Even so, he gave you a very slick-looking picture, with lots of atmosphere. People have said that the lighting is very nice to
look at, that it’s beautiful, and it is well-done. But it’s not the film 1 wanted to make. 1 wanted to go back to that idea of doing the film in Riverdale for less than $100,000, and using a young director of photography. I wasn’t too concerned about the technical look of the film, because it’s the content that makes a film work, not the stylistic approach. Our big mistake was trying to make it look glossy. Why imitate Hollywood?This is a common mis­ take among first-time directors. Racine would take a long time to light up, use
a lot of different lights and stands, and put them all around a room, which cut down on my freedom of movement. A 180° shooting space is a stage. 1 had a 360° radius in the knife-fight between Edmund and Mikki, but at that point, Racine had walked off the picture and [camera assistant] Daniel Arzrouni lit that scene for me. He also lit the race around the house. There was just no way that Racine would work with me, because he would cut me down into 15° to 45° angles. There would be so many light stands in the way that the piece of the pie I had to shoot in was getting smaller and smaller. I would argue with him, and he would tell me that he hadn’t enough lights to illuminate a 180° space, not enough power; it wouldn’t look right. There was always one fucking reason or another. Racine was a very temperamental man and, as
Daniel Arzrouni says, he was from the school of Renoir. He would use the prisms, gobos with various shaped holes in them, and use them on his lights. There were gobos all over the fucking set. It was like a Hollywood TV studio. Forty people, masses of lighting. It was not until the third week that we could get the Arri out of the blimp and use that as a hand-held camera, a very important utility if you want to do the kind of shots 1 had in mind. I had about 750-1000 shots that I wanted to get in, but with Racine’s way of lighting and at the pace we were going, I would only have gotten about 3/4 of my film done. We had a four week schedule, but it ended up
as five. The best and fastest times we had were when Arzrouni and his crew fought with Racine, because they were all nice. There was a lot of tension, and finally Racine—who was an older man—started to have a nervous breakdown. I remember the time when we did the race around the house; he wanted to use arc lights (we used no fake day-for-night photography), but that method would’ve taken six nights. That’s not so bad, considering that in Hollywood they would’ve
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taken ten nights, but we only had three nights and we did it in three nights! While Arzrouni and his crew shot the sequence, Racine sat in the bar and cried—I’ll never forget that. A director of photography, approaching his 70th year, sitting there crying. And I was sad for him because it was a sad moment. He had lost his crew through his own treatment of them; he treated them badly. He would never buy them drinks, or take them to bars; he would never talk to half of them, he was fighting with most of them.
you were at creative odds with your
cinematographer. How did you get along with your actors? Most of our actors were over 30. Some were
over 40, and in some cases, over 50. Most of them were experienced in making films and accustomed to certain plateaux, such as not working more than ten hours a day. They were used to meal breaks and hotels. This was my fault all the way... When I first
arrived at the location, I saw this big, huge estate with a private lake and lots of bedrooms. What I decided to do was have the actors stay in the house itself, for a period of five weeks, while shooting the film in sequence as much as possible, and build, build... hitting the climax in the fourth or fifth week. Well, it’s great on paper. In practice, it turned into MARAT/SADE: the inmates revolted. Instead of orchestrating the madness of the film to a pitch, the actors began to go bananas in the second or third week. They were more fragile than I expected. Anne Meacham started to go nuts and had to
be moved into a motel. A lot of people didn’t want to be there with the cameras because we were shooting at odd hours and I wouldn’t allow the flushing of toilets if a shot was in progress. I stayed at the house throughout the shooting, as did various others, including Martine, who was one of the best troopers on the film. Roger De Koven, I remember, was very very quiet and hardworking. Henry Baker was delightful; he never complained. But then you had people like [Joe] Sirola, who instigated the other actors to demand meal penalties—so they couldn’t work a certain amount of hours without stopping to eat, or work on Saturdays at the weekday rate. The spirit of cooperation just started to disappear. There was fatigue, because of the heavy night shooting; we’d start at 4-5:00 in the afternoon, start setting up with the crew, actors then com­ ing on at 7-8:00 and going on till dawn. And it started to get cold, very cold. There were booz­ ers—during the race, various people would fall,
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