An Interview With John Huston

School bored the hell out of me. It was tedious. Irksome. I regret this in a way because today I don’t think of myself as an educated man. In another way, it’s just as well. Instead of giving form and shape to my view of life, formal schooling would only have limited me. Of course, I admire disciplined learning in others, the academic education. It’s just that the one I had stood me better.

Yes, the doctors thought I was doomed by a heart ailment. I’m not sure something like this means as much to a kid as to a grown man. At the time I was ten. It didn’t terrify me. I learned to accept it. I wasn’t allowed to play or eat a normal diet. I was told I’d certainly die if I did. But I resisted it. Somehow I knew they were wrong and I was right. I can still remember the names of the specialists who attended me over sixty years ago, and I can’t account for what they did to that child.

No. Kids in my time didn’t haunt theaters. There were no movie buffs, no autograph seekers with that almost unhealthy preoccupation with the famous. Oh sure, the girls loved a Rudolph Valentino. But movies were not the consuming subject in my circle. To this day, having a single consuming interest is unthinkable to me. At different times in my life, boxing, writing, the horses, and art have been just as important to me as making pictures.

No, it was Stanton MacDonald-Wright. He and Morgan Russell were the first Americans to paint abstractions. As a young man, I was enrolled in the Art Students League in Los Angeles. We invited Wright over as a mentor. In my judgment, he knew more about the Renaissance than Bernard Berenson. He also knew Chinese art and music. He composed music and spoke several languages. He introduced me to Baudelaire, Verlaine, Balzac, Rabelais. Wright had an extraordinary turn of mind and tongue. I remember how he described a fat woman he’d seen on the street as looking, below her waist, like two young boys wrestling. Whatever education I’ve got, this man furnished the foundation. I owe him more than I can ever express.

I learned the shape and substance of a scene, what constitutes a scene, what makes dialogue. Scenes have to have beginnings, a crisis, a climax. And I observed in O’Neill’s dialogue a formula of contradiction where the character says something and contradicts it at the same time. The dramatic heat rises from this irony. And I saw lines on a page take on life. I was instantly fascinated.

No, not really. I didn’t put any great store in it. I didn’t begin to think too highly—or even highly—of myself, for that matter. And after that, I went through a long period when nothing I turned my hand to seemed to come out well. I became almost resigned to failure. It wasn’t regret so much as failing to satisfy certain ambitions, but failure in life, in the deepest sense.

I think young men need champions. MacDonald-Wright had been a champion. Later, Henry Blanke at Warner Brothers was my advocate. My recovery from this black period began when I met the woman who was to become my second wife, Leslie Black. She was beautiful, not just physically, but a lovely woman. She set a standard. I sat down and wrote a treatment called Three Strangers . Warner Brothers bought it for five thousand dollars and gave me the contract to write the screenplay. On that money Leslie and I got married in 1937. I went to the studio, and from then on, everything changed.

Yes. I felt an immediate mastery. I knew what I was doing. I don’t say that in the sense that I was an expert or good director, but in the sense of its being right and therefore true for me.

First of all, I felt myself at one with the Sam Spade character, and [Dashiell] Hammett’s mentality and philosophy were quite congenial to me. The story was a dramatization of myself, of how I felt about things. I remember the look of astonishment on a friend’s face when I told him that Hammett compared with the great French stylists. A detective-story writer being compared to Flaubert?

Yes, I did. There could not be a scene in which Sam did not appear. The audience was to know nothing Sam didn’t know. And they meet the other characters only when Sam does. There was just one exception, when Sam doesn’t appear in a scene. That’s where his partner, Archer, is shot. You only see the gun come onto the screen and don’t know who fired it. The studio wanted that. I didn’t. I reconciled myself by saying, “That’s really not a part of my picture.”

