Abraham Polonsky

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An interview in The Image Maker

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SOURCE: An interview in The Image Maker, edited by Ron Henderson, John Knox Press, 1971, pp. 17-27.

[Pasternak is an American film director, screenwriter, and educator. Howton is an American sociologist and film critic. In the following interview, Polonsky discusses the impetus for making Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here and describes his career as a filmmaker before and after the blacklist.]

[Pasternak and Howton]: Tell us about your new project.

[Polonsky]: I have three. One of them is Childhood's End by Arthur Clarke, which Universal bought for my company to make into film. Another is an original screenplay by me called Sweet Land, which Universal bought for my company to do, and a third is one I haven't sold to anyone yet, Mario the Magician by Thomas Mann.

You've been working on that property for quite a while now, haven't you?

I got it from Thomas Mann in 1950. He was living, in those days, in California. I've known his daughter for a long time, and I'd already directed Force of Evil. I got in touch with him and we had a discussion about my notions of directing it, which wasn't to be exactly the way he wrote it. He gave me an option on it, and I went to Europe to try to set up the project, but was unable to raise any money for it. No one was really interested at that time.

Why?

In 1950 everybody thought fascism was old hat. I think that was the real reason for it. In any event, when I was blacklisted, I had to drop it. So, the first thing I did, when I got to direct Willie Boy and had the project set up at Universal, was to get in touch with Erica Mann, and I got it back. But, of course, in all these years my notion of how it is to be done changed. Fundamentally, it's the same discussion I had with Thomas Mann. It was at that time that Thomas Mann said to me that he thought fascism was coming to the United States and he advised me to leave the country. He said he was going to England, and did in fact go to Switzerland. He had just finished Faustus. I disagreed with him and didn't come.

Is Mario your most immediate project?

I think it is. My problem, of course, is to get it financed without telling them what I'm doing, which is very difficult to do.

Isn't that easier to do, though, because you're dealing with a classic? It has a kind of built-in acceptance for the studio mentality?

Well, our studios are not impressed by Thomas Mann.

Yes, but it would make it easier for you, an impressive director, to bring in an impressive property. I'm trying to psych out the twisted psyche….

They don't have a twisted psyche! Their psyche is extremely clear. There's nothing twisted about studios: They know what business they're in. They don't understand what business they're in, but they know what it is. I mean, they don't know how to operate very well, because they have a tendency to make money in the way in which they are accustomed to making money, which is, to do again what has already been successful.

You mean to make a film of the film that was a film originally?

It's even worse than that! It's to be immediately up to date with what has already gone out of fashion. It's hard to escape that in the studios, because—to use your words—they're trying to psych out the market. And when the market has changed radically, as it has in the last five or six years, I would imagine for them (it has been changing over the years) they keep insisting that that market still exists out there, even when they say, "no, it doesn't really exist any more," we're going to adjust to it. So, now when they say they're going to do youth films, and in a sense are like the people in Vogue magazine who have a youth consultant, that's the youth market, this is what youth likes now, then they do youth films, whatever they think youth loves. "Youth" is, of course, a fiction—their youth, at least, is a fiction. Actually (they) would like to make pictures that appeal to the television market, that is to say, the widest possible market. They would like every film to appeal to every possible audience. And when they get something like that, they're very happy.

I gather you don't endorse the thesis, which is fashionable, that the big studios' dominance of the industry is somewhat passé, that the success of comparatively low-budget films, medium-low budget films, has been so impressive that the studios are more and more inclined to simply lease out their facilities and not, in fact, the entrepreneurs themselves?

Well, that's going on obviously with some of the studios, especially if they're in the stages of potential bankruptcy. But I would say that the new money coming in will ultimately go back into some sort of studio operation, especially if they want to stay in the television business, where you need a studio operation, since films for television and television series are made under studio control, unless you can't make them for the price.

Isn't that how the property of Willie Boy was originally conceived by them, as a television film?

That was a device. What actually happened was that Jennings Lang, a vice president at Universal, who was in charge of the whole television operation, said that if we brought Willie Boy in under television, then he, on his own, could OK going ahead with the project. He was certain that if I wrote the script they would turn it into a feature, and as a matter of fact they did at once—the minute I handed them the script.

