Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola is a critically acclaimed filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer, best known for directing The Godfather trilogy. A key figure in the New Hollywood movement of the later 20th century, he redefined American cinema with bold storytelling and technical innovation. The Godfather, Coppola’s breakthrough film, and The Godfather Part II won Best Picture Oscars, with the latter earning him his first Best Director award. His films, including The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, both recipients of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, are celebrated for their masterful direction and psychological depth. Building a legacy of visionary filmmaking, Coppola continues to push boundaries, most recently with his long-awaited epic Megalopolis, released in September 2024. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  The interesting thing about the conversation is, you know, I have written in every medium possible, I've typed, I've written longhand, but I met a woman, just once I met her, who was a court reporter, and I asked her if I sent her a dictation, if she would transcribe it into a screenplay, you know, which I showed her what the form looked like. I never saw her again, but I basically dictated the script of the conversation and would send my dictation to her, and then she would transcribe it into a screenplay, and that's where the screenplay came, how the screenplay came, that first draft was amazingly all just talked into a microphone.

• 1:08Rick Rubin?

  It's interesting, the form and content idea, that it's so much about listening and so much about words, and it's not about writing, it's about listening and speaking, really.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Well, in truth, I didn't write it, I dictated it, and I knew that dictation was a skill that, I mean, everyone can talk, but I knew it was something you could learn how to do, you know, so that it came out what you were hoping, and on the disc of the conversation, there is the actual screenplay, but that screenplay was dictated, it was the first screenplay, in other words, it wasn't made, you know, corrected by the film, it was actually, the film was really like that.

• 1:55Rick Rubin?

  How much effort went into...

• 1:59Rick Rubin?

  That overheard conversation, which really plays throughout the movie. It gets revealed to us bit by bit over the movie. We hear most of it in the beginning, but then as the film goes on, we hear a few more phrases.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:13Rick Rubin?

  It's a very simple conversation.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:15Rick Rubin?

  Yet it says a lot.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it was my intention that the key phrase in it, which is, "He'd kill us if he had the chance." That it really be the same, but, but in the end, we finally cheated. And we used the take where the inflection is slightly different. In other words, it's the difference between, "He'd kill us if he, he'd kill us if we had the chance." To, "He'd kill us if he had the chance," to, "He'd kill us if he had the chance." Anyway, there was a slight inflection, but I, I really need to credit my editor and, and, and sound mixer and colleague, Walter Murch, who was really very important in the project.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Because of course, he is a sort of sound genius, number one, Walter Murch. I'm sure you may have heard of him. And that was the first film he ever actually was the editor on. There was another, a second editor named Richard Chu, who was very good. But Walter was really, you know, almost like worked as a co-director with me on the editing of the film. And, and his talent went through, you know, carefully every little beat of that movie. And then ultimately, he did the final sound mix. A funny story I'll tell you, which you'll get a kick out of, is that when I was, Walter was a young USC student when I first met him. And I was trying to get him to work on the sound of our movies.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  And the unions wouldn't let him because he wasn't a, a union member. And finally, after going back and forth with the head of the union, they agreed he could work on it, but not if he had the word editor connected to his credit. So Walter said, "Well, call me sound designer." And that's where the phrase "sound designer" came from, just a union squabble. And now you can't go see an opera or a play or a movie without there being a sound designer credit. So Walter invented that.

• 4:16Rick Rubin?

  How important is sound in a movie?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Well, George Lucas, my young colleague, used to say, you know, "Sound and image is 50/50, but sound is much cheaper." So we really, we didn't have a lot of money in those days. So we always emphasized sound because we knew it was a, had a big role to play in what the film was gonna be like. But it was, you know, sound is cheaper to get than pictures. And we were up in San Francisco, you know, without resources. And that's why the really contemporary movie sound throughout the world came out of us, really, because we were in San Francisco where there was another company, wonderful company, called Dolby Sound.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And they were based in San Francisco, and they were always super kind to us. And we, of course, disclosed everything we were doing to them. And through Dolby, ultimately influenced, you know, movies throughout the world with five-point stereophonic sound and all of the, what they call Atmos. And that's all because, really, we were there with them as their colleagues, and we didn't have much money.

• 5:30Rick Rubin?

  Really, before that, there was just one big speaker behind the screen. Is that correct?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. I mean, originally, there was just one big speaker. And then ultimately, much later, when home hi-fi became stereo, and then very often, there were two speakers. But the idea of five speakers, three in the front and two in the back, was way later and came from Dolby and from ZOetro, our company.

• 5:56Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of the conversation as a genre film?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  You know, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of movies as genres. I mean, it's like, you know, what genre is the Taj Mahal? What genre is Notre Dame? What, you know, this thing to put everything in ratings and score them and give them, like sports, have one win over another, it doesn't... Art is not like that, in my opinion, you know? I mean, I remember when the New York Times... Started to give the movie review stars and I was so offended. I said, you know, this isn't sports. It's not like the pennant where the Yankees are in the lead and number two is the number three.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Art is not something that you can rate that way. I mean, it's you can like it or not like it, or you could think you have favorites and stuff. But but to turn that into a rating system is offensive to me.

• 7:01Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about casting Gene Hackman.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Originally, when I had written the script, I wrote the script before I made The Godfather. You know, I was a theater student in the 50s. So that to a theater student, the Trinity was Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, and Elia Kazan. I mean, they were the gods to me of cinema. So of course, I admired all three my whole life and still do. But Brando was obviously an exceptional actor. And, you know, I dreamed of one day working with him and I wrote the conversation with Brando in mind.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  And ultimately, when I managed, I never met him, of course, but I did get word back with him turning it down. And so then the conversation just went into repose for a while. And the whole adventure that came up when they offered me The Godfather. And, you know, why they offered me that? You have to realize that at the time, there hadn't been a sort of successful gangster movie for a while. And Paramount got that novel, The Godfather, before it was published. They had bought it very inexpensively. And they thought, well, maybe if they made it into a movie, they ought to make it with an Italian director.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  I mean, they offered it to important people. Everyone turned it down. So they decided that they should offer it to an Italian American, someone who was a screenwriter, and someone who was young and cheap that they could tell what to do. And I happened to fit the bill on those two things. I was beginning to be a successful screenwriter. And I had written a number of scripts professionally. And, you know, was Italian American, although my family were all musicians, I never. I never, I don't think I met a, ever a person who was a gangster as a kid. And I was young and, and, and married with two kids, so I was, you know, I need, I could be pushed around because I,

• 9:10Speaker 01

  uh, you know, except I didn't wanna do, do the film. Uh, I, I felt, I, I don't know. Have you ever read the original novel, Rick?

• 9:18Rick Rubin?

  I never have.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really, the story that makes up the movie is like a sliver of a much longer book that's pretty salacious and, you know, it was, it was written by the author, who's a wonderful, was a wonderful man and, and a talented writer. This particular book was written as a potboiler because he, he wanted to have some money so he could leave his kids some money. So he wrote this potboil and Paramount bought it and they, the, I mean, the first thing I said when I finally accepted it is that, you know, they wanted to shoot it in St. Louis, uh, and they wanted to shoot it

• 9:59Speaker 01

  in the period that was when we were shooting it, which was around nineteen seventy-three and, and you can figure that the reason they do that is so all the cars can just be the regular cars and all the hairstyles can be the regular hairstyles and all the clothes can be nineteen seventy-three clothes. So that was, that's what they wanted to do. And I said, well, I mean, the picture has to be shot in New York because that's where it's set and, and, and it has to be shot, shot right after the war, nineteen forty-five, because, you know, the Michael has just come back from World War Two and, and so I was trying to be, uh, more faithful to what I thought was the essence. And they, they had planned to make the film in, in St. Louis, as I said,

• 10:44Speaker 01

  and they budgeted for like two, two and a half million dollars at that time to make it, you know, as cheap as possible. And my decision of saying, well, it had to be New York and it had to be period. The budget went from two and a half million dollars to, to six million dollars. So, so I was, I was. Out, I mean, they wanted to fire me. Then, when I came up with my casting, they basically had made a hit picture called Love Story with Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw, who later then married the head of the studio, Bob Evans. And, you know, it sounds crazy to have Ryan O'Neal, who's the blonde guy, play a Sicilian. But in truth, Sicilians,

• 11:27Speaker 01

  there are blond Sicilians with blue eyes because they came from France. There are Sicilians who are, who look like Robert Redford, actually. So it's not inaccurate. But, you know, to think of a Sicilian as an Italian. I had met for another movie, a young actor named Al Pacino, who was, you know, dark and intense. And you know how when you read a book and you imagine someone in it, then it's sort of fixed in your mind? I read it and imagined Al Pacino, and it was unknown. I had only met him once because I was writing another thing that I didn't get to do. And he came to visit me and I met him. So I suggested Al Pacino for the part.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  And I eventually suggested, for the Godfather part, Marlon Brando. And they hated those ideas. First of all, they thought, you know, Al Pacino was a short, little runty guy. And Brando had just made, actually, quite a beautiful movie with Ponte Corvo called Quemata, or Burn. But it was a huge flop financially, box office. But it was a very good movie. So they hated the Brando idea. They said, you're not even allowed to talk about that because also he was considered troublesome and someone that, you know, made things difficult. And Pacino, they kept referring to how short he was, I guess because Bob Evans was a tall, good-looking guy.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  And so now, you know, between my ideas for casting and the fact that now, under me, the film was going to cost twice as much, I was really... I was positive I was gonna get fired. I mean, it just seemed to me. And I, and as I said, I had two kids and my wife was pregnant. And I wasn't out going to discoteques. I was, I was, I had a family that I had to take care of. So it turned out that I had also, a year before, written the script for Patton, for Twentieth Century Fox. And it was an unusual script. It was very unusual and I, I thought my producer liked it, but they hired Burt Lancaster to play Patton.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  And I think they were flirting with the idea of William Wyler. I know they were flirting with the idea of the great American director. And, and when I say great, I mean great, William Wyler, to direct it. And Lancaster didn't like the script. He felt that, I started the movie with, with Patton and all of his rank and glory, talking to the audience, just as if he was in a theater, right? And with this unusual beginning. And Lancaster, I guess maybe Wyler felt, well, he sort of worked his way up to that. That was not a good way to start. Anyway, I got fired and went off to San Francisco. So later on, we were renting an editing machine to Fox

• 14:21Speaker 01

  and, and they said, it doesn't work, you know, send a technician down there. I went down myself, I had no technician. But I saw it was George C. Scott doing Patton. What had happened, I didn't even know, was that Lancaster left and Wyler wasn't gonna be involved and they, and they hired George C. Scott. And he didn't like the Burt Lancaster script. So the head of the story department of Fox was a very nice man named David Brown. He said, well, we got this weird script that a young guy did. And, and it's, you know, it's interesting. So Scott liked it. And so that's how I discovered that my version of, of Patton's script was, was done.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  So then we were coming up to the Academy Awards soon, right when I was gonna get fired from The Godfather. And I was seeing the Oscars with my buddy Marty Scorsese, who was, you know, part of the... Part of the younger group that we were all friends. And I win the Oscar for Patton. And Marty said to me, he says, well, they're not gonna fire you now for at least three or four months because it would be embarrassing. And it was true. So basically, I was going, you know, from section to section, always thinking I would get fired and then something would happen, I wouldn't get fired. But then I would get another distance. And that was really almost like the whole movie. Should I tell you how Brando got the part?

