It should have been the first one. The first one was Up Periscope.
I didn't know you were in that.
I hardly knew I was in it, either. I had just come back from New York, and the casting director at Warner Brothers had seen the Studio One I did, and put me on call- it was really kind of a cattle call- for that picture. And Gordon Douglas walked down the line and stopped in front of me and said, "You look like John Huston out of work. What's your name?" I told him and he said "Well, you'll do." That's how I got my first film out here-because I looked like John Huston out of work.
Ride the High Country was your first film working with Sam Peckinpah.
Sam,yeah. I'd done a telvision show for him- The Westerner, and The Rifleman. The television show was the first thing I did with Sam. He was directing The Rifleman, which he'd created. He'd set up the the pilot film, and I guess owned part of it. So he introduced another character in the story, and he came in to dirct that episode. And that's really the first time I'd worked for him. My agent had swiped a script off somebody's desk so I could read it, and when I went out to see him he said "I've already seen what you've done; you don't have to read." And that was it. Sam's a remarkable man. You know, making The Wild Bunch was not just what was going on back here, or even the results of it; it's what was going on down there. That was what it was about. He was very- he had a bad case of the piles. Bloody. And he was working in a lot of dust. He wouldn't quit; he wouldn't take take the time to get it done, because I think he felt that they would fire him. So he stuck there. And he'd climb up on the camera, and you could see all the way down the side of his leg this red, brown, dusty, bloody, stinkin', smellin', mess would would drain out of him. But he fuckin' wouldn't quit. They wanted to have him go to the hospital and take it out, but he said uhn uh. Finally they persuaded him to see a specialist, because he wouldn't let anybody there do it. So the guy came down on a Sunday, and Sam would get up, and the Mariaches and all of us would go over to his house about 10 o'clock that morning, and they'd start playing, nicely, softly, outside his window. The house would be a beehive of activity; kids and chickens and ducks and pets and some of his family. And so every Sunday around two, we'd all go over ther and have a barbeque, because he likes to barbeque. So the doctor's there, and Phil Feldman, the producer, who was a very sympathetic man. And so Sam said to the doctor: "If you can take them out in the kitchen by a kerosene lamp, which is the way my granddad had his taken out, and you promise me I can be back at work on Monday, I'll do it." The guy shook his head and said "We couldn't do that, Mr Peckinpah, we'd have to take you to the hospital." He said, "Well, nothing doing." He went through the whole fuckin' movie like that. He'd get a shot in the ass for pain, or whatever, and that son of a bitch stuck up there every day. Finally, it began to to clear up toward the end of the picture- I guess he got back there and got it taken care of- but the incredible fight that man has, the sense of creativity...you know, there are shots in that film that are astounding to me. We'd rehearse it for three days, dealing with 400, 500 members of the Mexican army, and I'd say at least maybe 1,000 people in that town.
How long did it take to shoot the final gun battle?
Three weeks. From the time we started walking out from the little building with the girls on the set...
I guess you've worked with Peckinpah as much as anybody has.
Yeah, I've done four: Dundee, Ride the High Country, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and The Wild Bunch.
What did you think was your most satisfying performance for Peckinpah?
I think Alfredo Garcia, for my role. I'm not going to comment on the picture, but my role was it. It was a very unusual character to get to play. There were some things that didn't jibe, maybe, in there, but as far as my personal gratification, I got more out of Alfredo Garcia. But as a human being I get more out of The Wild Bunch.
Of course, your part in Alfredo Garcia was bigger.
Yes, well, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end: it started at the beginning of the picture, and ended at the end of the picture. A lot of my roles start somewhere else. But it was the emotional life of the character, really, because I tried to say it all: what I knew about Sam and his love for Mexico. I really tried to do Sam Peckinpah: as much as I knew about him, his mannerisms, and everything he did. I've had infinite opportunities to study him, so...usually, when you work for a director, if he's a very impressive person, you kind of steal from him anyhow, if he's an animated fellow with a passion, like Sam has. Billy Friedkin is the same way: he has this intensity, and thoroughness, and demands perfection, yet he's very gentle. Both were very gentle with me as an actor. But Sam's had a big influence on my life. God knows, everywhere I go, he's praised and condemned. I get a lot of questions about that. I don't think he's a horrible maniac; it's just that he injures your innocence, and and you get pissed off about it. That's the way Sam is. We'd need L.Q.Jones, and Strother Martin, and Ben Johnson, and a whole long table of people to make comments about Sam, because we've all worked for him and liked him. We know he's as wild as a bat sometimes, and we love him, and we're all willing to do well. Hey, man, I', sitting here rattling, and I should be giving you some astute insights into things, and I'm really kind of skirting a lot of surface. We're talking about a man's life-he's made an enormous contribution and been a very controversial filmmaker. He's done maybe the great western. He changed the way people think about westerns. He changed the way people think about films, with Straw Dogs and The Wild Bunch. He shocked and educated and presented realities about the Mexican Revolution without any of this romantic bullshit. You haven't seen his poetry unil you've seen Cable Hogue. Cable Hogue was done as if you and I were in Denver, Colorado in 1863, and we went into the opera house to see an opera. And this happens to be an opera about the West. That's the concept he had. It's as if you were going to see an opera. It's almost an intimate stage play, but it's bigger than that, pictorially, and you've got to see that. That's an element of Sam that I think is genius. It followed right behind The Wild Bunch, and if you haven't seen Cable Hogue you've missed maybe...maybe his pure soft being.
