The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

My absence was really, I think, the cornerstone of my eventual involvement in it. Well, you never know when you send something to an artist whether they, in fact, ever read it. It goes into a void. And I didn't know David, but I'd seen his work and it became a sort of fixation in my head. Because there were things, parallel things happening, oddly, or seemed to me, appeared to me in my head. My observation or just thoughts about him that were parallel thoughts, not necessarily to the story, but to what I'd been thinking about the story and the attitudes in the story. It seemed parallel kind of work that David was doing at the time. And I saw a documentary shot about him around. It was called Cracked Actor by Alan Yentob, who is now the head of... BBC Two. And I couldn't think of anybody else for it, actually. The only other person I'd ever thought of discussing it was Michael Crichton, but only because he was six foot ten. I thought that was... Is it not true, then, that you really wanted Peter O'Toole? No, I never thought of Peter O'Toole. That's the apocryphal story. Oh, yeah. I'm glad I got that sorted out. Anyway, I came to New York. I heard from various levels of management. Yeah, David will be in New York. Actually, none of them were very level. I phoned and the secretary said, oh, yes, David wants to see you. And come round to the house. He's recording. Come round at 10 o'clock. Maybe a bit before. He should be off by 10. So why don't you come round about 9.30? I got up at 9.30 and I chatted away to these strangers until 10. And boy, there were some strangers. Strangers coming and going. And 10.30 came. There was a call from the studio. It looks like 11. At about 3, I thought, this is a wrap. This is not going to happen. But by that time, I think I'd had a couple of good martinis. I thought, well, if I stay till 3, I might as well stay till 3.30. And at 3.30, the phone went again, and he came back and said, it looks like it'll be certainly within the next half hour, maybe by 5 o'clock. He arrived, and we spoke for about five minutes. He said, I'm tired. I said, I can understand that, so am I. And he said, don't worry, I'm going to do it. And... He showed me to the door. I was obviously looking a bit stunned from 9.30 to 5.30 in the morning. I said, don't worry. Let me know when you want me. I'll be there. We were starting in New Mexico. I'm saying, I'm going to do it. And he showed up. I think the first thing we shot on the movie was... The Hanneville signpost was a nice long shot to get the crew working. Using my cardinal rule was a nice shot of David Bowie walking into town. I had no idea the balloon was going to be there. It broke free of its door and came bouncing down the track towards us, you know. I said, don't cut it. I never believe in cutting anything, you know, because it's telling you something, you know. There we are. The co-star makes an appearance. Well, the first thing he sees, of course, a connection with a human, is the alcohol which is going to destroy him, or at least keep him here. I must say, for an alcoholic, it looks particularly well at the end of the movie. It's your life story, is it, Nick? The only thing I can add to that is that I'd known only the involvement that Nick had had in performance with Jagger before, so I went through the previous films, and I was very, very impressed with Nick's work, overwhelmed in fact. I thought it was, Walkabout in particular, really struck home. I thought it was a wonderful film. But what I didn't tell him that day when he turned up is that I hadn't actually read Man About to Earth. And it was a combination of having seen Walkabout and actually meeting Nick in person that convinced me that this is something I should definitely get involved with. So I think I conned my way through giving you the impression that I'd actually... Maybe he was outside, maybe he was home all the time, but upstairs. Possibly, yes. Getting with secret cameras, getting a reaction from him, seeing what kind of metal you are. But I remember that Nick talked... This is one of the few things that I remember from 1974, 5? 74. 74. Is that Nick was talking... I mean, I tried to kill the conversation as quickly as possible because I didn't want him to suss that I hadn't read it. So he was throwing bits of the film at me and I was... Yes, quite, quite, absolutely. Oh, yes, I can see that. And so I'm bluffing my way through. But it was probably the best decision based on absolutely nothing other than a man's previous work that I've probably ever made. It's a wonderful experience. I'm very, very proud of that film. Do you have your ID? We are all aliens. The idea of an alien being having to be from... We haven't finished with the aliens on the Earth yet. I mean, the aliens from outer space are yet to come. Some marry them. I mean, to be stuck... I remember when we were shooting the scene, Mr Newton first... goes into the pawn shop where are you from you know i mean okay with a western world and the and the he's from england he could speak english but he was an alien you know maybe i remember someone said to me some years later studio collection said i never understood that movie at all and he said i was driving into the valley to the studio and i pulled over the side of the road and i thought I know who Mr. Newton is, it's you. So that's, you know, a foreigner stays a foreigner for a long, long time, you know, whether it's a friendly foreigner or whatever. You drag the luggage of otherness with you. Yeah, the coming of whole communities to America, which is a wonderful thing, but still the fight in Europe now between trying to be united, but still alien beings, alien people. As Rip Torn's character suggests at one point, I mean, he asks his very serious question, Mr Newton, are you Lithuanian? Which I think is one of my favourite lines in the movie. It's a very funny line. For him, that was quite alien enough. Now, maybe he didn't want to face up to the consequences of having to ask the ultimate question, are you of our planet? I'm not sure that he felt that was necessary. He just needed to know that. How foreign are you? Yes, how foreign are you exactly?

