The first time I came to America was as a student actor, playing in Lear and The Optimist throughout the Midwest. We motored across the country the way that Joe Buck traveled cross country at the beginning of MIDNIGHT COWBOY in a bus. The characters in LOCUST, by the way, are very much related to those in COWBOY. They are all desperately searching for some kind of identity as they try to cope with unsuccessful careers in the movie industry. They all live on the fringes of Hollywood: would-be stars like Faye Greener [Karen Black], has-been actors like Faye’s father Harry [Burgess Meredith], a studio bookkeeper like Homer Simpson [Donald Sutherland], and a studio artist named Tod Hackett [William Atherton] who wants to be a great painter. When I first brought the property to Paramount there was not too much enthusiasm about it, but Waldo and Jerry and I went on pretending that it was all going to happen and Waldo and I continued improving the Script. Bit by bit the script for LOCUST got better and better, and the studio got more interested. The first real indication that we got that the production was going to go ahead was when the studio had our offices redecorated.

The film is not just about Hollywood, although the image of Hollywood as the dream factory that turns out seductive fantasies for its audiences is there in the story. But it is also about the funny, touching losers and dreamers who live on the fringes of any big city. The original title of Nathanael West’s novel was The Cheated, which indicated how people come here to fulfill their dreams for success and are frequently disappointed. West drew his characters with a cold, satiric eye, but we are making them more pleasant and likable in the film. I love these characters; I can identify with them. We have developed the personalities of the major characters into more complex human beings than they seemed to be in the book.

Faye Greener, for example, is a part-time bit player and perhaps a call girl whom the male characters pursue but never catch without paying for it one way or another. In the book she is beautiful and sexy but I felt that she should be funky and funny as well, a touching victim of her own dreams of romance and beauty.

I chose Bill Atherton to play Tod Hackett partly because I like to mix relative newcomers with established stars in my films—as I did before in pairing Julie Christie with Dirk Bogarde in DARLING, or Jon Voight with Dustin Hoffman in MIDNIGHT COWBOY. But also, when I do this, there is always a reason for it that is tied in with the plot. Since Tod is a stranger in the Hollywood milieu I thought that I should get someone with a fresh face for the part. It would be hard to make an audience accept Warren Beatty, for example, as a person unfamiliar with Hollywood.

I have been blessed with fine technicians on this film. Conrad Hall, who has photographed some fine films, is really first-rate. He knows what lighting effects you want before you even make any suggestions. The editor is Jim Clark who edited DARLING for me and worked with me on my segment in the omnibus film about the 1972 Munich Olympics, VISIONS OF EIGHT.

In that short film, called “The Longest,” I chose to intercut shots of Ron Hill—the British entry in the Marathon Race, around whom I built my episode—which were filmed during the long term of preparation and training for the event with material filmed during the actual race. This way Jim Clark and I felt we could give the whole episode more depth.

After the tragedy of the murder of the Israeli athletes by a group of Arab terrorists I at first refused to go to Munich. I was appalled, in fact, at the decision to continue the games. Ron Hill said that he personally wanted the games to go on—and, on one level, I could understand his feelings. But the Olympics are so nationalistic, so far from what they are supposed to be. That is why I comment on the sound track at the beginning of “The Longest” that I made the film because I was fascinated by the individual effort of the Marathon runner, who trains alone for years and has to compete with so much more than the race itself.

Making VISIONS OF EIGHT took me back twenty years, to my early days of doing documentaries for BBC-TV. When I started out in television one was thrown out on his own to do a little film, perhaps with a one-day shooting schedule, for a news program. I lost my job eventually because I insisted on supervising the mixing of the film myself—I knew what I wanted the finished film to look like while I was shooting it. From that earliest time I fought to get final cut on any movie that I have made, long or short, and I have managed to do so. Executives don’t grant it in the contract usually because they are afraid that giving you final cut will set a precedent whereby other directors will want it too. So they append it to a letter so that you will have it in writing but it will not be visible in the contract.