The blackballing, I guess you'd call it, of Sam Peckinpah lasted from the making of Major Dundee to the making of The Wild Bunch. I was wondering what you might know about that.
Not much, really. I remember the incident; we were on Major Dundee, but I have no idea what the background of it was.
Was it partly just that Hollywood wasn't ready for the kind of violence that he puts on the screen?
Well, Major Dundee was a rather controversial movie; I mean there was nothing in it that was a shocking or dramatic as The Wild Bunch. But that was Sam's first movie-his first big movie. He made Ride the High Country for $850,000, I believe it was, and he stepped on a few toes, and kicked a few people out. And Major Dundee was his first big picture; it cost a lot of money, and I suppose it was something to do with the budget-$5 million dollars at that time was a lot of money. It's a lot of money now, but you couldn't make Major Dundee now for twelve million, or The Wild Bunch for seventeen.
I really don't know that much about all this; what I know would be hearsay, and I'd rather not even comment, except that I would defend Sam. He was a serious man, and he was trying to make a serious movie. The subject matter wasn't the greatest in the world: you know, tha chase and all of that. But a lot of it came to fulfullment in The Wild Bunch: his ideas about the Western movie. I don't think he set out to demonstrate a bucket of red paint; he set out to do something else. But on the set he'd say "I want more", and the prop man, or the makeup man, would throw hin more: more blood, more guts. Some of the scenes were ghastly.
I understand there were scenes that were cut out.
One scene where he cut the guy's throat: the special effects department rigged a knife that would cut the guy's throat. Fuckin' blood spurted from here to the fuckin' street. And for a joke, Sam printed it. Scared the shit out of everybody who saw the dailies. But it was just a malfunction of the pumping apparatus.
Sam turned the face of the Western around when he made The Wild Bunch. It shocked the hell out of a lot of [with a wide grin] moralistic weirdo pinko liberals. I remember we were down in Nassau, where Warner Brothers had a festival. The Wild Bunch was being shown. The ladies-all these critics and people who'd flown in there for this event-half of them booed and stormed and screeched and shouted when The Wild Bunch was on. It pissed Sam off something fierce; he got up and yelled at them, or whatever he did. Essentially, his innocence, his perfection, his attitude toward films and what makes them exciting, got a negative vote that day from all these people. And I think that hurt him deeply. It pissed him off, and it frustrated him. But the high quality of the film stands out today.
It's gained a cult following.
All over the world. Every place I've been. In France, the film is shown in one theater every Saturday night at twelve o'clock, and it's been playing there I don't know how many years- five, six, seven, eight years. It's been playing there for fuckin' eight years. And the French- I'm not talking about the working man; I'm taling about the intellectual-are very fond of that film. They see things in it about loyalty, and the dignity of man, and togetherness, and government; they see things in it that I don't really know if I understand, because I'm not that acquainted with French culture. But the French love it, and the English, and the Germans, the Italians- everywhere I've been. Except Sweden. But they're a bunch of weirdo pinko liberals, too.
Do you feel more comfortable in a Western role than in a modern day one?
Well, no, actually not. I feel maybe most uncomfortable in a Western role, because my image of the Western man is John Wayne, and I'm just a little shit. When I think of the Western role I think that the man has to be bigger than life, bigger than the screen. And I feel less comfortable working in those, because I feel most inhibited.
Right now Sam's up in Montana. We share a place-it's our heaven. I ran into it four or five years ago; we'd always dreamed of this little ranch somewhere, and now, this year, he came in on it with me. He's built himself a beautiful house, lovely old log place, waaay in the back-it's four and a half miles from the front of my property to the back, and he's in the back, the very back. He's in heaven. And he's going to find solace there, and he's going to start writing, and putting down all if his fury. Something incredible is going to come out of it. I know. Something incredible.
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