Mr. Polonsky, could you tell us how you changed your mind? I think you had an original impression of the Willie Boy book as being not especially interesting for a screenplay and a movie.

There's no particular reason why I should write a western, or any other genre film, although I'm interested in genre films, but I didn't see how it was relevant to me. Not that you only do films that are relevant to yourself when you're trying to make your living as a writer in the film industry, although they do become so. I talked about it with others a little and I suddenly realized that the events in the story had taken the exact sequence of the western myth: the actual historical events had taken that sequence. That interested me.

Which myth? The myth of the western American movie, or the western myth?

Oh! The way I always put it is that the western genre film deals with the Western Myth, an illusion. I'd always enjoyed those films myself, as a young man. Now the illusion of the West as a kind of Paradise Lost—in which for a small period Americans lived in this strange and marvelous world, this frontier in which all kinds of heroic sentiments were generated, and in which an idea of what the American was was most clearly presented: the adventurer in search of the Good Life. But, of course, the Paradise Lost was genocide for the Indians, and, in fact, Ford in Cheyenne Autumn had that too in effect. But the very great western directors kind of know that, even as they're dealing with and eulogizing the myth in terms of its excessive nature.

An exploitation of the myth?

Of course. Suddenly, I saw that in fact this myth was still operating—as a notion of American life—and that it was possible to tell the story and set in motion a counter-myth to it. But I wanted the film to have the clarity of a myth and not be overly psychologized, because if you overly psychologize the relation between the characters you destroy the mythic quality in which the events determine what is really going to happen.

Is that why the language is very spare, very lean?

And the remarks are kind of gnomic, so to speak—little balls of words like stones and rocks that I dropped. There are only one or two scenes that are really dramatic scenes in a normal motion picture narrative sense. They just drop these words, and they're not very relevant as dialogue, even; in fact, the film could be silent, almost, and still work.

Would you elaborate on the counter-myth theme?

The counter-myth is genocide. Now, of course, some of the critics, even those who loved my picture, speak of the scene in the poolroom as representing my political opinion, which is absurd, since it's kind of a take-off on a Mark Twain-Huckleberry Finn kind of scene in which some of the poolroom hustlers and river characters are making the usual remarks they make in a poolroom. They like to talk about democracy a lot and what he's really saying, of course, is very funny. When a character says, for example, "Let's hear a cheer for President Taft, but not to me. That's the inequality in the country … I pay my taxes," and so on—that's supposed to be a funny scene, and hardly represents any political opinions I might possibly hold! I included it really in a way to remind people of Mark Twain.

And also, it's there to give a democratic idea when he speaks of what democracy can do for an Indian.

That's right. And it's supposed to be amusing rather than pretentious and important. It's certainly not my idea of what democracy is, if I know what my idea of democracy is. I begin to doubt it occasionally. So, the counter-myth is the genocide theme.

Now, the film is embedded in the whole notion of racism, and it's not against it in any kind of way, as if that were the point of the film. It just takes that for granted. What I do is assume that the western myth is fundamentally racist, even though the question never comes up, but just the way the Indian appears in the mythology of American life: an invisible person. They're the original exiles in this country. And, of course, that third factor came into mind when I finally became interested in it because I've been a kind of invisible exile myself, in my own country, for twenty years.

And you, like Willie Boy, refuse to be invisible.

But I was luckier than he was, because I didn't believe in the Indian notion of the earlier days of not committing suicide, because if you committed suicide, you lost your relationship to whatever future there was after death. So what the Indians did was charge into the enemy and have the enemy kill them so that they died heroically in battle, which is exactly what Willie does on top of the mountain, because he could have killed the sheriff Coop, with any of those three shots which is demonstrated in the attack on the posse.

You wanted to, it seems, say something from your generation's perspective to youth of today through this film that has some relationship to your being blacklisted for twenty years. You have also mentioned that you think of this film as a "free gift" of entertainment. How do you relate these two conceptions of Willie Boy?

