WHEN IT COMES TO WAR

Not many filmmakers directed both Fred Astaire and Patrick Swayze. Or followed up a tender, thoughtful film written by Harold Pinter with an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick. But John Irvin did. His is as diverse a filmography as possible, jumping from genre to genre, highbrow to low, touching to tough. ‘In England I was perceived as an actor’s director, but in Hollywood, after THE DOGS OF WAR, I was perceived as an action director, an alpha male type filmmaker. That’s why I came back to England, to do films like TURTLE DIARY and WIDOW’S PEAK.’ In this interview, which was done by telephone in October 2021, Roel Haanen asked Irvin primarily about his tough pictures: HAMBURGER HILL, NEXT OF KIN and CITY OF INDUSTRY, to name a few. They also talked about his latest, MANDELA’S GUN, which focuses on the period of Nelson Mandela’s life when he was a radical freedom fighter.

You completed shooting MANDELA’S GUN six years ago. What are the prospects of the film at this point?

Making a film in South Africa requires the foreign company to direct the finances through a South African company. When we were in post-production that company went bust. So, we had to complete it in a bit of a muddle. But the film is finished. A couple of years ago we managed to sneak it into a festival in Harlem where it won Best Actor, Best Music and Best Director. It was nice being honored in Harlem. We’ve now sorted out the legal separations. From now on it will be represented by an American sales company. Hopefully, you can see it very soon. I’m very proud of it. It took a lot of original research.

When making a film about someone who’s as revered as Nelson Mandela, does that legacy hinder you in telling the story of the man that he was?

There’s no doubt that there’s a certain aversion to seeing a representation of Mandela as the head of the MK, which was part of the armed struggle. They were prepared to fight violently for their rights. There was a moment when we were filming Mandela as he was taking weapons training in Ethiopia. I was lining up the shots and rehearsing the actor [Tumisho Masha]. And the DP said he had a problem with it. He couldn’t see Mandela holding a weapon. So, the answer to your question is yes. There’s definitely an aversion to seeing Mandela as someone who was prepared to go to war.

I was interviewing the lawyer who defended Mandela at the Rivonia trial and we were talking about his famous speech, in which he said: This is a cause for which I’m prepared, if needs be, to die. So, I asked the lawyer: Do you think it was a cause for which he was prepared to kill? And this distinguished man was absolutely stumped. I don’t think anyone had ever asked him that before. The point is that if you can’t get justice democratically or judicially, you’re not left with any other option than violence, I suppose. The question is: are audiences prepared to acknowledge that Mandela, in his youth, was a radical? A revolutionary? Margaret Thatcher called him a terrorist. To me, that was part of the attraction of the project, to characterize the man in a more rounded, human way. He was a wise elder, of course, but in his youth he was a revolutionary leader.

During your research for the film, you discovered that the CIA was complicit in his arrest.

Yes, we did. The man was a CIA agent working at the consulate in Durban. We tracked him down in the foothills of the Rockies. He was very reluctant to speak, didn’t want to be photographed. He was really nervous. But we did get a recording of his claim that he was in fact instrumental to Mandela’s arrest. Before he left South Africa he had foolishly boasted about his involvement at a dinner party. Now, whether that was an idle or drunken boast, who knows? But we got him to repeat it. He spoke frankly about it - he thought Mandela was a threat to world peace and had to be stopped. When we got this confession The Sunday Times did a spread on it. We were never contradicted and the CIA never tried to block the information we caught on tape. But the former CIA agent died a week after we spoke. Subsequently, I did hear a rumor that in fact a former head of MI5, who after his retirement was advising the South African government in so-called security matters, was also instrumental. MI5 were hobbling the activities of the radical movement in the region.

I don’t know if this is true, but on IMDb it says that you have ties to MI5.

Absolute rubbish. No, no. I would like that taken off, because it’s ridiculous. That rumor might have started out of a book about the Manson murders. When I was in Los Angeles, after the Manson murders, I met a man who was involved in the investigation of those murders. [Irvin is talking about Reeve Whitson – Ed.] He was a very dark player. He befriended me and he was definitely a man with a violent past, and I suspect a rather dangerous past. He boasted about his activities in South America, for instance his involvement in the capture of Che Guevara . He was an odd character and I’ve always been fascinated by odd characters [chuckles]. I think he started this rumor that I was connected. It’s true that in the sixties, when I did my documentaries, that I would have dealings with the security services from time to time. But that was MI6, not MI5. When I came back from Yemen, where I shot a documentary on the civil war, I was debriefed. There wasn’t much I could tell them. But I was never part of that world or paid. I was far too left-wing, for a start. I was anti-apartheid , anti-war, anti-nuclear. They were probably well aware of my left-wing activities. So, I was certainly not involved in any hanky-panky.

