Twenty years have passed since Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable agreed to play the two adventurers in Queen Victoria’s India who undertake to trek into remote Kafiristan to seek their fortune, find it, and are felled by their own pride. On a visit to Huston’s Ireland retreat John Foreman, producer of BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, discovered some Huston had made in preparation for that venture, dug deeper, and came up with the script, production notes, exact breakdowns, and the diaries of Huston’s trips to India and Afghanistan in the search for sites. Now Michael Caine and Sean Connery play the two ill-fated blokes who go through triumph and disaster, meet these two impostors as men, but can’t keep it up, thus offering what is perhaps a more realistic view of the nature of man than Kipling’s famous romantic poem did.

It romantically enough with a pact the two men make not to indulge in the commoner varieties of pleasure, an obvious plant set up by the author for the second-act curtain of this morality play: once crowned, the flesh calls Connery, and succumbing, his image shatters, as does, eventually, his body, in a San Luis Reytype drawbridge disaster. Caine, surviving, at the end is back in Christopher Plummer’s Kipling office, having come full circle, geographically and psychologically. Useless—although the effort is rewarding—to pretend to more than one is. Not a bad message for today.

The size of the film bears no relation to its source: 8½ (magic film figure) million dollars patiently await transport to the coffers of the Moroccan government, a score of stars’ bank accounts, and the British and American film indusby’s experienced system of expenditures. Two mountaintops were planed to make way for opposing Kafiristani cities. Folklore abounds as I arrive. Twelve hundred extras have their scalps shaved daily, an unfortunate habit of the monks they portray. Yorkshire pudding and roast lamb lunches are supplied to the British crew from a kitchen van brought from Pinewood Studios in England, while the locals light fires among their forest of donkey legs to brew their interminable mint tea. In front of the cameras it’s all British Rahj, behind them it’s the organizational ability that may be its legacy.

For three days I watch the special effects team trying to cause a few mules to fall down a hillside. Mules don’t usually fall down at all, being mules, and all the trapdoors dug into the footpath, hot potatoes under the tail suggested by Connery, yelling on the part of the twelve hundred teadrinkers, and blind shots from Caine’s antediluvian rifle can’t make them do it. The cursing is quadrilingual: Arabic, French, English, and Cockney. Huston is taking it all sitting down; it gives us a chance to talk. When the mules finally topple, his concern is with their wellbeing. The film seems to take care of itself.

Somehow, I have always thought, you and Kipling were going to get together. Observing your own trajectory, and comparing it to his path through difficulties and his constant search for the spirit of man, I am surprised that you have waited this long.

I have been intending to get together with Mr. Kipling for about twenty years, but it took a long time for it to come about. I was, of course, a great Kipling reader when I was a kid, and I’ve got reems of Kipling verse stored away in my unconscious to be tapped on drunken occasions. In fact, I have been looking forward to making this picture for a long time.

Why didn’t you do it before?

I had originally intended to make it with Bogart and Gable. Then Bogie died and I put the thought away. After several years Gable said, well, let’s go along and do it with someone else. We were in the process of doing that, during the making of THE MISFITS, but at the end of that picture, why, Gable died. And again I put it away. It was resurrected a couple of years ago by John Foreman, who saw that I had done a lot of preparation. I had been to the frontier countries scouting the locations, with the intention of perhaps making the film in Afghanistan or India. Where we are is supposed to be the upper right-hand corner of Afghanistan, looking at the map, then known as Kafiristan, which was the most locked-in, remote, secret country, perhaps, in the world. Much more so than Tibet. Only very recently have those frontiers been crossed. They had remained as dosed in my time as they had in Kipling’s, until just two or three years ago.

Do you identify in any way with Kipling’s quest, with his attempt to define man’s struggle against nature, for example, and his fight to maintain an individuality in the face of encroaching progress? I think that’s what had attracted Robert Flaherty, your old friend, to try and film The Jungle Book, before Korda took the film away from him and turned Sabu into a Hollywood cutie.

I think that’s a universal quest. Kipling himself identified, not only with people, but with animals, and even things, living in a kind of pantheistic world when trees and rocks had identities. IVs this universality in Kipling that I feel dose to, although it goes much deeper than that, of course.