I think it's important to know that, to begin with, I didn't make this film for any market. I assumed in the very beginning, when it became possible to make this film, which was an accident and a miracle of a sort, to get the right to direct a film after twenty years and spend $2,300,000 of their money, it's impossible, and when the impossible occurs, it's like a miracle. So I made this film, with the notion in mind that it was probably unlikely that, first, I would ever finish it, because it's possible you might not finish it, and secondly, I probably wouldn't make another film again as a director, because it's very hard to be a director in Hollywood. The director is the most dangerous man in the business and usually he is circumscribed in various kinds of ways; the old producer-supervisor system was set up to control the director.

You mean from the Thalberg days?

Oh, yes sure. The whole point about it was that the director was an employee, and not the maker of the film. The maker of the film was the producer. Now this has been changing, of course, in recent years, and never was really true; it was true financially, but never was true in the case of the really important directors, because they, in some way, were always making their films, using products, stories, handed to them of which they had very little choice. In a very significant way, they were actually making their films, and there now would be no film history or film classes if they hadn't been doing it. You would have had nothing but sociology as a way of studying film. This would have been a product made in those days; it would have had its audience; it was made for this kind of an audience; it was made like The Saturday Evening Post stories, or whatever stories were being made then, and when the time passes the product is gone, has been consumed, and can never be reconsumed, because it's so boring, dated, and gone.

Now what makes that not true is the fact that the directors really operated during this period and created the medium as you now know it. Walsh did it, Ford did it, von Stroheim did it, all the ordinary American directors in one form or another did it. In recent years it's been recognized that this is so and now that they begin to speak of film as an art form, why, of course everybody becomes very self-conscious about that, and begins to make films that reproduce the discoveries made in the other arts—to imitate them, so they feel it's more artistic that way—but fundamentally I would say that the contribution made by the older directors is even more significant in that sense, but they didn't think so. It's better to make movies than works of art.

You said that you spent 20 years directing films in your mind. Surely you must have lived vicariously in the films of others. What filmmakers are you interested in?

It's hard for me to remember the films of those 20 years—there are all the American films that were made and all the foreign films that were made. When I made that remark, it was made because I'd been challenged by a peculiar question. The question was in praise of me; it embarrassed me. It went something like this: "How come, after not directing a film for 20 years and having only made one before, this is such a good picture?" I don't know how to answer that question, so what I said was I've been directing films in my mind for 20 years and I've had a lot of experience.

Of course, it's based on another notion which I think I share with some people that being a director is something in your mind and not just a question of techniques. The techniques of directing a film are really trivial, I would say. The techniques are not trivial in the sense that the more experience you have the more valuable your resources are when you begin to approach a subject. That's really true. But you elect yourself to be a director the way you elect yourself to be a writer, or elect yourself to be a revolutionary, or your elect yourself to be a prophet. There's no evidence except the conviction in your own mind and whatever sympathy you feel for works similar to what you have in mind. Having elected yourself, you try to get somebody to let you practice this new profession you've chosen for yourself. If it's a revolutionary, it's a revolution; if it's a director, it's a film; if it's a writer, it's a novel; if it's a painter, it's a picture. Now, there's quite a wasted election from that, naturally, but some are not wasted.

Would you elaborate on what you mean when you say that the technique of directing a film is trivial?

There's nothing trivial about the technique; what's trivial is your control over it. In the commercial picture the fundamental resource is the actor. There is enough resource in the studio, if your election is correct, that you are able to draw upon it very freely, and in terms of what your notion of your film is. In the elaboration of all the techniques into film, you are almost able to assume others' talents as your own. That demands a certain kind of temperament, a certain kind of intelligence, a certain talent.

The precondition of a certain kind of elaborate technical training, like the one that makes you a surgeon, is not the same thing that makes you a director. And somewhere along the line before you elect yourself director or get the job, you've done something in film. In my case, I had been a screenwriter. And being a screenwriter is in effect to do all the things you talk about by assuming that someone would show you how to do it if you had to do it. The screenplay is evidently a strategy for making a film.

So on the basis of two films you've learned on the job and you're ready to make your first film?

On the basis of my past I am willing to say that I am willing to re-elect myself on the next occasion. I don't know if this makes it clear, but I really think that you can watch a thousand films, if you're a writer, of course, or an editor and have worked on many films, but being a director is a unique kind of thing, like being a novelist or being a painter, and most of us share that unique ability in some sense, but not as much as others.

