A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
Page 55
Christa cowrote a damn good script with me. For inspiration, we reread some of those formulaic detective tales from the forties like "The Case of the Lame Canary," by Erie Stanley Gardner, and "Bats Fly at Dusk," by A. A. Fair. I knew Highsmith's work from the many screen adaptations of her writings. My favorites were Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), with Farley Granger, and Rene Clement's Plein Soled (Purple Sun, 1960), with Alain Delon. Not to mention Wim Wenders's American Friend (1977), which I'd appeared in, based on Ripley's Game.
The Day of Reckoning wouldn't be green-lighted until Highsmith herself had approved our script. She did. When we met the grand dame in Paris during a stopover on her way home to Switzerland, she told us she loved our adaptation. The film was to be a twelve-day shoot on a strict budget with everything tightly synchronized. We cast French actor Philippe Leotard to play the greedy husband and Spanish-born Assumpta Serna as his sensual wife. Cris Campion, who'd played opposite Walter Matthau in Roman Polanski's Pirates (1986), got cast as the handsome nephew who destabilizes the wife and flirts with her teenage daughter. For that role, our own Samantha was perfect. She'd watched us working on the script and wanted to be part of it. I could hardly believe Samantha was already an adolescent. She was a natural in front of the camera and enjoyed being on set, most recently in Portugal as an extra on Street of No Return. Wasn't it only yesterday that I was making up bedtime stories for her with our own characters, Nuki and Mush? She was no longer that sweet little girl, but a testy adolescent playing loud music and talking back to her parents. Samantha's teenage hormones were on full throttle. Though she was in her rebel phase, Samantha made her papa proud when it came time to do her job on The Day of Reckoning.
While we were in preproduction, the unit manager was scouting for just the right chicken farm as our principal location. They chose a place not far from Paris. The first time I went inside the coop where they raised the birds, the odor and the cackling were overwhelming. The crew had to wear masks. Though we spent many intense hours inside that horrible place, we never really got used to it. I swore I'd never eat another goddamned piece of chicken.
At the end of our movie, the wife locks the husband in the coop and releases the chickens. The animals go mad and peck the poor sonofabitch to death. To film that scene, hundreds of chickens were to be set loose in a closed courtyard. What we didn't know was that the poor animals would be driven mad by their first contact with direct sunlight. The farm owner did. Since the animals were soon going to be slaughtered anyway, he was only too willing to have them die and charge the producers for damaged poultry, making double money on the deal. It was one of the saddest, most agonizing spectacles I'd ever witnessed. Blinded and terrified, the maniacal chickens scurried around until they finally dropped dead on the ground right in front of our crew. We hurriedly shot the scene before the chickens were nothing more than a sea of quivering feathers.
With Anthony Perkins introducing our episode, The Day of Reckoning turned out to be one of the most popular programs in the Highsmith series. We managed to get the chicken feathers out of our hair and clothes, but it would be a long time before I could put the terrible sight of all those crazed animals out of my mind. I was so agitated, I couldn't sleep for many nights. I'd get up, go in my office, and put on a Beethoven concert or symphony. That helped a helluva lot. Then I leafed through my frayed poetry anthology, rereading one of the poems that always soothed my spirits. It was "The Day Is Done," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which concluded:
... And the night shall be filled with music And the cares that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away.
The good thing about all those insane chickens was that they got my creative juices really stirred up. I'd been dabbling with a novel called Brainquake for quite a while. Now I decided to finish it. Writing without distractions was getting hard at our place on rue de la Baume. The telephone was constantly ringing with an invitation to something or other, a wheeler-dealer pitching his movie project, or an earnest film student writing a doctoral thesis about my films. Good friends were always stopping by, ending up at our table for long meals. Samantha and her teenage pals made quite a racket, too. I decided I needed to get the hell out of Paris so that I could concentrate on the book. Our good friend in Provence, Jerry Rudes, had invited me to stay with him at his place outside Avignon. I took him up on the offer in the summer of '9i, hopping on a train with my manuscript and a couple boxes of cigars.
