The Sheila Variations

From Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films

One of the many film-making books I have on my shelf is Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films. Perhaps this is only a book that an obsessed cinephile like myself would love, or perhaps not.

It is a book-long interview with Kazan, going over each one of his films, a chapter devoted to each. In-depth discussions of his relationships with various DPs, his development of each script, his feelings about the performances he was able (or unable, in some cases) to get. The interviews in this book were done in the early 70s.

What this book proves to me is: Whatever Elia Kazan does not know about directing isn't worth knowing.

To my taste, his main contribution to the "scholarship" of acting/directing, was this simple statement: "Acting is turning psychology into behavior."

I remind myself of this constantly, if I am struggling with a part, with a choice I need to make in anything I am working on...

Remember: Turn your psychology into behavior.

Too many actors stay in the psychological. I have fallen into that trap myself.

Kazan always reminds us that everything must be SEEN. Psychology MUST be turned into behavior. Which is why the scene in the park in On the Waterfront is so rightfully famous. (Kazan discusses it in-depth in the excerpt I will post, momentarily)

Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint are obviously falling in love, in a very hidden un-spoken way. Yet somehow, we must SEE their feelings ... even if they have no words to express what is going on. Brando was the kind of actor who understood that kind of stuff instinctually, and so what did he do? Eva Marie Saint drops her glove. He picks it up for her, and they continue walking, and he does not give the glove back. They stroll along, and he fingers the glove, stroking it, and then he tries it on.

The moment is breathtaking. To this day, it is one of the most honest and startling moments I have ever seen in a film.

She wants to get away from him, because she is a good Catholic girl, and also because he is the enemy of her family. She should not be seen with him.

He can feel that she wants to get away, but he wants to keep talking with her ... so he kidnaps her glove, so that the conversation will be prolonged.

But even deeper than that, there is this sensuality in how he touches that glove, in how he tries ON the glove (it literally made my toes curl when I first saw it as an adolescent - I wanted to BE that glove).

With her, he can let out his sensitive side. He can be vulnerable. So him trying on the glove ALSO has the connotation of a man allowing himself to express his "feminine" side.

But again: the genius of the scene is its subtlety. It does not bang you over the head. it does not scream at you, "DO YOU GET IT??"

Another thing I find so extraordinary about these interviews, is Kazan's humility. He definitely takes credit where credit is due, but if it wasn't his idea, he never takes credit for it. He obviously LOVES actors, and is a little bit in awe of them. Of what a genius actor can do.

Here are some excerpts from the chapter dedicated to On the Waterfront. Interview questions are in bold. And I've added emphasis to some of Kazan's words because ... well, because it's my blog!

Since Waterfront is such a classic example of your work, I'd like to go into detail with you as to how you approach each directorial choice, from idea to release print. We've already talked about the script, so let's move on to the cast.

I had a problem right away. The actors had to be in the same league as the scenery. They had to be as real as the Hoboken locations. You rarely get that with actors. I was very close to the Actors Studio then. I not only started it, I was still teaching there. I had guys like Rod Steiger, Eva Marie Saint and a whole bunch of others. They were more people than they were actors. Rod Steiger looked like somebody in a hurry, that's all.

After finding leads who would look like they belonged on the New Jersey waterfront, I had to surround them with bit players who would also look real. The problem, of course, was the Screen Actors Guild. That was murder. I don't know what arrangements we finally made with SAG in the end, but there weren't many of their people around. So I was able to use a lot of real longshoremen.

The next problem was getting actors out into the cold, which was not as easy as it sounds. A couple of days I had to go to the hotel and pull Brando out by the hand. It was not only zero degrees on the waterfront, but the north wind was blowing off the Hudson and the actor's faces, therefore, without makeup became like the real thing.

In casting the major roles what were you looking for? What was the essence of Terry Malloy for you?

He wants opposing goals, ambivalence. He was at war within himself. He's the only character that's that way in the whole picture. That was crucial. Brando was that. He had so much shame in him – from God knows what. He had the ability to project the inner struggle of conscience. That's the essence of the story, Terry's inner conflict. It had to genuinely be there in the actor playing the part. Another fellow whom we considered and whom I like and who was ready to accept the part was Frank Sinatra. He would have been brilliant.

Did you always look for the essential quality of the characters in the actors themselves?

Unless the character is somewhere in the actor himself you shouldn't cast him. The person has got to have the essential qualities, the mainstream in him. Otherwise you fake and never get a truly good performance.

With the priest played by Karl Malden I was looking for the ability to believe and advocate certain simple, clear values. Karl couldn't stand sophisticated distinctions. I started him off, and I knew him intimately. I still do; he's a close friend of mine. I knew that Karl was that guy. What do priests really know about life? The waterfront priests know more, but they're still dealing in absolute right and absolute wrong. Karl deals that way too.

With Rod Steiger you could just smell it. You could look at him and say, "Here is a guy who is going to make it." I just smell the soul and see what the hell is there.

Eva Marie Saint was a true-blue girl who didn't think she was pretty, didn't think much of herself. Her role was crucial. If I hadn't found a truly innocent, devoted girl, a girl who had something in her that resembled the simplicity and faith that well-brought-up Catholic girls have, I'd have been in trouble. I'd seen Eva in a play in which I didn't think she was exceptional, but I thought her quality was exactly right for Edie. It turned out I was right.