You wrote Body and Soul before you directed Force of Evil?

Right. Body and Soul was a situation where the writer turned out to have more influence with the producer and the studio than the director did, which is very bad for the director, Bob Rossen. But it didn't hurt Rossen because after he made that film, he became an important director.

What were your impressions of Rossen? Did you ever agree on an interpretation?

I never interfered, actually, on the interpretation of the movie. We discussed it all the time in the sense that I had opinion, that Rossen had opinions, or anyone else had opinions. That's not interference; it was a normal, healthy situation. The genuine interference that I posed had to do with the fact that Rossen was a writer, and his conceptions of what a scene should be began to alter as he directed the film. He would like to bring out elements that I suppressed, for example.

Like what?

Well, I think he is more sentimental than I am, in the main, and also his force comes from the application of a great deal of energy—unrelenting exercise of energy throughout the picture. He was in an unfortunate position because if I hadn't been there, he would have been able to rewrite scenes to make them happen that way. No one would have objected, but with me objecting, he wasn't able to do that.

Isn't it rather atypical for the writer to have as much influence compared to the director as you described?

Right. And it happened because of the personal relations that had been established so quickly between Garfield, who played the lead, myself, and Bob Roberts, the producer—between myself and Enterprise Studios which is the very reason that I was able to direct there. In other words, I think it was a question of personality, I suppose—I don't know what the words are for this—it was my relationship to the whole project that gave them the confidence that I could direct.

Did Rossen have another ending he wanted to shoot?

Yes. He suggested another ending to the story which was really carrying through my ending which was very ambiguous. Rossen said it should end as a real tragedy, and he wrote such an ending. And we decided to shoot them both because it was the end of the picture. In Rossen's ending Garfield gets shot and rolls through the ashcans, and they fall on top of him, and he's dead among the garbage of history. Then we shot my ending which was more ambiguous, in the sense that Garfield says that everybody dies, and he walks off. He may or may not die, but what's so unusual about that? Everybody may or may not die all the time.

So we screened both versions the next day and Rossen got up and said, "we'll use Polonsky's," and that was the end of it. He agreed. So I would say that in the main our relationship was good, although in memory Rossen probably resented it a lot. But people always resent you when they disagree with you, and they don't win. I suppose that's the normal kind of thing. Anyway, if you've been in politics a little bit, you take it for granted; after all, I'd been a teacher and I was quite used to it. And also, to having my way!

Before we get to Force of Evil, tell us about the group of radical artists you formed while working in the industry during the 1940's.

"Radical artists" is wrong, because that means their art was radical, and that's not true. They were a group of social radicals with a rather wide spectrum of opinion with the more traditional Communist Party attitudes as the center of it, in some kind of way, with all kinds of variations all around it: liberal Democrats, Socialists, and so on. That was the community and it was significantly involved in both state and city politics at the time, and I merely dropped into it like I was at home, since I'd been in it to begin with.

Was there a hard-core conservative group of people?

There always is. Because the studio represented the same spectrum of American life you found elsewhere. There were conservatives, liberals, radicals, and so on. But there were more radicals than usual in that particular small community, because of the people that had been drawn on for the motion picture industry out of New Deal times. In normal times, it wouldn't be that way, because I don't think that artists are politically more radical than other people in general. They sometimes think they are, but it very often turns out they're not.

I would say that artists—the writers of that time, especially the writers of that time—were more significantly left en masse in Hollywood than later, and even before. You must also remember that the writers had been the leaders in the struggle with the producers in unionization for the writer's union. They had been beaten several times, but finally they won and had a great deal of coherence among themselves. So they were important. In the community. Recently, when I was in France, everybody in Europe wanted to know if there was really a social film movement going on among certain writers and directors which was cut off by the McCarthy movement, and the answer is yes. But it wasn't an esthetic movement in the sense that social realism is an esthetic movement. It was a generalized political awareness existing in a number of people who were trying to make films that reflected this in one way or another when they had an opportunity to do so, but that opportunity in Hollywood is very limited.

Probably the most socially aware films are often made by what could be called conservative directors like Frank Capra, because what we consider socially aware is a sentimental attitude toward the goodness of man, and getting together and working things out right, and getting rid of injustice. That's a political attitude, of course, but it's generalized, like breathing, as opposed to not breathing. It could hardly be called a definite political attitude.