In the sixties, you started making documentaries in the Direct Cinema style. What were the benefits for your development as a filmmaker to start with that particular style?

When I went to the London Film School of Film Technique, I was very committed to social realism. We were all very engagé. The manifesto of Free Cinema, which was Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson and that crowd, was my primary influence. Anderson’s O DREAMLAND in particular. You could divide the documentary movement in Britain at the time between Robert Flaherty’s more romantic approach and John Grierson’s work. I was closer to the Flaherty school. Certainly, if you look at MANDELA’S GUN, that is closer to Flaherty than it is to Grierson. The Free Cinema movement was good stuff. I subscribed to their belief that British filmmakers were mostly pre-occupied with middle class stereotypes, for the middle class by the middle class.

The first film I made with the help of the British Film Institute and my father [GALA DAY], was very much in the spirit of the Free Cinema movement, but adopting all the latest technology of hand held cameras. I had four units filming it, getting into the action, taking part in it. It has no commentary, I wanted it to be self-explanatory. The inspiration for that was not so much Free Cinema, but JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY. In that film, they had multiple cameras at work, and they didn’t try to hide the actual process of making a documentary. I thought: if you can film a jazz festival like that, why not do a coalminer’s gala in the same way? The head of the coalminer’s union said: I cannot guarantee your safety if you come here with a film crew. But we went ahead and shot it and the film was shown at the London Film Festival and won many plaudits. It got me on my way on a very tender age. Immediately after I did a documentary on the end of the Algerian civil war, called INHERITANCE, which really established me as a documentary filmmaker.

One of your big breaks was the BBC production of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. What were some of the challenges for you during that production?

There was massive industrial unrest at the time. The unions were up in arms against management throughout the land, not just the BBC. At the time, Tinker Tailor was the most expensive drama the BBC had ever attempted. One of the reasons it was so expensive, was that I insisted on shooting the entire thing on film. In those days, with television drama, the interiors were always shot in the studio, with electronic cameras, and the exteriors were shot on film. Of course the quality diverged significantly. I said: We have the greatest screen actor in Britain. I cannot reasonably expect him to shoot this in a television studio. I persuaded them that it was economically feasible to do it all on film and all on location. I promised them I’d shoot six minutes of film per day, to justify the budget. Then the unions decided that this production was perfect to disrupt. To target BBC management, they tried to bring production to a halt. I was a pro-union man, but I was caught in the middle. They started refusing to do overtime, and then the shop stewards ordered a go-slow. They did everything in their power to sabotage the production and hold the BBC up to ransom. Some days I would only film for one hour. Tinker Tailor became a battleground. When something like this happens, it’s very difficult to keep everyone’s mind concentrated on the main event, which is the film. When they eventually settled, after about six months, Alec Guinness had another project he had committed to, with a pressing start date. So, to finish on time, myself and my production team worked about twenty hours a day. We did that for about two weeks.

When I went to Hollywood afterwards, to do THE DOGS OF WAR, a lot of my friends thought I’d sold out. I gave an interview to Screen International and said that it was a pleasure to work in an environment where people actually loved film. That caused a number of rebukes, but it was true. In making Tinker Tailor we were hobbled by the unions trying to prevent the film from being made. When I came to Hollywood I was absolutely amazed that people actually wanted to work, with a song in their hearts. They were committed to the film, not to negotiating with management over golden hours or platinum hours.

Had you always wanted to go to Hollywood, or was that just a door that opened for you because of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy?

Actually, the door opened for me because of another series I did, which was a four-part series for Granada Television, a Charles Dickens adaptation called Hard Times. It was shown in America and seen by people at Zoetrope. Francis Ford Coppola and his team came to me and while we were discussing various projects, Tinker Tailor came along. By the time I had finished, I had already committed to THE DOGS OF WAR at United Artists.

But to your question, had I always wanted to go to Hollywood? The answer is a resounding yes. For my generation of filmmakers, Hollywood represented the Mecca of film. Hollywood films were a big part of my childhood and they inspired me to become a filmmaker. Obviously, at film school it was the Nouvelle Vague and the Italians, but they all took their measure from Hollywood.