• 15:46Rick Rubin?

  Please, yes.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I was in a meeting with all of the heads of the company, including the president of Paramount, who was from a big filmmaking family. And we were sitting around the table and I said, let's get either Marlon Brando. We need a great actor for this part, so let's get either Marlon Brando or Laurence Olivier. I realize Olivier is English, but he looks like a mafia head, if you know the one named Vito Genovese. And he's good enough actor that he could do it. But he was too ill at the time and he turned us down. I said, then there's Marlon Brando. He's really only 47, but he's one of the great actors of the world.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  And as I'm speaking, the head of the studio, the president, says, Francis, as president of Paramount Pictures, I'm telling you that Marlon Brando will never be in this picture and you're no longer permitted to talk about it. And then I pretended I had a fit and I just fell on the floor. And they all looked at me and I said, you're telling me I can't even talk about it? How can I direct a movie? I'm not even allowed to talk about it. And they said, okay, three conditions. Number one, Marlon Brando will shoot a screen test. Number two, he'll do the movie for nothing, free. And number three, he'll put up a million dollar bond

• 17:15Speaker 01

  to guarantee that he's not gonna cause any trouble on the picture. And I said, okay. Because I figured at least now I could talk about it, you know? I mean, of course, that was absurd. He's not gonna put up a million dollar. Well, how do I do the screen test? So I contact Brando's representative. And I said, I would imagine that Marlon might like to fool around with, you know, some, just experiment a little and see if he can find a way to do the character. And if he would, I would come over and, you know, kind of work with him or suggest things. And that's all I said.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  So I was told that, yes, you could come to his house early in the morning. And I did a little research and I found out that Brando always wore earplugs because he didn't like loud, jarring noises. So I got some, like, a friend of mine, like a ninja cameraman. I said, you know, let's all, we're gonna communicate just with hands. We're not gonna talk or shout. It's gonna be very quiet. I'm gonna be quiet. So we get there early in the morning. I remember there was a beautiful baby in the kitchen with a nanny. And we're all set up. And the door opens and out walks this man, beautiful man in a Chinese robe or Japanese robe with long blonde hair.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  That's Marlon Brando, you know? And we look at him and he, see, he was so smart. He knew exactly what was going on. So the first thing he did is he walked over and got some shoe polish out of the thing and started to make his blonde hair black. And then he made it into a bun. And suddenly, he started to have, you know, black hair. And then he put on, I brought a couple of shirts and I bought, and I bought props. I bought provolone cheese. I brought Italian cigar. I figured he, you know, I wouldn't really direct him. I would just put things near him and he could take them or not. And he went, I remember he went for a long time with his collar. And he says, those guys, the collar is always, he's talking to himself.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And then he says, oh, he talks like, he looked like a bulldog. And he takes some Kleenex and he stuffed it in his mouth. And then he says, he got shot in the throat. So he said, he got shot.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Now, his phone rings. I mean, his real phone rings. He picks up the phone and he goes,

• 19:46Speaker 01

  have no idea who was on the other line. But he started to turn into this character that he was inventing. And I'm, I'm shooting with a, a Handycam and my guys are, are shooting. And it's, it's amazing, this transformation that he did. And he did it. I didn't do anything. I just put, you know, and he took the provolone and he, he used the props, the cigar, he did a thing. So now I know I got something great. But I knew these guys, they're also scared when you get into, in, in intermediate management. The guy who owned and bought Paramount Picture was a guy named Charlie Bluthorn. He was about a 56-year-old Viennese guy.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  He created the first conglomerate. He had a company called Gulf and Western that was, he would buy and sell auto parts and he just made a fortune. And, and he bought Paramount and he, and he was accessible. You could talk to him. They, we all called him Charlie. So I decided I'm gonna take my thing and fly on my own dime to New York and show the test to Charlie Bluthorn, which I did. And I went in his, he was there in the Gulf and Western building, which is now where Trump powers, on Columbus Circle. And I went into the secretary and act and he said, oh, is Mr. Bluthorn? And she said, yes. And Charlie comes, Francis, you, why are you doing here? I said, I wanna show you something. So he said, all right, I'll come, one second.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  So down the hallway, he had a conference room. I set up a Betamax or, you know, a videotape thing. And he came out, I turned it on and he comes and looks and there's Brando coming out in the Japanese robe with the thing. And he says, no, no, that's crazy, no, no. That's incredible. And that's incredible. What do you have? It's amazing. So, once I did that, he was in. Of course, they didn't talk about the million-dollar guarantee. They did get him for scale, which he never was happy about. And that's how Brando got the part.

• 21:57Rick Rubin?

  Would you say he was washed up in Hollywood at that time?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Well, at the time, he was washed up. He had made some flops, and he had been chastised for bad behavior, mutiny on the bounty and subpictures. So, I don't think he was really, you know. People are washed up, and then they're not washed up anymore. But at the moment of The Godfather, he was washed up.

• 22:21Rick Rubin?

  Had he not made The Godfather, had you not had the idea to get him and convince people for it to happen, I don't know that we would think of Marlon Brando in the same way. Not that he's not Marlon Brando, maybe the greatest actor of all time, but I don't know if that was his second act or his third act.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Well, I personally, having experience with the guy now, I'm sure that something would have come along, that he would have created something so spectacular that he would have, which he did with The Godfather. But he would have, he was a genius, not just as an actor, but what he used to talk about and how he used to think. It was very unusual. And I mean, I met some incredible people. I'm now eighty, what am I, eighty-five? Eighty, I'm gonna be eighty-six in a few months. I met, you know, Claude Renoir, and I met Marcel Duchamp, and I met all these incredible people. But Marlon Brando would be high up, and Cora Sauer, Marlon Brando would be high up on

• 23:24Speaker 01

  my genius list.

• 23:29Rick Rubin?

  What was your relationship with Puzo like?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Wonderful. He was like the uncle, your Italian uncle, and I adored him. That's why you notice with The Godfather, it always says Mario Puzo's Godfather. I'm the one who insisted that, because I believe that who writes the original material should get the... You know, this idea of a film by so-and-so is ridiculous. You know, if it's an original screenplay, okay, a film by. But if someone else wrote the play or the novel... That's why all my films, it says, you know, Bram Stoker's Dracula, or John Grisham's The Rainmaker, Mario Puzo. He was a wonderful man. He was a character. He loved to gamble. And he was a terrible gambler.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  And so I had this nutty idea, let's go to a gambling casino in Reno and book ourselves into a suite in Reno. Because in a gambling casino, you can have breakfast at 4:00 in the morning. You can have anything you want, anytime. So we used to write through the night, and then he would like to go down and, you know, have a break and play roulette.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  And he would like lose a thousand dollars in a half an hour. And then he would tell the people, "Well, we're losing thousands down here, but we're making millions upstairs." And we would go back up. But you could not love him, Mario Puzo. He was so sweet. You know, he was great, because I would write the drafts, and then he would, in long hair, put things. And I would have a line where Clemenza says, "You know, you gotta make some spaghetti for your group." He says, "First, you brown some sausage." And Mario's note was, "Gangsters don't brown, they fry."

• 25:17Speaker 01

  But he was always making it better in his own way. He did write a book that is a really top, beautiful novel. Even Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch 22, was a friend of his, agreed. But this Godfather was a potboiler. His other book, and the name will come to me, is a beautiful, first-rate novel. He was a good writer.

• 25:41Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of yourself primarily as a writer or a director?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  My heart wishes I wanted to be a writer. I don't have the talent. You know, I believe all of us human beings, I believe we're a genius species and we all get talents. It's not always the talent we want, however. And, you know, I didn't get the talent I want as a writer, but I got other things. I got a good imagination and I got a lot of energy. So I'm willing to rewrite the script 100 times if each time makes it 1% better. And I have a weird talent for forecasting the future, like a kind of Cassandra. But there are, there are directors, you know, who just like see it. And that's a gift I don't have.

• 26:31Rick Rubin?

  Is the forecasting the future only as it relates to filmmaking or other things as well?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  It's come out more in filmmaking, you know, like I made The Conversation 10 years before Watergate. Or I made my film about basically women's liberation 12 years before the women's movement, which came out of the political. So, and even Megapolis, which is America as Rome. America just, just basically elected, you know, someone, you know, Sulla or somebody, you know. So my films do have a prophecy element in them. I don't know how where it comes from, you know.

• 27:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's unintentional, but it has come to be the case.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Several times already, you know, so, so. But, you know, I mean, I was, I was a theater student as a kid. I was like, did you ever see the movie called Rushmore that Wes Anderson made?

• 27:29Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like that kid in Rushmore. In fact, that's my nephew, Jason Tressman.

• 27:34Rick Rubin?

  Fantastic.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Wonderful boy, wonderful kid.

• 27:36Rick Rubin?

