The Importance of a Singular, Guiding Vision: An Interview with Arthur Penn (Web Exclusive)

Arthur Penn (photo by Judy Janda)

Providing a succinct summary of Arthur Penn’s career is not easy, since his films are not Hollywood escapist fare but, conversely, are certainly not examples of rarefied avant-garde cinema. Penn’s films often blend frequently unsettling violence with contemplative sequences; stark aggression coexists with cerebral anguish. Nonetheless, when reviewing Penn’s work, particular moments of visceral power tend to overshadow the calmer, introspective interludes. It is difficult to forget, even after many years have elapsed, the raw immediacy of Billy the Kid shooting a bystander out of his boots; a well-meaning sheriff’s bloody assault by racist yahoos; the brutal lyricism of Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-riddled bodies; or a psychotic father’s murder of his newlywed daughter. These cathartic moments, culled from both the early and late phases of Penn’s career, point to this director’s determination to undermine his audience’s complacency in a manner that is simultaneously shocking and thought-provoking.

 Unlike contemporary film school brats, Arthur Penn’s apprenticeship began in the early days of broadcast television. Most memorably, he directed plays commissioned by Playhouse 90 and Philco Playhouse, two of the most oft-cited representatives of the medium’s so-called “Golden Age.” He subsequently achieved great success on Broadway, where he directed such distinguished productions as William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker and Two for the Seesaw, Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic, and An Evening with Nichols and May. There are vital links between Penn’s work in television and theater, and his film career. His experiences as the floor manager at NBC’s Colgate Comedy Hour influenced his jaundiced view of stand-up comedy that can be detected in Mickey One (1964), while something akin to Nichols and May’s astringent satirical verve is evident in the darker humor of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Little Big Man (1970).

 At a time when flashy but empty blockbusters receive an inordinate amount of attention, Arthur Penn’s career is more exemplary than ever. Penn’s films are not hermetic intellectual exercises, but, like the best popular art, they do not pander to their audience’s worst instincts. An entire generation of filmmakers has reaped the benefits of Penn’s discovery that American films could transcend the limitations of the time-honored genres, while refusing to slavishly imitate foreign models. Arthur Penn was interviewed at his New York apartment in the summer of 1993 by Cineaste editors Gary Crowdus and Richard Porton.

Cineaste: You had been working in TV for several years when you directed your first film, The Left‑Handed Gun, in 1957. How did that come about?

Arthur Penn: Fred Coe, the producer, asked me to direct it after he’d asked a couple of other people—Delbert Mann, I think, couldn’t do it—and I said yes. Gore Vidal had originally written it as a one‑hour Philco Playhouse directed by Bob Mulligan. It was a very nice interior...

Cineaste: It’s like a chamber play.

Penn: It is, it’s very small, but Leslie Stevens and I completely rewrote it.

Cineaste: You made it into a Western.

Penn: In point of fact. We introduced all the stuff that is sort of original in the film, like the Hurd Hatfield character. We took that figure historically from what was called ‘yellow journalism’—you know, those little yellow books written by dime novelists which turned people like Billy the Kid into legends. We just started to play with that idea and then figured he would be a terrific character.

Cineaste: The treatment of violence is quite distinctive for a Western of that period. When one of Billy’s buddies gets shot, he cries out, “I can feel my blood!” And there’s a remarkable scene where one of the deputies is literally blasted out of his boots. Was that your contribution?

Penn: Sure, that’s my stuff, including the slow motion and fast motion of that shooting. It’s done very quickly. Billy says, “Hey, Ollinger,” and the deputy turns in slightly slow motion, and then, boom, he hits the ground in slightly fast motion. I was just playing with the medium. It was such a thrill to have a medium you could do that with because that was not possible in live TV at all. We didn’t even have tape yet—just as I left Playhouse 90 they were getting tape—so we had to do everything live and didn’t have a medium beyond the electronic image to work with. But the film’s dialog was Leslie Stevens’s.

Cineaste: Since it was your first film, you didn’t have editorial control.

Penn: I didn’t have anything. After I finished shooting it, I never heard ‘boo’ from Warner Bros. I never saw a cut, nothing, and then the film was released. The first I saw of it was when I went with my brother and sister‑in‑law to see it on a double‑bill. It was amazing, a very strange experience.

Cineaste: How would your version have differed?

Penn: Oh, not a great deal.

Cineaste: Is it a question of different emphases here and there?

 

Paul Newman as Billy the Kid in The Left-Handed Gun

Penn: And rhythms, because, having come from live TV, I didn’t understand the excesses of filming as they were practiced by the more knowledgeable directors, so l shot very little film. We did the film in twenty‑three days, so l didn’t cover anything that was extraneous. I could have wished for better rhythms in certain scenes and sometimes a more antic spirit—for example, when Billy and his two pals have that flour fight. There are a couple of other scenes likewise intended to be a little more antic to suggest a young guy, a kid, and those are done a little ponderously.

Cineaste: You also said that Warner Bros. botched the ending?

Penn: Yes, that’s a terrible ending. It’s flat and absolutely deadly. It’s that line of, “Well, we can go home now,” the classic phrase used in a million films. Well, what’s so great about going home?! Besides, Pat Garrett is not the principal character.

Cineaste: What was your preferred ending?

Penn: It was to be a ritualistic ending. Small groups of black‑clad women, mostly, slowly assembling into a candlelit cortege. It was meant to seem both haphazard and deeply formal. We started to shoot it but never got there. The studio stopped us and told us to wrap the picture right there. The scene with Pat Garrett became the ending.

Cineaste: Why do you think the French critics were more receptive to the film? Were they paying more serious attention to genre films?

Penn: I think they were paying serious attention to the dark American films, the unusual ones. The problem with American film companies is that if a film doesn’t click immediately, they just throw it away, and that’s what happened with this one. It got a bad review in The New York Times and, bing, it was gone.

Cineaste: You’ve said about The Miracle Worker that you were disappointed in your failure to fully adapt the stage play for the cinema. How would you have made it more cinematic?

Penn: I think there should have been an almost silent film eloquence about the impact of Helen’s affliction on the family so that we wouldn’t have to have Captain Keller enunciate, “Two weeks, Miss Sullivan, two weeks, then the child comes back to us!” Those are lines that had to be said on the stage but that I didn’t need on the screen. As a result of my lack of belief in the cinema at that time, I took the expository material from the stage, like that artificial time limitation, and kept it in. I think I would have had the same physical actions, only done with a more searching camera than one that was relying on the dialog as well as the image. But there are parts of that film that I’m very proud of. The opening credits sequence, for example, probably more than anything else, illustrates what I mean—the danger to a child like that of a Christmas tree ball or of laundry hanging on a clothesline—because she had to be watched all the time.