Jerry set me up in a quiet room on the second floor of his cozy house overlooking the Rhone. I didn't need much more than a good table and chair, an ashtray, and a small bed in one corner next to a nightstand. Christa had shipped down my Royal. Besides the birds chirping and the Mistral blowing, there was hardly any noise to distract me. It was a writer's paradise. I got into a terrific groove in Provence, and in about five weeks, I'd finished Brain quake. It opened with a bang:
Sharing a good cigar with Australian director George Miller (of Mad Max fume) at the Avoriaz Film Festival in France
Sixty seconds before the baby shot its father, leaves fell lazily in Central Park. Sparrow-weight with bulging jugular, the balloon peddler's face appeared coated in white ashes of cow dung used against flies, but the pallor was really from his anemia.
Brain quake was about a bagman named Paul who delivers cash for the mob day and night in an old black leather bag. Paul drops off thousands of dollars with judges, police commissioners, CEOs, lawyers, assemblymen. Everyone's on the take. Paul never opens the bag or utters a word. Bagmen are a special breed of colorless guys who strictly obey the mob's rules. No girlfriends or wives. No friends. No hobbies. No alcohol or dope. No gambling. No talking. No quitting. Break a rule, and they eliminate you immediately.
Paul secretly suffers from seizures. I coined the term "brainquake" for the attacks that send tidal waves of pain through his head. The novel had a bunch of colorful characters: Michelle, the ivory-faced young woman whom Paul falls for; Zara, the black homicide detective who nails killers with a sexy flair all her own; Father Flanagan, a professional hit man who crucifies his victims; Cornelius Hampshire, czar of the civilized and uncivilized worlds of crime; and Captain Lafitte, a colorful war veteran and now skipper of a barge navigating the rivers and canals of France.
Down in Provence, I remember one interruption to my writing, a middleweight title fight that took place one August night in what was left of the Roman coliseum in the nearby town of Arles. One of Jerry's journalist pals invited us. We had swell ringside seats. Before the fight began, the announcer introduced me to the big crowd, and I took a bow. I hadn't been to a prizefight since the thirties. Back then, sportswriters like Ring Lardner and William Farnsworth would let me tag along with them to see Jack Dempsey, Jack Sharkey, Max Baer, and Primo Carnera in fights at Madison Square Garden. Arles was a million years and a million miles from Manhattan.
The manuscript for Brain quake knocked around some major publishers in New York without any bites. I had a meeting in Paris about the book with a top literary agent, Swifty Lazar, the man who'd sold Nixon's autobiography. Lazar returned my manuscript several weeks later from Beverly Hills with a note that the book was "too European." A French publisher, Les Belles Lettres, published it in French in 1993 as Cerebro-Choc. It has since come out in several other languages, but ironically never in the language in which it was written.
Most of the young editors in the States who passed on Brainquake didn't know much about my movies or my other books. I was like a foreigner in my own country, nothing more than a flicker in the history of American cinema. In France, by contrast, I was always treated with esteem. I couldn't take a subway or a bus without people recognizing me and coming up to talk to me. President Francois Mitterrand and his culture minister, Jack Lang, had always made quite a fuss, annointing me "Commander of the Arts and Letters," whatever the hell that was. The French had been good to me, and I'd never forget it.
Christa and I were fed up with livi
ng in the chic and expensive Eighth Arrondissement. What we wanted was a more working-class quarter with its markets, bakeries, bistros, and corner cafes. We found a little apartment we could afford on the other side of town, not far from the Lyon train station, and bought it. Our new neighbors on rue de Reuilly were everything except bourgeois. They went off to regular jobs early in the morning, hung out their wet laundry in the interior courtyard, and fed their cats on windowsills. People from other apartments in the building sometimes gathered in the courtyard to gossip or share picnics. We loved the authentic atmosphere of our new home in Paris, even if it was quite small. Rue de Reuilly simplified our lives and put us in touch with hardworking French people, a tough, vigorous lot. But it also squeezed Christa, Samantha, and me into a sharply reduced space, making us sometimes feel like we were living in a sardine can.