You say this movement was cut off. What themes would this movement have brought to the screen if it had not been cut off?

I don't know. It's impossible to predict because what cut off the movement was something that was happening elsewhere in the United States on an even larger scale. So that was cut off in the entire United States, which is what we mean by the McCarthy period. You must remember that the main political fight that took place in the United States about this time and toward the last years of the war, and right after it, was a struggle in the trade union movement, the CIO and the structure of the left-wing leadership. And that movement was an enormous movement in American life, and its consequences were fatal because that made it possible for McCarthy to operate against people who lost their allies, because the main allies in that movement, of course, were the organized trade unions, and what had happened during the building of the CIO and all the alliances around that among the bourgeoisie.

But really and truly, the triumph of McCarthyism was in effect the cutting-off of a generalized social movement which began before the war, and identified itself then with the objectives of the war. As the war changed, when it was over, and the battle was drawn between the two victors, that social movement came to an abrupt halt as United States policy changed, and the internal life of the country changed. So the witchhunt against the Hollywood people was, in a sense, a consequence of that generalized defeat, I would say, and it's gotten a lot of attention because everybody knew who these people were.

Do you consider Force of Evil an expression of the fear of this movement?

Not only that, but an expression of the conflict. Because Force of Evil was made during the main rush of that period. The Hollywood Ten had already been in trouble, and we were already conducting campaigns for them. This may be one of the reasons people still look at Force of Evil and find something in it, aside from whatever esthetic things they find interesting.

Was the film specifically attacked?

No, what they did was attack all the films written by these people regardless of content. They really picked on the ones made during the war period with lines such as "We can get on with the Russians, they're not so bad," like Mission from Moscow—a film written by a man who was not even a radical, Howard Koch. But he was blacklisted because of that.

Was there an anticipation of the McCarthy attack?

Oh, yes. By the time the war was over, the Hollywood Writers' Mobilization had began to harden its attitudes, too. People who were in it began to drop out. They tried to make films about the returning veteran, his rights, etc. They tried to repeat again the objectives of World War II, the promise to humanity which had been in that, all the usual things, the political hangovers. And the attack had already started because it was going on in the unions. And then, as if to crystalize it in Hollywood, a strike, led by the Conference of Studio Unions, was called which was an attempt to shake off their leadership. That was a very devastating strike because it destroyed almost all the good unions in Hollywood like the story-editors unions. The screenwriters guild, in effect, sided somewhat with the Conference of Studio Unions and when that strike was lost, the leadership in the screenwriters union changed, too.

What I'm trying to say is that you're not dealing with an isolated event in American life, but merely the focus of such an event that happened in Hollywood. It merely reflected what was going on throughout the country.

Hollywood's first reaction to the blacklist, when they subpoenaed the nineteen (of whom the ten are part), was to react furiously against it. They formed the Committee for the First Amendment, which had almost every single writer, director, and actor in Hollywood on it. But by the time the first hearings were held in Washington—I think by the time that plane got back with them—the Committee for the First Amendment was in a state of absolute disillusion. I went to the various meetings of the Committee, of course, and no one was there at the second meeting. I remember Humphrey Bogart walking around the room saying to everybody: "You sold me out! I was in Washington, and you sold me out!" He said, "The hell with all of you. If you don't want to fight, I'll take care of myself!" And he stormed out of the room.

People like John Howard Lawson were such obvious main targets that his jail sentence was inevitable. Could you have played ball and adapted, and compromised?

Of course, that was offered to everybody, including John Howard Lawson. People who were more profoundly involved in radical politics than Lawson made the switch, and very often appeared before the committee as what they called "expert witnesses," and made a career of it.

A career?

A career of being expert witnesses. They functioned as the main advisors to those committees.

What would you have been required to do and what difference would it have made in your development?

They asked me if I would give the names of people I knew had been involved in certain radical activities, and if I would provide those names—they didn't want too many, just a few to establish the fact that I was cooperative—then I could just go on doing what I was doing.

They you would have continued to get directing offers?

Of course, they guaranteed them.

You might have made Funny Girl?

No, I might have made a whole series of Kazan pictures.