More specifically, I was wondering whether you identified with Kipling’s fear that so many of our universal values were disappearing, and whether with this film, and by going back to him as an author, you were hoping to stress man’s need to heed to his origins instead of the future alone?

I only hope that man’s future entails going back to his origins. This, it seems to me, is the only hope for man. Otherwise he will be destroyed.

Hope is a very abstract quality.

I thoroughly agree. In fact I believe we must do more than that. Each man, every day, must attempt his own little voyage of discovery, follow his own quest, to try and rediscover those things. It is this examining into one’s own spirit which is what this film is all about. But this is rather highfalutin talk, as far as the picture is concerned, and I may be guilty of a profundity in a moment. The two men in this picture are indeed one man, and it’s a dialogue that one man has with himself. They are divided into two men, because it cannot be all that introspective, in film. When the story calls for them to be divided, it’s a kind of a division of a single personality, and when they come together again, the individual is united. One half of “him,” as one half of ourselves very often does, falls prey to that illness that attacks us when we get to high places, folie degrandeur. Imagining that we are more than we are. Gods, in fact. The other one is that half of ourselves that chides us and says that we are absurd.

Your profession, in our society, gives you sway over an enormous number of fates and means. Does the temptation you mention never manifest itself in the life of a major film director?

I am not aware of it in myself. Nor am I aware of it in any of the better directors that I know. None of them seem to have ever fallen that deeply in love with themselves. With their work perhaps, but not with themselves.

The theme we are discussing runs through your work like a red thread. Doesn’t your concern, in these human terms, sometimes make you feel rather alone?

I think I share that concern with many who have ideas, and I think it’s important for any creator, to be obsessed, briefly, with his idea, and as long as he’s sufficiently fascinated by the idea he hasn’t that much time to think about himself.

Is it always easy to distinguish? Obsession might just be the bridge between idea and self.

Perhaps; in fact, during those periods of obsession there is no dean division between oneself and the idea. And my two characters in the film represent these two facets. It becomes a question of how to convey all this in images, and I think that this film has got rather more symbolic images than any that I’ve ever done. Of course they are of a simple order. I use a Masonic emblem to symbolize a universal connection between men, and my protagonists’ lives are saved in a remote mountain town because the unfriendly high priest recognizes in the emblem on Sean Connery’s chest an old holy insignia he believes belonged to Alexander the Great. It’s just a pictorial device for translating an idea into images. The same goes for the arrow that Michael Caine gets stuck in him during a battle, but which fails to kill him. Pretty soon he is carrying a golden one around as a scepter. I am sure that at some moment every man alive, no matter how lowly, has dreamed for a split second, at least, that he himself was a god. This goes for a painter as well as for a film director or a dice player. When the spirit is in him he is inspired, but he better not go away from that dice table imagining that he is a deity. Or a painter, when he puts his brushes down. He better give up the idea.

Is that what happens to you in your own painting?

The temptations come to every painter who has, however briefly, command of his medium. And to every dice player or filmmaker. Every discipline has its advantages and its disadvantages. In film one sometimes becomes surfeited personalities. I like painting because when I leave the set I like to retire and be by myself or perhaps with one other person. I can’t go on being in a group; too many voices. That doesn’t mean that I’m not sociable when I am not making a film, but a set such kinetics in the course of a day that I prefer to go into retreat at night.

Did you move to Ireland because you felt that the kinetics of life there are more kin to your nature?

There are so many things that I like to do that Ireland offers. I am a horseman, and it’s a great horse country. And I like to fish, and the fishing is good. I like the sport of hunång—the riding to hounds, that is—and the country itself has a serenity and a tranquility that assuages the spirit. I go back to Ireland to lick the wounds that have been inflicted on me in the outer world.

What is your feeling about the use of animals in film, where there is always a danger of their being hurt?

Every precaution is taken. As a matter of fact, the mules came through without a scratch, as you saw. They are so wise. The risk is so slight; I would myself assume risks, or a man would, in the film, just as an animal. I’ve never lost a man on a film that I’ve made, and I’ve never lost an animal.