Cineaste: Most of the action is anchored in this house, which becomes very ominous.

Penn: Yes, exactly. Years afterward, when I had my own children, I thought, gee, how that house must have resonated with the silence of that child, just moving as a presence, and people not being able to talk about her, even to each other, but just having to watch, with the child as the focus of all the behavior of the family. But we wouldn’t need the words. We needed the words on the stage because there

was no way to suggest how adversarial her malady was, beyond the fact that it was a demonstrated one. But you could do it in the cinema and you could do it very well. The big fight scene at the table, for instance, is a wonderful scene. It’s a good piece of cinema because there was no dialog and no need for it.

Cineaste: Much of that scene was shot hand‑held, wasn’t it?

Penn: Yes.

Cineaste: And the shots are held for a fairly long time.

 

Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke fight it out as Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker

Penn: Yes, because I didn’t see the need to cut until certain events needed to be punctuated or you needed another view on them. I thought the film should really resemble those early silent two‑ or three‑reelers where they just kept the camera grinding. Those films were usually comedies, but there’s also a basic humor underlying this scene which is really a little battle. You know, “You do that, I’ll do this. You do this, I’ll do that.” It was sort of a mano a mano, in that regard.

Cineaste: How did you achieve the visual effect used for Annie Sullivan’s flashbacks?

Penn: It’s quite technical, and I won’t remember exactly, but we took the camera eyepiece and blocked out everything but a little square of the frame in the center with the intention that we would then optically blow that up to be the full frame. We did tests first to find the right ratio—I think it was something like fourteen times—and then we made that piece out of metal and put it into the camera. When we blew up that portion to fill the frame, it got very grainy and began to break down to the point where the emulsion could just hold an image. We wanted to get to that point where the image almost disappears to be the equivalent of Annie’s inability to see. She was virtually blind herself, you know, so that was all she ever saw of the world. She had many eye operations before she was ever able to go to Alabama.

Cineaste: The lighting, especially in the interiors, often seems quite theatrical, with pools of light amidst surrounding darkness. Is that a carryover from the stage presentation?

Penn: No [laughs], but that’s a wonderful story. Ernie Caparros, the cinematographer, had never seen the play. He was a debonair fellow, a rather cynical Cuban, but a good cinematographer. When we began shooting, the film didn’t seem to him to mean much of anything. About three weeks or so into the schedule, we shot the scene at the pump, the big defining scene, and Caparros saw the emotional power for the first time and he saw the effect of it on the crew. I mean, there were grown men standing there weeping. Suddenly, he got the idea—Academy Award!—and from that moment on it was, “Oh, I have to light the chadows.”

Cineaste: Chadows?

Penn: Shadows.

Cineaste: Rembrandt lighting.

Penn: Exactly, we’re talking chiaroscuro, and I’m saying, “Come on, Ernie. Let’s go, Ernie, we’ve got to finish this movie,” and he’s saying, “No, no, I must light the chadows.”

Cineaste: The sets seemed to be very sparsely decorated.

Penn: They were sparse at my request. I told George Jenkins, our art director, let’s have no pictures on the wall. Let’s have it be a sightless house in that respect, so that we don’t ever see a picture or part of a picture at the edge of the frame. At first, he said, “Well, I don’t know,” but then he got the feel of it and leapt into it wholeheartedly. But it was a very strong intention about the film, to somehow convey the idea of a house that had lost its faith in sight and sound.

Cineaste: What’s the story behind the casting of Patty Duke in that part?

Penn: We auditioned a lot of kids for the Broadway play, maybe a hundred or more. I’d say to them, “Show me how you’d walk if you were blind. OK, now show me how you’d do that if you were blind and couldn’t hear.” Well, they were all good, interesting kids, and then in came this little child and something just came out of her that was absolutely palpable, we all felt it. I had seen her in The Goddess, Paddy Chayefsky’s film that Del Mann directed with Kim Stanley. She played a little part in it, but she was wonderful.

Cineaste: Whatever your dissatisfaction with The Miracle Worker—and I think that’s really a testament to your ambitions as a filmmaker—it is nevertheless an incredibly powerful piece of work and is also valuable for preserving your Broadway stage presentation.

Penn: I have no regrets about it beyond the fact that I wasn’t so mature in terms of my ideas about cinema then. It was only my second film and I was just putting my toe in the water, cinematically speaking, because I wasn’t yet ready to plunge.

Cineaste: You seem to have taken that plunge in Mickey One.

Penn: Yeah, I was really doing the stuff that I hadn’t done yet in The Miracle Worker. I was testing the medium, trying to see how metaphoric it could be, how nonlinear, what the poetic implications of the medium were, so it’s pompous in many respects.

Cineaste: You’ve said the film was intended to deal on a metaphorical level with the national atmosphere generated by McCarthyism.

Penn: There are aspects of our government that I’ve always found offensive, but I think they came to a head during the McCarthy period. Looking at the new Anthony Summers biography of Hoover, what you see is that it was a government by a kind of terror, and that endured for so long and culminated in a period dominated by McCarthy, a complete alcoholic with a staff made up of certainly questionable people.

To define this very quickly, Alger Hiss is one of my closest friends. To have arrayed against a man of such dignity, clarity, and intellectual perception such a volume of scoundrels was not just a horrible experience in and of itself for Alger, but also a paradigm of a kind of bloodthirst that had taken over in American politics. It probably was always there but the means were not always as potent. You didn’t have television, you didn’t have those leaks to the media that McCarthy or Nixon used. I think the Hiss case is the real paradigm of the modern era of politics.

Now, I didn’t think anybody was going to get all of that stuff about the McCarthy period, but I felt there had to be a kind of moving away from this fearful state of mind we were in. I was hoping that the country could get out of that McCarthy period and out of the Cold War paranoia I thought was absolutely gripping us. I was wrong, of course, because we never did get out of it. But in simple‑minded terms, the film was about saying ‘yes’ instead of saying ‘no.’

Cineaste: Were you aiming at an art-house audience?

Penn: Oh yes, it was clearly an American New Wave film. I knew that it was going to be extremely limited. It was more limited than I could have imagined because Columbia just hated it. I had a deal with them to make two films for no more than a million dollars each, and I would get paid a minimal amount. Mickey One was supposed to be the first of the two, only they never wanted the second one.

Cineaste: Were there any particular film models or artistic theories behind the film? What was the genesis of it?

