neither/nor
homicide and murder. It’s usually a pretty thin separator. But I think that Leonard wanted a more emotional approach. He didn’t want to give people a bannister to hold onto as they descended into hell. And it’s really, I would say, much more his film than it is my film.
It sounds like there were three or four personalities impressing themselves onto the material; were there any points that you really came to loggerheads over? Compromises you regret— or don’t regret?
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SR: Te first thing is, when you make a film, and you’re not making a commodity, you’re not running a sausage machine, if every project you do is different, than you don’t necessarily know how to do a project when you begin it. Usually if you’re doing something new you figure out how it should be done just about the time that you finish it. So, some of the things that really were meant to capture the American spirit—the shots from the helicopter where we found mustangs running wild on the floor of the Grand Canyon, shooting with the lapd helicopter—those were what I wanted to do. Te way we structured it, going from the wilds to more civilized America, then to the sense of corruption or hidden violence at the core of that, including a historical throwback to gunfights and things like that. I had friends who were pretty good private pilots, one in particular who acted as a kind of aerial coordinator. We had really good helicopter pilots. Te guy who flew all of our stuff with the lapd is the guy who shot all the stuff in Rambo, and had been one of the five people on the team that did Blue Tunder, which set the standard for helicopter shooting. I really like helicopter shooting, but it was dangerous, actually. We had one case, working with the lapd… In helicopters the pilot always says what he’s gonna do before he does it to the other person he’s coordinating with, whether it’s
mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
his co-pilot or whether it’s a pilot in another chopper. In this case, he told the pilot to turn left and the pilot said “Turn left,” but for some reason he turned right, right straight into us. Our pilot was an experienced stunt pilot; he said, “He’s headed for us.” He told the cameraman to pull up his feet and then he took us into a steep climb, and the other pilot passed right under us. We managed to get out of the way. And you get very worn down. When we were shooting at the Grand Canyon, we had a guy who was like the dean of the pilots who flew out of Las Vegas; he had been the guy who pulled a lot of people off the top of the MGM Grand casino when it was burning up, he rescued a lot of people. He was, generally, crazy. But he was a great pilot. So he could do things like get down and follow bending rivers at full speed. To do establishing shots you fly over the lip of the Canyon, and then the Canyon goes out beneath you, and your feet are on a glass thing…
On the other hand, we were shooting with different
production crews in different circumstances. For example, in Los Angeles, on the ground, doing ride- alongs with the lapd, we got pinned down by gunfire. I’d managed to get Willy Kurant to shoot those sequences with me, and I wanted him because he’d been Godard’s cameraman on Masculin Féminin, and he was famous in Europe as being a combat cameraman. He was very short, he was about 5’2”, he’d had polio. He walked with a limp. And he had to use a light version of the Éclair 16mm documentary camera. And the first day out, he said “You can’t dress like that and shoot combat.” And he made me take off everything that was metallic or reflective and dressed me in all black. He just got me ready for shooting in difficult situations, some of which we definitely had.
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