
Part one of the interview.
PSYCH-OUT and GETTING STRAIGHT dealt with the counterculture movement. How much a part of it were you personally at that time?
I was watching it up
close and I was very emotionally involved. I spent a little time at
the barricades, but my contribution to the counterculture movement
was really GETTING STRAIGHT.
Even in PSYCH-OUT you
can see that the movement is starting to change and become much
darker.
I think that's true,
yes. That was about pretty much the same movement – the hippie
movement, which matured into the movement against the War.
I actually spoke to him
this morning! He called me and I was delighted to hear from him. He
was great to work with. He turned out to be such a pliable, flexible
actor. He had a remarkable quality of being able to do no wrong. If
you asked him to change the character a shade for a particular scene,
he would do it brilliantly, and yet it would be every bit as
authentic and as correct as his original version of it. So I could
modify the character in any situation as much as I wanted to and he
would never change the quality of the work. He was brilliant to work
with.
GETTING STRAIGHT is
such an alive film, it's incredible.
It was screened about a
year ago at the Laemmle and it was amazing. It played absolutely in a
contemporary way and it didn't have a sense of having aged at all.
There was a lot of commentary in the audience about ''Why don't you
re-release it?''

It's difficult to say,
but offhand I'd say probably GETTING STRAIGHT. When I got the
location of the University with all the glass walls we had to suit
what was happening inside with what was happening outside, and it
opened up enormous opportunities. Also, I'd never shot a riot before
with tear gas and policemen beating up people. When I suddenly had
the equipment to do that, with the tear gas and the paddy wagons and
the helicopters, it became a different version of the movie than I
had originally pictured in my head as I had written it. That said,
though, the subtleties brought by the actors to THE STUNT MAN brought
enormous changes to the film that I hadn't anticipated. When you work
with someone like Peter O'Toole, for example, you're going to get
invention and style, and you're going to get additional meaning that
you might not have intended when you wrote the words.
What memories do you
have of working with a very young Harrison Ford on GETTING STRAIGHT?
Harrison Ford was a
handsome young, inexperienced actor that was sent to me by the Studio
Casting Department, who very well fit the part. So I cast him. I was
quite happy with the result. His character had a distinct attitude I
liked. And he was original.
I never met Bergman, to
my sorrow, because I know how strongly he influenced me. There is
something wonderfully illusional about Bergman films. He frequently
makes us work to distinguish truth from illusion. I feel we invent a
great deal of our own reality because we are unable to distinguish
what the hell is happening around us, i.e. THE STUNT MAN. Also he has
made it mandatory for me to stage processions.
Both GETTING STRAIGHT
and THE STUNT MAN make great use of the 'rack focus' you created. What
inspired you to develop it?
Somebody had given me
an 8mm camera with a 10 to 1 zoom lens. It was a birthday present. That
summer I was hanging around the poorl playing with the camera when I
realized that with the 10 to 1 zoom lens you could create poetic effects
and transitions that seemed to mix near, far, past, future. With the
long end of the lens you could de-focus an object, like a flower in a
tree, and switch your focus to an object that was a different distance
away. The first object would disappear and the second object would
suddenly appear, and it made the relationships between the two objects
much closer. I then found out that you could do the same with faces as
well, and that same evolution seemed to exist,
a relationship between the faces, the objects, time and place that was
strangely intimate, much more so than a cut or a dissolve. I came up
with the term 'rack focus'.
I went to Laszlo and
showed him my tests and said ''Do you think wecould do this on 35mm?''
He said we should do some tets before we do our next film, and they
turned out well, so we tried using it on SAVAGE SEVEN (1968). We developed
it a bit more on PSYCH-OUT, and then I went full-blown with it as a
camera style on GETTING STRAIGHT, whereI began blocking the actors and
the camera at the same time. I developed a technique I called 'critical
focus'. For example, I would start on a close-up of a face, which might
be thirty yards away but because of the long lens appeared as a close up.
As the character walked towards the camera I would keep him in focus and
keep the head size the same so it seemed like the world around him was
getting bigger, until he got to right in front ouf the camera and then
that became the establishing shot. With a close-up, you'd see all of his
surroundings. Someone would walk
up behind him, and then it would become an over the shoulder shot. In the
meantime we handled focus changes invisibly so the shot remained true to
what it was at the time. One thing would develop into another. It was a
very interesting way of shooting for me and I have used it as my process
ever since.
It definitely has a
psychological effect on the viewer.
Yes, I think so. I
think it sucks them in.
Many zoom shots, no
matter how brilliant they may be, call attention to themselves and
remind the audience they are watching a movie. Yours make the
audience lose themselves in the story and in the moment unravelling
onscreen.
I would agree! It
strangely enhances things and key moments.
It was perfect for THE
STUNT MAN, where you were dealing with paranoia. Would you also say
you have a psychedelic way of looking at the world?
For me it's not
psychedelic, it's pure reality! I think I might have a goofier way of
looking at the world than other people, but recent events have proved
dangerously close to the way we used to look satirically at the
world. I saw the new movie MARK FELT (2017) the other day. Liam Neeson plays Mark
Felt, who was the real Deep Throat who helped bring down Nixon. I bet
when they made the film they had no idea it would be such a relevant
film for right now. Every scene and every shot seems like something
out of the Trump world we are living in.
Part three of the interview.
Rush's THE STUNT MAN site.
Interview by Paul Rowlands. Copyright © Paul Rowlands, 2017. All rights reserved.
Part three of the interview.
Rush's THE STUNT MAN site.
Interview by Paul Rowlands. Copyright © Paul Rowlands, 2017. All rights reserved.
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