Penn: The genesis of it was a play by Alan Surgal, who also wrote the screenplay. It’s sort of an act from a play of his about a comedian who’s in trouble with the mob. Once we’d decided to make a film of it, we began to add things. This was just the time when Jean Tinguel had that machine at the Museum of Modern Art that destroyed itself. I thought that was such a funny kind of model for our time, because this was also post‑atomic bomb, so those were the things informing me.

Cineaste: Critics have often mentioned the European film influences in your work and, in this regard, Mickey One seems particularly relevant as a film that seems to bear the influence of the New Wave.

 

Warren Beatty as Mickey 

Penn: Yeah, it does, but I’ve always held the sort of personal contention that the New Wave very clearly floated in both directions. I don’t think enough has been written—in American criticism, at least—about the postwar influence of American filmmakers, especially what the French called films noirs, films by Walsh and others that revealed a dark side of America. I think those currents flowed in both directions. So, yes, I was influenced by the New Wave, but I was also trying to do something essentially American in Mickey One, and whatever the influence of the New Wave was, it was an American voice.

Cineaste: You’ve said that the basic problem with the film is that there was too much symbolism and not enough story, that the film failed to engage the audience in a way that would enable it to even consider the larger implications.

Penn: Yes, I wish I had done more narrative stuff. Beatty kept saying to me, “Too fucking obscure.”

Cineaste: After the experimental effort with Mickey One, you went to your first big studio production with The Chase, produced by Sam Spiegel. Would you comment on the script problems? Reportedly Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of the original Horton Foote play was then reworked by Foote as well as by Michael Wilson.

Penn: It was mostly Foote and Hellman. Michael Wilson did something, although I didn’t know it. Wilson was one of the guys Spiegel had working on it, and he had another screenwriter, Ivan Moffat, working on another version of the script. It was really a dog’s breakfast. Hellman heard about this, got very angry, and didn’t really finish the script. Foote was then brought in to finish it up and add more colorful dialog, which he would know, and which Hellman protested that she knew, having grown up in New Orleans. But she didn’t know about chopping cotton or working out in the fields. She came from a different background. But she had the great Hellman hard edge, no sentiment, and some of the scenes in there are pure Hellman. Most of them, however, are written by various hands. I mean, I would get sent dialog on the morning of the shoot.

I suspect that the script would often be tampered with by Sam Spiegel, too, because every once in a while I would get some pages sent down that had some of the worst dialog you’ve ever read in your life. Sam was a smart and cultured man, I don’t mean to suggest that he wasn’t, but he had no skills as a writer. He had all these different sensibilities working on the script, so l think he put things together that, stylistically and in terms of diction, were just terrible choices.

Cineaste: You also had problems with him in terms of not being able to oversee the editing of the film.

Penn: Yes. I had a prior commitment to direct Wait Until Dark on Broadway, so we had an agreement to cut in New York so that I could be doing the play but still see the film. But at the end of the shoot, he called me up and said [Penn does a Spiegel impersonation], “Where do you want to edit this, dahling? In London or in Hollywood?” I said, “Sam!,” and, boom, he was off to London. When I finally finished the play—which, mercifully, was a hit, because if it hadn’t been, I would have been suicidal in addition to being so angry—I went to London and they had already finished eight reels, scored and everything, and it was not a good cut. They left out some of the best material, including some of Brando’s unique improvisations. Except for Spiegel’s sense of authorship, I can’t imagine why they would leave those out because they were extraordinary.

Cineaste: Do you think he behaved that way because he knew he was dealing with a director who was still somewhat new to big time Hollywood studio production?

Penn: Absolutely.

Cineaste: He would never have tried to pull that with David Lean.

Penn: No, Lean had just kicked Sam’s ass all over the place. I think what happened here—something I had no real knowledge of or was just plain dumb about—was what this whole event meant to Sam Spiegel, which was to return in triumph to Hollywood where he had been a figure of contempt. He had been S. P. Eagle and now he was back as Sam Spiegel, the producer of Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, a member of the Board of Directors of Columbia Pictures, and a vastly wealthy man. He came back like a king returned to his throne, and he was going to rub Hollywood’s nose in it. And included in that were abuses of power and broken promises to me that were really unseemly.

Cineaste: Despite all the difficulties you’ve described, the film nevertheless succeeds in making some rather strong statements about racism, about gun culture, class relations, and religious zealotry, problems that are not confined to Texas or the South.

Penn: Certainly today’s perspective on the film is more generous and enables one to see better things in it. At the time I think the critics, and the New York crowd in particular, were disappointed that it was not as radical as they could have wished. They really wanted us to bash that whole scene.

Cineaste: Maybe they were surprised that the sheriff is a relatively liberal character. He’s not Bull Connor.

Penn: Yes, exactly.

Cineaste: He’s the one sane man in the film. Some of his lines are great, such as, “These people are nuts, just nuts.” Or, when he has to arrest and jail a black man to protect him from a white mob, he says, “Those people should have been home reading a book.”

Penn: Quite a few of those lines are Brando’s improvisations.

Cineaste: His beating by the vigilantes is quite vicious.

Penn: Yeah, that was Marlon’s idea. He said, “You know, I think the beating should be really savage.” And I said, “Yeah, but how are we going to do it so savagely.” So he showed me how to do it, which was to film it with slow-motion acting and speeded‑up camera. It doesn’t show, it was just a few frames faster, but it was astonishing.

Cineaste: On the other hand, I’ve read that he didn’t feel he should beat up Bubber Reeves’s assassin in the final scene.

 

Marlon Brando as Sheriff Calder brings in Robert Redford as Bubber Reeves in The Chase

Penn: No, he didn’t want to do that. But I said, “Marlon, we’ve got to have some purgation here. We can’t digest all these events and then just have you drive away from them. Let us as an audience have some release.” He didn’t protest it, he just said, “You know, it doesn’t seem to me the best choice.” And I said, “You’re right, it’s probably not the best choice.”

Cineaste: Did he have an alternative?

Penn: No, the alternative was to do nothing, to just drive away and leave that in everybody’s craw. He didn’t take a lot of persuading. He’s a wonderful, much maligned guy, so willing to try new stuff—anything but the way he’s been characterized. My two experiences with him were both just terrific.

Cineaste: Would you have preferred to have shot the film on location?

Penn: Sure, I think it would have had a texture of authenticity that we didn’t have. I could feel all the time that it was a stage. It had that backlot feel. It lost the immediacy that on-location specificity would have given it, so it became almost a parable. I have no great pleasure in the film, and I’ve said so on a few occasions, but I don’t mean about the film itself, the story idea, or the work of the actors. It’s just all of these other aspects of the film that I wish I had made as compared to the film that is there. And the film I wish I had made would have been much tougher, grittier, with stronger racial problems, certainly stronger racial forces, and a lot sexier, too. Some things of that sort were shot, longer and more meaningful scenes, but they weren’t chosen for the final cut.

