theartsdesk Q&A: Film Director Joseph Strick

Oh, I’m so glad you liked that because it’s not an easy one. You start with complete nudity so there’s no issue; once you've got a naked girl the whole idea of this ridiculous tease is lost. Anyway, that was the idea. But you know what they say, "Music is what you haven’t achieved in the film." Well, it’s not true, but…

Sidney Meyers was an extraordinary editor.

Oh yes, the three of us {Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and I] worked very closely. I was the kid. They were older men. That’s why the titles credit the three of us. They were both in their fifties and I was in my twenties.

So they say. Jiří Menzel in Prague definitely saw it. He said: "This and Les Quatre Cents Coups are the two great..." [He changes tack.] I had Stravinsky on The Balcony (1963). He was marvellous. The idea was, who is the best person in the world? Well, Stravinsky, obviously. So I asked him. He looked at some of the film: "Wunderful, wunderful; needs no music," he said. I was crushed. So I told the production manager, "It’s done."

I just got in touch with him. He was in Los Angeles. Through whom or how I got his number I can't remember. This happened to me twice: that a giant would not accept any money. When we finished the film we said we'd pay him the fee. He said, "No money, no money. Too much fun." "Well we owe you the money," I said. "No money," he said, "You see I don’t own that music. I was in Nice and it was out of copyright." "You did the arranging," I said. "No, No.” [The architect] Oscar Niemeyer did a house for me and wouldn’t accept a kopek. I'm so staggered by these men.

Extraordinary. I would never have had the nerve to approach him but, after he designed the UN building, they wouldn’t let him in America to supervise the construction.

Because he was a Red - still is, he‘s over 100. I got in touch with him. I said, "It’s disgusting. I can’t bear to be an American. Would you like to design a house for me?" "Of course," he said. We did it by correspondence. At the end of it I said, "Please let me have my bill." He said no. I sent him a cheque. He never touched it. It’s very humbling.

You say you were ashamed to be an American. Your Academy Award-winning documentary Interviews with My Lai Veterans(1971) was eerily reminiscent of today's military travesties.

I tried to do a film on Abu Ghraib but [the director] Errol Morris was too far advanced [on his film Standard Operating Procedure]. It's not bad. It's not appreciated. It’s a little… He gets devoted… Look, it's marvellous. He got a lot of people he should have gotten. He got that dreadful girl. He got everybody except Charles, who got eight years.

I would like to do a movie about paedophile priests but I can’t get any money to even begin looking at it. Also my circulation is bad so I can’t go through the time zones. It would be easier for me to do it in the States.

These docs are very much done by the production manager. Somebody tells you to shoot in the faith-healing scene [from Savage Eye] and all you have to do is open the shutter. And as long as you don't behave like an idiot director, you just shoot it quietly, you get these unforgettable things.

Like the shot of the woman speaking in tongues in Savage Eye. The great thing about that sequence was that today we see slick Evangelical preachers all the time delivering their very smooth shtick. These preacher didn’t have their routine polished yet.

They were so sincere. They thought they were doing good. Which is why they let us film. Isn‘t it marvellous? It’s an absolute conflict of cultures. The woman I cannot get over is the woman crying. How could they do that to this woman, she’s crying and in pain. "Go there and pray some more," the priest says. "Go there and let God burn it out of you."

It’s the best thing I ever shot.

Yes. The single camera you stick there in front of them is what they accept. They just ignore it because they're on doing their shtick. They’ve come there to praise the Lord. To get some attention. And that’s how they get attention. Which is ok until they come with someone who’s in real pain.

You were there last night at the BFI screening of your three early documentaries: Muscle Bound(1948), Savage Eye and Interviews with My Lai Veterans. Were the reactions different to those of audiences in the past?

They were more distant from it and laughing a lot more at the shenanigans of the preacher and his assistants, the way they were moving people in and out and the way they knew when a good one was coming up because they'd move everyone out of the way - I didn't tell them to do that, but they knew. The audience was more hip.

Everyone is always dead silent in the My Lai film. The feeling is one of, "Oh, stop it. You’ve told me quite enough!"