  How different is the word on the page in the script to the movie? How different are those two things?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Well, if you've seen the script, which I'm sure you have, you see how it's broken down. It's basically like a short story. And the script is broken down with, you know, a lot of exterior, interior, and describing what is going on. That whole format is really not done for creative reasons. That's done so that's easily budgeted. They wanna know how many days and nights, how many nights. So the whole format is that. The movie is basically what you see and what you hear. And that's how they broke up the script so that it, so that when you, when you read a screenplay,

• 28:26Speaker 01

  you know, ignore all that exterior, interior, medium shot. Well, that's all for the guy to budget it. Just think of it in terms of like it's telling you what you're gonna hear and what you're gonna see. One of the interesting things, Rick, is that because cinema got invented, you know, cinema got invented first before, I mean, the, the moving picture before television. And that was an accident because what was going on in that period when the motion picture was invented? There was also television was being worked on. And it could have been, one could have happened first. It just so happened that the motion picture camera,

• 29:08Speaker 01

  which was silent and black and white at first, happened first. And because it happened first, these brilliant originators of movies worked in a way that had never existed before, which was telling stories with pictures. Of course, pictures had told stories. The great artist F. R. W. Marnau said, "Sound had to come, but it came too soon." And what he meant was that, that they were really inventing a new way to... Do drama through just images without sound. Once sound came, it just stopped the whole thing and they went back making hokey plays and old fashioned plays.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  So this wonderful accident that silent movies were invented. If television had been invented first, who knows? I mean, television later, when it was invented, benefited from copying what movies were like. But movies wouldn't have been like that if it had, if they had sound. So it was a great gift. And then, of course, sound came about around 1929. And internationally, I don't know if you know this, but my grandfather, Augustino Coppola, who was a great tool and die maker machinist, was hired by a company in Fort Lee to make the Vitaphone. And he, I have a picture of him, I'll get it for you.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  So my, my family, the Coppola family being in that he made the machine that did the Jazz Singer with, with Al Jolson. And my other grandfather, my mother's side was importing, owned a movie theater and was importing silent movies for Italian immigrants. So our family is five generations in the movie business. My granddaughter, just Gia, made a movie called The Last Showgirl. She is the fifth generation of our family in the movie business.

• 31:05Rick Rubin?

  That's incredible.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 31:07Rick Rubin?

  What's the relationship between painting and film?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Did you see Megalopolis?

• 31:14Rick Rubin?

  I did.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so you, you know, Megalopolis takes the position that all artists control time and that a painter is freezing a moment of time. Or as Goethe says, architecture is frozen music or dance is time and space. So we control time, artists control time. And so a painting is a movie, but frozen in one moment of time.

• 31:40Rick Rubin?

  It's a beautiful idea, the artist freezing a moment in time. It's a powerful way to live with that understanding. The reason I wanted to talk about the conversation first was I originally saw it in film school forty years ago. And I watched it again this week, having not seen it in forty years. And I feel like I remembered every single image from forty years ago. And that's not typical for me. Usually you remember the story, but I didn't really remember the story, but I remembered the images.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 32:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, again, can't explain it, but it was an interesting experience. Like, I've seen this, I remember this, I remember how he was sitting when he was playing saxophone. I remember the speaker sitting next to him. I remember what the apartment looked like when he tore it apart. It's interesting how certain images stick in our mind in almost a dreamlike way. Again, I didn't remember the meanings of these images, just the power of the frame.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Let me ask you a question. Did you ever see a movie I made, it was a flop, called Rumblefish?

• 32:54Rick Rubin?

  I've never seen Rumblefish, but I know a little bit about it, it's black and white, yes?

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I made, my intention in making it was I wanted to make an art film for kids. And I did, and you know, my deal always was that if the movie covers what it, whatever the finance was, then I own it. And Rumblefish didn't cover it, so I don't own it. And I was sad about it because I sort of love it, it has Mickey Rourke is in it and, and interesting. But interestingly, when it played in Latin America, somehow, for some reason, I can't explain, it just stuck. And there was a theater in Chile somewhere that just showed it for a year.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  And a whole generation of South American novelists and filmmakers all were weaned on Rumblefish, which I didn't even know what it was. In fact, one of them came back to Tulsa where it was shot and made a film called Searching for Rusty James, which was the character there. So, you know, it turns out that my greatest dream had come true. To me, the greatest award you get is not a big check, it's not a stupid statue of this or that. It's when a young person comes who made a film, says, I, I became a filmmaker because I saw your film. Because I made a film, I told you, I made because I saw Antonioni's film,

• 34:19Speaker 01

  or because I saw Stanley Kubrick's film, or because I saw Orson Welles' film. That's why, that's why I did it. There's a new, have you heard of a film just, just came out called All Quiet on the Western Front, with a director named Edward Berger? He's also, he made the film Salvation about the, the popes. But this is a heavyweight filmmaker. And he comes, he says he wants to meet me. And I said, gee, I love the, I, I, I know your film All Quiet on the Western Front is wonderful. That's the remark book. And he said, well, I didn't know anything about movies, but when I saw Apocalypse Now, I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker. That to me is joy. That, that's all, because that's what it's about.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  It's about, you know, we're on the shoulders of the people who came before, and we were passing it into, into the future that way. That's, that's what the apprenticeship system is. And the fact that you could have made somebody so important want to make films, boy, that's a gift.

• 35:27Rick Rubin?

  What motivated you to go to film school?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  I was a theater major, as I told you, and I was really successful. I, I was a, I was not successful in anything, but in my college career, I became the big mensch in the film department. I had all the, the keys and I had a lot of clout, but I had no money and no girlfriend. And I was sort of hanging around on the campus, waiting for rehearsal that night. And there was a little building, we called the Little Theater, and it had a poster on it, said, today, four o'clock, Sergey Eisenstein filmed Ten Days That shook the world, October.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  So I didn't, you know, I had nothing to do. I went in there, about four or five people in there. And there was no, and it was a silent film, but there was no music. In other words, they didn't play a piano score or something, it was just silent. And I saw October, Ten Days That Shook the World, which is a long film. And I came out and I said, wow, I'm not gonna be a director and go to Yale Drama School. I'm gonna be a filmmaker like that. And I, and I decided to go instead of, I was gonna go to Yale, to the famous Yale Drama School. And instead, I went to UCLA. Because in those days, if you could show residency, college was free.

• 36:47Rick Rubin?

  Was film a small industry at that time?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  No, no, there was, there was Hollywood and, and, but, but no one had ever gone from film school to make Hollywood films. There were only a few film schools. There was USC, and they were considered more technical, so they made documentaries and technical films. There was UCLA across, and then there was NYU and CCNY. There were about five film schools in the country. And, and UCLA was the arty one. And so I went to UCLA and, and, and it was occupied during World War II. At UCLA, there were bungalows near Sunset Boulevard that were built by the army and, and had some purpose that wasn't part of the school.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Then it got absorbed by the school. And that was the movie department. The students were pretty much a hundred percent men, except for maybe just a few. I remember, I was amazed when I went because one of the new students was a Swedish woman named Ingrid Thulien, who had been a star in Bergman films. And she went to UCLA to become a director, this goddess of Bergman's there. And there were two or three other girls, you know, so I was there in this new crop. I was the only one who had come from theater. So, you know, in, in fairness, I, I noticed that movie directors who don't come from theater

• 38:17Speaker 01

  or who, or who were not ex-actors tend to not know a lot about acting. Which is interesting and because obviously the two most important things of movies, the essential, the oxygen and hydrogen is writing and acting. I mean, you can have, if you have good writing and acting, you can have terrible photography, terrible music score, terrible sound effects, terrible everything, the movie can still be good. But if you don't have good acting or writing, you can have the greatest score, you can have the greatest photography and it's not, the movie can't possibly be good. So I knew that from my theater background.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  And there were a lot of older guys who were more senior in the UCLA Film School. And there was limited equipment, so like an editing machine, for example. They would take the editing machine and lock it in their editing room. So they always had it and the new kids didn't, you know, had to scrounge to get an editing machine. So whereas theater, my experience of theater was as a group experience. You all worked together and then you went and had pizza together and you had a crush on some girl that you didn't tell her you had a crush on. And it was the opposite in movies. Everyone was a loner. Everyone was alone with their editing machine.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  And in fact, my company, American Zoetrope, was basically introducing a more theater culture to film. You know, in our company, all the film, we all went together, we would go eat together and we would, you know, help each other on each other's films, which is what my generation of filmmakers are still like. You never hear someone in my generation, my colleagues, say a bad thing about another director in that. There's a colleagueship that's really nice.

• 40:07Rick Rubin?

  Who were the other young directors in your group?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Well, there was a brilliant, brilliant director named Carol Ballard. He made later the film The Black Stallion and Fly Away Home. And there was a very crazy, but in his own way brilliant, character named Dennis Jacob. There was an extreme, the only one who sort of made it a teeny bit in the movie business, other than Carol Ballard, who over time is greatly appreciated, there was a guy named Noel Black.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Who was a very nice gentleman and he had a little bit of a career. Other than that, my generation, there's me, you know, kind of in a way.

• 40:54Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the story of Zoetrope. What did you envision?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  I'm about five years older than these colleagues. So George Lucas is about five years younger than me, except for Carol Ballad. He's four years older than me. But pretty much everyone, even Marty is about probably five years younger. They're all about four, five years John Williams. And what happened was I won what was called at UCLA, the Goldwyn Award. And that was sort of like the Nobel Prize to UCLA writers, mostly novelists. I was the first screenplay ever to win it. Goldwyn Award was $2,000 and I was living on a dollar a day. So it was a lot of money.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  And it was also immediately since it was a screenplay that won every agent in town wanted to represent me to be a screenwriter. And I got a job as a screenwriter, working for a company, a famous man named Ray Stark. And I had been an assistant also to Roger Corman when I was poor. I learned a lot about filmmaking from Roger Corman. At any rate, one thing had led to another and I was now directing a Hollywood picture. I was, you know, 25, I had two kids. And I was directing a movie called Finian's Rainbow at Warner Brothers, starring Fred Astaire

• 42:18Speaker 01

  as an older man, but he's a wonderful person, and a young woman named Patchouli Clark. And then an English-

• 42:27Rick Rubin?

  Oh, she's great.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:29Rick Rubin?

  Great singer.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  She was a wonderful singer and a sweet, sweet lady. And then a crazy English guy named Tommy Steele. But it was a really cheap movie. It was like less than $2 million. And I wanted to shoot it in real Kentucky where there really were people in the tobacco business, but I had to shoot it on the old sets of Camelot, all phony sets. I hated it. At any rate, one day I'm shooting, and in those days, the whole crew were, you know, grown up adults wearing suits and ties, even the crew were like that. And I look on my left and there's a skinny kid watching. So at one point, I went over to him and I said, what are you looking at? He said, not much.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  I said, well, I said, OK, what are you doing? He said, well, I want a scholarship to observe what's going on at Warner Brothers. And this is what's going on. But I'm really gonna go to the animation department. And, you know, Hanna-Barbera were there or something. So I said, well, tell you what, because I liked having a young person. I was there with all these older men, you know. I tell you what, why don't you come here every day? And you can come and watch here. And all you have to do is one thing. He says, what? I said, you have to just come up with a great idea every day. And he did. And that was George Lucas.

