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Portrait of a director 2009-10-19 16:36:20 | Source I am curious about whether you felt you had any intellectual colleagues in '50s Hollywood. Certainly it wasn't like Germany in the '20s. Well, let us go back to after the warm. I was a university guy - 1/2 literary, 1/2 a painter. And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world. Now in theory, if there is no straight line in the universe, this has its effect on art. Art must consist of something bent, something curved. We had come back from the war, and we were really too old for the university. We had seen too much. The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy. At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political. In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is. We were trying to negate beauty, and negate that art which was a synonym for beauty. We were soaked with it. We were deeply steeped in Art. We were looking for something completely different. In Magnificent Obsession, Rock Hudson has a line: "As far as I'm concerned, Art is just a guy's name." Exactly! In Hollywood, the producers said, "Never say Art. Nobody wants to know about it." Arty is ok, but Art is for crazy painters, or sculptors, or what-do-I-know. Now after the war, we were looking for something completely different. Artaud's essay in The Theater and Its Double describes a completely new era for the theater. It explains simply, "No more masterpieces," for God's sake, no more Art. We are really not interested. Together with Marxism, this was to be something populistic - this is different from the American term populism. It would be something the average man could understand, but with something additional - style. There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art. As a theater man, I had to deal with high art. I would play farces and comedy to make money, and classics for the elite. But we were trying to escape the elitaire. So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less. This tied in with my studies of the Elizabethan period, where you had both l'art pour I'art and you had Shakespeare. He was a melodramatist, infusing all those silly melodramas with style, with signs and meanings. There is a tremendous similarity between this and the Hollywood system - which then I knew from only far away. Shakespeare had to be a commercial producer. Probably his company or his producer came to him and said, "Now, look, Bill, there's this crazy story - ghosts, murder, tearing the hair, what-do-I-know. Completely crazy. It's called Magnificent Ob . . . no, Hamlet it was called. The audiences love this story, Bill, and you have to rewrite it. You've got two weeks, and you've got to hold the costs down. They'll love it again." So, my God! A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do. But certainly, Shakespeare was even less free than we were. But let's go deeper into drama. How was it with the ancient Greeks? I have studied pieces of the Periclean period, and all of them are crazy situations. But there is a difference there. The role that style plays today was then taken by religion. Take Oedipus, for instance. The Freudians don't like this, but in reality Oedipus is a detective story, a mystery, nothing other than that. The mother thing, the complex, is bullshit, because he didn't know. He's not guilty, really. It's sheer melodrama, for the masses. Now I talked with Brecht about this, and I told him that it was religion that made such crazy melodrama possible for the ancient Greeks. That, of course, is not possible any more. He agreed. But he was at a complete dead end. L'art pour I'art offered nothing, so finally he escaped into Marxism. There is no doubt that this is what made it possible for him to continue. It was politics that made his art possible, as religion did for the Greeks. Now my idea of the melodrama he carried into the "drink and smoke theater," where there was nothing sacred. The idea was, Let's forget, for God's sake, the word Art. In this theater, there is really something going on. Beer is served; you meet a few whores. Of course, we were conjuring the Elizabethan theater. Slowly into my program in the theater I was sneaking in the melodrama - popular plays - and I discovered they were making lots of money. At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power. The intellectuals were all saying, "Give him a year. Give him two years. It will all blow over. He'll go away." I wanted to escape. But what did I know? I knew Law, and I knew theater. I didn't, of course, know American law, and in America the theater did not exist, except for Broadway. But America to us - especially to Brecht - was raw and rough. That was our idea of it - boxing, triviality, banality, killing, and the American melodrama, which was the American cinema. This goes for Stroheim, for Sternberg. All of it was melodrama; but in their hands, given a style. When Brecht was there he tried to sell his ideas as a literary man, which didn't work. Not in America. And for movies he had no feeling. He was not a visual character. He didn't see. In his movie scripts he didn't catch movie style or technique. It was only theater. Furthermore, he insisted on his Marxist way of thinking. Of course, McCarthyism finished any possibility of that. You use the term "we" in describing the early formulation of your aesthetic. In your talking about America I sense that you did feel, intellectually at least, alone. Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals. They carry their Freud or their Marx around in front of them on a platter, and say, "Hello, I'm so-and-so, have you heard of Karl Marx?" Yes, thank you. This kind of pseudo-intellect is worse than the man who lives by instinct. You can't talk to the American intellectual. But I was one of the few who stayed. Brecht, Mann, they all left. There is no tradition in the United States. In anything. It was different in New York, which was highly Europeanized. But California was a mixture of Mexicans, early settlers, people who had been in the Pacific during World War II or Korea. It was open. Your wife could go to the supermarket in her bathing suit. When we came, there was no industry at all. Just blue skies, no smog. Of course, after the war, the picture changed completely. But before, everything was movies. And you have no idea how this shaped your life. The movie stars were a strange aristocracy. If Lana Turner walked down the street to buy dark underwear, Hedda Hopper would tell all about it. It was so primitive, and at the same time it was so pleasant. We liked America in spite of everything. Europe was so old, so burdened with guilt complexes. California was a center for mass art. Europe to an artist after the war was not at all interesting. I had become a complete foreigner in Germany. And there, in Hollywood, was an industry for a new art. America, after Magnificent Obsession, was for me an opportunity. That is very interesting. You mean you welcomed the opportunity of Magnificent Obsession? Yes, for the first time, I began to realize here my ideal of melodrama. It was my first real opportunity. That film, and the melodramas that follow, are all attempts to formulate something. You were in America over ten years before you took that step. Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films. But your reputation in Germany was based on your success with melodrama. None of your pictures during the '40s seem to follow up on that. I wasn't so sure then. I didn't think I could continue to do the melodrama as I had done in Germany. I couldn't know how it would go over with audiences here. When I was able later to get free of Columbia, I took up that offer from Universal. Although I was hired to do comedy, strangely enough the first one I did was that submarine picture, Mystery Submarine. I got it, I suppose, because I had been in the Navy. It was alluring to shoot in a submarine, with hand cameras and so forth. But it was a miserable little story. Here the auteurship of the studio comes in. But I did want to do pictures about America. Not just appeal to American tastes. The French call it contes moraux - a series of episodes. Not so much moral tales, as tales about peoples' morality. The Lady Pays Off, for instance. I wanted there contrast to all those silly women you see in pictures. Now this predated women's lib. I wanted to draw a picture of a woman who is free to the extent that she wasn't even likeable. I wanted to contrast a masquerade world of gambling and unreality to a new woman's world. I wanted here to take a woman who is beautiful - a very luscious girl - who wanted to have her way, but not because she is beautiful. I used Linda Darnell because she was beautiful, not one of those ugly things that people look at and say, "Who'd want her?" She was wonderful to work with, putty in a director's hands. Unfortunately all this was tamed down by the studio - even before I started on the script. You mentioned the FBI questioning you about morality in No Room for the Groom. How do you see this picture in your plan for a series of contes moraux? I have just seen this film, and I am surprised that it still holds up. It still seems sharp to me. It never becomes doctrinaire. It never preaches values. It is always dissolving itself into funny situations. Now this picture was supposed to make something of Tony Curtis, but he complained to me that he was only a clown in it, just the butt of the jokes. "Oh no," I said, "Tony, you are the whole antithesis of the picture. You have to be dynamic. You have to fight against everything, the whole establishment. You are all the and values of the film." And he was really very good. My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life. Now I had something in mind, a definite design; but of course I had to grab the opportunities as they came. That is why sometimes I took on a lousy project - just to have the chance to work my plan. In this series, the furthest back in time in Take Me to Town. I haven't seen this film, but in my memory it lingers as a pleasant picture. It's delightful. Bob Smith said it's your most optimistic picture. It certainly is the most "open" of your films. The characters don't seem so completely trapped; the situation isn't hopeless. . . . Of course. This is early America, and therefore it is almost a fairy tale. The women of the establishment are the evil queens, and the hero, he is completely stalwart. A preacher! Now the Sheridan picture is a society that is still to an extent open. So there are just the slightest signs. It is all mellowed down, which of course, has to do with the period. 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