The beauty of Muscle Beach, your first film, a short, is its idyllic nature. Made more idyllic through the fact that we know exactly where this sort of innocent muscle-pumping will lead: to vanity and grotesquery.

Now we have a muscle-pumping Governor!

That's a terrible thing to say, but true. I never thought of it. Absolutely true. Heartbreaking. But Los Angeles was heartbreaking in those days. It was so crummy. It was a wasteland. It still is mostly. There are a couple of museums and a couple of orchestral things. One Gehry building. In those days, what was worst about it was that, when there was a building, it was absolute trash. Imitation of Tudor - Beverly Hills-on-Thames, you know - next to a southern revivalist building. One would think, what are you people about?! What is this nightmare of a wasteland!?

So the films were made by a group of Easterners who all wanted to make films. The characteristic was that they were very well made. They wanted to do something more than spend their lives in TV. There are five extraordinary crews in London, as good as any in the world. Five in Paris. And a hundred in Los Angeles, most of them working on utter trash. They wanted to be something. If you wanted a film with any meaning they loved to work on as volunteers.

All three films were made by volunteers.

I was in New York when I shot My Lai.

Well, when I got out of the air force I couldn’t get a job in the cinema: all the returning veterans had a right to their jobs. I had been at a university for a year before.

Science. Because it was very clear that physics would win the war. I had no talent for it. I was an average middle-C student - which means forget it! Everybody knew the war was coming. The war was there; you’d been at war two years by the time I went to university. It served me in very good stead when I needed the money to make a string of films of my own. At that point I got out of the air force and could only get a job in journalism.

On the LA Times.

Yes. I met Ben Maddow there who was a marvellous screenwriter who did Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust and John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and so on, and I asked him how do you become a film director. “Well, you get a camera,” he said,  “and you go out and start fliming what you think is visually extraordinary.  And you start from that." I said, "OK." I had been an aerial photographer. I got a camera I had used in the air force: a war surplice double hand-wind EYMO 35 mm camera. I was one of these exposure people. I needed the best treatment for my negative that I could possible get because I was not a precise technician.

Where were you an aerial photographer?

I was in an anti-submarine unit off the coast of Virginia. I flew 17-hour grids. In my years we got one and a half whales. It took radar to stop the subs but before then they didn’t know what to do to stop them. They had already landed one submarine off Long Island dropping spies.  So they were just flying us around, even though that was quite foolish. When the British invented radar in two weeks they destroyed 25 per cent of the U-boat fleet. Das Boot. Have you seen that film?

Well that’s what happened. Two weeks. Just radar. They flew over the Bay of Biscay where all the subs in the North Atlantic would rendezvous because they couldn’t use radios - they exchanged light signals and recharged their batteries there because they were diesel - and the radar planes got them and bombed them to oblivion. But I wonder what would have happened if we hadn't invented radar. We were losing 25 per cent of our troops and everything else going by boat. It would have gone to 50 per cent. In which case we would have don’t it anyway. So it was very bad.

To come out of this situation and do such effortlessly cheering film as Muscle Beach is amazing.

There I was wandering around with a camera looking for something to do and I walked towards the beach, which is the only acceptable part of LA because there’s the ocean -  turn your back on all that trash! I began to shoot some seagulls. Then I see these muscle men, these acrobats. What are these people doing?! I thought, well, it’s alive. I began to shoot it. As I shot it, I began to get better. I began to develop a style forshooting that stuff.

Everything was projected in the wrong screen proportions last night [at the BFI]. It was projected as widescreen but shot in 4:3 in academy aperture. I should have gone up to the projectionist but the last time I went up to a projectionist… We’d been invited to Cannes with Ulysses. I had been promised a prize. In the one screening after they had accepted the subtitling, which had come from the Academie Française, they had erased the subtitles with erase pencils. I thought, what do I do? Go up and stop it. Ok, I go up. There’s a committee of five, all dressed in tuxedos, like thugs. I said, "You can’t run the film that way; it’s no longer my film." "No," they said,  "We've decided it’s going to run this way." I turned round and there were all the electrical switches. What did I do, like an idiot [he motions to flick of the switches]. They grabbed me, threw me down the steps and broke my foot.