• 43:53Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  And he was so bright, you know, and I knew it. So finally, I said to him, you know, George, I have another movie that I want to make, going across the country in a small little van with the editor and everything, and shoot whatever happens, incorporate it into the script. And it's called The Rain People. If you come with me and we'll do it together. Then the next film I'll do will be one you want to make. So he said, great. So I made this film called The Rain People, even before the edit of Phineas and Rainbow was done. I mean, I had left what I wanted, but I wanted to get out of there. And we had like two little vans and another van with the editing machine.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And we were in a position, we had a script. It was about a woman who leaves her husband. She loves him, but she doesn't want to be a wife. And goes on the road. And the idea is that we could make it, but if something's happening, if there's a, you know, an emergency, and we could go 300 miles out of way and incorporate it into it. So it was another slightly different kind of filmmaking. When I went to college, there was a football player. That we all sort of loved, whose name was Killer Kelly. And Killer Kelly had been so banged up that he had a metal plate in his head and he was like a child. And, and, and, and the college just hired him to rake leaves. And I always used to see him and my heart went out to this

• 45:23Speaker 01

  big man, you know, who was like a kid. And eventually they, they, I heard that they gave Killer Kelly like a thousand dollars and basically said, goodbye. So I, I had, I met this young guy, I like an actor named Jimmy Khan. And I told him the story and my idea was that she, there's a guy, he's hitchhiking and, and that this housewife picks him up, maybe she wants to have an affair, I don't know. But she becomes sort of saddled with this person dependent on her. And that was what the story, but my idea was that we could go anywhere we wanted to, you know, there was a mine disaster in Virginia.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  We went there and incorporated that, or there was a parade in Memphis and we got, he wandered through the brick. So it was a style of filmmaking. So George and I did that, but essentially we had a whole film company. We had all the equipment, we had all the people. And we ended up doing the final scenes in Kansas, I think, I forget the town. But the, the town fathers of Kansas said, if you guys stay here, we'll get you a studio. And you can have, but we realized we were a mobile film company and, and, and so one thing led to another and George was from Modesto. So to him, San Francisco was the big city. And I wanted to get out of LA because I wanted that control

• 46:48Speaker 01

  that was on the movie business to go away. So we decided to take the whole unit and just, I, I had a house and a summer house. I sold them and, and, and we made a sort of a kind of a studio.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Of sorts with sound and everything in San Francisco. And that was Americans. And then George wanted to call it the Transamerica Sprocket Works. And I had visited when I bought the equipment, a Danish company called Lanterna Film. I wanted to call it, you know, American Lanterna, you know, or, or, you know, Magic Lantern. And eventually we went back and forth and we called it American Zootown. And it would, the idea was it was this group of filmmakers. And it wasn't just me making the film. It was George was gonna make one, John Milius was gonna make one, a man named John Korty. Did you ever hear of John Korty? K O R T Y.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  He was a important filmmaker in San Francisco. And so that's how it happened.

• 47:53Rick Rubin?

  So when you were 25 years old and directing your film, were there many other 25 year old directors who came from film school at that time? Was that a real thing?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  There was one who was someone I admired immensely, who was young, who had directed the Sonny and Cher movie. And he was from Chicago. He didn't really come from a film school. But he really impressed me. And, and we were always up for the same thing, but we were good friends. His name was Billy Friedkin. And he had made a film that I thought was the highest thing you could do. He made a film, The People Versus Paul Crump. Did you ever hear that movie?

• 48:36Rick Rubin?

  I've not.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  It was about a black guy was, was gonna be executed for murder in Chicago and was not guilty. I mean, this is the gist of it. And Billy made a film about it called The People Versus Paul Crump. And it was so effective that he got pardoned or he didn't, he didn't get killed. And I say, if you can make a film that saves somebody's life, my hat's off to you. And that was Billy Friedkin, who later made The Exorcist and The Sausage and The French Connection.

• 49:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Did you become friends at that time?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Very good friends. He, he was, but he was much hipper than I was. You know, I was married with three kids and he was more, more adventurous. And, and he was an incredible character. He, he, he married Jean Moreau for a while.

• 49:31Rick Rubin?

  Wow. Typically, at that time, the directors would have been people who had done other jobs on the set and worked their way up and were maybe fifty or sixty years old, I imagine.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Yes, but there were, there were some directors who, who were more interesting than that. There was another company, I forget, but which was basically the offspring of studio executives. So they, I mean, they had a lot of ins. But Hal Ashby was a director who had been an editor who was very advanced and, and, and he was, he made some wonderful films. And that's when a lot of the Corman people I knew co, like Nicholson was always in the Corman pictures, but he became very important. And Dennis Hopper, who later was in My Apocalypse, Dennis Hopper was a handful. He was amazing. He was in Rumblefish.

• 50:24Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about Roger Corman and that whole world, the Corman world.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  The Corman world was before all of this happened. I was very poor film student and I was living in a tiny little place. I had gone to military school for a while. In fact, the same military school that Donald Trump went to, New York Military Academy. And I ran away. I went AWOL and, and, and didn't, didn't want to stay there. And my father never forgave me for that because he had a, he had borrowed the money on one of those deals where you pay, and he still had to pay even though I wasn't there. So he said, I'm gonna have nothing to do with your college. So I had about a dollar twenty-five a day

• 51:08Speaker 01

  to live on beside this little hovel I lived in. And that meant I kinda had twenty-five cents for breakfast, fifty cents for lunch, and then I would eat Kraft macaroni and cheese dinners every night because that was it, you know? So I was very extremely poor. But there were some fabulous faculty members. One was a woman who was my directing teacher, who was a famous woman, really, named Dorothy Arsner. Have you ever heard of her?

• 51:37Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  She was the only woman director in Hollywood for, in the thirties and forties. She directed Crawford and, and, and she, she was a great direct, she was a woman. And she was my directing teacher. She was, I mean, everyone at UCLA so respected her. To this day, I will not refer to her as anything but Miss Arsner because she was so fabulous. So I noticed on the bulletin board, you know, I was looking for some way to make some money in that night, I was a busboy at Kelbo's Restaurant. The things that called this number were assistant of Roger Corman, some knowledge of Russian is, will be helpful.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I, I, I saw October, Ten Days of the World, that was my knowledge of Russia. So I said, I called up and, and I, and they said, we'll call you back and let you know if you get an appointment. Well, I hadn't paid my phone bill, so I didn't know. I was just in horror that, that I would get this call, but the phone wouldn't go through. Ultimately, I did get the call and I went and it was a very bright woman, so she hired me. And the job was to take this Russian movie he had bought. The Russian movie was very idealistic. In other words, it showed the, the cosmonaut sees the golden cosmonaut of hope for the future.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  And Roger said, what I was told through this woman, who, who was my boss, to take out all of the golden hope stuff and, and cut in monsters that they see. And he said, they wanted, he wanted a monster that looked like a great female organ and ultimately the male organ gets swallowed by it. So I, my job was to do this. So I was in every day and I couldn't speak Russian. I was, I was doing the, you know, writing a new, to loop it into English, but I would get there very early and slump myself over the movieola. So when she and Roger came in, they would see I, like I had been there all night, which I hadn't.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  So ultimately, I did this ridiculous job and, and it became, it was released as Battle Beyond the Sun or something. So ultimately, she gave me a, you know, her thumbs up and Roger offered me to be his assistant. And he offered me, I think, seventy-five dollars a week. When I complained, he said, when he had an assistant job, he got forty dollars a week. At any rate, I became his assistant, and that meant, basically, I had to wash his car. I had a, he had a lawn with sod, I had to move the sod. And then, but finally, he, he was gonna make a movie with Vincent Price. Of course, I had, I knew who Vincent Price was.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  And what he did is, the company making the movie, he had them hire me. Because I was on this payroll of this, this A I P studio. But I would only work, I would work as the dialogue director. So, in other words, I would run the lines with Vincent Price and these other actors who were in it. But I was a theater student, so, so he said, well, you can stage it if you want. And he would shoot like seven pages a day, so, I mean, he just would go through it. And so I was there, ahead of him, with Vincent Price, reading the lines and then setting it up. And then he, they would shoot it, which was incredible. But at twelve-thirty, they all broke for lunch, I had to then go back and be his assistant.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  In other words, what he had done is, he had them pay me, but he then got me being assistant for free. And so at one point, he said to me, uh, do you know anyone who knows how to do sound? And I said, of course, I know how to do sound, because he was gonna make a picture in Europe, and he wanted to take someone there to be the sound guy. If, also, if someone went on one of those trips for Roger, if he, if the person bought a car. In those days, we used to buy cars, like you buy a Volkswagen in Germany, it was cheaper. So, so if you bought a car, then, and you agreed to take the people around on the film in the car, he'd give you three hundred dollars. Well, that's what I won the Golden, where I had two thousand dollars.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  I bought an Alfa Romeo sports car. Wow. And picked, picked it up in, in Europe, but of course Roger didn't like it, because I could only take one person. I was hoping I'd get a girl that would. But instead, I took one of the Israeli guys, this guy named Joschi Gross, his name, he was a great big guy from Israel and his, he was the cousin of another Israeli guy named Manokam Golan. And this Joseph Gross was wonderful. He, he said, I know you're unhappy to have me in the car, but we'll have fun. I'll tell you a few jokes, you'll love it. And he was right. And we're driving, you know, so I drove all around with Joschi Gross.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Bottom line is that everyone knew that Roger, after the company made a film, would use all the stuff paid for and, and make another film for himself. But he was called back to make a film called The Raven with Peter Laurie and Vincent Price. So we all knew that there was this whole unit that he would probably could sell him on making a picture. And in those days, Psycho had just come out. So I just wrote one page. I wrote a, the key scene of a Psycho kind of movie. Everyone wanted to get the job, but basically Roger chose mine and sent me, said,

• 57:20Speaker 01

  okay, can you do this? Uh, I'll give you $20,000 to make the, I mean, not give me the budget, $20,000 to make the film. And I'll send this lady with you because I'm going to put the money in two names for cosigners. And I suggest you make it in, in Ireland because, you know, they all speak English and, and, you know. So I take the, my Alfredo Mail and I go to Ireland and I go to where there's this little studio in a place called County Wicklow. And I meet an English guy there and he says, what are you doing? And I said, I'm making a movie for Roger Corman. He says, well, what's it about? Well, here's the one page. I hadn't written the script yet.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  He says, tell you what, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll want to buy the English rights. And he said, what do you want for them? And I said, $20,000. So now I had $40,000. So when I told Roger about it, he said, well, send me the $20,000 back. And he knows he wanted to own the picture for free. Instead, what I did is I told the lady he had sent us, so we gotta deposit this check in a bank account, co-sign it, and I put the whole forty thousand dollars in the bank account under only my name, and I made the movie for forty thousand dollars. So Roger was plenty pissed off, but then when he saw it, he more or less liked it. And that was a film that he called Dementia 13, which was technically the first real film I ever made.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  And you know who loves that film is who's the great writer who writes scary stuff? Stephen King. That was one of his favorite movies, Dementia 13.

