by Walter Chaw I asked Walter Hill about a moment in Hard Times, his directorial debut, where, during a little dance at a picnic, the scene pauses and runs backwards for a few frames. “On purpose,” I asked, “or because of damage? Needing an extra second to fill the scene?” Hill looked at me for a beat, then broke out laughing. “Roger promised me that no one would ever notice that,” he said, “and it was true for fifty years.” “Roger,” of course, is Roger Spottiswoode, the legendary editor turned director who cut that film and later collaborated with Hill on the scripts for 48Hrs. and the unproduced The Last Gun. They met in the early ’70s on Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway: Hill had adapted the eponymous Jim Thompson novel and Spottiswoode was the British editor of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs who’d been brought over to America to work on his Junior Bonner and The Getaway simultaneously. Peckinpah’s next film, the troubled Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, marked the end of Spottiswoode’s association with the notorious “Bloody Sam.”
Spottiswoode remembers Hill as the guy who encouraged him to direct: “He was wonderful to me. He was the most generous, thoughtful and caring. He gave me a home and he fed me when I was kind of figuring it all out, you know. He’s such a sweet human being.” I grew up in the period where Spottiswoode came to prominence as a mainstream filmmaker, seeing his late-’80s run of The Best of Times, Shoot to Kill, Turner & Hooch, and Air America all in theatres. In the ’90s, he did a James Bond that was notable for casting Michelle Yeoh (Tomorrow Never Dies) and directed one of Schwarzenegger’s last pre-“Governator” vehicles, The 6th Day. Around this time, he also made the seminal telefilms And the Band Played On (HBO’s star-studded account of the early days of the AIDS epidemic), Hiroshima, and The Matthew Shepard Story.
Spottiswoode is a skilled editor and director, but more importantly, he’s an artist of conscience and taste. Ahead of its time, his film about war journalists, Under Fire (1983), is essentially the blueprint for Alex Garland’s Civil War. It was the third time he’d worked with Nick Nolte after serving as Associate Producer on his friend Karel Reisz’s Who’ll Stop the Rain and co-writing 48Hrs. He helmed Dennis Potter’s last antemortem project (1994’s Mesmer), an underestimated Patricia Highsmith Ripley adaptation (Ripley Under Ground), and even a Second Sino-Japanese War film that reunited him with Yeoh, The Children of Huang Shi, about the rescue of 60 impoverished Chinese orphans from conscription. I’ve been dying to speak with Spottiswoode for decades; this bucket list of mine keeps getting shorter. We began with the subject of Spottiswoode’s mentor, editor John Bloom:
ROGER SPOTTISWOODE: I was incredibly lucky. I went and got a job as a messenger in one of those commercial companies on Dean Street in London. They did all sorts of commercials, their big account at that time, I think, was Lucky Strike, and their in-house editor at the time was John [Bloom], but he’d been offered a pretty big feature after a series of smaller ones. So he felt like he needed another assistant to help him handle some of the load, and there I was, and for whatever reason he took me under his wing. So anyway, I started working for John as his second assistant right when he was offered…this would have been 1966?
FILM FREAK CENTRAL: Georgy Girl?
Yes! He generously took me along with him. I forget where we went to, might’ve been Twickenham or Pinewood or somewhere. Anyway, so then I was with John for a few years, for two or three years through The Lion in Winter.
Tell me about that time with Bloom: six films in two years.
(laughs) Yes, we kept very, very busy. Georgy Girl was a big hit. It only cost, like, £200,000 and made considerably more than that, so suddenly John was a very hot property. It had a really good cast and a great script, but John got a lot of credit and he was being offered lots of really good things. He had the pick of projects, but he was always very unaffected by that–very thoughtful about the process of editing. Really, I just, for a long time at the beginning, I just watched John work. He was an incredibly gifted teacher in addition to being an incredibly gifted editor, and he would cut scenes and then run them for us, for me and Lesley Walker, his other assistant, and he would, you know, ask us to critique it. We’d spend 15 minutes, half an hour, sometimes an hour discussing a scene after he got it together. He would ask why it worked and how it might work better, and he would change it if, you know, if you thought there was something he hadn’t tried out. As we watched, he’d change it for us and we’d see it. It was a very–you couldn’t have a better learning experience than that. To get to watch new footage get made and put in by somebody much more experienced than oneself…
Incredible.