1967. I retired the film from the festival and the festival director said, in prose I still haven’t deciphered, "There are things that can be read that can't be spoken." But we weren’t talking about spoken! We were talking about subtitles!

I wouldn’t accept her as a ... Of course, I had seen them, everyone had to be influenced who had seen them. But I felt much closer to [Vigo's] A propos de Nice. That had some twist: remember the shoe shine shop?! Riefenstahl never had a twist or a sardonic or a complex moment. Nothing but heroism and the Führer. Besides I devoted a part of my life to getting rid of them. Of course, she was a marvellous artist.

A lot of directors are interested in either formal qualities or exploring societal issues. You do both, mostly. Except in My Lai.

There’s always a little technical question in all these things. I was brought up that way. The technical problem in Interviews with My Lai Veterans is to have talking heads that don’t put you to sleep. Muscle Beach, I didn’t know if it would be a film; I thought I was shooting stuff. Irving Lerner really did the thing that put it together: a singing narration. I believe it is the first singing narration in a film. Fred Zinnemann did it in High Noon, of course, "Do Not Forget Me, Oh, My Darling".

Did Hollywood not come knocking after Muscle Beach?

No. I began to get jobs, but trash. Schlock films. Sub schlock.

You promise to keep it to yourself? There’s a whole area of sub schlock in which film is used as toilet paper. In this case it was the making of so-called documentaries of a town called, Waterbury, Connecticut. They’d get a cinema, a 200-seat house. They get them to agree to screen it. Send me in. I was to shoot the documentary of that town. You’d be happy to know the soundtrack was the same for every town. You identified that town only by the labels and railway station. That sort of thing. That is sub schlock. After that you’re going to have to make enough money to make your films. So I left film and I made some money.

That was much later. My father was the inventor.

He was a penniless immigrant from Poland. He invented tubeless tyres. He had been a steel worker. He'd arrived in 1914. He worked in the steel mills, which is what they imported Polaks to do.

Pueblo, Colorado, then he went to Pittsburgh towards the end of the war. When his health failed they threw him out onto the street. He was shovelling coal into a blast furnace, that sort of thing. When I was born, he was a milk truck driver. But he was studying the milk truck and all its things and he came up with a pneumatic tyre but one that was way advanced. Tubeless tyres were another 20 years off. He was a brilliant inventor. He turned his mind to automotive trucking things: truck trailer invention and manufacturing.

He never got the patent. He was just too poor. He had six children. Then he emerged and his invention was devoted to truck trailer. My only invention was the user of the motion simulator as an entertainment system. Ever been to Disneyland?

Oh you have! Have you been on Star Tours? The whole room that moves in accordance with the film. That’s mine.

I organised companies in the technology business. It was the time of Sputnik and the US was determined to catch up with the Russians. You could form a company to solve a technical problem. They’d give you a contract. And if they didn’t fulfil the contract you were gone. But if you fulfilled it, they paid you. Or there would be staged payments. They couldn’t survive unless they worked. I would build a company, set a group of people together who I believed in and build it up and when it got to 100 people I'd sell it. I didn’t want to end up in the people management business. I didn’t want to stay in it. That’s what it amounted to. I didn’t want to get besotted with the money. Everyone you meet in those fields are besotted; they can’t stop. They do antisocial things. They turn into Microsoft and monopoly outfits, Google in which they lose site of things. All I wanted to do was make movies.

There are quite a few people who emerged though business. Sloane Wilson. You do need people to come out of ad agencies etc.

He turned down Joyce. Haven’t ever forgiven him. [Laughs.]

Savage Eye has a Joycean poetry to it.

That was Ben Maddow. He was a poet. He was earning a living as a screenwriter. Then he finally got a chance to have his poetry part of the film. The task was to make it work. In the back of my mind always was Ulysses. I read it at 16, couldn’t get it out of my mind. You have to be devoted to doing it. Those words.

Savage Eye almost seems to fulfill the free-wheeling Joycean style better than your version of Ulysses (1967) in some ways. Do you think that's because you had to play it safe when translating such a revered novel to film?