There's always some luck in casting. You make guesses based on your personal, subjective responses to people. Sometimes those guesses turn out good, sometimes they don't. Nevertheless, I think it's crucial to cast people who inside all the fronts and manners and agreeabilities and adaptabilities are like the characters you are casting.

You do the same thing with the smaller roles?

Yes, to whatever degree possible. Like the old actor, John Hamilton, who played Eva Marie Saint's father. I'd known him for a long time from around the street. There was this sense in him of I'm a failure. I'm not going to make it. So much goodness and so much pain.

What was your next step after the cast was set?

I had three readings at the Actors Studio with all the actors who had speaking parts. I made all of my basic, general observations to each of the leading players … I warned them that it was going to be rough on location and cold. Mostly I said general things like no makeup, but I also told each of them what to work on in their part. It was valuable.

Can you tell me more about the process of the reading?

Before each scene I would tell the actors involved the kind of place where I intended to play it, such as a rooftop. Then I would have them read it, just to relate to each other, just to listen to each other. Listening is awfully important in the theatre, but it's even more important in films. More often than not you're photographing a person listening. If a scene is good, what little is being said has an effect on the person listening, particularly in On the Waterfront, where the whole point of Brando's character was that not only was he inarticulate but that he was only semi-conscious, that he was unaware or only partly unaware of the struggle going on inside himself.

Listening is more than just hearing the words; it's a total process. You not only listen with your ears but you take in the person's intention. You listen in the deepest sense of the word. It's a total response to the person, not only to what he says, but to what he's trying to do, what he means. I stress that a lot. Very often in my movies you will see people being photographed who are not talking.

Can you describe the process from one reading to the next?

The second reading had to do more with my introduction to what their main objectives were. I would do just enough to get them going on the right track. You don't tell them each station nor all the curves along the way. You don't tell them the ambiguities or the temporary reversals. But you put them on the right track so they're doing the right thing. I would make the reading start casually and then say, "You see, this is what you want and because" and so on.

Would you fit that into the "spine" for them?

I wouldn't do it up front because that is revealed increasingly as it goes along. There are things each day that reconfirm the original goal, the original objective that I set for them. You must never go faster than they are. You never feed them more than they can eat and digest. You should never talk about the significance of the movie. That is the result of all the other factors being right and has nothing to do with their performances. The significance is a result of their performance. Drawing charts is a dangerous thing. It becomes a lesson in logic, everything must fit into that. It can make a performance very mechanical. But you sure as hell better know where you're going.

In other words, you may do it for yourself whether you do it for the actors or not.

I do do it for myself. I used to take copious notes. But I always acted very offhand about that because what you're trying to do is wake up that element in the actor. You reach into him and find the spine in him and arouse that and get him to enjoy playing that. That's very important – get him to enjoy playing that.

But if you say the spine is so and so and this is related, and the actors take notes, watch out. As soon as an actor starts to write a lot, you're in trouble. He shouldn't write, he should just begin to behave the right way, and like behaving that way.

For example, when Brando began to enjoy Saint's innocence and find it attractive; instead of putting him off, he began to like it. At the same time it made him feel guilty. His behavior followed automatically without my saying anything.

The worst thing you can do is say to an actor, "What you're doing is this and that's right. Now keep doing that." Don't do that. They're doing it already. That's very ticklish. You're dealing with behavior, not cognition. Once you've got it going in the actor it's amazingly solid. They don't lose it. If he or she finds the behavior strain in them awakened, you don't call attention to it. It's very bad to do that. You are careful not to get them to put it into words for themselves. I saw a lot of brilliant guys in the theater when I was a stage manager make great speeches. They should have published the speeches instead of putting the show on. Directors show off a lot, it's a terrible thing. If you could direct a whole movie without a word of direction, you'd be better off because then the actors would be doing it spontaneously.

Sometimes, like in the taxi cab scene, which I get so much credit for, I didn't do anything. I read it once, but the scene is so good, the personal intentions in it are so clear, and the actors are so gifted, that I did nothing. The actors knew it all. It's so human and so basic.

Was there any scene you had difficulty with in the reading?

A key scene in which it was essential to get things going right was the one in the pool hall at the beginning.

You had to get across the fact that Terry and Johnny Friendly liked each other. It may seem like an insignificant scene, but if you don't get all the relationships going correctly at the outset, the rest of the picture is meaningless. I had to stress over and over again that Johnny likes Terry. He likes his stupidity, he likes the fact that he's agreeable, that he was a fighter. He finds him cute, he likes his inarticulateness. He's physically fond of him, he likes his muscles. That came out very well in the moment when Lee Cobb got a headlock on Brando and horsed around with him. You also have to make it very clear that Terry likes Friendly, too. He's grateful to him. So when the break between them comes, it's a break between two friends.

Do you tell the actors those things at the reading?

Yes, I would tell them quite a bit, but you don't have to tell them too much because when you say the right things, they are very stimulating to a good actor. When you start talking too much, it's usually because you're floundering around and don't know yourself.

The values in Waterfront are extremely clear. All I had to do was call these very intelligent men and women's attention to what was already there. I also did another thing. In a hopefully casual way, I took them aside and talked more generally about what the problems were. I did that with Brando, for instance, and he got a tremendous impetus from that.

Do you ever play the actors off against each other, using the private things you know about them?

I'm very sly about those things. I'm not ducking your question, but I don't really like to talk about that too much. What I do is talk to the actors about each other, not their acting but their personal lives.