Cineaste: Bonnie and Clyde was an enormously popular film but also an enormously controversial film. How do you account for the absolutely vociferous critical response, at least from some critics, which condemned the film? Were you disappointed that your artistic intentions were so misunderstood?

Penn: No, I was delighted because they were misunderstood by people who should have misunderstood, like Bosley Crowther, an old wave New York Times critic who at that time was on a crusade against violence in films in general. When he saw Bonnie and Clyde at the Montreal Film Festival, where it was first shown, he is alleged to have said to somebody that he was going to blow that film out of the water. Which he did, in his review, but it was the best advertising we could have had because people wrote scores of letters to The New York Times, which published them. Then Crowther wrote another attack, a Sunday piece, and more letters poured in, and Crowther responded again, and the more he frothed at the mouth, the more it enlisted support for the film.

It was not a film about violence, it was a metaphorical film. Violence had so little to do with it that it didn’t even occur to me, particularly, that it was a violent film. Not given the times in which we were living, because every night on the news we saw kids in Vietnam being airlifted out in body bags, with blood all over the place. Why, suddenly, the cinema had to be immaculate, I’ll never know. Crowther had philosophically painted himself into a corner by arguing that art, and particularly the cinema, has a social responsibility for setting certain mores and standards of behavior, which is a terrible argument, it just collapses in ten seconds. He was in that corner and couldn’t get out of it and it cost him his job.

Cineaste: Were you surprised by the popular appeal of the film?

Penn: That film was a great surprise to everybody. The guy at Warner Bros. who was in charge of distribution said, on seeing the film, “This is a piece of shit.” Literally, that’s a quote. Warren said, “All right, give me forty‑eight hours, and I’ll buy it back from you.” They wouldn’t sell it, but Warren was prepared to go out and raise the $2.5 or $2.7 million or whatever it was, and he would have been able to do it. He had that much clout. I wish he would have so that we’d have been able to open that film.

What Warner Bros. did with that film is terrible. You know, distributors make exhibition deals on every film, like it has to be in a theater for so many weeks or you can’t book it. But they let theaters have it for a half week, while The Graduate, which came out at the same time, had a five-week minimum. Well, if we’d have had that, we would have gone through the roof. We’d be conducting this interview in a much more palatial apartment.

Cineaste: How do you account for the film’s enormous popularity, especially with young people?

Penn: I think it caught the spirit of the times and the true radical nature of the kids. It plugged into them, it just touched all the nerves, because here were these two who, instead of knuckling under to the system, resisted it. Yes, they killed some people, but they got killed in the end, so they were heroic and martyred in that respect. I must say, in our defense, we knew a little bit of what we were doing, because the studio asked us if we wanted to do it in black and white, and Warren and I said, “Absolutely not. It’s gotta be a film about now. This is not a re‑creation of Bonnie and Clyde, they were a couple of thugs. We’re talking about two kind of paradigmatic figures for our times.”

Cineaste: So historical accuracy was never really a concern of yours?

Penn: Never tried, never came near. Of course, they weren’t like that. We were flagrantly inaccurate and said, right off the bat, this is metaphoric.

Cineaste: So when critics wrote that the film romanticized Bonnie and Clyde, that’s exactly what you were trying to do.

Penn: Exactly. Far from trying to do anything accurate.

Cineaste: And yet the film is not without social commentary on the period. The screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman, who have readily acknowledged you as the true auteur of the film, commented that they were more concerned with the mythology and that you were more concerned with social context and commentary.

Penn's Bonnie and Clyde were meant to be romanticized versions of the actual bankrobbers   

Penn: What caught my fancy about the script was what I remembered as a child from the Depression, which was people in New York neighborhoods being kicked out of their homes. When I was doing research by reading newspapers from the period, what struck me was the enormity of the banks’ naiveté in holding these mortgages and then foreclosing on farm after farm after farm. It was stupidity of a monumental, punitive nature. They created a nation of displaced people who essentially began heading to California.

These kind of bucolic figures like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde were called bank robbers by the FBI in order to aggrandize the agency when they tried to capture them. But they were really just bumpkins, who said, “The banks are foreclosing on the farms, so let’s go knock off the banks.” It’s a very simple, retaliatory response, and on a small scale.

Cineaste: So the sequence with the dispossessed farmer was your contribution.

Penn: Yeah, that was a scene I built.

Cineaste: Robert Towne received a credit as “Special Consultant.” What was that for?

Penn: He wrote certain little scenes in the film as well as some additional dialog, but very telling dialog. In the family reunion scene, for example, when they go back to visit Bonnie’s mother, that scene was in the original script, but it didn’t include Clyde’s explanation to Bonnie’s mother about how as soon as everything blew over he and Bonnie were going to settle down and live right down the road from her. And she says, “You do that and you won’t live long.” That’s Towne. He made some very salient contributions.

Cineaste: There is much made in the film of the media blowing the Barrow Gang’s exploits out of all proportion. Hoover was in office then...

Penn: Yes, but the FBI had not really been granted a national status, they were not able to go beyond state lines, and very few crimes were called national crimes. I think the Lindbergh kidnapping was one of them, so they began to call almost anything kidnapping and that gave them jurisdiction. It was an effort on Hoover’s part to build a national police force. But in this case, it was the local sheriff, Sheriff Hamer, who eventually did track them down to Louisiana—that part of it is accurate—and did blow them away. They fired something in excess of a thousand rounds of ammunition at them. It’s amazing, the pent up rage must have been enormous.

Cineaste: It’s a remarkable scene in the film, and even in film history. How was it conceived?

Penn: I had a kind of epiphany on this film where I saw the ending, literally frame by frame, before I even came near shooting it. In the earliest days, when Benton and Newman and I got together to discuss the script, I suddenly saw how that scene should look. I thought we had to launch into legend, we had to end the film with a kind of pole vault, you know, some kind of great leap into the future, as if to say, “They’re not Bonnie and Clyde, they’re two people who had a response to a social condition that was intolerable.” So I thought, gee, the best way to do that is to be somewhat balletic, and, having seen enough Kurosawa by that point, I knew how to do it.

What I did do, which I think had not yet been done, was to vary the speeds of the slow motion so that I could get both the spastic and the balletic qualities at the same time. Technically, it was an enormous problem because we had to gang four cameras together, shooting simultaneously from the same vantage point. The cameras were literally joined side by side on a stand. The problem, because of the very fast speeds needed for the slowest slow motion, was that we were using up gigantic magazines and we didn’t even have time to say ‘action’ because the film would go through the camera so fast. So we said, “OK, when Warren squeezes the pear, that’s our cue, and everything goes.”