I don’t think so. If you feel that then I failed to some extent with Ulysses. I don’t mind failing a little bit with Ulysses because it’s such a giant work. If I were to sit here to tell you I think I'd done it, you’d have me committed. I started off thinking I'd do the whole book. But I couldn’t raise a dime. Even though Savage Eye was a success. And I had taken that money to make The Balcony and I took this money to make Ulysses. But I couldn’t make a film of 19 and three-quarter hours. I couldn’t do it. Nobody would let me. I wanted to. That would have been marvellous.

Your Ulysses is quite literal in some ways. Were you afraid of being experimental with the book?

You can't get more experimental than Joyce. I wanted to do better and better images. They would be more and more revelatory. I wanted to do a good job with the cast. I wanted to have a decent looking and operating film. I wanted nobody to confused. I wanted it to be clear. And then when it came down to it I wanted it to have something of the revelation of the book.

Savage Eye is influence by Joyce for sure. I’d like to think more than Riefenstahl. I’m teasing you. For somebody who spent those years enraged at having a family wiped out... So when we saw Riefenstahl we thought it was good but what a perversion.

Seventy per cent of the family was wiped out.

Ulysses was famously banned in the Unites States.

My father smuggled it over by 1925. It sat in the house like a holy artefact. He’d gone through Paris, bought it there and brought it back. At 16, I began reading it; it was something very extraordinary.

It’s a funny story. I was required by contract to deliver a film that would pass the British Board of Film Censors. The censor was a gadabout; he loved to be taken for lunch and to talk about casting. Joseph Losey would play him like a violin. And then when it came time to cut, Losey would throw him a bone. That was considered a way to handle to Trevelyan, who was related to the historian. So he knew that I was very committed to passing. We gave him a doctored script - I never would have gotten to make the film - and they let us begin. But British Lion Films Corporation was a nest of conflict because they had the Baldwins. They said that they would make this film over their dead body - which was encouraging. Others were quite supportive but the Baldwins were extremely influential in the place. After they were told they had to withdraw, they didn’t put up any money until an Irish bank strike in which they continued to write cheques while we were shooting and they all came through two weeks later when the bank strike was over and then British Lion had to kick in.

So there we are at the end of it. I sent the censors the film. They made 29 cuts. I said, "Well, the screens are going to go blank and we'll cut in an awful noise on the soundtrack and the film will be unplayable." We sent them that. They called: "What have you done to your beautiful film?" I said, "What have I done? What are you trying to do to my film?" The BBC heard about it. They called and said, "We'd like to run a programme on your film." "It’s very nice if you can run the cut pieces," I said, thinking they never would. They said yes! "You’ll run all of them," I said. "Yes." "Including 'fuck' and 'shit'?" I said. "Yes." And they did. And that cut the ground entirely from under the film censors. It had been seen! On BBC One!

Yes. That's the first time it was put on the screen anywhere. My contribution to world culture! [Laughs] Gather ye rose buds while ye may. As a result it ran for a year at the Academy Cinema at nice prices. And we made the entire negative costs in that cinema. Everyone worked at a minimum and owned a piece of the film. As a result of that they made five times their low salaries from their interests in the film.

I'm not ahead of the audience. I don’t care about the censors. The theatre censors were wiped off the map in 1958. That’s going to happen o film.  It’s too ridiculous. It’s ludicrous. We’re going to put together a programme of forbidden films. We're trying to do it country by country because we want to find the films that are still forbidden. In France, Battle of Algiers wasn't allowed until 5 years ago.

Les Amants. That was only because of cunnilingus. Trivial matters.

Yes. Well, the worst is the collaboration between the exhibitors and the Government. They accept anything. And the distributors. They don’t fight for the films.

We'd like to forget Abu Ghraib because we'll do it again - if we're not doing it now. We probably are. We're certainly wiping out villages.

Yes, it’s a political film.

We didn’t shoot them. Their stories didn’t check out. Two said they hadn’t done anything when they had, so we didn't need them on the camera lying. Five were telling the truth.

That’s what they’ve been doing ever since. The African American was only there because he had been caught. Photographs had been published in Life magazine of him with a gun standing over bodies. He was well and truly caught. He came there to clear himself. He committed suicide afterwards.