I enjoyed doing documentaries but I prefer to direct fiction films in which I can tell a strong story and manipulate characters according to their individual motivations. A KIND OF LOVING was my first chance to direct a feature film. When I was looking for an actress to play the girl who works in the same factory with the hero, I actually did interviews with girls as if they were applying for a secretarial job. They didn’t know what questions I was going to ask and so they had to react as they though t the character would. When you are casting you have to know how an actor will come over on film. Bill Atherton, for example, comes over even more strongly on the screen than he does in real life. On the other hand, an actor may read the part well but not be right for it when you see him in the screen test. Some times you reject one person for a part, try several others, and then come back to the individual that you started with. Julie Christie didn’t get the part of the girl friend in BILLY LIAR right away, but eventually I decided that she had done the part better than anyone else.

I did three pictures in a row with Julie. After BILLY LIAR, which brought her into prominence, we made DARLING, for which she won an Oscar, and then FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. The latter was a beautiful film but the performances were in different keys. Only Peter Finch, as the rich man hopelessly in love with the heroine, lent to the film that sense of classic doom which hangs over the characters in the Hardy novel.

At the New York premiere a lot of ladies with blue rinsed hair were saying at intermission that the picture was too slow. I thought that maybe it was too long for American audiences and suggested that I sweat some footage out of it; but the front office said, “No, give it time. It will catch on.” Then I heard later that they had got a hatchet lady to cut the film. I told them that I could have done it in a way that the missing footage wouldn’t even be noticed. Since then I have gotten tougher contracts every time I sign to do a film. For one thing I don’t allow theater previews because they induce a lot of pressure, and this is made worse by the fact that frequently studio people don’t tell you what they really think, so that often you don’t know where you stand.

I resist compromise terribly because I really am a perfectionist. If I don’t get something right while I am shooting I do it over until I do get it right. We rented a house in the Hardy country when we were filming on location, but the cameraman took so long to light the little rooms in the house that we were using that we rebuilt some of the rooms in a local bicycle shop to shoot some of the interiors there. Shooting on location can be very expensive—trooping around with all of that equipment and all of those people. I am leaning more and more toward doing as much in the studio as I possibly can, because there you can get total concentration. That is why we have built a Los Angeles street on the Paramount back lot for DAY OF THE LOCUST—right near where De Mille parted the Red Sea for THE TEN COMMANDMENTS—even though we are working in Los Angeles.

They say in the film business that you are only as good as your last picture. On the plane to Los Angeles for the premiere of MADDING CROWD I was sitting next to a publicity man for the company. We knew after the New York opening that the film was not going to be a great success, so he said to me, “Be careful what you do next. What is this MIDNIGHT COWBOY thing? It doesn’t sound very promising to me.” Nevertheless I was able to persuade United Artists that James Leo Herlihy’s novel could be turned into a good screenplay, and I got Waldo Salt to do it. Except for my first film I have developed a project that I wanted to do and then found a writer that I felt could do this particular property In the best way. I work with the writer while he is doing the script.

Collaborating with other people on a movie is a real challenge. Everything is fine at the outset, but as work on the production progresses, egos assert themselves and tempers can flare. Nevertheless I think a director should listen to the people he is working with, even though he does not always go along ultimately with what they have suggested. A producer, for example, can help the director when the latter loses objectivity because he has become so involved with the film. The producer must protect the whole project and see the production as a whole. Sometimes he can encourage you to stick with an idea when you want to scrap it because it hasn’ t worked for you on the first try. By the same token, although I supervise the editing of a film, I first let the editor put the footage together his own way before I make suggestions, because he can sometimes give me something quite brilliant which I might not have thought of. This is certainly true of Jim Clark.

Because a film is not shot in sequence a director must carry the overall plan of the movie in his head so that he can locate the actors in a scene in such a way that they will know where they are supposed to be emotionally in the moment of time that is being filmed. We started shooting COWBOY in New York City in wintertime, with the scene in the cemetery where Ratso takes Joe to visit the grave of his father. We worked in the studio in the Bronx for a while and then went to Texas and Florida for location work while new sets were being built in the studio.

I at first had doubts about using Dustin Hoffman in the film: THE GRADUATE had just come out, and I was concerned that the screen image which Dustin had developed in that film would militate against his playing the bum Ratso in COWBOY. But Jerry Hellman told me to go and meet him because he had seen Dustin in a play off Broadway. Finally Dustin donned a dirty raincoat and took me on a tour of Forty-second Street and Greenwich Village, visiting all sorts of pool halls and dives. By the end of the evening I was convinced that he was right for the part because he had proved to me that he could fit into that milieu very well.

