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M: One of the side benefits of moving Zoetrope up to San Francisco in 1969 was to take the filmmaking out of a self-contained film universe. In Los Angeles it's very easy, if you get to a certain level in your profession, to live, breathe, eat, think, sleep film. And to have so many offers that you're working all the time—without that ability, given by time and space, to reinvent.
In San Francisco there's not that much work. There aren't that many producers up here. There's a kind of enforced idleness between projects that allows you to develop other interests and then, in the best sense, to plow the results of those interests back into the next film.
It has to be said—both systems have their risks. The risk of the Hitchcock-ian system is that you may stifle the creative force of the people who are collaborating with you. The film that results—even if it's a perfect vision of what somebody had in his head—can be lifeless: it seems to exist on its own, without the necessary collaboration either of the people who made the film or even, ultimately, the audience. It says: I am what I am whether you like it or not.
On the other hand, the risk with the process-driven film is that it can collapse into chaos. Somehow the central organizing vision can be so eaten away and compromised by all the various contributors that it collapses under its own weight.
You remember you told me how much you liked the line breaks in my translations of Malaparte? The decision where to cut film is very similar to the decision, in writing poetry, of where to end each line. On which word? That end point has little if anything to do with the grammar of the sentence. It's just that the line is full and ripe at that point, full of meaning and ripe with rhythm. By ending it where he does, the poet exposes that last word to the blankness of the page, which is a way of emphasizing the word. If he adds two words after it, he immerses that word within the line, and it has less visibility, less significance. We do very much the same in film: the end of a shot gives the image of that last frame an added significance, which we exploit.
The advantage of writing and editing is that at any time you can stop what you're doing and walk around the block, or have lunch, or take a phone call, or go dig in the garden and think. At any particular moment, the editor has the freedom to interact or not interact with the material. You can always step away and let the subconscious do some work.
When I write a script, I lie down—because that's the opposite of standing up. I stand up to edit, so I lie down to write. I take a little tape recorder and, without being aware of it, go into a light hypnotic trance. I pretend the film is finished and I'm simply describing what was happening. I start out chronologically but then skip around. Anything that occurs to me, I say into the recorder. Because I'm lying down, because my eyes are closed, because I'm not looking at anything, and the ideas are being captured only by this silent scribe—the tape recorder—there's nothing for me to criticize. It's just coming out.
That is my way of disarming the editorial side. Putting myself in a situation that is as opposite as possible to how I edit—both physically and mentally. To encourage those ideas to come out of the woods like little animals and drink at the pool safely, without feeling that the falcon is going to come down and tear them apart.
In any film scene there's a petitioner and a grantor, a weaker character and a stronger. Otherwise you don't have a scene. It may be obvious what the power relationship is, or it may be hidden from one or even both of the characters themselves. So at each moment in every scene there is a dynamic between two people that can be expressed in many ways.
In making a film you're trying to get the most interesting orchestration of all these elements, which, like music, need to be harmonic yet contradictory. If they're completely contradictory, then there's chaos. It's like when instruments are tuning up before a performance, you can't make anything coherent out of it. It's a fascinating, evocative sound, but only for about fifteen seconds. If, on the other hand, all the instruments play the same notes—if they're too harmonic, in other words—yes, there's coherence, but I'm bored after a few minutes. Just as bored as with the chaos of tuning up.