We developed a special fondness for one of our new neighbors, a solitary old lady named Madame Simone who lived with a few cats. Born in Brittany, she'd never married, working at a menial job in a nearby hospital. Neighbors would drop off food at Madame Simone's front door to help her out, because she evidently had trouble paying her bills. One time, the bags of fruit and vegetables on her threshold remained untouched for a couple of days. That's how we discovered that she'd died. We learned later it was a lung embolism and that Madame Simone was only in her fifties, though she looked twenty years older. There was a collection among the neighbors so that she could get a simple funeral in her native village in Brittany. The cats were adopted by everybody, and we went on watering the rose bush in front of the apartment. A couple of distant relatives showed up from Brittany and gave away all the crucifixes and Virgin Marys that Madame Simone had been collecting for years. They must have brought her contentment and peace. Samantha was sad about the loss of our neighbor but surprised me with her sharp comment that Madame Simone belonged more to the nineteenth than to the twentieth century. For school, Samantha was reading Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple (A Simple Heart), and we'd been discussing the story. In her naive good faith, our deceased neighbor reminded us of Felicity in Flaubert's tale. We'd miss her.
That fall I was invited to Japan for the presentation of the Japanese translation of Il Etait une Fois Samuel Fuller. Our hosts would also be screening a number of my movies as part of a retrospective. It would be great to revisit Tokyo with my wife and daughter. I hadn't been there since I'd shot House of Bamboo, thirty-five years before, and I was anxious to see how it had changed. The trip would also be a welcome respite to our crammed existence in Paris.
We were put up in a modern hotel in Tokyo, too modern for cantankerous Samantha, who had illusions of sleeping on a bamboo mat. I could hardly recognize the city, so drastic were the changes from the fifties. Gone were the little houseboats on the river. Everything was now covered with asphalt. Aluminum and glass buildings soared up into the sky. Japan was a world power again, economically vibrant. Western-style music was being played everywhere. T-shirts, blue jeans, and American-style hairdos were standard fare. The theater in Tokyo's Shibaku district where they showed my pictures was packed with avid fans. Their love of movies was unchanged. Men and women came up to me afterward with bouquets of flowers, the Japanese custom of showing satisfaction and respect. At a press conference and in one-on-one interviews, journalists wanted to know why White Dog, which was so well received in Japan, had never been released in the States. I retold the story, but it was still tough talking about that debacle.
A reunion was organized with Shirley Yamaguchi, my leading lady from House of Bamboo. Shirley had gone into politics and was by then a senator. She came to visit with us at the hotel with a slew of bodyguards. I was so happy to see her again. She was still as warm and beautiful as ever, with those high cheekbones and twinkling almond-shaped eyes. Shirley and I reminisced about the delightful Robert Ryan, who'd since passed away. One of the bodyguards signaled it was time to go. The senator was on a tight schedule. Shirley stood to bid us farewell, first kissing Christa and Samantha good-bye. I put my arms around her and held her for a moment. It was beautiful but hard to swallow that this was probably the last time we'd meet up, at least on earth.
A Tokyo magazine had organized a trip for me to the Lafcadio Hearn Museum, in the coastal town of Matsue, on the Sea of Japan. I'd often spoken to the press about my love of Lafcadio Hearn, the first Westerner to penetrate Japanese culture and write extensively about it. First, we took a train to Kyoto, visiting the Buddhist monasteries there with their lush, peaceful landscaping. Samantha got her wish to sleep on a mat on the floor and eat her fill of sushi. From Kyoto, we boarded a small plane to Matsue, arriving exactly one hundred years after Hearn went there.
Hearn had come to Matsue in 1890 on a magazine assignment and stayed on to teach in the local school. He'd ended up marrying his housekeeper, Setzu, who was in disgrace because her samurai husband had left her penniless. Hearn became a Japanese citizen in 1895 under the name of Yakumo Koizumi. Nowadays, the townspeople of Matsue were only too happy to commercialize his legacy, having learned a few American tricks about attaching Hearn's name to souvenirs-coffee, tea, noodles, anything-in order to turn a few yen with the tourists.
Hearn's grandson, Bon Koizumi, and his lovely wife, Shoho, invited us to share a meal with them at their home. They didn't speak any English, so a translator tried to keep up with me as I told them how I'd always been intrigued by Hearn.