Cineaste: How were the bullet hits applied?

Penn: There were bundles of wires going up their legs and a special effects guy would trip them by making electrical contact with nails sticking up in a row connected to a battery. Meanwhile, as the bullets are going, someone else was pulling an invisible nylon line that took off a piece of Warren’s head, they were both going through contortions with their bodies, and all of this filmed in various slow motion speeds in four cameras.

Cineaste: How long did that scene take to shoot?

Penn: It took three or four days. We would get one take in the morning and one take in the afternoon, because it took that long to prepare. It was one of those insane moments where, as a director, you’re saying to yourself, “I see it this way, I see it no other way, so I’m not going to economize,” and, meanwhile, you can see people whispering on the set, “This guy is nuts. What the fuck is he doing?”

I just had this vision. I knew what it would look like and, when I got into the editing room, it turned out to be a true one. Dede Allen edited the film but Jerry Greenberg, one of her assistants, edited that scene, and he was just shaking his head. I came in and I said, “Here’s how it goes—this shot, to this shot, then to that shot.” It was as if I was reading it out of some other perception. I knew exactly what it would look like.

 

Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde's bloody finale

Cineaste: The various scenes of violence in the film escalate progressively in a very clear dramatic purpose. How would you describe your esthetic strategy?

Penn: The best example I can give, quoting from the film itself, is the sequence where Bonnie and Clyde, with C. W. Moss driving the car for the first time, go to rob a bank. They say “Wait here,” and go into the bank, and C. W. proceeds to park the car. Now, everybody in the audience is titillated by that, and is meant to be. Then the bank alarm goes off, and out come Bonnie and Clyde who are asking, “Where’s the car?” It’s wedged in between two cars, of course, because C. W. has parked it beautifully. So, into the car they go and scream, “Get out of here!,” and this enormous comic tension is built up. We’ve got you laughing and laughing, and C. W. finally gets the car moving and, at that point, the guy comes out of the bank and jumps on the running board. Clyde, in a paroxysm of fear, turns and fires, and that first killing is the one that knocks you right out of the chair, because it’s a guy getting it right in the face. The intention was to disarm the audience to that point where, bam!, the shooting occurs, and then comes the scene in the movie theater where Clyde is hitting C. W. and saying, “You dummy,” because he’s expressing his own remorse and panic about having killed somebody.

Cineaste: In that scene Bonnie seems relatively unaffected.

Penn: She doesn’t mind. In our choice of what we were doing, Bonnie had a more romantic view of danger. Once she’d made the determination, from the very first scene, that she was going to go downstairs and join up with this guy, she was on the qui vive.

Cineaste: Is that why you begin the film with her point of view?

Penn: Yes, it begins with a big close‑up of her lips, her hungry lips. I’m sorry it sounds so corny, but that’s what it is—a hunger for something more than her present existence.

Cineaste: Was the film’s visual style influenced by the work of Walker Evans?

Penn: Yeah, we used a lot of his photographs in the titles. The man who did them, Wayne Fitzgerald, kept saying, “God, there’s something not right here. I’m going to take the credits home tonight and I’ll bring them back tomorrow.” What he put in was the sound of that box camera click and suddenly it evoked the memory we all had from our childhoods of that clicking noise of the Kodak camera shutter, and it just made the titles come alive.

Cineaste: While Alice’s Restaurant is very sympathetic to the counterculture of the period, it also seems to have no illusions about some of its more utopian notions. You’ve said that the film is not so much about the younger generation as it is about your own generation. Was that because of the focus on Ray and Alice?

Penn: Well, a little bit, but it’s also about my own experience. I went to Black Mountain College which was a very experimental college, very countercultural, and it endured only fifteen years. I had such an association with that marvelous educational place. We lived in a small community in North Carolina, we cooked our own food, grew a good portion of it, and a lot of wonderful people dropped in, like Willem de Kooning and Merce Cunningham and John Cage. I mean, you’d look up and there’d be someone like Bucky Fuller, people of enormous intellectual or artistic magnitude.

It was a very attractive place but at the same time it had the seeds of its own destruction within it. It couldn’t last because it was a dream as much as Alice’s Restaurant was a dream. So I wasn’t passing judgment, I was simply saying, “I admire you kids for having defied the draft, I admire you for all the things you’ve done, for living your own kind of style, but at the same time I have no illusions that this is going to endure.”

In fact, that last image of Alice on the church steps is intended to freeze time, to say that this paradise doesn’t exist any more, it can only endure in memory. It’s a very long dolly back and yet we seem to go nowhere because we’re zooming in at the same time. It took us days to make that shot. Technically it sounds right to say let’s dolly back and zoom in, but we found that if you don’t pass objects you have no sense of tracking back. So we had to cut tree stumps and slide them into the frame at just the right place so that, as we were dollying back, we were revealing the tree stumps but, at the same time, the image was not getting any larger.

Cineaste: The film paints a somewhat critical portrait of Ray and a somewhat more sympathetic portrait of Alice. Was this based on your knowledge of the actual people or more a reflection of the dramatic needs of the piece?

Penn: No, I think it was accurate. I knew them both pretty well, they were right down the street. Ray was a dreamspinner but he was also a bullshit artist of magnitude. And Alice was a very warm, welcoming woman, a kind of idealized mother image. Not only did she cook but I’m told she also  did make love with some of those young guys—I mean, you can’t beat that for warmth.

Cineaste: Was the character of Shelly, who dies of a drug overdose, a way to avoid the charge of romanticizing the drug culture?

Penn: No, unfortunately, although it’s not on Arlo’s record, that did occur. There was an even more ironic, terrible part to it. Shortly after his death, the wife of the guy on whom we based that character went to the beauty parlor, had her hair and a full make‑up done, went home and killed herself. They were both young, in their twenties.

Cineaste: There were really two distinct oppositional strains in American politics during the Sixties and people would define themselves as being part of one camp or the other, either the counterculture—the hippies, Yippies, or flower people—or the New Left, including SDS and other political groupings. Alice’s Restaurant is interesting in that regard because even though it’s about the counterculture, the Old Left element, with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and so forth, is represented.

Penn: As you say, it is a strain in the American culture that needs to be followed. Woody was a major figure in my life as a young lefty—you know, another Solidarity guy. And Marjorie Guthrie, an ex‑modern dancer who married Woody, was around during the making of the film.

Cineaste: How do you see the film in retrospect today?

 

Arlo Guthrie gets inspected in Alice's Restaurant

Penn: I don’t think of it as a particularly weighty film but I think it’s probably the best film made about that culture. That’s not saying much—the previous efforts had been terrible, just disgraceful—but I think it had to be documented, to get it down on film. The film has authenticity of attitude and spirit.