I have no regrets of ever going. In fact, had I been smarter, I could have made more of it. I never settled in Hollywood. Once I finished a film I would come back here. I would constantly jump back and forth between Hollywood and London.

You never lived in Hollywood?

Well, it was a second home. I had a house in Laurel Canyon which was my base when I was there. I was certainly part of the British expat community, but unlike Michael Apted, who went the whole hog and became an American citizen, I never went that far. But I’ve had a good and full life in Hollywood. Of course, there’s always the politics, the disappointments and intrigue that goes with the film industry, but if you’ve worked for the BBC you’ll be no stranger to intrigue and power plays.

What I love about THE DOGS OF WAR is that it’s an unsentimental, methodical look at the life these guys lead. Was that your vision?

Yes. I was using my time in documentaries, and my observation of mercenaries that I knew and filmed in Yemen. They were French, British and Belgian mercenaries who were doing a secret operation in Yemen, heavily disguised as Mujahedeen. There were many clichés about mercenaries. I thought they were more complex than how they were usually represented. I certainly didn’t want a sentimental version or the mock-heroic version. I wanted to characterize them as men with a bleak background. Nearly every mercenary I met, felt betrayed by the country they once served. Certainly the French. There was a mercenary, called Philippe, who was captured in Dien Bien Phu. He was tortured for six months. He had fought in the French resistance and later committed war crimes in Algeria. When I met him in 1963, he had never been out of battle since the second World War. I asked him why he became a mercenary. He was an educated, thoughtful man and he said: I served my country for many years and realized I was only serving big business, so I decided to do some business of my own. Psychologically, it was much more complicated and darker than just men going off to fight for money. There was a lot of moral puffery about mercenaries that I thought deserved to be punctured. I hoped THE DOGS OF WAR would give them some humanity, without being sentimental about it. Most armies up until modern times were made up of mercanaries.

There’s also an interesting visual aspect to THE DOGS OF WAR. There are quite a few dialogue scenes with people talking in cramped hotel rooms, overcrowded restaurants or bars and even in the hull of the ship, but they are all very clear, with lots of full shots and medium full shots.

I’ve never told anyone this, but the studio had asked me which cinematographer I wanted. I said: Chris Menges. Because we had made documentaries together. But they thought he did not have enough experience. It was my first feature, so they wanted me to work with a more experienced cinematographer with a long line of credits. Mike Newell, who was a friend of mine, suggested Jack Cardiff, because he had just worked with him. So, I went with Cardiff. It was a good choice, because Jack was well aware of the financial imperatives that are imposed on directors. But when I was discussing the film with Chris Menges, he and I agreed that we wouldn’t use any sets, but just shoot it where it happens. So I carried that idea with me and gave Jack Cardiff a lot to think about. [Laughs] Norman Jewison, who was one of the producers, came to the set and seemed very impressed. He encouraged me to continue with what I was doing.

Was it difficult for Cardiff?

It was a challenge he enjoyed, I believe. He certainly hadn’t worked like that before. Because he was used to working on larger sets where he could put the lights. This was a bit too tight for him. He was used to working with a great variety of lights. At heart he was a painter. He applied light. But I said: We just need one major key light and a bit of fill. But he was very supportive. He didn’t enjoy working in Belize though, with the open sewers. The stench gave him an excuse to smoke lots of cigars. 

Cardiff directed a film about mercenaries himself, the excellent DARK OF THE SUN.

Yes, it was rather embarrassing, because when the producer and I were talking to Jack about doing the film, the producer, Larry DeWaay, said: We don’t want it to look like that shitty film THE MERCENARIES [alternate title for DARK OF THE SUN]. Jack didn’t even blink. Afterwards, I said to Larry: You do realize that Jack actually made that film. Larry went: Oh no!

Although he’s known for his mannerisms, Christopher Walken is rather stoic as mercenary Shannon, which fits the character well. I think it’s one of his best performances. How did you direct him?

It was just a question of discussing and rehearsing  and finding the truth of the character. The only time he cracked was after we did the scene where his character is beaten up. He had these prosthetics which masked his face that he had to wear for a couple of days. At some point, he shouted: I don’t know who the fuck I am! [Laughs] Which was more an effect of that mask, than it was about the psychopathology of the character.