I'll bring something up before an actor plays a scene, something seemingly off-handed about the other actor in the scene.

For instance if I want Brando to do something, I'll say, "Look how thin Eva Marie is." Or I might call attention to her costume. "She looks perfect today; she looks just like a little Catholic schoolgirl." That may wake him up to something about her. A director doesn't have to do much, but you have to do things that go to the core of the actor's problem.

Once I called attention to Steiger's camel hair coat – a brilliant touch which, by the way, Steiger thought up.

When you're working with pros like Brando, Steiger, and Cobb, do you ever run into the difficulty of an actor saying, "Oh, man, don't give me that director shit!"

They've never said that to me, though I imagine they must have felt it at times. Brando might negate something I suggested, but he would not ignore the basic principle I was aiming at. He might not like my idea, but then he would do something else that was better. A director should never feel that he has to win an argument. Not everything you say is going to be right. But hopefully everything you say is going to be stimulating. And if one thing doesn't work, go right back two minutes later with something else. You don't have to win. You don't have to be the boss man.

Can I push your memory and ask you to pick a scene that you recall from On the Waterfront and describe the process of getting the actors to reach the moments you had worked out on your own?

There's a scene where Edie comes across the roof looking for Terry. He has a pole with which he's making the pigeons fly in a certain pattern. There's hardly anything in the text at all. She just wants to talk to him. We know that she's come for a purpose. I made her intention clear to Eva. We also know certain constraints Edie has. I made those clear to her as well. Brando's mystic and mysterious personality helps with that because he's not immediately reachable. I counted on that without calling her attention to it.

I made clear to Brando how guilty Terry feels in relationship to Edie. I only had to say it once. It's obvious in the script, and he was very aware of it anyway.

I tired, then, to give him something to do that would make Terry not immediately accessible to her without him having to "act" it. So he has a pole and he's guiding the pigeons around. When she walks over and wants to talk to him, he sees that she's there to tell him something important but that it is hard for her to speak. He could avoid the confrontation, which he'd rather do, by talking about hawks and playing with pigeons.

I didn't have time to make explicit to Brando that his dialogue about hawks was like telling Edie, "Don't judge a man by what he does in this terrible city, because it's a question of survival here." Brando knows that and if you make it too clear it becomes obvious and corny. The whole scene works off his avoiding a conversation by playing with the birds. As the scene goes along, they move over to the cage and then I point out to her that as he handles the other birds and offers her an egg, things happen.

Actually there's a little boy in the scene as well.

Yes, Terry's able to avoid her further with the little boy. She finds him charming because of the way he plays around with the kid. And when Terry offers the egg, she can feel the sensitivity, the goodness in him. One thing which is bewildering her, which I pointed out only once, is that on the one hand he's rough, dumb, and crude and on the other hand, he's so gentle withal. Brando has that within himself. Again, you don't have to tell him to be both crude and gentle. You've cast the role right so the guy's got it. You don't have to tell her anything either.

I directed the scene by using the business that Budd Schulberg had written, which is the offering of the egg, the way he handles the bird – which Brando liked to do – by his lack of shyness with the boy, which contrasted with his shyness with her, and by giving the boy a tough 10-year-old attitude that girls are somehow inferior, and by accentuating the boy's role in the scene. Actually I directed the boy more than I did either of the leads. You have the scene almost doing it for you by the business you've set up. You know very clearly what values you want but when you don't have to stress them you don't.

In a scene like that how do you define Brando's objectives?

My God, you don't have to define them. They're obvious.

His objective is that he wants the girl to like him, and he also feels guilty about her brother. If you talk too much about the guilt, you play that which you don't want to play. That was the damnedest movie because I did a lot of talking for a while at the beginning, but I did very little afterwards because the movie sort of played itself.

But clearly the objective can't be to be guilty.

No, I didn't say that. I said he feels that. You have to distinguish between what a character feels and what he's trying to do. What you stress is that you want to get close to her, get together with her, get her to like you. But you don't even stress that too much because it's all in there, and if you stress it too much you take away from the naturalness that Brando had. Really and truly once I set up the business with the pole and the boy and the egg, the scene played itself. Terry's able to stay with Edie, remain at her side and still avoid the confrontation. That's how you get the ambivalence in the scene played out.

This is the kind of scene you see a lot where someone wants something but can't move towards it directly.

The best kind of scene is where what they want – the object – is present. So it's not just a matter of speech.

The object, the girl, is there. He wants a look from her, he wants understanding from her, a certain tone of voice. The way to avoid her is there in the business.

And then it almost plays itself.

That's why sometimes in the scenes that are best directed, the actors will say, "You didn't do anything in that scene." But you did. You put that pole there, you chose the roof. You made him put the egg actually in her hand.

One of the nice things in the scene is after he gives her the egg and she looks at it. Then I told Eva, "Look at him." I didn't have to tell her what she feels. If I had, she would have tried to show me that he was sweet and you'd get terrible stuff. How can you look at a pigeon's egg and then look at the boy who gave it to you and not play it right? You can't.

So you've done the emotional direction by giving the actors physical actions. That's the way I always work. I was brought up as an actor in the Stanislavsky Method. This has to do with objectives, with conscious emotions and objects, objects, objects.

Did you know what you wanted ... in the cab scene?

What I wanted was to show the moment when a man suddenly thinks of what he could have been, like everybody does at some point in their lives. I wanted Terry to be reproachful, but gentle.