Cineaste: Perhaps because it was released toward the end of the Sixties, it has the feeling of being a more despairing commentary than was perhaps intended.

Penn: I didn’t intend it to be despairing. But we mustn’t think of it as having been a revolution. Certain changes were made but we’re going to slip back to the status quo, that was the sense that I had.

Cineaste: In Little Big Man, was your intention to develop a counter mythology of the history of the American West?

Penn: Yeah, it was to say, “Wait a minute, folks, the American Indian has been portrayed in movies in the most unpleasant way possible”—I mean, pure, naked racism—“so let’s examine how we have told our own history, such as Custer’s last stand.” I mean, you go out there to this day and they feed you a lot of bullshit about the great, brave Custer, but the books don’t bear that out at all. He was a pompous, self‑aggrandizing man.

Cineaste: Did you intend any parallels between Custer and President Johnson?

Penn: Possibly, possibly.

Cineaste: There were a lot of things in the air at that time. Not only was the Vietnam War going on, but there was also the beginning of a revisionist strain in Native American history with books such as Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and films like Soldier Blue.

Penn: I was so disappointed when Soldier Blue came out because I had been waiting for six years to make Little Big Man. I had the script but nobody would make it. Even with the force of Bonnie and Clyde I couldn’t get it made until Soldier Blue came out—it was a sort of sympathetic film, but much more romantic, which did rather well. Finally we got the OK to go, but the guys who were running Cinema Center Films didn’t understand what I was trying to do with that film.

Cineaste: The film is clearly sympathetic to the American Indian.

Penn: Yes, and, in that sense, it’s what Thomas Berger wrote. The comic style also clearly comes from Berger—you know, the Jack Crabb character who was 121 years old and who was at all these events throughout history. That’s pure Berger plus a good screenplay by Calder Willingham.

Cineaste: Did you make any significant changes from the Berger novel?

Penn: Only one major one, to my knowledge, which is that the chief doesn’t die at the end. In the novel, he dies. I was all for adhering to the novel, but Calder Willingham and [producer] Stuart Millar kept saying, “Wait a minute, this is all wrong, it just ends. All the sense that he’s gonna die should be there, but there should be one more turn.” They did persuade me and, by God, I’m so glad they did. To have ended it with his death, and to tug on your heartstrings, would have been so easy. But for him to say, “Am I still in this world?,” and, then, realizing he hasn’t died, “Oh well, sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t,” is really more in keeping with the tone of the film.

Cineaste: We’ve read that the role of Old Lodge Skins was originally offered to Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield and Richard Boone. Was Chief Dan George a last-minute discovery?

Penn: I had folks out combing the hustings and Chief Dan George, who was Canadian, had performed Chief Joseph’s farewell as a sort of ceremonial thing and somebody had seen him and put him in a small part in a Disney film. So we were trying to track him down, but meanwhile, I was getting all this pressure from the studio to get a name because Dustin was not that big a name yet. Actually, we didn’t approach Scofield and Olivier was not a serious consideration. Boone was a serious contender but his agent said, “For the part of Old Lodge Skins? Let me tell you something, Richard is not going to play the part of old anything.” I was also interested in Donald Pleasence, a strange, terrible idea, and I’m afraid it’s mine. I just knew him as a very elastic character actor and I thought we could get him. Fortunately, none of them accepted my offer and I was so grateful.

Cineaste: You apparently didn’t feel it necessary to cast the film’s Indian roles entirely with Indian actors. What’s your attitude on that issue?

 

Dustin Hoffman as Jack Crabb in Little Big Man

Penn: My attitude is pretty ecumenical in that respect. I know today in Hollywood people say you can’t do this because you don’t have enough Native American actors or Latin actors or whatever, but that’s a lot of bullshit. I used Latin actors, Native American actors, Asian actors, whatever, because it didn’t matter to me in that respect. What mattered to me were the two cultures, white and Native American, and how they perceived each other. And when I came to do the score, I asked myself, “What do I really hear here? I hear pure blues, just a guy with a guitar singing blues, a really good black score.” So we got a white guy, John Hammond, Jr.

Cineaste: How important was historical accuracy for you, especially the portrayal of Native American culture? I noticed someone credited as “Historian.” What was his role?

Penn: His role was to keep us from transgressing violently or too egregiously, but not much more than that. He was a nice man from the National Historical Society or some such. I didn’t want to have the wrong costume or something, but that was it, because we were going to set our own tone.

Cineaste: As in Bonnie and Clyde, you successfully used an approach which conjoins humor and tragedy, violence and comedy.

Penn: Yes, and it’s an approach that really couldn’t exist under the studio system today because they would preform a judgment about the category of a film as either one thing or the other. What was happening at that time in Hollywood was that enormous power had devolved upon the directors because the studio system had kind of collapsed. We were really running it, so we could introduce this new perception of how to make another kind of movie. I don’t mean that movies in the past hadn’t had this mixture to some degree, but to have it to that total degree, to make it the very narrative style of the movie, was I think pretty much unheard of.

Cineaste: That blending of comedy and pathos seems very characteristic of your work.

Penn: Yeah, I’ve used it on the stage constantly. It’s so important in the theater, the most serious play...

Cineaste: We’re talking more than comic relief.

Penn: Yes, it’s more disarming, it’s comedy to disarm in order to make the audience vulnerable to a turn that is unanticipated, that will tap into an emotion you were not expecting yourself to feel.

Cineaste: Another characteristic of your work is the subversion of traditional genre expectations, such as in Night Moves. That film seems to have some parallels with Blowup because both films deal with the elusiveness of the truth. The Harry Moseby character, like David Hemmings’s character in Blowup, is never really sure of what the truth is.

Penn: I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s perfectly acceptable. I think we were trying to do something just a little more than that, which was to say that in the detective film genre, the detective eventually solved the crime. I mean, Bogart eventually found it out, however painful it was, and Mary Astor was sent up. In Night Moves we were trying to say, “Wait a minute, maybe the enemy is us. Maybe Moseby’s vision is blocked by his need to have a friendship with this stunt man, who was taking advantage of that friendship.” That was the only other sort of quietly psychological aspect that we were adding to that form. It’s a pretty dark and despairing film, and I guess I was feeling that way.

Cineaste: The paranoia links the film to Mickey One in a way.

Penn: Yeah, maybe, but it was much darker than Mickey One, which had a kind of youthful hope. In this film, when someone asked, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?,” the reply was, “Which Kennedy?” That was really the capsule of our lives at that point.

Cineaste: There are echoes of the Kennedy assassination in the enormous conspiracy that devolves toward the end of the film.

