fired him, he wouldn’t allow us to release the film. Reluctantly, we backed off. When the time came to film the break-in, he
was told to get a fake fuckin’ window. Of course, whenever he said he’d get something, nothing happened. So we said, “Allright, we’re gonna break the real window and have Hervé crawl through.” Now this guy’s drunk out of his fucking head—he said, “No sweat, I’m gonna stand outside and chuck this log through the window and Hervé will come through two seconds later, scaring every­ body.” OK. READY. ROLL ’EM. SPEED. GO! He throws the log, which makes a dent in the window about 1/16 of an inch. Hervé can’t get through and the cameras are rolling. All of a sudden, we hear him pecking his way through! Simla’s in the fore­ ground, he’s supposed to be terrified, and he starts laughing like crazy. I’m about to say C(JT when Hervé finally breaks through the window. He’s supposed to look dangerous but he can’t get his balance on the sill and falls through, hits the floor, taking the curtains with him, which fall on top of him. Window ruined: sixty bucks. The estate was owned by a very respectable
English gentleman and his wife. It was a very funny scene when they returned after the film was shot; the lady almost fainted to the floor when she saw the house. There were holes in the lawn, tire tracks all over the place, furniture smashed, windows broken, cushions ripped. What was worse—and this I never realized—was that some of the crew had stolen some valuable antiques (a grandfather clock, some silverware and rugs). The house was full of stuff dating back to the 1850s. We were promptly hit with a lawsuit for $30,000 in damages. They settled for $8,000 cash. It was very sad and I regret that very much. Thinking back, we should have taken some cash and put in two heavy, muscular bodyguards to protect the house... and the producers.
In the midst of all this chaos, you managed to direct a feature film. How did your di­ recting skill manifest itself? Well, you can see the result. The first day of
shooting, oddly enough, I wasn’t that nervous. I looked forward to it; I was hungry. I knew it was going to be a good film and I intended to get it done. One of my mistakes as director, as I’ve said,
was putting the actors in the house to simulate the story conditions, as in the school of Method acting, I suppose. Another mistake I can warn other young directors about, is that I tried to shoot the film in sequence as much as possible.
When you have very little money, that’s tough. ’Cause if you run out of money toward the end, that’s when you’re stuck. Most of the important scenes were at the end and, as a result, they had to be rushed. Early in the film was pretty much unimportant stuff, and a lot of it was cut out anyway. I spent a lot of time shooting stuff that was irrelevant. Particularly rushed, and this both­ ers me most of all, is the scene of Edmund and Serge talking in the study, which is one of the most important scenes, and it was—I think—the last thing we shot. We had to do it in two days. I had to shoot it like a television sequence. Two shots, one shots, medium shots. No originality to the scene at all. Just get it in the can, nothing tricky; it was that fucking rushed. Another mistake: fatigue sets in. One of the
most important aspects of direction is one’s physi­ cal shape. Friedkin says (and I agree with him totally) that a director has to be as strong as a bull, requiring less sleep than anybody. Also, he re­ quires a certain detachment of perspective. A director must be able to divorce himself from all the hassles, never losing sight of the theme of his movie. Too often I did, getting involved in all the petty shit. And I would use the petty shit as an excuse for not thinking. I overshot. My ratio, incidentally was 7 to 1. That’s pretty
low. That means I shot 70,000 feet and only 9,000 appear in the answer print.
What did you discover your directing tech­ niques to be? To put it briefly, I would say that I’m actor-
oriented, rather than technically oriented. I like to set the action before I set the technique. I rehearse (we did this in NY before we went to Canada); readings, some staging. There were only one or two days for rehearsals in Canada.
SEIZURE is a very suspenseful film, but it plays suspense in what feels like a very new way. IVs not “What is going to hap­ pen?9* because death is inevitable. The sus­ pense is more, I don't know... existential. I wanted to move away from the film school
influences that I’d had and do something origi­ nal in the VAMPYR direction but, as you know, VAMPYR has no fucking suspense. Hitchcock once said the difference between suspense and surprise was that, in a suspense film, the audi­ ence knows something is going to happen in advance whereas, with surprise, there is no set­ up. SEIZURE is of the second category. I wanted to make a film where you did not know what was
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