Yes, the more so because John didn’t feel himself to be very experienced, either. He had his pick of projects and people he wanted to work with, but it never affected him. He was a wonderful… This time with him was wonderful. It was a wonderful education.
You brought him in as supervising editor on Under Fire then as editor for Air America.
Really, he’s never been far from me in my career.
I thought a lot of Under Fire while I was watching [Alex Garland’s] Civil War.
(laughs) Well, after I saw Civil War, I did think maybe Garland had seen Under Fire a few times. Really, though, what helped us in the project a lot, I think, was that we were talking about Nicaragua at the end of the Somoza regime, so we had history to tell–and Garland’s film doesn’t have that luxury. His is more science-fiction, and it’s hard to have a political film be truly successful, I think, where you don’t know the politics or even the outcome. What persists about Under Fire for me is the script. Not initially, I think. Clayton Frohman’s draft had a really incredible scene–the moment where Gene Hackman’s character dies and then his body is photographed by his friend–that we kept, but I credit Ron Shelton with just a phenomenal [shooting] draft. He understood that Under Fire was really about photography. I was obsessed with a photograph of the person who’s just been shot with his arm up by the French photographer, I forget who it was, but there’s two versions of it, which makes one wonder whether it was restaged.
Robert Capa’s “The Falling Soldier”?
Maybe that one, yes. [T]here were some books about war photographs that may have been somehow duplicated, manipulated in some other way, or maybe it was two frames from different times interpolated and, well, anyways, I became interested in images, their power and, and how they affect us. From there, journalism’s role in actually manufacturing reality led me very quickly to Under Fire. With Shelton, we also wanted to talk about how journalists, for better or worse, once they’re there on the scene, they inevitably change the scene. It’s not about bad or good, it’s just about how powerful images are in our society.
Now more than ever.
Yes. Everything is unreliable now. You used to be able to use real footage and so forth in changing people’s minds, but I don’t think anyone has faith in what’s real now. Images are so easily manipulated, and they’re still infecting people and [the] media is getting cleverer, more clever, with using images to get what they want.
Talk to me about [Sam Peckinpah’s] Straw Dogs.
Straw Dogs I was brought in in the middle. He had fired a third of his crew. I think he might have been on his third or fourth editor already. He was down at Cornwall, drinking more than the Cornish, which is quite good going, and he had managed to lay waste to at least a third of his people, or at least that was the scandal. Sam attracted a lot of scandal. I have no idea if any of it’s true about Straw Dogs before I got there: the carousing, all-night card games, gambling, girls–the British tabloids had a field day. I wasn’t reading them, but we’d all heard of them. The producer, Dan Melnick, I think he asked John, of course, and John said, “No thank you, but…” And I got the offer, but I didn’t want it. Who wants to get fired? And John said, “No, no, no, you’ll be in great company. You’re going to get fired, and it’s not going to hurt your career because you’ll be in great company.” I was still nervous, and he says, “It’s all right. Go there. It doesn’t matter. He’s probably going to fire you. He’s firing everyone. But that’s a credit on a big movie, you know, just go with it. Worst comes to worst, it might be entertaining.” Well, he was right. I mean, I didn’t get fired, but he was right about the entertaining.
Then came Junior Bonner and The Getaway. You didn’t get fired.