If it were just reproach you'd get, "You son of a bitch, I could have been a champ!" But if you say this to your brother, then you do it mournfully, and it's moving. I did have that much in mind. Brando and I thought so much alike in those days. We were so similar in our tastes and feelings that there were a lot of times when he did what I wanted right off the bat, and often he did it better than I thought it could possibly be. He's a genius. He's the only actor I've ever worked with whom I would say that about. And his genius was profound because it had to do with humanity and not mere brilliance.

You described watching Laurence Olivier work. You said he'd sit there and pick up an ashtray and say, "No, that's not right."

Then he'd pick it up with one hand, pick it up with the other, pick it up with both hands …

What is that kind of precise moment-to-moment external, physical work all about?

Brando never did two takes quite the same because he knew he had to be alive on each take. Olivier's system, in those days at least, was exactly the opposite. In a sense, he was directing himself. If he did the externals correctly, they would mean what he wanted them to mean. Hopefully, if he did them correctly, he would also feel correctly. There is something to the behaviorist kind of approach.

I'm explaining something to you, right?

If I do it sitting forward, there is some suggestion that I'm anxious for you to understand. If I do it lying back, there's some suggestion that you can take me in an offhand way and that I'm showing off. Or if I squirm around, it suggests that I want to get this interview over with. Every position means something. Once you start to think that way, there are values in it.

My problem, being the kind of director that I am and working with the kind of actors I work with, is to put those things in so they influence the actor without his knowing it…To the actor I only stress his objective.

My objective right now is to get you to tell me everything you can about directing. If I were setting it up, I might put you in a different kind of chair.

No, not you might, you do. You control the externals, just as much without my knowing it. The externals are essential. In other words, the form means a lot. I'm a formalist as well as I am the other. I think the ideal director uses both. With a guy like Brando it was easy. And you don't just do it with props. You use everything.

For example, remember when he comes back from testifying, he walks down a row of extras and they all snub him? I chose extras that he didn't like. So when he walked by them he played it as if, "The hell with them. I'm glad I did it." That's using the externals.

Let's go back to the specifics of the film. The first scene is the introduction on the dock. There's a very wide shot, which you hold on for a long time.

The point of the introduction is that the whole waterfront, which is wide and enormous, is in the grip of one fist, one little clique, one little clubhouse. I could have put the entire scene inside the office. But I did it this way because it dramatized what I thought was the situation there. So it wasn't casual. It was a specific choice I made.

In the next scene Terry has to set up Joey Doyle. His objective, I suppose in the simplest terms, is to get Joey up on the roof.

No, it's to carry about his boss's orders. Can you see what happens the moment you state it that way – all the feelings that get evoked by your choice of objective? The feeling that he's not himself, a feeling that he belongs to somebody else, a feeling that he wants his boss's approval, a feeling that he's tied up in a situation that he has no choice about.

I told Brando the objective, but that alone is not enough. How you dramatize the other elements of the scene is through picturization, and that has to do with the art of cinema rather than the art of directing actors.

In the introduction the actors come out of the cabin in single file and walk to a certain point. Terry goes one way and the rest go another. Before they go, Friendly claps Terry on the back. Watch the way Brando walks – he did it himself – in sort of an abashed way, his head down. N

Next I cut directly to a high-angle shot. Brando is on the ground holding a pigeon and he shouts, "Hey, Joey." The reason I did that was to dramatize that Terry had suddenly made a decision: "I'm going through with it." But I wanted to show that he wasn't comfortable, that he was straining against it. By shooting down on him from a high angle, the point comes across automatically. That's picturization. That's cinema.

I made the mistake of oversimplifying the objective. How do you get beyond the text so that you can conceptualize a scene in a richer way?

Part of it is to leave the instinctive part of yourself alive. Behave like an artist, not like a bookkeeper. Don't be a guy that's right. Don't be a professor, be an artist. You get on the set and you see this little boat house and you say, "Yeah, that's it." I don't know why. Maybe later you'll figure out exactly why you responded that way. And above all don't tell anyone.

I wasn't thinking about telling the actors or even about how you shoot it. Rather, I'm talking about the concept – that this is a scene about Brando acting out orders from his boss as opposed to it being about his getting Joey up on the roof. As you said, it evokes all kinds of feelings.

Don't evoke those feelings. Don't go into complications. Not to the other person or yourself. By the way, one good idea is better than two good ideas. As a matter of fact, one good idea is better than three brilliant ideas. Get it down to one good idea. Don't try to play several things in a scene – things in an actor that are ambivalent – get them objects that suggest it. Or make the scene work in a way that reveals it. Don't try to do two things in every moment. If you want ambivalence, do one thing and then later do an opposite thing. Don't complicate it. Make one strong, simple statement. This is the least ambivalent movie I ever did.

The scene in the taxi. You may not have had to articulate the ambivalences as clearly for yourself, but they were all there.

But one way or another everything's played out. Terry says, "What you did to me. What I could have been." He actually says that, I've done other movies where things were not said at all.

The next scene in Waterfront is when Terry hears the news that Doyle is dead. It's a terribly important moment. It is the first blow of shame to hit Terry.

I started on the sneering faces of Two Ton Tony Galento and Tami Mauriello and panned over to Terry. He just stands there. Brando doesn't have to act much because of the contrast between his face and theirs. Again, you set it up so that the sequence of pictures tells the story. The fact that Brando does act brilliantly is gravy. But if a lug had been in his place, we'd still have made the point through the contrast of images. I'm telling my inner story all the time.