The Army wanted no part of the picture at first. During the first screening, they all started walking out, by rank order, beginning with a three-star general. For a time I was highly suspect for turning out such a product. They figured the picture would dishearten any young soldier. Mental casualties usually occur, you know, during the baptism of fire. General George C. Marshall saved the picture. He saw it and said, of course, every recruit should see this film to prepare himself for the reality of combat. There were some scenes I did take out, reluctantly. Again, it was Marshall who requested it. I could understand. I had interviewed some of the men on camera before the first attack to ask them why they thought they were fighting the war. They were quite eloquent. It wasn’t like Korea or Vietnam then, you know. I can never forget the kid who told me how everything was going to change after the war. There he was in the midst of hell, and he believed the world was going to be a better place. Why, he told me, there was going to be a tunnel under the English Channel, maybe under the Atlantic. Not long afterward he was dead. They laid out the casualties in a row on their bedrolls. They had to lift their backs up to pull the bedroll over the head. I had my camera right down there filming their faces close up. In the original version of the film, I had their voices speaking about their hopes for the future over the dead faces. I guess that would have been too much for the families. So it was cut, along with about a third of the film. But after General Marshall approved of the picture, the rest of the brass fell into line. I was decorated, promoted, too, to major.

It was to show how men who had been mentally damaged in the war could be helped by psychiatric care to lead useful lives. We filmed it at Mason General Hospital on Long Island. We set the cameras up in the receiving room and filmed the patients as they were checked in. Then, as their treatment progressed, we kept on filming, thousands of feet. The cameras caught miraculous things—men who couldn’t walk recovering the use of their legs; one fellow regained the power of speech. But the War Department wouldn’t release the film. They said it violated the patients’ privacy, even though all the men filmed had signed releases. I think the Army was concerned about not destroying the warrior myth. Only a few weaklings were supposed to break under the experience of war. The others were to come out standing proud and tall. No one had been able to budge the Army before, but after years of trying we finally got the picture released in 1981. It was quite a campaign. Ray Stark, one of the most powerful figures in the film business and a man for whom I have the deepest affection, led the effort. Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association, worked on it. We had the U.S. senators and representatives from California, but the person who was most instrumental in getting Let There Be Light released was Vice President Walter Mondale.

The point is he gets the young character, played by Tim Holt, to laugh, too. They laugh at the absurdity of the venture. My father could inspire that kind of awareness and laughter in others. He would laugh and get me laughing—not necessarily at a joke. Usually it was a shared weakness he spotted or made me see that brought on that marvelous laughter. I haven’t laughed like that since he died.

It was more that I didn’t regard him so much as a father but as a friend. He hadn’t been much of a father to me; that wasn’t required. When I got to know him, I liked him. I also respected him, but I didn’t go to him for advice. Instead, I learned from his actions, from his way of looking at life. My father was my closest friend, and he would have been even had he not been my father.

I never made anything so thoroughly disliked. The first time the picture was previewed, people walked out, not just in twos and threes but by the score. They left at the parts I considered most important. Remember the death of the Tattered Soldier? He is walking in circles, then just sits down and dies. Audiences just couldn’t take it. I think it was almost unfair to put it on them. This was one of life’s darker moments for me. Before the picture was released I had to go to Africa to make The African Queen . I thought the Red Badge was safe, since I left it with two men who had championed it all along, Wolfgang Reinhardt and Dore Schary. But the studio decided the audience hadn’t been sufficiently aware that they were watching a masterpiece. They had to be told. So they changed my opening. I had shot a little scene for the opener, before the titles, where The Youth is standing sentry by the trees across the river. A Southern-accented voice calls out, “Would you mind stepping out of the moonlight and into the shadows, Yank, or I’ll have to pin one of those red badges on you. ” This was dropped. Instead they had the picture open with a copy of the book, with the title and “by Stephen Crane” so that the audience would appreciate that something serious, you know, important , was coming up. And they added a narration, too, that I hadn’t wanted. They cut a 135-minute picture to 69 minutes. And it still failed. I don’t blame the studio for its concern. I can understand their wanting to avoid an utter, ghastly failure. I believe that any picture, particularly an innovative picture, should pay for itself. If it doesn’t, other innovators who follow you have to suffer. They aren’t going to be given the opportunity to innovate. Still, I think The Red Badge was a good picture the way it was done originally. It’s interesting, almost twenty-five years later, I got a cable from Metro wanting to know if by chance I had a print of the original. Of course I didn’t. It’s gone forever.