Penn: Yeah, and, you know, I had worked with both Kennedys. I had served as a TV advisor to Jack Kennedy’s campaign. During the Nixon‑Kennedy debates we were in the Kennedy camp using the medium in a way we thought made for a better presentation. Later I started working with Bobby. I went down to Washington and we did one radio commercial. We were then going to do a whole bunch of radio and TV stuff as soon as he came back from California, and of course he never did.

Cineaste: So Night Moves was a very personal film?

Penn: It was personal in that respect, but it’s also despairing in that I just felt, “Oh God, this country...” I mean, those assassinations—Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr.—were just crushing to people who’d been involved in those movements. I’d been in the Civil Rights movement up to my ears.

Cineaste: Your next film, The Missouri Breaks, was not critically well received but too often a consideration of the film itself seemed to get lost in stories about the size of the actors’ salaries.

Penn: Yeah, I think there was an awful lot of original work in that film and I think Brando’s characterization is brilliant. We were searching around for it, saying “What the hell moves this guy?”

Cineaste: Didn’t Brando say, “I don’t understand this character, so I think every time you see him he should be in a different guise.”

Jack Nicholson and Brando in The Missouri Breaks

Penn: Yes, and I said, “You’re absolutely right.” When we got to that last scene, he said, “How about a dress?,” and I said, “Yeah, OK, let’s get a dress,” because I thought this character has got to be the most fragmented personality, since all we had left was that he was going to get his throat cut by Jack.

Cineaste: He was a fascinating historical character, too—a ‘regulator’ hired by the wealthy rancher to kill the band of horse thieves—and rather perverse in that, although he’s there to enforce the law, he’s crazier than anyone else.

Penn: Absolutely, and killing people in ignominious acts—in the outhouse, making love—that he would have had personal abhorrence for.

Cineaste: What was the difference in directing Brando in The Chase and in this one?

Penn: Oh, in The Chase I was much more tight‑assed and restrictive. You know, when we’re going to improvise, let’s clearly improvise. But here I just felt that I had two of the best actors in the world so what could I do except just turn ‘em loose. They were both wonderful. It was like pitting a couple of heavyweights against each other.

Cineaste: Brando gives a much freer performance.

Penn: Yeah, because Jack’s character has an obligation of group leadership and greater responsibility, so he’s tied a little more to the earth, while Brando was just able to go. Jack’s attitude was, “What the hell is he going to do next?” Brando’s scene with the horse and mule, for example, was totally improvised. He said, “Just give me the horse, and let me go.”

Cineaste: The female lead in the film was very interesting but the character seemed somewhat anachronistic. Was that an intentional nod to Women’s Lib of the period?

Penn: No, that was totally McGuane’s perception of a kind of Western woman totally unlike the traditional, demure virgin who would faint at the drop of a hat. I thought she was terrific.

Cineaste: What attracted you to Steve Tesich’s script of Four Friends?

Penn: I just liked the idea of it altogether, these kids who had grown up through the Sixties, a different group, working class, and the immigrant aspect which certainly I knew.

Cineaste: Did you see them as perhaps more typical of kids in the Sixties than the hippies of Alice’s Restaurant?

Penn: Oh, certainly. I thought they were sort of basic American kids, with a streak of romanticism, of naiveté, and gullibility.

Cineaste: Especially Georgia, but for all her grand ambitions, she finally seems rather unfocused and directionless. At one point, during one of her reconciliations with Danilo, she complains, “I’m so tired of being young!”

Penn: That’s really very much the theme of the movie. That generation got hit right in the heart with the end of the Vietnam War, the sense of no real purpose to anything, and that was the intention of the film.

Cineaste: There are several moments of surprising violence in the film, most notably the murder and suicide at Danilo’s wedding. Was that scene intended to have larger metaphorical significance?

 

Jodi Thelen in Four Friends

Penn: It’s an immigrant sense that you don’t cross social lines. As a young Yugoslav boy coming here into a working-class community, the social lines are very clear to you, and you know your place exactly. Steve himself, as an artist, crossed the line but he was writing about the people that he knew, the memories of his neighborhood, and when Danilo was about to cross the lines socially in that marriage...pow! The whole script was pretty pure Tesich, almost nothing there is my distinct contribution.

Cineaste: One would think that a working-class father would want something better for his son—you know, ‘God forbid you should have to work in a factory like I do’—but with Danilo and his father it’s the other way around.

Penn: That’s not uncommon, certainly in immigrant families, that attitude of don’t aspire to too much, you can’t do it. In that regard, I’ll tell you a funny personal story. When I was in live TV, and doing every third show on Philco Playhouse, my mother, who was living over in New Jersey, would see this credit, “Directed by Arthur Penn,” come up at the end. Finally, one day, she asked me, “Tell me, son, what does a director do, exactly?” “Well,” I said, “he works on the script with the writer, he hires the actors, he’s involved with costumes, he controls the camera angles,” and she looked at me and said, “So who does it for you, son?” It was simply impossible for her to perceive her son being that competent.

Cineaste: It’s interesting that you said the script is mostly Tesich’s conception because in some ways it seems to express a real disgust for what came out of the late Sixties, a feeling which I didn’t necessarily think you shared.

Penn: No, I didn’t share that, but I don’t think Steve would characterize it as disgust. Clearly he’s not a political figure himself at all, and, if anything, Danilo is offended by what he sees

as political violence in that scene where the burning American flag goes across his windshield. I think the film expresses more a kind of romanticism, a kind of remorse for lost childhood, lost youth.

Cineaste: He seems to perceive the period as nihilistic.

Penn: He sees it from the position of somebody who is never going to be a part of it somehow. The nearest he could come to being a part of it was Georgia, who for him was the quintessential American girl, and she eluded him. I don’t think the ending is right, I don’t think he really gets Georgia.

Cineaste: After a career of subverting or going against the grain of genre expectations, you directed a couple of straight genre films, Target and Dead of Winter. Why did you take those on?

