television and movies that he had made to fill in for the picture. And we had made a deal with Roger to give us the money for this script, and then we went off to the Philippines and made two pictures there, BACKDOOR TO HELL and FLIGHT TO FURY. And when we came back we met with Roger to try to set up the deal on EPITAPH and Roger, we were meeting at The Brown Derby on Vine Street, and just before Christmas, and Roger said, “You know, I’m really sorry, but I’ve changed my mind.” He said, “It’s too, too European.” It was a story of a guy who’s trying to raise money for an abortion for his girlfriend. And so Roger said, “I won’t back this picture, but if you want to do a western, I’ll back a western.” And by the time we’d finished lunch he said, “Okay, you might as well make two as long as while you’re at, you can do two as cheap as one.” And we’ll continue after the, he changes--