It just disgusted me. Here people were being persecuted for their beliefs, and nobody was coming to their defense. I felt ashamed of Americans. I saw the thing that was coming and I wanted to cut it dead.

Yes. As a matter of fact, Willy Wyler and I went to him urging that he have his guild take a position on this anti-Communist hysteria. He refused. From that moment on I had very little use for him politically. I should say none.

At about that time I had gone to Africa to make The African Queen . Then I went to Paris to shoot Moulin Rouge . I felt no burning desire to come back to the United States. It had temporarily ceased to be my country, so I didn’t mind staying abroad. The anti-Communist lunacy of the period also influenced me to move to Ireland. I found out what they thought of Joe McCarthy. And it was a low opinion of him and what he was doing. That made me even fonder of those people.

I’m against dictatorship in any form. And I believe in the principles of decentralized government, not as interpreted by Ronald Reagan but as interpreted by Franklin D. Roosevelt. I have never felt so well about our society as when FDR was in the driver’s seat. I never believed what his enemies said about his assuming the prerogatives of a monarch. I’ll go even further than saying I am a Jeffersonian Democrat. Down deeper, I am an anarchist. Theoretically, doesn’t every right-thinking person desire a society so virtuous that no laws are required? But that’s nonsense, isn’t it?

I don’t expect when I go into those situations that it’s going to be an ordeal. Yes, people got ill on The African Queen . The irony is that we had brought in bottled water to head off trouble, and it turned out to be contaminated. I don’t know if it was required that we make the picture in the darkest heart of the darkest part of Africa. I suppose I was yielding to the romantic impulse within myself. Every day was a joy. This is one of the few experiences in life I could live over again.

Bogey was not particularly well read. We didn’t share much common intellectual ground. But Bogey was a good companion. We got along. We could insult each other without taking umbrage. And you can’t do that with many people. And he was a decent man, completely without pretense. The one quality he could not take in anybody was pomposity. Consequently you were rarely at a party where Bogey wasn’t going after somebody. Often he had to be rescued.

I never felt, for example, Marilyn Monroe’s highly publicized appeal in person. But it was obviously there on the screen. I think the camera is simply a better observer than the human eye. It sees into the soul somehow. For example, in the film I am now directing, you see the charm well enough in Aileen Quinn, the little girl playing Annie, when she looks at you and smiles. But on the screen it comes across as though incandescent lights have been thrown on.

One could not hope merely to transfer the novel to the screen. Melville’s book has that wonderful, random, disparate quality. Authors of the last century could indulge themselves more, the way Melville did with those chapters on the flensing of whales. He allows himself to slip under the influence of Shakespeare, too, and goes into the dramatic form. So, calling the picture Moby Dick is, in a sense, only a means of identification. The essential, however, is Melville’s philosophic argument. Ahab speaks for Melville, and through him he is raging at the deity. This point, by the way, was never commented on by any critic who saw the picture, not even those who championed it. They failed to recognize that the work was a blasphemy. The message of Moby Dick was hate. The whale is the mask of a malignant deity who torments mankind. Ahab pits himself against this evil power. Melville doesn’t choose to call the power Satan, but God. I thought the picture was quite good when it was released. But it went against the critics’ preconceptions. And what they wrote influenced the way the picture was received by audiences. They seemed to expect Ahab as a raging madman, the way Charles Laughton played him in an earlier version. I rejected that. Then there were those who thought of Moby Dick as an adventure story. No kid of ten is going to read Moby Dick . It takes the hard application of an adult mind to appreciate Melville. It is anything but an adventure story.

Early on we were wary of each other. Ernest Hemingway did not rush into hearty relationships. He was no backslapper. Papa rarely liked anyone he had met only once, particularly men. But after the first two or three meetings, he began to trust me, and we found a sense of kinship. We were at a party once at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. A man was there whom I’d encountered several times before and whom I disliked intensely. He was always talking about “the niggers,” always trying to show that the black man was an inferior breed. Of course, he’d say, they’re human, but certainly far beneath the Caucasian. I was so outraged this time by the son of a bitch that I was about to throw one at him. Papa shook his head slightly in a quiet warning to me. While I was cooling off, Papa went on talking to the man, very gently, understandingly. When the fellow was gone, he pointed out something he’d picked up that I hadn’t sensed. “Don’t you see,”he told me, “he’s part Negro. ” It was deeply sensitive and thoughtful. And it’s not the kind of story one often hears about Hemingway.