When an actor becomes terribly aware of the objective, there may be a tendency to leap at it.

It's worse than a tendency. There's a danger that he'll play it inhumanly – mechanically. You're telling the inner story through external things, which is what directing is. Directing is turning psychology into behavior. If you don't do that, all you have is people walking around feeling…

In the scene in the pool hall where Terry comes in to protest…

He doesn't know what he wants to say, that's another thing that's important. Protest is an intellectual word and suggests knowledge. All Terry wants is to be reassured. I wanted to make him not a bright guy. It's very, very important that someone who's not used to thinking is made to think, who's not used to feeling anything like guilt is made to feel something like guilt. That scene is critical.

Another thing that is important is that on that level of humanity people do not know their objectives. Most of us don't know what we're doing until after we've done it. Then we may psychoanalyze ourselves. But in life very often we respond angrily or we cajole, we scold, we insist, and it just suddenly comes out of us. Sometimes with actors who are not as good, when they're not giving me what I want, I tell them what it is.

When Terry's sent by the hoods to spy on a union meeting in the church basement, the church is attacked. He grabs Edie and rescues her. That begins their courtship. They walk, he sits on a swing in a children's park, and they talk. In terms of your homework, the justifications …

You've done all that by now because you had a scene between them before. The rest of it is done by the fact that the hoods bang on the windows, that Terry sees her, and you tell him to grab her and pull her out.

Terry and Edie met the day after Joey's murder. There's a scene on the docks, the shape-up. Mac, the foreman, starts giving out assignments. At the end he throws the tags in the air. Everyone races to grab one like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Terry and Edie meet over a tag.

It's a big shock to see the sister of someone whose death you've caused…Edie's in physical danger, and he doesn't want her to suffer. Before the hoodlums showed up, his attitude all through the church scene showed that he wasn't impressed with the union leaders or the priest. You also feel that part of his attitude is an act – not an act exactly – but it's the way that character, Terry, was brought up to think. I had to be careful there, because all you had to do was glare at Brando a few times and he got defensive.

Did the problem ever arise where you had to prevent the actors from playing the end of the scene at the beginning?

Always. You always have to be aware of that danger. There has to be a sense of discovery in a scene. The scene is in the script because the character couldn't get to where he is at the end except for that scene happening. Just the fact that he has to pull her out of physical danger there does a lot.

Also, he has to handle that girl, touch her.

The whole idea – nothing you have to explain to Brando, although I did – was these girls are either whores or they are virgins. A good girl you don't fool around with and the other girls are bums. That doesn't mean the good girls are angels or anything. But they're virgins when they marry. The guys look up to them for that reason. He relates to her in that way. When he can't stand the sight of that decent girl being subjected to physical danger, he rescues her. But he's also playing out his guilt. It's like he's making up for what he's done to her brother. I don't remember if I explained that to Brando or not, but it's so obvious it doesn't need much explaining. It's not that the script's obvious, but it's played out very carefully in steps.

But in terms of not playing the end of the scene before you get to it – I'll go back to the scene in the taxicab during which Terry clearly makes a discovery.

A lot of that, Jeff, has to do with starting right. Remember I told you about the first couple of readings? You make them listen a lot. I'm looking at you and I'm listening to you. I'm taking you in. I'm not playing my action. I'll take it off you, see what you've got to say. How do you feel about that?

Just fine. My question is, When does Terry discover that Charlie has been using him, wrecking his life? Does it really happen in the scene, or is Terry just facing up to it and talking about it for the first time?

The conversation is awakened by what happens in the scene. But it's not really a discovery in the scene. That would be false. That he's a failure is always in the bottom of Terry's heart and stomach. By the way, all Brando's behavior and disposition in the first part of the film is that of a man who's a failure, who's scornful of himself. There's a conscious sense of guilt not only from the fact that he helped murder somebody but he also feels guilty with respect to his own potential, which he had betrayed all through his life. It makes the conversion much stronger when you stress that.

Let's go back to the opening courtship scene between Terry and Edie.

I think if he hadn't rescued her from that violence, she wouldn't have walked with him. That's what I mean about the script being well-constructed.

But then I had to somehow answer the question as to why she stays with him. Edie knows that from the point of view of propriety and public opinion, she shouldn't. Even though she wants to. He wants to keep her with him, but he doesn't want to exert any force. He wants to approach her gently. That was a time when Brando saved me. Eve dropped her glove by accident, and he picked it up and put it on his own hand. I could never have thought of that. When she reached for her glove, he got there first so she had to stay with him. At the same time, he could play it cool, as though he didn't know he was keeping her. Also, there are all kinds of sexual overtones implicit in the gesture.

How would you state the objectives in that scene?

You can say that you're trying to get her to like you or you're trying to apologize to her. But there's a case, I think, where you find it exists without articulation, because of the circumstances, because of the past, because of who he is and who she is. If they just sense it, you don't have to say it and it's better not to. I'm very leery of stating objectives.

I had to find some way to bring them together and hold them together despite the fact that she would not necessarily like him and would not necessarily like to be seen in his company. I made them walk in a way that reflects that.

In the beginning of the scene they're not close to each other. Another thing I did was put it in a playground. The setting returns them to a state of innocence. When the hoods started hitting the windows of the church, it again arouses his shame and guilt. I took them to a place where those kinds of feelings would exist least – in a park, a playground. That's why he sits on the swing.