It was his first role as a leading man. He had just picked up the Oscar for THE DEER HUNTER and the head of the studio was very keen on rewarding him. They were happy to give him the leading role. That made my life much easier, because I very much wanted him to play the lead. First time I saw him was in Woody Allen’s ANNIE HALL and I thought: This is the perfect mercenary! What I didn’t want was the typical Anglo-Saxon warrior type, which greatly upset Frederick Forsyth. He thought that bringing an American in the lead role was a terrible betrayal of his book. He thought Shannon should have been Anglo-Irish. He was very sniffy about it.

Did Forsyth approve of the finished movie?

No, he hated it. It didn’t bother me, because I took most of the atmosphere of the film from my own experiences and not from the book. I used my own observations, certainly when it came to set dressing and décor.

After THE DOGS OF WAR, did you get a lot of offers to do more action films?

Well, that was the problem. In England I was perceived as an actor’s director, but in Hollywood, after THE DOGS OF WAR, I was perceived as an action director. That’s why I came back to England, to do films like TURTLE DIARY and WIDOW’S PEAK. It’s almost like a split personality. In America I was seen as an alpha male type filmmaker. But I always wanted to do more psychological films.

So, it was career strategy, doing all these different genres?

Indeed. It has its benefits and its disadvantages. Because no one can pigeonhole you. David Lean said: Never come out of the same hole twice. I consider myself extremely lucky, because I got to explore a lot of different territories, which would have been off-limits to me had I stayed in one place. It also meant I’ve had a longer career.

Certainly GHOST STORY is a much different film than THE DOGS OF WAR.

GHOST STORY started off well, but there were some huge problems. First of all, in the script the town is cut off by blizzards and snowfall. But the town where we shot it, in New England, had no snow at all, for the first time in fifty years! We had to take snow making machines off of the American Winter Olympics. Furthermore, the average age of the cast was about seventy-five. One of them was recovering from a stroke.

We had some previews, which went well in the Midwest, but on the East Coast the screenings produced some disappointing notes. The studio asked me to change the ending, but one of the leading actors was in Los Angeles, the other was at Shepperton. So, I had half a set built in London, the other at Universal Studios. I shot both halves and cut it together. Then Universal’s other Christmas film had bombed and they needed GHOST STORY quickly as a replacement, but the special effects weren’t ready. So, I told them: If you need the film now, all I can give you are worms. So they said: Give us worms! I had wanted the effects to be much more fleeting and elusive, but I could only give them worms and decay. But the studio was very grateful to me, because the film was a surprise hit for that holiday season. And not many directors can say that they worked with Melvyn Douglas and Fred Astaire.

Was that one of the reasons you did the film?

I had always wanted to do a ghost story. As a genre, it was very much part of my childhood. I wanted to explore it. I still harbor a desire to do another one, because to me, GHOST STORY didn’t quite come off in the way that I wanted.

You made two excellent war movies, HAMBURGER HILL and WHEN TRUMPETS FADE. They can be seen as companion pieces. Both are about young men sent in to fight pointless battles. That cannot be a coincidence.

No, it’s not a coincidence. WHEN TRUMPETS FADE was released in some parts of the world as HAMBURGER HILL 2, which validates your comment on their being companion pieces. Both deal with older men asking young men to make a blood sacrifice. One of the reviews of HAMBURGER HILL said: Every politician should see this film before sending young men off to battle. I’m really proud of that review. And after WHEN TRUMPETS FADE came out, the Wall Street Journal asked me why I keep making war films that show the officers as incompetent. I said: Because that’s my observation. Even Napoleon wasn’t infallible.

When it comes to war, there’s always this dichotomy between what these young men expect and the cruel, indifferent reality. I am currently working on a script about the Falklands War in which I go deeper into this theme. The desire of young men to challenge death and then face the reality of it. The degradation, but also the great love that young men find for each other under these horrific circumstances.

You faced some of that firsthand when you made a documentary in Vietnam, right?