• 58:59Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember when you first saw Psycho? Did it feel like a different movie when you saw it?

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought it was scared the hell out of me. I mean, it really were. I mean, Hitchcock, you know, Hitchcock never had great acting in his films, but, you know, Psycho was worked like dangbusters. And Vertigo, I mean, Vertigo, I thought was incredible when I was a kid. But the best acting in a Hitchcock film is Strangers on a Train or The Wrong Man.

• 59:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me about Vincent Price.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  He was a wonderful man. He was really, just like what you imagine, a great thespian. He was, I had seen him in a favorite film of mine and my brother's, my big brother, who was an important figure in my life. Did you ever see a movie with Vincent Price called The Baron of Arizona?

• 59:54Rick Rubin?

  I've not.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Oh, it's Samuel Fuller. It's great. But I loved Vincent Price from The Baron of Arizona, so I was in awe of him. He was a wonderful man. He had been in a film that he was great in called Champagne for Caesar. I remember that I saw when I was a kid. I always remembered this character that Vincent Price played. My brother used to take me to the movies, so I loved people like Vincent Price and all the Corder films made in England, you know, Four Feathers and The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. Unbelievable film, Michael Powell films.

• 1:00:35Rick Rubin?

  You described Making the Rain People. How different was that than?

• 1:00:42Rick Rubin?

  What other people were doing in terms of making movies at that time?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  It was quite, quite different. We were, we were a mobile unit and we were incorporating and I was rewriting, I was rewriting and we were editing as we were going, the story as it came along. And originally I had a part for an actor named Rip Torn. You remember Rip Torn?

• 1:01:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, fantastic.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was great. And he was in my film with Geraldine Page on your big, my first movie that I made. So I had made a deal with Rip Torn to be this motorcycle cop in, in the movie that she has a fling with, sort of. It doesn't quite work out. And Rip Torn was telling me that he was a character and he wanted, he wanted me to buy him a motorcycle and then he would do it. So then I would buy, I bought him the motorcycle, but it was stolen. So he said, well, you've got to replace it. So I bought a used motorcycle and he got all upset about it. In the end, in the last minute, he bails on me. I have no one and I have the part.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  So Jimmy Khan tells me about a guy he worked with in an Altman film named Robert Duvall. And the last minute, I'm able to get Bobby Duvall to be the motorcycle cop in the Rainbow. By the way, George Lucas also shot a 16 millimeter documentary about the whole making of the Rainbow people called Filmmaker, which you can get.

• 1:02:13Rick Rubin?

  Would you recommend to anyone who wanted to be a director to study theater first? Learn about acting?

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Oh, without a doubt. Not only that, I tried to get every film school I ever visit to have first year directing students not make short films, but do one act plays. Because if they do one act plays, they get to see the result in front of an audience right away. If they make a short film, they get bogged down in post-production and end up not seeing the short film for eight months and then, and they don't benefit from seeing how an audience reacts. Also, In theater, you learn about acting. And in film school, you don't learn about acting. In fact, traditionally, every school, every university that has a theater department and a cinema department, they don't get along.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  They don't work together, even in Poland or in some other country. There's a natural disassociation, and it's cultural. It's that, you know, the cinema people think the theater people are phonies, you know, and so darling. It's a funny thing. I really worked hard at UCLA recently to bring the cinema and film people together with some degree of success.

• 1:03:32Rick Rubin?

  It's a great idea. I imagine even learning about cinema probably would make the theater better as well.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  No question. Cinema is the child of theater. I mean, and it goes back to the Greeks and perhaps before the Greeks. There's so much to learn that we, you know, that we hand down. But it's funny, also, you think that the cinema students would welcome having some actors for their films. And I know so few cases of where a good actress from the UCLA Film School worked with a filmmaker, but they got married. That was Caleb Deschanel, a wonderful cinematographer from USC. And his wife, Mary Jo, was in the theater department.

• 1:04:20Rick Rubin?

  When you moved Zoetrope to San Francisco after the rain, people, tell me about setting up shop and tell me what happened next with Zoetrope. What was the vision for it and what happened?

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  We didn't quite get what we really wanted. I had wanted, my idea was to buy with a mortgage, of course, a big white elephant mansion.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Reason is that all those bedrooms and things are perfect. I saw a place in Denmark like that, that was right on the water. And it was this wonderful film company called Antena Film. And it was all kids working together, boys and girls, you know, editing and stuff. And a big mansion is perfect, all the facilities in there. And then sometimes they even had something related to an entertaining room that you could shoot in. So we were looking for old, broken down mansions that we couldn't find anywhere. They wouldn't, they wouldn't sell it to us. We had a lot of problems with being vetted.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  And so finally, there was a, south of, you know San Francisco at all? A little bit. In those days, south of Market Street, there was the, south of Market Street area, which was a little seedier. And there were some warehouses. And there was a record company that was there on Folsom Street. And they were looking for someone to share the lease. And I made a deal where we would have a place for our truck to come in and all our equipment. And then we had a big area where we could, where we built the screening room and a mixing studio. We could mix sound. And it was this whole, this whole area, and we had offices. And George liked it, but he really had bought the idea of being in the country

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  and having it more in there. So he was never a hundred percent comfortable in this more. And I viewed it as a temporary thing, that if we were more successful, that someday we would be able to buy some sort of place. So it was like that for about a year and a half. And then basically, we just went broke. Like, I was offered The Godfather. I bought for myself a little house with my wife and then two children, my pregnant wife and two children. And George wasn't comfortable. He wanted to be somewhere. And so we got a place in Mill Valley, and George liked that. And so we had like a Mill Valley annex.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  When he made American Graffiti, of course, that made money. So finally, George had some money. And then he, ultimately, he bought a property in a place ironically called Lucas Valley. But it was, he got a kick out of that. It was Lucas Valley before he bought it. And he built his Skywalker Ranch there. And then he started becoming really successful. I mean, more commercially than me by far.

• 1:07:21Rick Rubin?

  What was your involvement in American Graffiti?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Well, I was important. He couldn't get it off the ground without me. And I really liked the script. In fact, I had made The Godfather by then. And I had enough money. American Graffiti was gonna cost $700,000. And I went to the bank and I asked if I had enough. My Godfather credits, could I have $700,000? And it was my wife who said to me, you know, Francis, someday, you know, you could certainly finance the film, but it should be your own film. And that and the bank said, I'll give you the $700,000, but I want you to wait for a few days

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  because we had a client who financed his own movie and lost it all. So basically, we got Universal to put up the money. And they required that I be involved in it. And I was helpful on Graffiti. I helped with the casting because that was, you know, George didn't really know all those actors. And that was done by my associate Fred Ruse. And it was wonderfully cast. And he was shooting without a cinematographer at all. They were just shooting. And I went to his friend who liked him and got Casco Wexler to come on American Graffiti. So I was there as the big brother.

• 1:08:48Rick Rubin?

  Were the songs written into the script?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  That was his idea. It was the first time that the score of a movie, yes, he had picked all those songs. And I remember we got all of those songs for $140,000. Today, you can't get one song for a hundred. He did many unusual things. Number one, he had the first score that was all basically rock and roll. And he's the first person, at the end of the movie, when the movie ends, there's like four lines about the main characters. That so-and-so went and did this. So-and-so went to the Vietnamese war. That was George's, all his innovation. No one had ever done it before. And when we showed, when we showed the film preview to Universal,

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Universal sent up some executives and they saw the preview. And when it was over, they said, well, we're very disappointed. We really think it needs a lot of work. And I said to them, I said, are you kidding? I said, they loved it. I said, you ought to get on your knees and thank this young man for saving your job. Because, and, and, and then because if you don't want it, I'll buy the film for you right now. And because I did have the ability to do it, even though my wife is, I wish I had.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I don't, I don't because you know, my, my philosophy is you win a few, you lose a few. It all comes out the same.

• 1:10:11Rick Rubin?

  That movie really impacted that music as well. Like the whole revival of 50s music really began with that movie. And to this day, you can hear a radio station that plays music from the 50s.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:28Rick Rubin?

  That was not the case before that movie.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Well, there was a great line in it that he had, that George wrote, which is rock and roll went downhill ever since Buddy Holly died.

• 1:10:38Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about John Milius.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  He was extraordinary. He was, he was, you know, the USC guys all had spec, Walter Murch was sound. Caleb Deschanel was photography. George was everything. And, and John Milius was their writer. And he was this flamboyant guy who just, it just tumbled out of him, you know? He was, and you know, you know what happened to him? You don't know what happened to him?

• 1:11:07Rick Rubin?

  Uh-uh.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Tragically, about eight years ago, he was, he was on a, a blood thinner. His girlfriend said, oh, that blood thinner stuff is nonsense. I think you should just drink certain kind of milk product. It was, she interfered and she stopped him from taking it. He had a stroke. And now he can't speak anymore. And then he has, fortunately, he has a, I mean, he, it's heartbreaking. He has to write on a slate, but he's got a young lady who really takes care of him and loves him. And I mean, his head works, I know, but he just can't, you know, it's a stroke.

• 1:11:47Rick Rubin?

  Did he write the original script for Apocalypse Now?

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. It's mostly his script. I, I didn't even, what I did is I had a copy of Heart of Darkness with me. And I, between the script, I would use the, my underlying copy of Heart of Darkness to do it. In fact, like the Dennis Hopper character in the, in the movie, he wasn't in the script at all. But when, when I saw how wired Dennis Hopper was, I invented, there was a character in Heart of Darkness called the Russian, who's sort of like the sayer of Kurtz, you know, of the prophet or whatever. And I, and I invented that character with Dennis Hopper right during the movie. And that became a, you remember the Dennis Hopper part in Apocalypse?