What did you want the scene to say?

That they are brought together overcoming her reluctance and also his. With Edie there is an object, he is able to express, however indirectly, his shame. In a sense, he confesses to her without ever saying a word. His behavior says, "God, I'm sorry about your brother."

Is that something you would ever say to Brando?

I might have told him, "You want her to know that you're not a monster, that you're sorry about her brother." Often as soon as I would do that, he would cut me off. When he heard enough, he'd walk away. I knew he'd gotten it. It was obvious. And he would start to behave naturally.

Was that scene played as written? It feels so real, as if invented on the spot.

There are two things operating.

First, I always try to move actors through scenery not in front of it, so they actually touch things. If they're in front of everything, the scenery might as well be a painted backdrop.

And second, Brando does something special. Sometimes it drives you nuts. He never says a line the same way twice. He changes the rhythm so the other person is forced to listen, sometimes frantically, to see what is being said. He is, in a sense, marginally improvising everything. He keeps a certain element – ten percent perhaps – of improvisation in every scene with my encouragement. When he did it too much, as he did in some other people's pictures, he was a pain in the ass. But when we worked together, he kept it within limits and it always gave his scenes a feeling of surprise, of being alive.

The other actors felt emboldened to improvise as well. If he said something unusual, they'd answer in kind, and I'd let it go as long as it stayed within the intentions of the scene.

All of the scenes are close to "as written" but no scene is exactly as written. What is writing? In movies saying the precise dialogue is usually not that crucial. I try to stick pretty close. I protect everything essential, and usually I protect the text, but if he hit a prop at different times in different takes, I didn't say that on this word you must touch this object.

Edie plays a brief scene with her father then goes back to Terry up on the roof. They do the business that we talked about before with the birds. He invites her for a drink and takes her to a bar. They sit at a table, and he tells her his history. Right in the middle of it he stops and says, "…But what am I runnin' off at the mouth for? What do you care…?"

Brando did that. It was not in the script, and it was not my idea. It's brilliant, a sudden flash of life. He's so in it.

It's a spontaneous articulation of Terry's inner life – the mixed feelings he has and the sense of not being worth much.

Yes, that is it. You hit it on the head. He's full of shame. He's betrayed his whole life.

Why are you smiling?

Because you only got half of it. It's interesting that you got, "What do you care?" There's another part which is …

Of course. He's saying, "Please care."

It's telling that Brando would do that. He was always hoping that people would care about him.

It's the most dead-on kind of flirt.

Yeah, except he did it well and unexpectedly. I don't think even he expected to do it. If a thing like that is planned, it can be terrible. It's very interesting when you reverse your directions in a scene, even for a minute. The whole scene is about his wanting her to care, then he says, "I don't care if you care."

He goes on talking about the dog-eat-dog world, how nobody cares about anybody. They dance, and then a huge guy comes in and tells Brando that Friendly wants him.

What's good about that scene is the end of it when Terry and Edie have to go through a wedding party to get out the door. I don't know why it's good. I don't know why I thought of it. That movie is well-directed. It really is.

We haven't talked about Karl Malden yet. He is, in some ways, a much simpler character than the others.

I believe I got what I wanted. It's been misunderstood a lot. I was born Greek Orthodox, and when we moved to New Rochelle there was no Greek Orthodox church. My father was religious, as some businessmen are. He made me go to Catholic church and catechism school. I hated it. I went to confession once, and I really resented it. I had a lot of dealings with Catholics, and I've always had it in for them a little bit, although I like a lot of Catholic people and have lots of Catholic friends. I thought their religion was simplistic, mechanical, and slightly hypocritical.

Anyway, I wanted Father Barry, the priest Malden played, to be a rigidly ethical man who in any circumstance would always tell you what is right. I knew Malden as well as I knew anybody, and he had that quality. Priests are like that in those working-class communities. I would talk to myselk and say, "That's the way the priest should be." When I got Karl, there wasn't much more directing to do.

It's funny because you said before that you hate cigarettes as a prop.

It doesn't tell much. Eating tells more.

Father Barry smokes all the time.

That's to make him a waterfront priest. The man on whom his character is based smoked a lot and drank a lot of beer.

How did you help out newcomers like Eva Marie Saint on this picture?

You make sure the actor doesn’t feel that he's being judged. You stay on his side of the camera, sometimes physically during rehearsal, but spiritually at all times. You make him feel like a friend who is helping you solve problems, which is in fact what he's doing…

Another thing that is very important is to bring the crew and the actors together. There's usually a terrific barrier between them. Brando was great with that. He liked the crew better than the producer and the other dignitaries. You get the crew and the actors kidding around at lunch on the first day, and by the second day they're all friends working toward the same goals. The director's personality sets the tone for all that. It's one thing I do well.

In Waterfront I have the feeling that maybe even from take to take you would throw a new stimulus into the environment.

I always did that. But when you're shooting in an environment that's functioning irrespective of you, you cannot control everything. Cars drive by. There are noises all around you. You have to try to make an asset out of everything that could possibly be a difficulty.

We're talking about the scene where the sling drops on Dugan and kills him. At the end of the scene Malden makes his "Christ in the shape-up" speech.

That's the most criticized moment in the picture because the body looks as if it's ascending to heaven under the guidance of an officer of the Catholic Church. It looks like some sort of symbolism, and I suppose it inevitably is. No one believes me, but I had no idea when I shot it, that the scene would look symbolic. I was naïve not to think so, but the truth is that's the way you take a dead body out of the hold of a ship. You can't carry it up the narrow steel ladders.