Penn: Target is a pure ‘Let’s make a product’ type of picture in that I wanted to show that I could do an action picture. Somehow my reputation to the new, incoming studio executives was one of some kind of arty, very distant, strange character who couldn’t shoot an action sequence. Well, I made up all that action stuff in Target. There’s something about the athleticism of directing a movie that’s very gratifying, which is, you know, ‘Let’s get out here and figure out how we’re going to use that bridge. OK, he’s going to run over here, there’s going to be a boat passing underneath, he’s going to jump from here,’ and just lay it out like that, on your feet, and do it. All right, that’s only one aspect of movies, but it’s an absolutely necessary aspect of movies. All the fine directors have it, that kinetic skill, to be able to get out there in a basically new location and say, ‘OK, this is what we’re going to do and this is how we’re going to do it.’ In the case of Dead of Winter, I was helping some kids who were in university with my son. They had written the film but had been unable to get it independently produced. Finally they came to me and asked for help, and I said I’d try with a major studio. So I got MGM, but they exacted a promise from me which was, “If we put real money in this picture, cover our ass if the kid can’t do it.” And that turned out to be the case. The kid slated to direct it had cowritten the film but he couldn’t make up his mind which one of the great masters he was going to imitate. It was paralyzing—you know, should this be like Hitchcock, or Welles, or Hawks? The picture was going down the drain, so I just sort of picked it up. I think it’s a good little thriller, a chiller/horror kind of thing. They’re alright films.

Cineaste: But I’m sure you’re aware that many fans of your work felt these were not real Arthur Penn films.

Penn: Right, but they are. That’s who this is.

Cineaste: How much credence do you give to the auteur theory?

Penn: Well, it’s a relative term, I think. The French invented it. You see, for five years, during the war and the German occupation, the French never saw an American film. Right after that, American films flooded in, and these young, fervent film kids said, “Wait a minute, there’s John Ford at that studio, and John Ford at this studio, and John Ford at that studio, but they’re all John Ford pictures, they’re not a Metro picture or a Columbia picture. Let’s track these guys, like Nick Ray and more obscure people, to see if there isn’t a kind of visible continuum in their work,” and of course there is. Whatever the studio or the genre, you could see the distinct stamp in the work of these directors, and I think that became the auteur theory.

It was then enunciated in the critical community and, as you very well know, there are a lot of priests and eventually people take up a really ecclesiastical position which is that ‘The auteur theory is absolute and everything in a film has meaning because one person’...well, bullshit! Nothing I ever experienced on a movie set is auteurist to that degree. You know how much you depend on your colleagues and collaborators. You have only to shoot for five or six days to know how many accidents are felicitous and that have nothing to do with you that come into the movie. You just say, “Thank God, what a marvelous accident,” or “That’s a good idea, let’s keep it.” So in that sense I don’t think the absolutist auteurist theory really holds up.

Nevertheless, there has to be a singular, guiding vision, there’s no question about it, and in that respect the auteur theory does hold up. But it’s only a small part of the experience. It’s not the day to day experience that I ever had and I don’t think Truffaut ever had.

Cineaste: Many of the younger generation of directors storyboard everything before shooting. I gather that’s not your approach.

Penn: No, not at all. I don’t even know where the camera is going to be most of the time.

Cineaste: But you can’t go on the set and noodle it out for three hours.

Penn: No, but what I can do is to let the actors find the scene and, once they find the scene with me, then I know where the camera goes. Anybody would know where the camera goes.

Cineaste: Are we talking prior rehearsal?

Penn: Rehearsal on the set, first thing in the morning. Come in with the actors and let them just find their way.

Cineaste: Blocking it out as much emotionally...

Penn: Oh, emotionally and then consequently physically, so that once they find the emotion, the physical response comes with it. Then, lo and behold, there’s no problem. You say, “OK, bring the camera guys in here. Here’s where it is—master shot here, coverage here, closer angle here,” and you lay out the day’s work.

Cineaste: What influence has your association with the Actors Studio had on your work with actors. Some of the early performances, like Paul Newman’s in The Left‑Handed Gun,  seem to come out of an Actors Studio approach.

Penn: Yeah, it does, but let me try to put this in proper perspective, because there are a lot of misperceptions about the Actors Studio. The Actors Studio is, in a sense, both the beginning and the end of an era. The American theater, throughout its life, for the most part essentially emulated the English theater. That’s a declamatory style of acting—it’s verbal, it’s vocal, it’s oral, it doesn’t have to have an emotional equivalent, and it’s filled with all those lovely English gestures that have come down through the years to stand for theater. I remember that style of theater even in my own youth, when I was going to theater, in Katharine Cornell, the Lunts, and those wonderful bits of business they did.

Then, during the Depression, along comes the Group Theatre, this crazy bunch of radicals, who are reading Stanislavsky, studying what they’re doing at the Moscow Art Theatre, and asking if there wasn’t an American equivalent. So they went searching for it and they found it to some degree but then the Depression ended, times changed, the Group Theatre lost its lyrical theme, Odets’s voice was stilled, and the Group Theatre died.

Now comes a guy named Kazan, formerly with the Group Theatre, but who’s now the leading director on Broadway. What used to happen in those days, if you were an actor, was that you got signed for the run of a play. Although you wanted more than anything else in the world to be in a hit, you also wanted more than anything else in the world to be out of that hit, because it meant that you were now in servitude for a year, eight performances a week, and you had to do it over and over and over again. I can’t tell you what a killing experience that is. So a bunch of actors got together with Kazan and said, “Let’s have a little place where we can work for each other, at a peer level, and do other scenes,” and that’s literally how the Actors Studio started.

With that came both the whole Stanislavsky movement toward the interior emotional correlative, the emotional equivalents out of your own life through your own character, as well as the liberty of not being in the play that you were in every night, the liberty to do stuff in this group that was sometimes over the top, and sometimes new behavior began to emerge, stuff that you’d never seen on a stage before. With the birth of the Actors Studio came the closure of one old style of acting and the beginning of an entirely new style. In that first group were Julie Harris, Steve Hill, Paul Newman, there were about thirteen or fourteen terrific actors who started the Studio. Kazan brought in Cheryl Crawford and Bobby Lewis to help him run it, but none of them could devote full time to it. But there was Lee Strasberg, unemployed—unemployable essentially, not a very good actor himself in those days—and he took on the Studio. And I’ll say this for him—rain, snow, sleet, nothing stopped him from being at that Studio every Tuesday and Friday, unpaid!

That immediately attracted the young kids who came to New York and the one thing Strasberg insisted on was a very stringent audition process. To get into the Studio, you had to be a maverick and show a real streak of originality, and he picked them all—Steve McQueen, Jimmy Dean, Kim Stanley, one after the other. Brando, of course, was the personification of it. So they learned acting from this style, then they became movie stars overnight, and suddenly the Method, particularly as a style of movie acting, was established. And I will submit to you that it’s better cinema acting than there ever was before the Studio.

So that longwinded answer is what accounts for the fact that I cast actors from there whenever I can because I know I’m going to get a really swinging, odd, wonderful performance that’s unpredictable. There are now second, third and fourth generations of actors who have learned the Method and know only this style of acting.

Cineaste: Dede Allen has described your shooting method as one of providing “top to bottom editorial coverage.” Would you explain what she means by that?

 

Penn's frequent editor Dede Allen