There were others, like Rossen and Kazan, who talked. What were your decisions at the time? Did you talk them over with your wife?

It never occurred to me as a possible action. I mean, I never thought of doing that. I knew it existed as a possibility because it had been offered to me, and I had seen it operate around me, but it never even occurred to me, the way it doesn't occur to me to hit you on the head and take your purse. Now, of course, you might say, "what would you do if you were hungry and starving?" Well, our attitude is that nobody should have been hungry and starving in that time because it wasn't that situation. I know from experience and from knowledge that lots of people were forced to talk about their friends when they were captured by the enemy in Germany, Italy, maybe even Russia, too. And did. Some did; some didn't. Just what the limits of resistance are in these cases is doubtful; we don't really know. We just know that some do and some don't. We know that some last longer, and some don't. I don't take any moral position on that because I think to do so is an ungenerous attitude toward the problems of living. Life can be extremely difficult and, at points, people survive under any circumstances they can. It may not be worth surviving, but that's a kind of post facto decision that people make, you know.

I don't believe that's a serious judgment to be made on people, when you know all the circumstances of it, even in the case of the people who talked before the Committee. My feeling toward them is that they did what I consider a bad thing. I'm sorry they did it, and I'm not interested in being their friends, or anything like that, but people do that in life. People live a long time, and act badly very often. But that should not upset your general attitude toward what should be done.

How can it help then?

No, what you do is do what should be done, according to how you conceive how things should be done, if that's the kind of thing that interests you. And when some fall off, they fall off, that's all. That's the way it happens. I mean, in the general biology of humanity it's a very common occurrence. Maybe that's the way evolution works, I don't know.

You were natural and spontaneous; it wasn't a matter of ruminating?

No, when you start to ruminate, you get into trouble. If you start to ruminate on the question of betrayal, you are in the process of betraying, very often. You don't necessarily have to do so, and may not, but then you have a lot of self-punishment and self-pity going on all the time. And that's the worst form of punishment the enemy can accomplish, I guess. To make you think, my God, how good things would have been, if I'd only cooperated! What a lifetime of punishment that must be.

You mentioned the price paid by the people who cooperated; but didn't you pay a price, too? You referred on another occasion to working on "rotten pictures" for TV or for Hollywood. This must have been an unpleasant experience.

You're assuming that we did nothing else. In any case, I wrote books, I wrote articles, I carried a picket sign against the Korean War, I continued to live in a more general way than just being a writer working in Hollywood, as I do now. So the life wasn't that narrow and sterile. You see, a whole life went on at the same time in every sense of the word. That's why you just don't make a film, you live it, too. You're making a film and all the while you're watching to see if it happens.

Do you find it ironical that you went out of filmmaking, at least in the official sense, at the beginning of the McCarthy era, and now you're coming back with a big bang at the time we seem to be moving into a new period of repression?

It doesn't strike me as ironical at all. It strikes me as significant. What I mean: I feel like a [judas goat].

I'm not sure you want to comment on this, but at present the attacks on the mass media by Agnew, and the deliberate use of the mass media, especially television, by Nixon, suggests to many people that a new version of McCarthyism is building up which will take as its focus of interest the writers and artists and producers in the mass media. Do you see it that way?

You must remember that Nixon was one of the main McCarthyites. It was Nixon who red-baited Helen Gahagan Douglas out of her job in Congress, and he made his career in Washington as such a person; now he's the President of the United States. He's just changed his advertising agency, that's all, not his opinions. I agree with the New Left: I think there's a wider blacklist now than there was then. While I was in Europe, I remember reading an editorial in the New York Times on the existence of a blacklist in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It's obviously true that if you are in the peace movement today, you get arrested, they take your picture; if you're a physicist or a scientist, you can't get a job in any place that has anything to do with government contracts. I think Agnew's attack is characteristic of such a period, and I think the fact that the networks are laying down in front of it is very recognizable to me.

I find it interesting that both of your films, Force of Evil and Willie Boy, are derived from the two essentially American film genres.