My preparation in those days was akin to just putting a hat on, and if it looked right, then that was it. Actually, it hasn't really changed very much at all. I think that probably one of the things that Nick identified with me is that I was definitely living in two separate worlds at the same time. My state of mind was quite fractured and fragmented. I didn't really have much emotive force going for me, so it was quite easy for me not to relate too well with those around me.

David, I watched him and it struck me that he was always different. He was not an artist that got into a mold. He seemed to be always changing. And that attracted me, that he seemed to have that wonderful chameleon change and make use of his life and grow from it in terms of his work. And I don't think you can put him in a box like a folk singer or a a rock and roller, he's expanding and changing all the time that couldn't be pinpointed. There I am finally, appreciably younger, not nearly as distinguished as I look today. It was of course great fun to wear those glasses that I couldn't see anything through. so that by the time the first couple of days of shooting were over, my legs were a mass of sores from running into tables and chairs. Are you all right? Just tired. I'd just gotten back from a trip to China, and I was in a kind of traveler's euphoria. It was during the Cultural Revolution, and it was an interesting and eccentric journey. And one of the first things that happened when I got back is somebody called me. but I don't know who, and said, there's a project Nick Rogue is doing. Well, that was good enough. I've been a longtime fan of Nick's, both as a director and as a cameraman, and I believe that Candy Clark, who was an old friend of mine, suggested that Nick think about me for the part. We had a meeting, and as far as I can remember, that was it. What exactly do you want? I want a lawyer who's well-versed in patents. That's me. Reasons for doing the film. One, employment. Two, fun. I might add, in the fun category, somebody said, well, who's in it? And somebody, myself or Nick or somebody said, well, David Bowie, Candy Clark, Rip Torn, Buck Henry... and he named one or two others, and this person said, well, that's not a cast, that's a dinner party. A point well taken, and why wouldn't somebody want to be with the dinner party rather than just a cast? They were all either friends of mine or people I had admired. The location was interesting, which is always of some importance to me. It's nice to work outside of Los Angeles and in a place as... exotic as new mexico i got to age 20 or 25 years it's kind of peculiar trick and i i don't really know whether it was successful or not but it's always interesting to do i also got to play a homosexual which was unusual in films in that time without ever making any particular reference to it i mean it was interesting to play a homosexual character with no specific references to the homosexuality as such. And also, although this wasn't built into the deal, I got to blow a bubble on screen, a spit bubble, which I think is the first time it's been done since Harpo Marx did it.

Science fiction, of course, already sets up a kind of sensibility of its own. It frees the poetic sensibility to a certain extent because you can play with ideas, some of them completely loony and some of them very reasonable. You know, the metaphorical structure is already built in and the audience will allow things to happen that they'd never allow to happen if they're watching what they consider to be real people doing real things in real time.