"And your grandmother, what a woman she must have been!" I told Bon enthusiastically.
Before I knew it, I was describing scenes to them from a movie about Hearn that I'd have loved to make, a love story between Hearn and Setzu overlaid with Japanese folklore. Intercut into my picture, I explained, would be animated sequences from Hearn's wonderful fairy tales.
I promised the Koizumis that I'd try to find a producer for the film, keeping them abreast of our progress. Back in Paris, I'd do more research on Hearn, rereading some of his wonderful books and fairy tales, then knocking out a treatment. Through friends, a Japanese producer living in Germany contacted me about backing the picture, but then never came up with the dough. I wished I could've gotten on the phone with a bigtime producer like Darryl Zanuck and jumped right into making that picture. I considered approaching Steven Spielberg about the project because it seemed to be up his alley. By then, he was not only directing but producing movies, too. But even if Steven had always been respectful of me, we didn't have that kind of relationship. It would've looked like begging, and my pride wouldn't allow that.
The Koizumis regularly wrote to us from Japan. In one letter, they announced the birth of a baby son, assuring the perpetuation of the Hearn clan. Someone will make a pisscutter of a film about that boy's greatgrandfather someday. But it won't be me.
Metamorphosis
of a Melody
57
During my years in Paris, I remained an outsider. I paid no attention to anti-American slurs, especially in French filmmaker circles. Jealousies and national rivalries were going to be felt by any American living abroad. That stuff didn't mean a damn thing to me. I felt fortunate to be in our new working-class digs on rue de Reuilly, set back from the busy street, the aromas of fresh-baked bread, mint tea, and beef stew wafting through the courtyard. I was as comfortable as Albert Einstein must have been, living the end of his life in a modest neighborhood in Princeton.
Don't get me wrong, I was only putting my lifestyle on a par with Albert's, not my accomplishments. I've never been the least tempted to evaluate my place in movie history. I'll leave that to the specialists. Hunkered down in a corner of our bedroom where I'd set up a makeshift office, all I was thinking about were the yarns I was spinning. My old Royal was still banging away, thanks to my friend Curtis Hanson, who would send over my favorite silk ribbons from a Santa Monica stationery store. I was so proud to see cool, sensible Curtis fulfilling his potential as a top-class director.
Every morning, before I started writing, I'd go out for my typical walk, stopping at a nearby cafe to
have a coffee and croissant and read the Herald Tribune. On my way home, I'd buy a couple of baguettes for the family, sometimes strolling back along boulevard Diderot. Diderot, what balls on that guy, secretly printing his groundbreaking, seventeen-volume encyclopedia even after the King's Council formally forbade it!' Other mornings, I'd walk along rue Faubourg-Saint Antoine, past where the hated Bastille prison fortress used to stand, where so many political prisoners of every class were locked up. The Bastille was one of the first buildings destroyed in 1789 at the outbreak of the bloody French Revolution. I loved strolling in Paris, where every corner, square, and quarter was steeped in history. And what a violent history it was.
The French had always tagged me as a "violent" director. My movies are frank. But violent? Maybe, but it's relative. You switch on a TV anywhere in the world, and all you get is violence-news, video clips, ads, TV movies, nonstop, day and night. I'm not condoning it. But for cryin' out loud, violence is an inescapable part of our heritage, like greed, sex, religion, or politics, a constant theme in human history, no matter the continent or culture. To deny its existence is to be a goddamned hypocrite. How much violence can a filmmaker legitimately show audiences in his or her story? Does violence on the screen encourage people, especially youngsters, to be destructive? These are valid questions. I don't have the answers.
I remember the premiere of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), at the DGA theater in Los Angeles, with its beautiful cinematography and bloody battles. The first twenty minutes of The Wild Bunch, with the children watching red ants devouring scorpions, was just great. DGA members got very upset with the film's brutal images. Critics railed. Hell, I didn't care how many critics took Peckinpah to task. I agreed with him about wanting people to be aware of the danger of desensitizing violence by making audiences feel the horror and the pain.