The scene ends with the black guy giving Joey's jacket back to Edie, the one Dugan had been wearing.

Poor working-class people never throw anything away. In cold weather a good warm garment is a valuable thing. And it's a token. He's actually saying, "Here, he'd want you to have this."

That's played in a three-shot; then the black guy walks out, and Terry and Edie stay in the frame. What you are left with most is the confusion and conflict in Terry, though he doesn't seem to be doing anything.

What is so good about that moment is that it makes the audience try to read him just like you're doing now. It's important that the central figures in a drama never be totally clear. You should try and figure them out. When you're casting, talking to an actor and you can't quite figure out what he or she is thinking, it's usually a good sign. It's a quality that all the really good movie actors have. In drama and in life there are many moments when you're bewildered. Bewilderiment is a very dramatic thing – you don't know what will come of it, which way it will turn. All Brando had to do was look at Eva, and she brings out his guilt.

When Terry kisses Edie you feel the utter desperation of a young man in love. It's like he wants to swallow her.

People like Terry Malloy are by prejudice, by training, and by the brutalized society that they are brought up in taught that sex and love are separate. Making love is something you do to a girl, not with a girl. Terry never felt any love for anybody before. He was always on guard, and the macho thing is to put everyone down. What you say is true. Brando's got that quality in him, and also Eva arouses it. She makes you feel tender and concerned about her. You hope she's going to be all right.

Terry is a desperado, a tough. He even says to Father Barry that she's the only good thing that's ever happened to him. She is a repository for his goodness. If she will kiss him, if she will love him, then he must be a good guy.

That's absolutely true. I couldn't say it as well.

Later, Terry is up on the rooftop with his pigeons. A cop is there as well. Terry spots him and says to the kid, "Jimmy, suppose I knew something, say a mug somebody put on somebody … you think I should turn him in?" He says, "A cheese-eater! You're kidding!" Then Terry goes over to the cop, and the cop does a beautiful con job on him, working on him to testify before the Crime Commission. He follows Terry to the pigeon coop and sets up the scene in the taxicab. He says, "Didn't I see you fight in the Garden one night … against a fellow called Wilson…?"

That was a beautiful piece of writing. I get a lot of credit for that scene and the one in the cab, and I had nothing to do with either. One thing which I can take some credit for is that you feel that Terry partly knows he's being conned. That's another ambivalence of Brando's. I saw it and encouraged it. Some other actor would have just played Terry as dopey. Brando never made the character dumber than he was, he never condescended or patronized the character. He's a terrific artist.

Then you cut to a scene where Friendly, surrounded by his cronies, puts Charlie on the spot. He says, in effect, "Go handle your brother." When Charlie says he can't, Friendly replies, "You can't have it both ways."

I set the scene up like a kangaroo court – absolute silence – with Friendly and his thugs just waiting to see what Charlie would do.

The next scene is the famous one in the cab, and you've already disclaimed any responsibility for it.

There was no way to ruin that cab scene. All you had to do was get those two guys saying those lines. The only thing that was added was a sound Brando made, something like, "Oh, Charlie, oh, Charlie." That was really a terrific contribution.

We had a lot of trouble that day because we were supposed to shoot it with rear projection.

Sam Spiegel might be good on story construction and script, but as a mechanical producer he was often delinquent. When we got to the set, there was no rear projection equipment. So Boris Kaufman, the cameraman, suggested putting a venetian blind in the back of the cab and shooting straight into the back seat. Then on the sides of the frame, he caught a piece of the windows and had flickering lights going by.

Actually it was a blessing because if you had seen the street outside we would have had to have more street noise. But it was a really desperate day. It took most of the morning to solve the goof on the rear projection. Then there was another problem.

Brando was being psychoanalyzed while we were shooting the picture. One of our understandings was that I would let him off at four o'clock so he could go to his analyst.

So the last shot I did that day was Rod Steiger's close-up and I read Terry's lines to him. Steiger was good enough to do it, but he never forgave me. He thought I treated Brando better than I did him. I sure as hell did! But it didn't hurt. I knew I would only be on him for a few reactions, and I had promised Brando anyway.

Sometimes it's important for a director to withdraw himself a little bit. If you've got the characters going good and then you talk about it, they get to thinking about satisfying you instead of playing the scenes. I was smart enough that day or troubled enough by my technical problems not to do anything. Steiger never got enough credit for something he did brilliantly. Throughout the scene you feel an older brother's concern for his younger brother. At the end of it you feel Charlie's sadness because he feels his brother has condemned himself and that he, himself, has been put in an awful spot. Steiger is very touching in that scene. If he has done anything better, I have not seen it.

In a way it's a shame that it all worked so well because it would have been interesting to ask you how you went about getting that scene.

I think it's more interesting to realize that I didn't do anything. That it was set in motion long before. That they were aware of the elements in the scene, which were that you have to make your brother do something that he doesn't want to do and your brother is in danger. Steiger knew all that without my telling him. And Brando knew everything. How Brando understood that emotion – having to do with his dignity, the fact that he could have been something – I don't know. When he said, "Oh, Charlie", the melancholy and depth of pain were just terrific.

Part of that feeds off the fact that Charlie has pulled a gun. Terry puts his hand on it.