(laughs) No. When I met Sam, they had come back from Cornwall to start shooting the studio stuff, uh, his, you know, Dustin’s bedroom and various studio scenes that we’re shooting at Twickenham. So that was that for Straw Dogs, and I… It gets muddied in here now, I worked on several things at once, all briefly and largely uncredited, but that’s okay, I never needed to be credited. And because I was in America then finishing up Straw Dogs, somehow between post on that and something else, [Peckinpah] started Junior Bonner in Arizona. I started going up there to show him dailies or to show him the cut footage. We were in Hollywood and, weekends, on Friday nights, we’d catch a plane to Tucson or Phoenix, and then we’d drive out where he was shooting. We’d arrive just when everyone was going into the bar. They won’t come into the cutting room, but the next day I’d go out to the set or wherever Sam was and show him the footage.
You’re not credited on Junior Bonner.
Am I not? He had a very nice editor there whose name I don’t remember, who wasn’t really cutting, who was the montage editor. I think that’s what he was called. And he was a lovely man who knew Sam well.
Was it Frank Santillo?
Maybe. Sam kept saying this guy was helping because, you know, Sam was running entire reels of cut footage and screening it through a Moviola, and of course the Moviola bag doesn’t really take more than about three or four hundred feet of picture and sound before it overflows. But Sam would want to keep running, so this guy, a very nice editor, would stand behind our Moviola and try and keep the film off the floor. Meanwhile, Sam was saying, “Get your ass around here and look at this, because I want you to do some cutting.” And this editor would say, “It’s his film and your film and I’m not touching this film except to keep it off the fucking floor.” He knew Sam. He knew not to come and look at anything because then he’d be asked his opinion and then they’d get into a fight about it. “I think it’s fine and you think it’s shit. We have another argument. We don’t need another argument.” He had it figured out.
So did you. How did you not get fired?
I don’t know, luck. And I think the fact that I really, having been told, knowing how many people had been fired, I was assuming I was going to get fired and it didn’t really matter if I dug my heels in or said what I really thought at all times. I was going to get canned and I was going to join a good list of people. It made me brave. I told him what I wanted. He would scream at me, you know, you fucking British kid. But I think he respected someone who couldn’t be bullied.
(inset: Pierce Brosnan and Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies; Nick Nolte in Under Fire)
Tell me about Karel Reisz.
Karel was a dear friend of mine. I’d cut The Gambler for Karel, an amazing film. He’d offered it to John Bloom, and John, again, was busy, and then he offered it to me. The first day on set, he pulled me aside and said, “You won’t need to cut while we’re shooting because I like to be in the cutting room and do the edit with you.” And I said, I see. Well, that’s fine, but it’ll be with someone else, because I don’t want to do it if that’s the way you do it. (laughs) I only cut for the director, not with. I’d make my version and then have a discussion about it. I said to Karel: “You’ll always get your version, and I quite understand what you want, but I won’t do it the way you say. But that’s fine, I’ll help you find an editor you can work with.” Gosh, I was young and sort of silly, wasn’t I? He thought about it for a while and he said, no, I think I’ll try doing it your way. Oh, great. And he did. And we became great friends. We did The Gambler and then Who’ll Stop the Rain. Anyway, Karel was the loveliest man, and I was the luckiest person to have known him.
He sounds like the polar opposite of Peckinpah.
In many ways. Because while Sam shoots four masters, one from every corner of the room, and then all the coverage that goes into each one of those masters, 70,000 to 100,000 feet of film on a big scene, Karel would do a film in eighteen takes of one master, and then a couple of close-ups to get you between takes. The masters were the shots–wherever he could, the masters would be the scene. They would sometimes be wide, and then it would track in and become a close-up for a moment, and then it would drift off, you know, there would be some more coverage but not anything like the same way as Sam. Sam…he would blanket, the word blanket was applied first to Sam. Blanket coverage. It couldn’t have been more different with Karel. For me, to start my career with these two people who viewed filming in such a completely different way, not to mention their temperaments… Karel was the most, thoughtful, articulate, quiet person in the world, and Sam was…somewhat different.
Now Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. You left the project before Peckinpah did.