Ten years after.

I felt a lot of emotion. But I knew his speech pattern from talking to him before so I could see the emotion in the change in the speech pattern when he was talking about that.

None of them could. Some were absolutely unreconstructed. Part of the interest in that film was finding out about myself because I would have bombed. I was in the outfit at the end of the war that bombed Hiroshima. My mother always thought I had done it and I couldn’t talk about (but she also thought I was a basketball hero, when I was terrible; you know how mums are.)

How do you get a young person to perform an atrocity? How would they have got me to? I wanted to understand the Germans. And I began to understand them from this. From seeing my next-door neighbours talking about it. The kid who has a war wound, he has some perspective. He’s really a New York Jew but he’s in Florida for some reason or another and wounded, but he understood what was going on and he didn’t kill anybody. In the early atrocities the people who don’t participate aren't punished. The people who are doing it know that it is a monstrous thing. So they let those two kids go; they didn’t bother them. In the early German death squads, they shot people in the backs of the head: lined them up. Men who refused to do it weren’t bothered because that was very early in the game, well before the death camps were set up. And there I am on the verge of an atrocity that killed 100,000 civilians.

The worst thing in that massacre that isn’t said in the film is that there was not a female or a male left in tact. They cut them all up. I couldn’t get anybody to talk about it. Out of 105 men, a bunch of them were having a good time. That pseudo hippie only said it off camera, we kept the recorders running, "Everybody else was shooting, and I figured I need to get in some target practise." Shooting human beings for fun.

The idea was to have a banal typeface. Make it as straightforward and banal as possible.

Well, I'm glad. That was the purpose.

That film cost $22,000. Nothing. People make movies for nothing now. I’m going to make a feature with a palm camera.

I have an easy subject. Almost trivial: a Feydeau farce.

Too show-offy. They lean with their wrist. Which is why they’re actors. You’re not married to an actress, are you?

Oh good! [Laughs.] They’re not all there, actors.

Yes, well they’ve found an ideal narcissistic racket.

Savage Eye cost $65,000, and it made quite a made of money, four or five times that. With that I was able to buy The Balcony. The family was absorbing a bit of money. The Balcony did well. The Balcony was partly financed by the distributor. Then from Ulysses on they were financed by distributors but I had to find money to buy the rights. The Ulysses rights cost $75,000. That’s what the money was for. After Ulysses I was very much in demand because the film did so well. I took two Hollywood projects. Got fired from both.

George Cukor took over on Justine, right?

That's right.

Well they wouldn’t let me make my movie. There’s no point. I wanted to get Glenda Jackson to play one of the principal riles. "She’s ugly!” they said. She had never been in a feature. I knew her when I was directing at Stratford-upon-Avon. I knew she was a great actress.

Yes. Just once. Once at Stratford, once at the National.

I lived in London for seven years. And moved to Paris for Tropic of Cancer, met a scientist and have lived in Paris ever since.

No. They’re not easy people. Truffaut was a real shit. When I got thrown out of the projection booth at Cannes he attacked me in Playboy. "I had a lot of nerve," he said. And he had used my flat in London to make Fahrenheit 451 without paying for it. I never asked him for any money. We had a friend in common, Lewis Allen, who was my producer on The Balcony and co-producer on Never Cry Wolf (1983). He said, "What were you up to attacking Jo?" "Oh I don’t know," he said, "I get that way sometimes." Which is true. He went through an awful lot of friends. They’re mean, that bunch. Godard is mean.

My best friend is Barney Ross who ran Grove Press; I was the director of Grove for about 30 years. He commissioned Godard to do a movie called Vladimir and Rosa. Godard had nothing but contempt for anyone who gave him any money and he sent them a film that had nothing to do with it. Grubby. Really grubby

No. I really want to make film. But at 86 you can’t complain that they don’t give you a big Hollywood production to make. I never survived a Hollywood production. If you’re not making your own film what’s the point? I wasn’t doing it for money, just because it pleased me. It didn’t please me that they told me that Glenda Jackson was ugly! And that you have to use Anna Karina. "But she can’t act! " I told them. Casting is a chorus line in Hollywood.