Yes, it is the source of my fascination with this subject. When I was making BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL, I did a big sequence with [war photographer] Larry Burrows. We flew into a battle that was just winding down. We landed and as we got out there were lines of body bags. All these body bags were being loaded onto the helicopter, as we jumped out. We decided to film there and hopefully get out before nightfall. But we were cut off and the intelligence said we were going to be attacked by the men in the black pajamas. We dug in and later that night there was a lot of noise, but luckily the attackers were rebuffed. In those forty-eight hours I talked to the marines, who were eighteen or nineteen years old. I was twenty-nine and felt like an old man in their company. These boys had been going into enemy territory the previous day to pick up morsels of flesh of their dead friends to put into body bags, so that there was something to be buried and honored. A year before they had been sitting in classrooms and now they were being put through the meat grinder. But I was so impressed by the bleak humor with which they handled the situation. It was getting dark quickly and they started exchanging jokes between fox holes. I never laughed so much in my life. That sardonic, black humor is not something you see very often in war films. They show the gritted teeth and stiff upper lips. So, when I made HAMBURGER HILL it was important to me to use that direct experience. I wanted to honor the spirit of those young men who didn’t ask to be there.

Although the two films are thematically linked, there’s also a difference. At the end of WHEN TRUMPETS FADE, there’s redemption. But at the end of HAMBURGER HILL we’re left with a feeling of desperation. I was wondering if this, in your view, extrapolates to the wars itself.

Yes, there was a sense of having fought a justified war after World War II, which wasn’t there after  Vietnam. After my experience in Vietnam I didn’t want to make any more documentaries. When I was with those marines, getting into the helicopter, this man from ABC television raced across and asked me where we were going. I told him we were off to film a battle. He asked us: Any dead bodies there? I need to film some dead bodies. He said he would be fired if he didn’t get some dead soldiers on film. It was sickening. I incorporated my revulsion of that moment in HAMBURGER HILL. When I got back from Vietnam I went to a party at Life Magazine and they were talking about the casualties in terms of baseball scores. I freaked out. That’s when I decided to quit making documentaries, which was an overreaction, because obviously I could have made documentaries on many other topics besides the moral sink that was Vietnam.

HAMBURGER HILL was part of a short wave of Vietnam movies that came out in 1986 and 1987. The others being PLATOON and FULL METAL JACKET. I assume you were aware of those other productions.

Actually, HAMBURGER HILL could have come out before PLATOON. When I wanted to make the movie, every studio turned us down. Paramount said: This is not a Paramount picture. After we made the film independently, they said: This is a Paramount picture. We had raised the money for it through foreign sales and off we were to the Philippines. Having made the film, Paramount wanted to wait to see how PLATOON did, because Vietnam was considered a very unpopular subject. Of course, PLATOON came out and won Oscars. Then they said: We can’t come out so soon after PLATOON, because audiences will be saturated. So, they delayed the release. At that point, HAMBURGER HILL was being processed in a laboratory in London. And the grader of the film was also Stanley Kubrick’s grader. Now, Kubrick was holding back the release of FULL METAL JACKET for the same reason. The grader, being a friend of Kubrick’s, said to Stanley: You’ve got to get yours out, because HAMBURGER HILL is not half a bad film. Have a look at it. He actually took the print of HAMBURGER HILL in the middle of the night and screened it for Stanley in his screening room, after which Kubrick rang up Warner Brothers and said: You’ve got to get FULL METAL JACKET out within two weeks. So, HAMBURGER HILL was pushed back yet again. We could have come out first, if Paramount had been a bit braver.

Do you know how veterans viewed your film?

It has a huge following in the States, especially amongst veterans. We screened the film for veterans in Los Angeles, and while the film was playing, I was standing outside the theater, because I always get nervous during those types of screenings, and when the audience started coming out, a woman approached me. She asked me if I was the director. She wanted to thank me for saving her marriage. I asked her what she meant. She told me her husband was in Vietnam and that he had always felt responsible for ordering artillery fire that killed fellow marines. I asked her where her husband was. She said somewhere in the car park weeping. After all those years of marriage, he had just confessed this to her, that which had been haunting him for all these years.

Unbelievable.

[There’s a silence on the other end of the line.]

It was. Sorry, I had a little moment there.

I’m reminded of the Johnny Cash song Drive On, which is about a Vietnam vet whose family can never understand what he went through. It also features that line It don’t mean nothin’, which is prominently heard in HAMBURGER HILL.

That’s the chorus line of Vietnam, which was profoundly ironic… It don’t mean nothin’. It means fucking everything, but if you allow it to mean anything, you die.

Let’s move on to a lighter topic: NEXT OF KIN. That one has an irresistible premise of a family of Appalachian mountain people taking on a mafia family. It also has a fantastic cast. How do you look back on the film?