• 1:12:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  That didn't exist. That was out of the book. And, but even like the music that, people think of my family, a classical musician, it was my idea to play Wagner through the attack. That was John Mewes's idea.

• 1:12:48Rick Rubin?

  There's a story that you shot for several weeks and then took a break and went back to San Francisco. And then rethought the film during that break. Is that what happened?

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Not exactly. What happened is when we were casting, some of the people I liked weren't available. And my best bet was Harvey Keitel, who's a great actor. But Harvey Keitel is in a school of acting that is, is very active. You know, sort of De Niro does it too. But in other words, he's not, it's not a reflective guy looking. It's a guy being active. So when we actually started shooting. I felt it was wrong. I haven't done this many times. And that's the worst thing you could do is to change an actor that you started. But I really felt it was wrong. And now weeks had gone by.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  I mean, my neck, the debt was all mine. In those days, interest was 21%. So I was scared and I felt I had to make that decision. And nothing against Harvey Keitel. He's a wonderful actor. But I felt it was that type of in-your-face that he's good at, that this wasn't gonna be that. So Marty Sheen had tried out for it, but he wasn't available. But by the time this happened, I went back and met people. And Marty Sheen was available, and I made the decision. And so then, when I did have Martin Sheen, who had a nice face and was someone that could be someone just watching,

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  then I felt I needed something early in the picture to show what a complex human being he was. And so I invented that scene where he looks at himself in the mirror and smashes. And he's totally, obviously, a weird guy. So that throughout the movie, when you see him looking at the jungle and stuff, you know that this is a person. That's not just a regular, simple person.

• 1:14:56Rick Rubin?

  How often do things happen or come up during the process of making something where you realize there's an opportunity to do something that wasn't planned that's actually better than what was planned?

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Well, you know, obviously, there are many, many film directors, film artists, what do you call it? And therefore, there are many, many different methods. I mean, Hitchcock's method was one that was very controlled. He was a brilliant artist. He could make storyboards, as it were. He could design the film and then do it just like he designed it. So with every filmmaker, there's the potential of another way to do things according to him. My style is sort of like...

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  To me, making a film is like asking a question, and the answer is the film. In other words, I don't know the answer. And sometimes, as in, obviously, I knew how to make a gangster picture, because I made a few of them. But when I made Apocalypse Now, I had no idea how to make it. And if you don't know how to make a movie, and you admit it, and listen to the movie, the movie will tell you how to make it. It will do it for you. And that's what I have found in many of my projects to be. And in a way, I deliberately create situations that cause accidents, sometimes big accidents. I don't mean accidents that endanger life,

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  because I never would do that. But in other words, I create accidents or do things, and then make use of what happens, so that the film has in it this excitement of it. I'll give you an example. Like in The Godfather, Marlon is at the beginning of the movie, first scene. At one point, I saw a cat. It was not a movie cat. It was not an idea that was in the, you know, it was just a cat, a studio cat. It was a cat. On the third or fourth take, I just picked it up and put it in his hand. And he didn't say, "What do you want me to do with this?" Or I didn't say anything. I just put the cat in his hand. And that's the take in the movie.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  So I'd like the actors to know that whatever happens might be something we want, you know. It's just my style. I mean, and I don't care. I mean, Marlon once said something I thought was so interesting. He said to me about acting. He said, "You can't care, or they'll see it on your face." So in a way, as a director, I don't care if I lose all the money I have. I don't, I didn't do this to make money. I did this to do something more beautiful than making money. And of course, I have to feed my kids and all that, like everybody else. But that's not my high priority. So I'll take chances in movies.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  And sometimes, those chances give beautiful results. Sometimes, they don't.

• 1:18:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. You know enough to know it's out of your control, and you'll set the stage for something. Wonderful to happen.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Right, but it sort of is your under your control because you're you're not protecting yourself. I mean, you're you're doing it without a net. And you know, the the stakes are high in some, I mean, not with human life. I'm I I have never killed any animal or creature in my life for any reason. I'm I'm trying to get to the point where I'll brush away mosquitoes. That's the hardest one. But but like in the in the horse's head and the in the or the caribou being killed and I had nothing to do with that. I just said, well, if the if it's gonna happen, can I can I photograph it?

• 1:18:48Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about directing Brando.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  Well, Brando is very easy to to direct because like the first thing he does is he sits down and he puts his hand like that. And he's asking basically where the frame is. And then he'll proceed to act with whatever in that space. And he'll just do it. And you can say things to him like make it more angry, make it less angry, make it funny. And he doesn't like to have acting talk. He just, you know, make it louder, make it softer. And basically, I I always worked with Brando through props as though whatever I know that whatever I put in front of him, he's gonna use. But he he he doesn't panic.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  In other words, if like here I am now, let's say a herd of buffalo were to run behind me. He would and that happened, he'd say, oh, look at the buffalo. You know, he he wouldn't, he wouldn't say, well, I better get out of here. He uses anything and everything when when they're shooting.

• 1:19:50Rick Rubin?

  I never heard that idea before that he would want to know where the frame was and that he was aware of the framing and wanted to make everything work within the frame. I would think of him, the method, as being more free and emotional and he would go where he goes. And the camera would have to follow him because he would be free.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  No, but he knows he knew what he was doing. Like, for example, in Apocalypse Now. The problem was, I mean, I'm saying wonderful things about Brando, but the truth is, he was like a big kid. In terms of like, if he said, "Look, I don't want you to eat that ice cream," he would eat the ice cream. So when he came for Apocalypse Now, he knew that he was supposed to, he was a Green Beret Colonel, that he couldn't be a fat Green Beret Colonel. But he came way overweight. But then, he knew that. And I won't recount many steps of this, but basically, what that meant is that that's what made us shoot him in the dark with just a beam of light.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  But he had just that beam of light, but boy, did he use it. He poked his head in it, he poked his head out of it. In other words, whatever he was going to use, he used it creatively.

• 1:21:10Rick Rubin?

  It's also, that's a great example of problem solving, because you wanted the military guy to be in shape when he showed up, and he wasn't. So you shoot him in the dark, and it's iconic because of the fact that you were working around something that you wouldn't have chosen.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  Right. In other words, when I first realized that he was so big, I said, "Why don't we go the other way to him?" I said, "Why doesn't he be..." He got big, and we show him with a mango in one hand and a native girl in the other. He said, "No, no, no." In other words, he was shy about being overweight. He didn't want to... My original thing is if it's raining and you can't shoot, figure out how to do the scene in the rain. If he's fat, and he's a Green Beret guy, say he's a Green Beret guy who got fat and see him eating all the time, and he's giving in to his senses. You could have done it that way. But people who are overweight, be it Marlon Brando or Orson Welles,

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  no one who's fat likes to be fat. And they're shy and embarrassed by it. And Brando was no exception.

• 1:22:26Rick Rubin?

  How recent was the Vietnam War to Apocalypse Now, the filming?

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  It was going on, I think.

• 1:22:32Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I was, I mean, it was right, it was near the end, but it was still going on.

• 1:22:38Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  You know, the US, the guy who was minister, the Defense, Secretary of Defense was, what the hell was his name? He had been it twice, but they totally said, no help, no helicopters, nothing, America, we want nothing to do with Apocalypse Now. So I found the helicopters and stuff in the Philippines. Rumsford, Secretary Rumsford, he was a, not a good guy, I don't.

• 1:23:05Rick Rubin?

  No. Would you describe yourself as confident or insecure?

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Well, I'm, I'm insecure. I mean, I don't know of any artist who's totally confident. You know, you know that you're walking on a ledge that you could fall off at any time.

• 1:23:24Rick Rubin?

  Would you say you're hard on yourself?

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  All I know is this, right now, there isn't a human being, guys who did terrible things to me that I haven't forgiven in my, totally, because I say, well, they had their reasons, I wasn't on their mind. But the person that's hardest to forgive is yourself.

• 1:23:48Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of yourself as a perfectionist?

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  I don't think of myself as a perfectionist, but I, I think I am a perfectionist. I have a counter right over there, I'm looking at it, it's just, there's nothing on it but a coffee machine and a thing. And someone's always putting some, a thing of basil over there, because there's not a lot of room here. And I like it the way it is, and I don't even want this beautiful thing of basil over there, I want it the way I want it.

• 1:24:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. How different is the finished movie of Patton than your script?

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  It's very similar to my script. In fact, I, I would love someday for someone to take the, the movie, because I shared the credit with someone else, which I don't mind. It's just like that script.

• 1:24:40Rick Rubin?

  I want you to walk me through making a movie. What happens when you make a movie? How much is intentional? Who brings what? How does it change?

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  Okay, well, the first thing is you're getting pregnant with the movie. So like I am right now. And I'm taking an American writer that I just am a great admirer of. I just think she's the greatest is Edith Wharton. I mean, there are many American writers I admire, but many of them are women. But Edith Wharton, and she wrote a not so great book. One of the ones that is less than her master. I mean, she made House of Earth and Age of Innocence and Ethan Froman, all these. But she has a screwy little book called Glimpses, The Glimpses of the Moon. And I'm, there's something about it fascinates me.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  But years ago, I directed, when I was just doing The Godfather. Everyone was offering me chances to like direct an opera, direct a play. I mean, I was getting all these possible things. And I figured, well, I'll do it, you know, I'll learn something. So I, I directed a play called Private Lives by Noel Coward. Wonderful play. And I mean, I came to love it because I directed it, but it's really a beautiful play. And I did it in a very crazy way. In other words, do you know Private Lives at all? Noel Coward play? Well, it's very funny and it's about some two honeymooning couples looking over the French River.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  And it's always done with them leaning on the ballast, looking at the sea with the audience being where the sea is. Because there's all this really funny Noel Coward lines. And what I wanted is I wanted to do it around the other way where you're looking at it and the other way. So you're seeing them against the gorgeous view. Movie director, yeah? So I did it that way. And then there's a lot of music coming and record players and stuff. So instead of them doing that, I had a pianist on the apron of the stage doing it live. And I did this, I did this play this way and it was very successful. It was very well received and I loved, I loved it and I loved Noel Coward.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  So somehow I decided I'm going to do this Edith Wharton adaptation of this movie I'm going to make. As if I'm doing Noel Coward. There's no connection. The only connection between Noel Coward and Edith Wharton is me.