I did. I walked off out of MGM, got in the car, and never spoke to him again. I do want to tell you a good story, though–it’s about the other credited editor on that film, Robert Wolfe. Bob. He’s this quiet kid. He shot the titles for The Getaway, which are remarkable, and he and I edited The Getaway together. He was also on Straw Dogs. He did the, um, I don’t know whether you remember it, there’s a church-hall meeting? Which is a big, big, 10-minute scene. And he cut that in one sitting. He spent three weeks looking at the dailies but not touching a frame of it, and then he had about a week of doing nothing. And then one day, he came in, and over two days he made this 10-minute masterpiece that is exactly what’s in the film. Two cut, frame cut, three frame, long set, I mean, just an extraordinary feat, and he assembled it in his head. He was the most gifted editor I ever worked with or even saw working. And for it all, for all his gifts, he was a very nice, decent, ordinary person. Really a good heart, and very kind. And he had the courage not to cut it until he knew how to cut it. I lost my temper finally–Sam could be very warm and generous, but he could also be vicious–but Bob, you know, he was the best of us.
You got to close this circle, though, fifty years down the road, with a new edit of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. What did you see that you didn’t see before?
I felt, I felt finally that I understood at last what Sam had really wanted to do and, having wanted to do it, how he’d actually really done it. It’s this elegy. It doesn’t have very much plot. You’re told everything at the very beginning. Nothing surprising happens. It’s an odd film in that sense. There’s no tension. It’s a journey but it’s not about the journey that you see. It’s about a journey through Sam’s western idea, the, uh, you know, the American idea of what the western is about. It’s not a record really of what happened, but what they would have liked to have happened. It’s elegiac.
For a time? A people?
Yes, both of those things. And for what they endured, the people who did cross the country.
Where did the movie breathe again for you?
I was lucky enough to have an American godfather. When I was 15 and my parents were getting divorced, they sent me to America, and he drove me across the country. We drove across America together, slowly, never on freeways, before freeways even existed. We weren’t trying to go fast. We were trying to see as much of America as possible. We hunted everything we ate, pretty much. We’d shoot prairie pheasants every day. We’d go on a farmer’s land, ask permission to shoot three birds, clean them, give two of them to them and could we keep one, please? And then we’d put some of the meat in silver wrapping with some oil and butter and things and vegetables and put it in the V of the engine of the V8 truck, and it would cook by afternoon. That would be our lunch and we’d do it again and eat the rest of the bird at supper. Slowly, creeping, we spent three or four months crossing the Midwest, all the way over to the Rockies. He said, “You won’t understand it until you can drive it, until you can cross it, not fly over it. Until you get an idea of how difficult it was for the Germans and the French and the English, and all the people who came from the Netherlands who plowed their way across this country at two miles an hour or one mile an hour with horses and wagons that broke down constantly to get there.” And what kind of people would do that? What could drive them? A lot of them died on the way. What kind of people were they who formed what America is? America is so many different people and different ideas. We weren’t trying to get anywhere. We didn’t have any money. He was broke at the time. He was a documentary cameraman. It was a remarkable experience and it gave me a sense of who America was, and I got the feeling looking at Pat Garrett this time, suddenly, that this was Sam’s world.
He hired all these old character actors. He worked on that script by Rudy Wurlitzer.
It’s a beautiful script. Everyone’s voice is different in it. And Sam cast the people who could say those lines. I mean, they could say any lines, but who would feel convincing when they said it? It’s so very rich in sort of the texture of old America. The people who did cross the country haunt this film, and I think it’s a remarkable document of their experience. Sam put it on film, and I didn’t realize it quite as much as I do now. I see the film from a different perspective now.
Why?
I don’t know. But I feel more of an emotional knowledge of what he was trying to do, and I understood it. I see it on a different, you know–they’re all different versions of the same thing, but I see it now from a different perspective. Anyway, I was very lucky to be there. Yeah. And it was a lot to learn. And I, I learned a lot about myself and have had a lot of time to think. I know more and I can see more of what he was doing. I mean, not for nothing is he in the film himself: it’s so deeply personal, there’s so much grief. I think maybe this is a film that finally needed an old man to edit it, to carry some of that water.