With mixed feelings, to tell you the truth. The original script was much harder, much tougher. But the studio that was going to make it, Lorimar, went bust. Their portfolio was picked up by Warner Brothers. All the other films were dumped. Ours was saved by the fact that Patrick Swayze was already cast. He was one of the hottest actors in Hollywood at the time and Warner Brothers was keen to proceed with it. They very much wanted him in their cadre of stars. But they thought the DIRTY DANCING audience wouldn’t take him as a wild, avenging mountain man. So, they took out all the heavy violence and expletives and made it a much softer picture. Much softer than the one I wanted to make. But you’re right, it had a fantastic cast. When I said I wanted Liam Neeson as the older brother, because he was an absolute natural for it, Warner Brothers said: Never heard of him, we don’t want him. I kept at it and eventually they conceded.

When we were filming in Kentucky, one night there was a knock on the door of my Holiday Inn room. The sheriff was standing in the doorway with his boy scout hat on. He asked if he could come in. I thought there might have been a brawl between the Teamsters and the locals in a bar or something. He produced five medicine jars from a little black bag. He said: Son, while you’re here, you’ll be offered moonshine. Now, some moonshine will kill you. And some of it is pretty darn good. Don’t drink this one. Just smell it. But this one is really sweet. You can drink that one. So, I had this blind tasting of moonshine, without going blind. Then he packed it all up. I thanked him and asked him: How do you feel about the fact that there are more people shot here in cold blood per capita than there are in New York City? And he answered: Son, if you get shot here, you’ll know who and you’ll know why.

Earlier you made RAW DEAL, which was right after TURTLE DIARY. This is such a strange combination of films. This is what you called earlier your split personality.

Yes, it was strange. I had just made this film with Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley, based on a script by Harold Pinter. And now Dino De Laurentiis was asking me to make RAW DEAL with this… hunk. Dino had actually offered me projects before and I had always turned him down. With RAW DEAL he caught me right after TURTLE DIARY, which I thought was a really good film. One of my favorites. But it was very badly distributed by the Rank Organization in England and I was really angry about the lack of passion they had for the film. Dino said he had a really great script. I read it and thought it was terrible. I agreed to it, only because he let me hire Gary DeVore, who wrote the screenplay for THE DOGS OF WAR, to do a rewrite. Then I came along for the ride, because I thought: if I make a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger, at least it will get properly released. There will be an audience.

But coming back to your point about following up TURTLE DIARY with RAW DEAL: after it came out, I was having dinner with Pauline Kael in New York, and she said: I really liked your movie RAW DEAL. I said: Really? She said: Yes, it tries so much less hard than TURTLE DIARY. It wasn’t straining for significance. [Laughs]

You were just telling the story about HAMBURGER HILL being in this competition with PLATOON and FULL METAL JACKET. Something similar happened with your version of ROBIN HOOD, right?

That’s an interesting story, because that came to me through Joe Roth. He was head of the company that was developing the Robin Hood movie that eventually became the Kevin Costner one. And when he became head of production at Fox, he tried to take that project with him. But he wasn’t allowed to take it with him. And he was really pissed off by that. So, he decided to make a spoiler. He said: I’ll do another ROBIN HOOD and get in front of the Kevin Costner one. They sent me a script, which was okay, but not great. So, we got John McGrath to do a rewrite. I wanted to get the spirit of Robin Hood, the revolutionary. After both films were released, I was speaking to an executive of Warner Brothers, who had distributed the Kevin Costner one, and he said: You got the reviews, we got the money.

But the production had its problems. You think you’ve seen everything, but every time you make a film, there’s a surprise in store. In this case, my Robin Hood became seriously ill, so we had to use lots of doubles. We had to hide the problem from the studio, because otherwise they would have stopped the production.

I like how your version conveys the cold and wet and harsh conditions.

I had been asked by Universal to make film version of Robin Hood, right after GHOST STORY. And I said: Just re-release the Errol Flynn version, it’s hard to beat. So, when I got offered this ROBIN HOOD, I wanted to go the other way. I said: We can’t shoot in merry England with all the sunlight and people swinging from trees. We had to film in winter, because we had to beat the other film. So, let’s make it about an underground rebel group. We found these old salt mines on the Welsh border. Robin and his gang take shelter in those caves.

With CITY OF INDUSTRY you decided to portray Los Angeles as a city of concrete and steel and motels, which creates this strange view of the city.