• 1:27:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  So now I'm making it. I wrote a script and the ending of the Edith Wharton novel is very weak. That's what people, why it's not one of her biggest ones, but it is weak. But I came up with a way that's not weak. And so I'm sort of just now here's exactly what I'm doing. I have a script which has filled with Noel Coward songs and a sort of a style that is not unlike the private lives that I. It's as though Noel Coward adapted a Edith Wharton book and is now making it in this movie in England, which is why I'm here, you know, because I'm now actually

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  in pre-production of that movie. So now I'm deciding what style I'm gonna make. So I don't have any money because I invested, all the money I borrowed to make Megalopolis is basically, it's gone, you know, I mean, it'll, I think it'll come back over fifteen, twenty years, but I don't have it now, so I don't have any money. So I don't, I have to do it very cheap, which I'm doing. And I'm starting to have people come over. I'm in this house where you see, which I borrowed from some person who I knew in Tulsa. And I'm sort of just working with nothing, but I'm starting to actually make the movie already and that I can see how it could work and that I feel it does work.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  It's beautiful. And these Noel Coward songs, which are seventy years old, are so beautiful when even, I mean, people don't realize what he did. I mean, he, those guys like Cole Porter and Noel Coward and Rogers and Hart and, you know, Jerome Kern, I mean, these, this music is endlessly wonderful. So I'm seeing something that has no reason to exist, except I love it.

• 1:29:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. What was it about the book that fascinated you?

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  It's the premise is so absurd and wonderful. The premise, if I may tell you, is that, you know, in previous, marriage was always about business and affairs of state and, you know, I mean, you, this idea, you meet someone, you fall in love and you get married, that's, that's very unusual. It wasn't like that, you know? And in the 30s and in the 20s, the marriageable group was so specific. Just, in other words, you couldn't be part of it because you couldn't get past the butler in certain crowds. In other words, you, you had to have a certain education. There was a way that it had to be a certain group.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  And in this story, in Glimpses of the Moon, it's about this American group of these marriageable people. And because America had divorce and many European countries didn't, what the Americans would do, they would go see people in England and in Beirut and France and equally wealthy people and stuff. They'd be married, but they'd have affairs. And then if they had an affair with someone who was wealthier than their husband or their, their wife, they would get a divorce and, and then they would marry upwards. And so it was this, this premise. Well, there are two people in this crowd who are penniless. They've lost all their money.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  Their family lost all their money in the stock crash. Or whether they, they have all the elegance. They have all the, the intelligence. They have everything, but they don't have any money. And so, but they're allowed to be in the crowd because they, they'll help out in, in a way and they're accepted. And they had this crazy idea that, she has the idea that, why don't they just get married? And he's, well, what will we live on? He said, well, we'll get all these wedding gifts from our friends and they'll let us go stay at all their houses in Venice and places and stuff. And then after, you know, the, when the money runs out, then we'll help each other make a better match, which is what we're doing now.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  So basically, they do it. And the movie is, of course, about the inevitable fact is now the money's running out, but they love each other. And but they've made this arrangement and it's heartbreaking to them, you know. But of course, I won't tell you, but it's very beautiful, I think, what happens in the story.

• 1:31:50Rick Rubin?

  Are all of your movies autobiographical?

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  I think so. You know, I'm starting to think worse. I'm starting, you know, there's two ways of viewing life. You're doing it, I'm sure. When you're young, you view it from left to right. You're a young person looking out at what the future is going to be for yourself. But then there's a point as you get older where you switch and you're looking right to left and you're looking at that young person who you know is becoming you. There's philosophers that write, Heinecker writes about this. So I'm at the point where I'm now looking at life from the point of view of where I am now, eighty-five. And thinking about this kid who was so insecure and his mother probably didn't love him and all this stuff.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  From this point of view, and then it occurs to me something even more strange, which is, what if I really am a solipsist? What if I'm all that exists? You know, we all learn about that, you know, Cardinal Barkley and solipsism and stuff is what if all the people like my wife, who I lost, I love so much, what if she was just a chip of my consciousness? And so I, I tell you why, Rick, I feel that. Because when I made The Godfather, I had no power, I was young. I was like Michael Corleone. When I made Apocalypse Tao, I was in, I was in Hock for twenty-one million dollars. Interest was twenty-one percent.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  I had to be like Kurtz. And then I made a film called Gardens of Stone about a man who creates this young soldier and then he's killed. And I lost my son. I said, wait a second, what's going on here? Do I have to live every movie I make? Now, I make a film about a man who loses his son, and in the first week, I lose my son? I didn't, I wasn't even... So I think this is something weird is going on. Maybe I am a solipsist movie director, and I'm just making all of this stuff. So I put into Google, I think I'm a solipsist. What should I read? And the answer came up,

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  read Andy Kaufman's novel Ant Kind. Did you ever hear of Ant Kind? You know who, Charlie Kaufman?

• 1:34:18Rick Rubin?

  Charlie Kaufman, yes.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  He wrote a novel called, 700-page novel called Ant Kind. It's incredible, it's hilarious. So now I'm convinced that my life... The only way I can explain my life is that it's something Charlie Kaufman wrote. It's the only sense I can make out of it, because a mind like that... Because otherwise, how did all this... How can I be living... Am I really a filmmaker making my life?

• 1:34:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, nothing makes sense, really.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  It really, you know, and there's good reason why it doesn't make sense, because our brain is so hardwired for our survival that we don't really even see the world as it is. And there is, that's why, you know, there isn't the creator. There's the creator and the destroyer. That this idea of duality we have because it's helpful to our survival, but it isn't what the world really is, I don't think.

• 1:35:21Rick Rubin?

  Can you imagine, by the limitation of not having money for this next film that you're making, that that could actually be a positive thing?

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, because I'm now making decisions. I did stuff in the last few days in this crazy house that... Not even my house, I bought it. That was so beautiful. And every time they said, well, let's bring this because you don't have that. I said, no, we don't have any money. Well, let's do this. I know we can't, we don't have money. But we did everything we did without any money, and it was beautiful.

• 1:35:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  So I wouldn't have had it if I had money.

• 1:35:56Rick Rubin?

  How does new technology change filmmaking?

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  Well, that's an interesting point because I always make a point with my young apprentices that I want them to learn how it was when it was filmed before it was digital. Just the same reason I teach people who who are gonna always drive automatic transmission, what it is to drive a stick, just so they understand it. And the reason you need to understand how filmmaking was when it was filmed is because so many of the techniques and traditions evolved for good reasons, which are now no longer necessary. So it's very hard for them to understand cinema making if they're born in a digital age.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  I have apprentices now, they're the filmmakers of the future. I have one from India, one from China, I mean, they're fantastic. And you saw Megalopolis, you remember how the guy, what's his name, Caesar has all these apprentices? Those were my apprentices, they're really filmmakers, all of them. And they were the only ones that could, I told everything, that could criticize and have ideas, and they're brilliant.

• 1:37:11Rick Rubin?

  When did you start having apprentices? It's a great idea, by the way.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, George Lucas was not my apprentice, but I treated young people.

• 1:37:18Rick Rubin?

  It's like that, though.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Like that. But I tell you right now, Rick, the way to save this wreck of a world is to include the young people, start giving them responsibility because they're, you know, that right now they'll say, oh, those kids, all they care about is Minecraft and TikTok and stuff. That's because that's all they're allowed to do. You know, I would involve them earlier, I would like give 14-year-olds the right to vote, but four votes would be one vote. And then 16-year-olds, two votes would be one vote. In other words, I would I would get them in because they are capable of coming up with solutions that we're not capable of coming up with, I don't think.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  You know, all the great physicists who really did the incredible work in quantum physics, they were all eighteen, nineteen years old. Just like girl gymnasts can only do that stuff at fourteen. Physicists can only do what they're doing at eighteen and nineteen. Even Einstein really was, you know, he worked for a while in the patent office, but he was, these are young, these young minds we have, we're wasting.

• 1:38:32Rick Rubin?

  When you were offered to do Godfather Two, was it obvious that you wanted to do it?

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  I didn't want to do it. In fact, at first I didn't accept. I said that I would, I said, I want nothing to do with it, except I would write it with Mario and I would choose a director when we had a concept and suggest them. And so then after a while, I told them, okay, I have the idea. I have the thing and I have three conditions. And they said, well, who's the director you want? And I said, well, he's Marty Scorsese. He wasn't in those days so famous. And they said, absolutely not. I said, well, then forget it. So finally Charlie Boudron got on the phone and said, well, fantasy, I'll give you anything you want. He said, that's what it sounded like. I said, okay. Number one, I want total control.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  I don't want to have to talk to Bob Evans or anyone. If I want to say I'm starting, I'll start. All agreed to is the limit of the budget. The second thing was, I want to call it The Godfather Part Two. I don't want to give it, you know, son of the Godfather or anything like that. And number three, I said, I want a million dollars, which I never had. And so they came back and they said, oh, we can give you the million dollars. You have total control. But everyone says that calling Godfather Two is a mistake because people will think it's the second half of the movie they already saw. I said, then forget it.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  Now, I'm the guy who started this Spider-Man 6. I'm so ashamed. Rocky V. I should be shot.

• 1:40:12Rick Rubin?

  What's incredible about it, though, is that looking at the history of cinema, sequels and series tend to not be as good as the original. But in the case of Godfather 2, some people argue it's better than The Godfather. That's a very unusual situation.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  You know, it was luck. I don't know. What was it luck? I tell you one thing. We had a preview of Godfather Part II in San Francisco that the audience hated it. And they said the acting is terrible. And I went to bed that night, under the bed, so worried. And then it came to me. It said, "The problem is that, you know, Godfather 2 was one between the past and the future, back and forth. And it was always planned to go like every 10 minutes. It's too fast. I should double it. I should make it go every 20 minutes because the audience can't get yanked out of it." So the editors stayed up all night for three days

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  and made 120 picture cuts to do that. And then we took the picture to San Diego and the reaction was the opposite. They loved it. And then we took it to New York and they loved it. Then the rest was successful. So, you know, movies are an illusion. And if you don't have the right, if they don't accept the illusion, like for years, they didn't accept Apocalypse Now. Gradually, Apocalypse Now got terrible reviews, didn't get any Oscar nominations. The people said... One important critic, I think his name was Frank Rich, said it was the worst film ever made in Hollywood. But little by little, you got used to it. So, I mean, I'm...

