Take One (Nov-Dec 1972)

is a chase story, but instead of the desert of The Shooting you have the American landscape. Right. The six films I have made, they all involve a trip, a track of some kind. In Beast from Haunted Cave we had a track across the snows of South Dakota to a hide-out in the mountains. In Back Door to Hell we had a track across the Philippine jungle to rescue some equipment during World War II. In Flight to Fury we had a plane crash and then a track across the’ jungle involving stolen jewels. In Ride the Whirlwind we had a track and then a cliase where the heroes are being chased by the vigilantes, and in The Shooting, of course, we have the track across the desert. And Two Lane Blacktop is a race across the country, which ends up with a chase where the driver chases after the girl. So I am very attracted to this kind of movement, to travel as — maybe — a symbol of the road of life. Anyway it is a very appealing basic myth for me to begin with as a foundation for all the others. It is very hard for me to conceive of a film that takes place in one place. I read in the Sight and Sound article on you that you originally wanted Two-Lane Blacktop to describe some kind of love relationship between the two young men in the car. Yes, I think there is a love relationship between the two men, but the real love story is of course the story of The Driver and the girl. His inability to express his love at the right time and his losing the girl as a result of it — it’s really a story of a man who wants something very badly, and who can’t have it because he wasn’t able to act quickly enough. It’s a little bit of Hamlet I think. How is the love relationship between the two men expressed in the film? Well, it’s really expressed in the jealousy of The Mechanic for the girl. He is trying to keep The Driver from chasing after her. We don’t intend any overt homosexual suggestion by it, but I think there is that latent in all close friendships between two men; it’s obviously a very close and dependent relationship between the two. I didn’t see the film as basically a film about love relations, because you are really very subtle describing emotions between the characters. Yes, that’s right. The love relation is never mentioned in any of the dialogue — I always saw the film as taking place outside the dialogue. The dialogue has nothing to do with the film. The story of the film is entirely visual, and the dialogue is merely functional in terms of their everyday activities, and it’s probably unique in that respect, because I can’t remember ever seeing a film that didn’t deal dialogue-wise with the subject of the film. It’s hard to read the script for one thing, and so it was hard to raise money to do the film, because there is no way of knowing what the film is about from reading the dialogue, but I think that when it works, it is very effective, because the audience can really deal with images and through them they can get more inside the characters than they could if the characters were expressing their feelings through dialogue. | think that when a character explains himself the audience tends to remain outside the character, and they even can become very interested in the character objectively, but you never feel that you are the character. But when the character is ambiguous and is not too specifically defined, he can really become an alter ego for almost anybody in the audience, and the audience then have a much larger possibility of getting inside the characters and feeling and thinking as the characters. It is a very interesting point, certainly, but at the same time I also think it demands very much of the audience, and I know many people who were yery puzzled by Two Lane Blacktop and kept saying, well, what the hell is the film really about. Yes, it is an expectation that has been built up by 30 habit, that people think that they should understand something intellectually. I think there is a new kind of audience that’s being developed that will just accept a film experlence as an experience and not demand of themselves too much — | think it isn’t that they demand more of the film but they demand more of themselves than is necessary. They think they have to understand it intellectually to be able to discuss it as a subject, and I think that more and more people are finding that it is not necessary to do that, and that they can just accept a film as an experience, at least I hope it’s true. At your press conference yesterday, one gentleman said that the character of Warren Oates really might be stealing too much of the film because of his very human and touching performance. For instance he talks a lot more than the two younger guys, and that can be one reason why one is more interested in him than in the other characters. Well, I think that the Warren Oates character is a kind of relief, that he releases the tensions frequently enough so that the audience can deal with the pain of the other characters. I think if we didn’t enjoy him so much, we wouldn’t be able to tolerate the film at all. It would be too difficult and too painful an experience, but because of the tremendous relief that we get through the humanity and the comedy of that character we are able to tolerate a little bit more of the others and deal with them instead of totally rejecting them. There is still the chance that, when so much pain is presented in such a concentrated form, people are going to reject it and try to get away from it as soon as possible and not deal with it, because ultimately the pain is inside themselves and it’s not always easy to take. I think that it is an incredible piece of writing to create the Warren Oates character that functions so well in the situations, and of course Warren’s performance helps a lot. Yeah, he is certainly very beautiful. Was all his dialogue actually in the script, or did you create it together during shooting? No, every word was in the script. There is some dialogue between The Driver and the girl that was not in the script, but most of it was. Can you explain why you let the last image of the film burn? Have you seen, by the way, Jerzy Skolimowsky’s Le Depart, which is also about a young man who is crazy about cars, and there the last image also burns, although the context of course is different from your film? No, I havé not seen that film. The reason why I let the picture burn in the end — well, it began as an intellectual concept. I wanted to bring the audience outside the film and back into the theatre. The film deals with time and speed, and I wanted to add another dimension of time which is the time it takes for a film to run through a projector, and as the last images appear on the screen, the projector appears to slow down and stop, so suddenly we are dealing with time in another way, we are in a theatre looking at a film going through a projector, and of course when the film stops in the projector the frame melts or burns. It’s a way of finally forcing the audience to come back to themselves and leave the film, so to speak. It is a very intellectual concept, as I said, but I didn’t intend it to be dealt with intellectually. I hoped it would be an emotional experience for the audience, and it’s a shock because there is nothing else like that in the film. I understand that your next project is based on a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Can you say anything about that? The novel is called La Maison de Rendez-Vous and it takes place in Hong Kong, and I’ve just returned from there where I saw the locations and arranged for crews to be hired, but we probably won’t film until the end of this year. We cast one actress, Delphine Seyrig. To many people, it will probably seem strange that