I’m not consciously aware of it. But I suppose it is there. As the French put it, living is the pursuit, not the gain. It’s the fox hunt and not the fox that matters. Success stories, as such, have never interested me much. In any event, I don’t see any particular continuity in what I’ve done. I am just surprised at how different each picture is from the other.

No. I don’t look on myself as an actor. Just take the money and get a kick out of it. It’s so easy. And everyone behaves as though I’m doing a great favor when I agree to take a part.

The old studio system offered security, economy, discipline. And they did a program of pictures. That is gone. Now each picture has to be an event. Yet I can’t think of a time when more good pictures were made than this past year.

No. There might never have been more bad pictures than the year before. It is not the producing structure that makes the difference, it’s the talent and the material.

Grammar in its broadest application is the adherence to form, not changing the style. I’ve known directors who lay out a scene—here’s the camera, you stand here, and you stand there. Sometimes they even light the set in advance to save time. Then the actors step in and they shoot. Of course this is possible, but it’s highly limiting. As a rule, I bring people on, don’t tell them much, bring them into the camera lens, and let them say their lines to one another until I’ve found my way into the scene. Once you have found the right shot to introduce the scene—written your first declarative sentence—then the rest flows. You’ve found the key to the whole scene. That’s grammar. Also, the spatial relationships of the images on the screen should be what they are in life. If you are shooting people a few feet apart, then the upper part of the body should fill the screen. That’s what we would see looking at someone from that distance in life. If the characters are inches apart, you shoot a big head close-up. Again, that’s what the eye sees in life. And that is grammar.

I took twenty-five thousand dollars out of The African Queen . That is all I have gotten to this day. I also got living expenses while it was being made. Once the film was released, I was supposed to share in the proceeds. They never came in. You know the business about gross and net earnings in pictures?

That’s right. I see my pictures on TV all the time and I never get a penny from it. Fortunately, I usually commanded good salaries for my work.

I can’t name just one. I realize that the honors falling on me now are for the cumulative weight of my work. But I especially like The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Man Who Would Be King, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Fat City, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison . And I like moments in all my work, whatever the reason I made the picture, including some that I don’t like on the whole. I always shot each scene as if it was the most important scene in the picture and shot every picture as though it was the most important one I ever made.

I’d pick Willy Wyler, beginning at the present and working backward, for his faithfulness and painstaking commitment to what he was doing. Vittorio De Sica was one of the finest directors: I rate Bicycle Thief among the five best pictures ever made. Then there’s James Crewes, who directed The Covered Wagon , a great sweeping statement about what America was, not what it now is. I particularly admire Fellini’s delight at the discovery of truth within the grotesque. I admire George Stevens and René Clair. And, of course, there is D. W. Griffith. Among actors, William S. Hart influenced my childhood. I too wanted to peer through steely, narrow eyes and fight wrongdoers.

The people heading up studios nowadays aren’t a particularly creative lot. They are businessmen, accountants, former agents, tax lawyers. Most of them don’t know a damned thing about making a picture. They can wheel and deal and come up with somebody else’s money. Not the sort you would want to spend much time with by choice.

Sometimes when I look at the body of my work I’ll say, “Oh, shit!” But even Michelangelo on his deathbed thought he’d done nothing to ennoble art. He wanted to destroy his work—the Pieta! And this from the greatest artist who ever lived. Of course I am not comparing my work to Michelangelo’s. But this eternal dissatisfaction of the artist is what I was talking about.

Certainly not. I am more lost in wonder than ever.

Quite possibly. I’m sure I’m not fooling myself when I say I am just as able to make a picture today at seventy-five as I ever was—as long as it doesn’t involve climbing a mountain. I would rule out Everest as a location. I’ll accept the end readily and easily when the time comes. I expect I’ll go out the way Saroyan said he would, curious about what comes next.