I told the art department that I didn’t want to shoot at any location that had been used before by a movie or TV series. I wanted an outsider’s view of Los Angeles, completely unfamiliar. I had done the same thing, to a certain extent, with THE DOGS OF WAR: the London scenes were not shot in the familiar West End spots, but in the caverns of the city. I applied the same rule to CITY OF INDUSTRY. It created a less lazy version of Los Angeles, in a sense truer to the city. I was so successful that the producer of The Sopranos, who was at the industry screening of the film, used the same concept for his title sequence later on.

CITY OF INDUSTRY came out in an era in which crime movies were suddenly in vogue again. There was Tarantino and…

Yes, and Michael Mann’s HEAT in particular. Mann, who was at the same film school, was actually going to direct CITY OF INDUSTRY. But he left the project because the studio wouldn’t go above ten million for the budget. Michael said he couldn’t make it for that amount, so he walked. Then it came to me. When the film came out, Michael told me he couldn’t believe I did it for ten million. But it was true.

Because you had Harvey Keitel in the lead role, some people drew parallels with the Tarantino school of film, but I don’t see that. CITY OF INDUSTRY is gritty and realistic and atmospheric. It’s origins go back further.

I agree. It was film noir that I wanted to do here. That was a genre I had wanted to do for a long time. I had read all of Raymond Chandler’s books. They inspired me as a young lad. CITY OF INDUSTRY was my tribute to the genre and to the city of Los Angeles. I was showing it to Roger Corman, who’s a friend of mine, and he said he thought it was going to be a huge success. But the studio didn’t put any money into the release. It got nice reviews and all that, but it didn’t take off like I expected it to. But critics write interesting and favorable chapters in books about the film, as it being an example of neo-noir.

You want to hear a funny story about Harvey Keitel?

Absolutely.

In the film, his character goes into hiding. He checks into a motel and he has a breakdown. Harvey said to me: I don’t know how to do this scene. So, we kept putting it off. Suddenly he says: I want to improvise it, but I don’t want anybody there when we shoot it, except you. So, right before we shoot it, I tell him: I’m here because you asked me to be here, but don’t be inhibited in any way. Just let it rip. Are you ready? Harvey says: I’m ready, but first, John, I want you to sing me a song. I said: What? He wanted me to sing him a song. So, I sang him a song from my Newcastle background, called Blaydon Races. I sang to him: Thor wes lots o’ lads an’ lasses there, all wi’ smiling faces. And so on. When I finished, I said: That’s it? He said: Yeah. So, we did the scene. He smashed up the room. I walked him backed to his trailer and asked him why he wanted me to sing him a song. He said: John, if I’m prepared to make a fool of myself, so should you. [Laughs]

SHINER was also a pretty good movie, but just like HAMBURGER HILL and CITY OF INDUSTRY, it came out in the wake of similar films.

Yes, I’ve been unlucky in this respect. There had already been a number of British gangster films, so the distributor didn’t put much money into promotion. But there was some wonderful stuff. Michael Caine was brilliant in it. It was a very gritty script and it showed aspects of London life which are unfamiliar to most people. But as you said, it was shunted into the end of a series of films which the audience lost their appetite for. It’s still there and it still works. People see it and it’s referred to quite often.

So, you’re still working at 81?

Yes, I’m preparing the film about the Falklands War and I’m trying to retrieve the negative of TURTLE DIARY. People have been suggesting it should be shown again. Give it a proper release. And I’ve got three scripts in development at the moment. I don’t know of many directors who just stop making films. Clarence Brown and John Sturges are the two I can think of. Most directors, from Billy Wilder on down, had projects until they died. And no matter how great a director you are, you’re probably never totally satisfied with the films you’ve made. You’ll always find something wrong, something that could be improved. There’s a story about William Wyler going to see THE BIG COUNTRY with Hal Ashby. They were in the Panhandle of Texas, looking for locations, ten years after the film had been released. During the screening, Wyler disappeared. Ashby went to look for him and eventually found him in the projection booth. There was William Wyler, on the rewind bench with a reel of THE BIG COUNTRY, and he had just cut out a scene. He said: I always hated that scene. And Ashby said: But the film’s been released for ten years. And Wyler replied: I know, but now at least there’s one print that represents the movie I wanted to make. Nothing epitomizes better the sensibilities of a director than that story.

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This talk was edited for length and clarity.