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  You know, when you go out on a ledge, you have to accept that everyone's not gonna like it and it may take time. I mean, you know, the French Academy said what a good painting was. But, you know, poor guys like Gaultier, Matisse and everyone, you know, you could give it away in those days. Now, of course, those are the paintings people want. They don't want the French Academy paintings.

• 1:42:29Rick Rubin?

  Did you ever get notes from a studio executive that were helpful at any point in your life?

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, there were, yes. You know, you have to read through them and say, oh, that was, even Evans, who I was totally antagonistic with, was his idea to have John Marley play the Hollywood guy. And who was the police captain, Sterling Hayden? That was, that was Bob Evans' idea.

• 1:42:59Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your relationship with Evans.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  In Godfather, he assigned a guy as his guy to mind me named Jack Ballard. He was this production guy with a bald head, and he was horrible. Every, he was on my case every, every day saying, you're late, you have a meal, you can't do this. You know, then at one point, they told me that they were going to bring in an action director because there was no action in the movie. And I had to, basically, I took my, my kid and my sister, Tally, who was in the movie, and we went to Weekend and made that scene where she breaks all the crockery and stuff just to not have them bring in. They were always either firing me or replacing me.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Once I was told on a Tuesday, the first day Brando came in, everyone said that they hated Brando's first day's work. And I said, well, look at, I said, it's, you know, he's the first day. I mean, he's, you know, it's an actor, give him a few days. I said, tell you what, I can go back, it's Tuesday. I can go right back in there and reshoot the scene. And they say, no, no, don't do that. And then one of the producers, who was a friend of mine, said, you know, the reason they won't let you go in is because they're going to fire you this Friday. And, you know, they never fire a director in the middle of the week. They always fire him on Friday so the new director has the weekend to come in on Monday.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  So they said they're gonna fire me Friday. Who's they gonna bring? They want your editor to be, uh, who had directed a picture. And I had, I loved this editor guy, I still do. He was gone, of course. And he had made a picture and he asked me, would you hire my producers and different people in his crew to be your assistant director, which I did. But they were conspiring all the time to get me fired and get him made the editor. So they said, okay, they're gonna fire this weekend. I knew that this editor, Aaron Mavakian, would never, he was my friend. I know he wouldn't have done that. He was worried about me.

• 1:45:11Speaker 01

  But I don't think he, I, I'm sure he would not, he would not do that. So basically, I fired them all on the, on the Tuesday that I told you this. And then I took Brando and I went back up there and I shot the scene again. So now they had to wait to see whether the scene was any better or not. You know, so this shook everyone up. Everyone was, I'm, I'm sure, can he do that? Can he fire everyone? Well, he did, you know? I, I didn't have the right to fire everyone. I just did it and said, okay, now we're going up and doing it. I just took that chance.

• 1:45:46Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  So of course, then they saw the footage and they said, oh, the new stuff with Brando is much better. We think it's very good. But what's in the movie is the old one.

• 1:45:59Rick Rubin?

  When you finished the movie before it screened, what were your thoughts about the movie? Did you know it was gonna be a big hit?

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  No, no, I was sure it was a flop because the last minute Evans hated the music. And he ordered me to take the music out. And I said to him, I'm not gonna take the music out. You can fire me and get a new director and have the new director put the music you want in, but I'm not gonna take the music out. I love the music. So for about four days, Walter Murch was there with me because he was working with me. For four days, we were in a stalemate where I wouldn't change. I mean, they could have just changed the music and, but they didn't. Didn't want to fire me a week before the picture came out. So, no one had ever seen the picture, no audience had ever seen the picture.

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  It was always Paramount and Evans and the inside guy saying the picture isn't working. It's, it's, it's too long, it's too short. It was driving me crazy. So finally, I say to him, to Bob Evans, I said, tell you what, this is what I'll do. Let's show it to a controlled group of people, which had never happened. And, and, and see if they like the music or not. And he said to me, who gets to decide whether they like the music or not? And I said, you do.

• 1:47:20Rick Rubin?

  Wow, because you knew.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  No, I didn't know. I knew I loved the music.

• 1:47:24Rick Rubin?

  But you knew that you wanted to get a real reaction. And if there was a real reaction, everybody would know the real reaction.

• 1:47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I didn't know. I, I loved the music. But he was very, he hated the music and wanted Johnny Green to, to, we, I think the problem was he had promised Johnny Green. And I had this Italian guy, you know, great Italian. So anyway, they all came in, about 300 people to a Paramount screening room. And it was the first time an audience saw the movie, other than the, in, in, you know, the executives and stuff. And when it was over, it, it was incredible. And we said, what did you think of the music? And he said, the whole movie is great. What do you mean the, and they were just, they weren't even talking about the music. They were talking about the picture. We've never seen anything like it. It was wonderful. And the mu, and they said, the music is great.

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  It's incredible. And so finally, Evans conceded and he just had some music changes of like when there's some, some old source music when they fly into Las Vegas. And, and at that point, I then knew that I had. But another guy had seen the picture that is like a big brother to me. Did you ever hear of a guy named Robert Towne?

• 1:48:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  He wrote Chinatown. You know, I always have this big brother figure in my life because I had a great big brother. And Bob Town was someone I looked up and he's the first person who said, Franz, the film is great. And he says, Brando is great. He said, only needs one thing. And I said, what's that, Bob? He said, it needs a scene between Brando and Al Pacino. And I said, well, would you write it? He said, yes. And he did, and he wrote the scene. And when I won the Oscar, I said, Bob Town wrote the scene and did a lot of other great things. But yeah, he was the only one who was encouraging. Everyone else thought it was a big flop. Even when I went, when it was opening, I had no idea what was gonna happen.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  I had no money. And so I accepted a job to rewrite the Great Gatsby film that they were doing with Redford. Because I, you know, I had three kids. You know, and I was writing this and I was horrified because the Great Gatsby novel doesn't have a lot of dialogue in it. So I meant to have to make it up. And I had only a week to do it. So I'm calling my wife and she's in New York and she says, Francis, The Godfather is gonna open. They said it's gonna be in five theaters because it's getting such good reaction. And she's telling me, my God, there are people going around the block waiting to see The Godfather. I says, I can't talk to you. Ellie, I gotta finish this script and it was so crazy.

• 1:50:13Speaker 01

  The biggest success I ever had, which was of course The Godfather, I wasn't there. Because I was trying to write the script for The Great Gatsby.

• 1:50:23Rick Rubin?

  Was that Paramount screening the first time you got to see it on a big screen?

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  I showed it to all my friends, which was pretty much the same cut. All the film savvy people in San Francisco, no one said it was so great.

• 1:50:37Rick Rubin?

  Who was Al Ruddy?

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  Al Ruddy was a producer who, along with his partner Gray Fredrickson, was making a film in San Francisco with Sidney Furia, I think. And he had a company called Alfran because he had a rich wife whose name was Francois's. And since The Godfather was basically an unimportant project to Paramount at that time, they got this Alfran, which was Al Ruddy and his partner, got the job. But Al Ruddy was never around. He was always cooking up. He made a big thing about the anti-Italian.

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  There was a mafia guy who started an anti-Italian league. Al Ruddy was just never around, you know? He only showed around when there was a publicity still. And he's the guy who wrote the book that they made that show The Offer, which nothing happened where they said it was. Nothing happened the way they said it was and nothing's happened with whom they said it was. The picture, they had a movie star play Al Ruddy. And there's a nice still of him there, you know, with a guy with a beard that's supposed to be me. There's no real picture of Al Ruddy there because he was never there.

• 1:51:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  Well, for example, in The Offer, they're showing everyone riding around in a studio Paramount Pictures stuff. Paramount didn't own the studio in those days. We were in an office in Crescent in Beverly Hills. The studio, I never, I never was in the studio because they didn't own it.

• 1:52:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  You know who owned it?

• 1:52:16Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:52:17Speaker 01

  The Vatican. The Vatican had a big Italian company, real estate company, that invested in real estate and they owned the Paramount studio.

• 1:52:27Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing.

• 1:52:29Rick Rubin?

  How has the film business changed over the course of your life?

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  Well, I saw a change into the era of the so-called blockbuster. And then because of the outrageously overcharging cable fees that were initially done, the cable companies made so much money that they then bought the film industry. So that now the film industry is owned by people who bought from people who bought from people who bought from people who owned it. So the only thing that people who run the film studios are worrying about is the debt service, that they are hired and paid a lot of money to ensure that the company makes its debt service. And if it doesn't, they're fired.

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  So that you're dealing with not only a company, but a whole antique system. In other words, like when there was a trolley car on Santa Monica Boulevard years ago when I was a kid, and when they removed the trolley car, they also removed the tracks because they never wanted a trolley car back. They wanted it to be buses. So there's the movie companies, but there's the tracks. The tracks are the Rotten Tomatoes and the ratings. In other words, all of the accoutrements that are the train tracks or, you know, the infrastructure is all controlled by these companies that are desperately trying to not go bankrupt.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  So that if you're not on their side, if you're not in their world, then you're going to get, you're not going to get four stars, you're going to get no stars. You're not going to get, it's like the people, for example, in another analogy, it is possible to make jet fuel for aircraft that will not pollute the earth. But to do that, they say, we're up for it. We want any kind of solution to that. We'll buy it. But what they don't say is that the tracks, the infrastructure, what takes the fuel from the tank to the airplane is what they own. And what would work would be hydrogen. But their system can't operate because it doesn't hold hydrogen at those low temperatures.

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  So in other words, it's not just the people who own the existing systems, they also own the infrastructure that supports it. That's more important to them.

• 1:54:54Rick Rubin?

  Do you know how the Godfather was received in Italy?

• 1:54:57Speaker 01

  I think it was very, very well received. El Padre, El Padreino was a big hit because I, I know because I ended up having more cousins than I thought I had.

• 1:55:10Rick Rubin?

  What's the most beautiful place you've ever been on the planet?

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  I have to say that my wife and I went to Syria. And it was extraordinary and it was before all the war and the Arab Spring and everything and then it was, we just thought it was just most wonderful, beautiful. The people were just so sweet and nice and the food was so great and we went to see the Palmyra and it was an enchanted time. We were there a good three weeks too.

• 1:55:48Rick Rubin?

  Wow, that's beautiful. I would not have expected that answer.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  It was unforgettable trip this and the people were wonderful. But you know, people are wonderful. Human beings are, are, are, you always hear all those people are that nice and then you go there and they're nice.

• 1:56:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:05Speaker 01

  Everywhere.

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

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• 1:56:47Speaker 03

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• 1:57:34Speaker 03

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