He did it so gently. It looked like he was putting his hand on his brother's arm. That was beautiful. I could never have told him to do something as good as that. They were both tremendously talented.

In the following scene Terry breaks into Edie's apartment. She's cowering on the bed dressed in a white slip.

My wife used to hate those slips. She said, "You keep putting women in white slips. What have you got about white slips?" … Actually I always did like white slips.

Terry slams through the door and she says, "Get away from me." He says, "Edie, I need you to love me. Tell me you love me." She replies, "I didn't say that I didn't love you. I said stay away from me." He kisses her, and while they embrace, there's a call from off screen … He runs out, and she follows him. They discover Charlie's body hanging on a hook.

I wanted to get across the brutalization – he's just meat.

Was it written that way?

No, that was my idea. There was a hook in the wall there. That was some night. The crew was going to leave Spiegel. They called him a Jew bastard to his face. They were a largely Catholic crew, and they couldn't stand Spiegel's chiseling pettiness. They were going to kill him. If it wasn't for me, they were all going to go home…

Was it particularly difficult to work when everyone around you is ready to kill?

No, they were a nice bunch of guys. Also, I felt the same way about Spiegel. That side of him was intolerable. It was a tough picture to do, though, and I don't blame Spiegel as much in retrospect as I did then. After 7 or 8 weeks of that cold, everybody's nerves were on edge.

A number of things are striking in that scene. First, you show Charlie hanging on that hook in an enormous wide shot. He's in the corner of the frame, and as a truck pulls by, the headlights reveal him. You look and think, "Is that what I thought it was?" Secondly, what Terry does when he sees Charlie hanging there is amazing. He barely touches him. He puts his hands on the wall on either side of him and leans toward him but doesn't look at him.

The idea of not taking him down, the fact that there's nothing you could do, really gives you the sense that it's all over.

When Terry lifts him off the hook, he drapes Charlie's hands around his own neck. It's like an embrace.

All that stuff is Brando. He's so full of feeling.

Edie pleads with Terry to get out of town, go inland, get a job on a farm or something. He won't go. "You always said I was a bum. Well, not anymore. Don't worry. I'm not going to shoot anybody. I'm just going to get my rights." All through the picture she'd begged Terry to do the right thing. Now that she's in love with him and he's determined to dowhat is right, she switches over and tells him to watch his own ass, be expedient.

That was part of the intention. She's concerned about him now, so she wants to save him. Remember, Edie was born and raised on the waterfront. She knows he's going to get it. But the more significant part of it is how he changes. What he's done has made a man out of him.

There's one thing that I stress a lot that many authors and directors disagree with me about. They may be right. I may be wrong, and I say that truthfully.

I put a great stress on the idea that in a good film or play the protagonist changes. He's not the same at the end as he was at the beginning. Tennessee Williams disagreed strongly. He said it was the "drama" that I'd learned in my lefty days. That it's an emotional correlative of the political notion that, "Now I see."

But I do believe that events cause people to change, that heroes are made by events as much as events by heroes, and that in difficulty a person gets stronger, harder and more resolute. I myself have only learned from pain. I never learned anything the other way. So the significant thing to me was that Terry said, "No, I'm going down and get what's coming to me."

This takes us to the last scene in the picture. Terry bellows at Friendly, "I'm glad what I done … I was rattin' on myself all them years and didn't know it, helpin' punks like you against people like Pop and Dugan…"

That's where the parallel people have tried to draw between my HUAC testimony and Terry's falls short. I never felt that.

I always felt my situation had values on both sides. I was always wavery about it – informing on your peers is not an easy thing to do. In making Waterfront I drew from what I had been through in my life. It's what any artist does. But I never meant any parallel between Terry and me because the issue in the film is terribly clear. The corrupt union bosses were brutalizing and exploiting their fellows. It wasn't even another class. And they knew they could count on the code of silence to protect them. Terry was right to smash it.

You have mentioned a number of times how much you love Brando as a man and an actor, how his sensibility was so much like yours. He seemed like a perfect extension of you. That scene could have been terribly melodramatic. What makes it work is all the physical and emotional pain revealed by Brando's performance. Despite the fact that the issues are simple, he pays very dearly, and we feel for him.

That's right. I believe in courageous acts, but when you perform courageous acts, you often get the stuffing kicked out of you, and you've got to be ready to take it. You may not come out of the beating the same man. When he yells, "I'm glad what I done" to Friendly. That was an important choice. It made it into a real political act. I made him proclaim it to the world. That was the way I felt.

You had Friendly and his cronies on the same little houseboat where the picture started. Terry's on the gangplank between that house and the pier. Behind him the rest of the workers start to assemble, watching.

In a sense the fate of the waterfront is being decided. By doing it that way Friendly can't back off.

Friendly goads Terry to get him onto his turf, and finally he charges. He and Friendly fight. When Terry starts to win, Friendly calls for his gorillas, and they stomp the hell out of him. You did most of that action off camera around the corner of the house.

You gather that's important, don't you? Not only because it suggests more than showing the violence, but it's shot from the point of view of the jury. The other workers are more than an audience. They're going to make a choice. The victor is going to be the leader of the union.

Edie and Father Barry show up with a couple of longshoremen. Terry's lying there, semi-conscious in a pool of his own blood. Father Barry gives him a snow job, and we watch as Terry makes his decision. He says, "Get me on my feet." His physical acting is superb.

Sensational.

Posted by sheila