We tested several people for the part of Joe Buck. During the tests Waldo Salt would throw questions at the actor being tested as if the latter was a real midnight cowboy that had been brought in off the street for the interview. He would ask the actor about his John Wayne outfit, and we eventually worked some of this material right into Joe Buck’s monologue in the film about how proud he is of his outfit, how sure he is that it appeals to women, etc. We thought we finally had the right name for the part—but his agent tripled the salary we had originally agreed upon when he heard how interested we were in this actor. So we looked at the tests again. Jon Voight had been a close second to the other actor, and we finally decided to use him. And, of course, he was absolutely perfect.

Dustin did tests with several of the actors who were trying out for the part of Joe Buck because he wanted to work up his portrayal of Ratso and how he would interact with Joe. We did a lot of makeup tests on Dustin because we wanted him to look homely but not grotesque. The makeup man and Dustin’s own dentist made a dental plate for him in order to give the impression of Ratso’s rotted teeth. They put in little bits of black here and there, seeing how little we could get away with and yet get the impression that we wanted. In making a movie you always start with too much and pare away what you don’t need in the performances—makeup, etc.—until it looks right.

For example Ratso was supposed to be lame but I didn’t want Dustin to make him too crippled; in the end Dustin’s suggestion of Ratso’s lameness was just right. In the scene where Ratso gets up on a chair to pull down the blind in his dirty flat, Dustin thought of the detail of Ratso lifting his leg with his hand in order to get up on the chair to pull down the blind. Just the right touch.

I respect actors, you see, because I know what they are up against. Jon Voight took a tape recorder with him when we went to Texas, and he recorded the voices of the Texans whom we interviewed for bit parts in the picture. Then he drove us all mad by playing back the tapes incessantly on the way back to New York. But he did get his Texas drawl down perfectly in the bargain.

I like to rehearse a scene but not necessarily in the exact way in which it will be filmed. I always look upon the script as a blueprint that must be flexible enough to incorporate the things that develop once the production gets underway. We improvised certain scenes in COWBOY with a tape recorder running. Waldo and I were both there, listening to see in what direction the dialogue between Ratso and Joe was going. For example, what would two people living so close together discuss: their personal habits, their likes and dislikes, their religious beliefs? Then we took bits of what had been said by Dustin and Jon on the tape and put it into the dialogue.

We used the same method in creating some of the dialogue in SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY, such as in the scene in which Murray Head keeps Glenda Jackson waiting for four hours and she explodes at him when he finally shows up. The last speech of Peter Finch’s in the movie about loneliness, which he addresses directly to the audience, was not improvised, however, as some critics assumed. It was in the first draft of the screenplay, and it was precisely this last scene in the script that attracted me most of all when I read Penelope Gilliatt’s first draft. I originated the basic idea of the film, about a man and a woman both falling in love with the same young man. I had dinner with Penelope and the producer Joseph Janni and we threw out ideas that we might be able to use in the film, and then she went off and did the script, which we then went over together and revised in various ways.

SUNDAY got good notices but did not do especially well at the box office. The distributor’s opening the film in English university towns during summer vacation didn’t help; but I nevertheless think that when I made it I knew that it was a piece of chamber music that would not appeal to everyone. As I said earlier, in the movie business you are only as good as your last picture, so I had difficulties launching another project.

I worked for a long time on a screen version of Peter Luke’s play Hadrian VII, had a marvelous script about this mad individual who fantasi zes that he is the pope, and even had Dustin Hoffman test for the part. But the studio that commissioned the script finally dropped it. In order to get LOCUST approved for production at Paramount I even acted out for the company president the film’s finale—the riot and the fire—and that clinched the deal.

After LOCUST I want to do Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust, which is a modern classic just as Day of the Locust is. It is all about a man who leads an artificial kind of existence in England and escapes to Brazil to find freedom; but once there he falls into the hands of a maniac. When we did the Hardy novel we were intimidated by the fact that we were filming a classic of fiction: people do have preconceptions of what the film of a given classic should be. I have learned by that mistake, so we will be a little more free in adapting A Handful of Dust, just as we have been to some extent freer with our adaptation of Day of the Locust. The goal of a film made from a novel is to capture the spirit of the original. I am confident that we have caught the spirit of Day of the Locust and made a film that should nevertheless be an entertaining and moving experience in its own right.