See, I think genres, like other social habits, speak for us in terms of summaries of the way we see life. We live out the genres as we live out the myths and rituals, because that's the way we systematize our relationship to society and our relationship to other people. I think anthropologically speaking it has very deep connections with the role of religion in life. I would assume that I am essentially a religious person of some sort, at least in the sense that I try to make things signify as if there were some ultimate significance all the time—the ultimate significance sometimes being something that's not so ultimate after all. That's a question of temperament, personality, belief, and so on. I like gravitation—it's the gravitation that operates when I select themes, characters, meanings, and stories. And I am going to assume without deciding on it, that that'll probably happen with everything I do one way or another.

I don't think that the development of genres in the art forms are accidents. I think they're fundamental to the way art operates on our life. I don't think I make works of art in any deliberate sense—like I'm going to make an artistic film. I don't think that way. But, for instance, if I were to make a film outside the commercial media, inexpensively, you know, about some little thing, intended for a different kind of audience, or a smaller audience, it would then adopt a genre of whatever art form appealed to a smaller audience.

So in the long run, they're inescapable. Now, always, of course, as art advances, what you do is destroy the genre in one form or another, and reconstruct it in some other form, ultimately. If we leave out faddism, since by nature I'm not attracted to fads, and reject them deliberately. But genre is not a fad.

Force of Evil is essentially a study of polarities. You have an evil man who is a little man and you have an even more evil man who's a big man, and in between you have a fat, heart-aching slob, Leo. Did you mean Leo to be humanity, torn in between and unable to make a decision, helpless in the midst of all these forces at work?

Well, I don't think he's a slob, because I don't think that about humanity, of course. But I do think that most of us are able to work out a pattern of behavior in society in which we can accept a role we don't want to play in general for the benefits we get immediately by not recognizing what the implications are. So, Leo is able to say, "Gee, I just run a small business, I'm good to my help, it's not really a bad thing I'm doing, everybody depends on me, and now you want to get me involved with something big and terrible" because he doesn't realize that that relationship is inevitable. And his brother's superiority to him as a person or as an intellectual is that he knows that you can't be slightly pregnant with evil in this society, you're dealing with it all the time, it's part of your life, and it's manipulating you as you think you're manipulating it. So Joe, in effect says, "Let's manipulate it and let's beat it, and take the advantages," and his brother says, "You'll become an evil man. You'll be Cain. You'll be a murderer." And Joe says, "I'm not the murderer, the whole thing is the murderer and we don't have much choice anyhow, so let's beat it. We have to survive. Let's be on top instead of on the bottom, because on the bottom you're doing the same thing, except it's doing it more to you than you to it." This relativity in values, which to each of the people seems to be ultimate, are fundamentally not ultimates at all, and this relativity of values is coextensive with the entire morality of our society, I would say. And all societies, perhaps, I don't know, except the one we hope someday will come, which will not be like that.

I find it interesting that the flaw in Joe's development as a fictional character is his desire to maintain the sense of family, to protect his brothers, and it brings his ultimate downfall. In Willie Boy you have a hero who refuses to participate in the family relationships of, let's say, a tribal society. And this also brings his downfall. What were you saying in 1948, about families?

I've been trying to see some families in 1970. I'm looking very hard, but I can't see any. In the older Jewish environment, the family center was a source of strength, because it formed a cooperative effort in a hostile society. We were able to draw force from it, and allies. The tribal structure of the Indians is a disaster for them today. It's a disaster for the Africans, too, isn't it? Because in the context of modern technology, it has no strength to win. Willie is not a reservation Indian, he's not a white man either, although he's a partial success in the white world. He's a success in the white world by refusing to be white, and he's a success in the Indian world by refusing to be an Indian, and in that sense is able to exist as himself. But the moment the event starts, which he sets off, and he does an Indian thing, he runs off with the girl who's now his wife, now the old rituals and habits of his particular inherited myth, which is disaster for the Indians, begin to operate. And the more he becomes an Indian, the more impossible it becomes for him to live. And when he's really and truly an Indian in the end, he's like all the Indians, he's dead.

One final question: What advice would you give a young writer-director with ambitions to direct a feature?

Don't go to Hollywood. I would give myself the same advice, too!

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An interview in The Director's Event: Interviews with Five American Film-Makers

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The Genre's 'Enlightenment', the Stress and Strain for Affirmation: Force of Evil (1948)