My assumption after seeing the film, not while doing it, but after seeing it put together, is that it's all about alienation. Bowie is either a real alien or one can make the case that he is just a genius in a complicated, paranoid state. And my character is an alien in another sense. He's gay. He's removed by his very, very bad eyesight from normalcy. Most of the characters are in some way alienated, it seems to me. So it's all this series of interrelated alien forms. I always thought as this went along that one could construct a story out of what might be the central metaphor, which is the alienation of genius, the thinker or the artist in a society that doesn't appreciate him. There goes the saliva bubble, one of my proudest moments. I can't remember how long it took to get that out. It might have taken a while since it's always hard to produce a saliva bubble on command. But only someone as peculiar as Rogue would have said, sure, go ahead and do it. I don't want to have contact with anyone except you. You know, you don't think about whether you're acting with somebody who's been in a hundred films or somebody who's never been in one. What David has, of course, is a matter of presence. Like most rock stars, like most musical figures, he has enormous presence. And he's so compelling physically that it's always interesting. My father used to say, Oliver, when you get a gift horse, walk up to it, pat it, quiet the animal down, and then using both hands, force open its jaws and have a damned good look in its mouth. It's not like other films. I don't think rogues films demand quite the same things of actors that most other films do, or that a lot of them do. Because so much of the questions actors normally ask why am I doing this, why am I going over here, why am I saying this, don't quite apply in the same way. Rogue's idea of what's happening is extrapolated from things that happen physically, from the music of the movement and the intercutting of various things that don't really apply to the story so much as they do to the overall sensibility of how you're supposed to feel. But guys like Rogue have had an enormous effect on all the filmmakers that come after them, as everybody does. I think JFK is, to a certain extent, a child of a kind of Rogue filmmaking. Not even meaning that to be a pun. And that's interesting, too, is how the audience can now sit through a film whose style is jagged and fractured and built up and a mosaic of lots and lots of pieces and themes. Of course, in a film like JFK, it helps that all the characters are known historical characters or extrapolations of them. But it is unimaginable to think that the style of JFK would be an acceptable style 25 years ago. It just pushes the grammar a little further. The content of the film was almost unimportant, I do remember that. It was Nick's approach to what he was doing and it seemed to gel very much with what I was in my infancy and attempting to do in my work. And as I say, it was that kind of immediate reaction to each other that made me confirm with myself that this is something that I indeed wanted to work with this man. God, I did as well, didn't I? I'd never known about getting up so early. Hello. I just marked your paper. How'd I do? Don't worry about it. I won't. I thought he was shocked. Again, about violence. They're enjoying this violent sexual relationship, violent but joyous. And this kabuki-type theatre, no, a type of theatre, that not understand... It was all about, I guess, coming to opinions. Here he's dragging the girl who's having fun. This is an art that... Is it good or is it bad? Who knows? Making decisions about things. Mr. Newton's not only an alien, perhaps from another culture, but from a different universe. As we all have to fight at times, we don't like that behavior. But they do. He's watching this spooky that seems to him particularly frightening and upsetting. Just the way that someone else might find that form of sexual play unpleasant, but it isn't. You can't be ashamed of that. People are who they are.

That camera always interests me. Years and years ago, Milton Green, the photographer, was a friend of mine, and I was at his house in New York one day, and as I was leaving, he said, wait a second. I was standing on the front steps. He had a brownstone on the east side, and he came out of his door, and he very quickly took a picture of me with a camera I'd never seen before. And I said, oh, okay, well, send me a copy. He said, no, no, no. Here it is. And it was the first I'd ever seen or heard of a Polaroid. And there it was, this incredibly mysterious thing, not unlike when Rip first sees the developed film in the World Enterprises camera. So I went right out and borrowed $1,500 and bought some Polaroid stock. In no time at all, I got a brand new life and I like it. Not my own boss the way I used to be, but so what? Oliver, you're the president of one of the largest corporations in America. I'll tell you one thing, it's never too late. In the context of general audiences' relation to films, by their very nature, Nick's films are cult films. That's true about a long list of directors whom I admire and whose films I would be happy to be in. They are not, by their very nature, films that are easily accessible to American audiences in the way that they expect their films to be. There's enormous amounts of information in Nick's films that depend to a large extent on familiarity with artifacts of culture, some popular culture and some fine arts. You know, to point a camera at, albeit a very famous painting, but a painting that isn't, you wouldn't go out in the street and say, who painted The Fall of Icarus? And expect to get a lot of people to answer it. And to show an Auden poem for enough time for a viewer to read it, that already narrows the audience to a sizably smaller amount than if you show a diner sign The films of guys like Rogue depend on a subtext so powerful that it carries the audience through all these sort of minefields of disparate information that they may or may not be familiar with, most likely not. Well, I mean, if I owned a copyright on the Bible, I wouldn't sell it to Random House. It's what I want. The way that I read it, for me, in fact, he wasn't godlike at all. In fact, it was, for me, best exemplified by the painting that's used in Bruegel's Icarus Falling. In fact, he was very much a fallible entity. I won't say god and I won't say human because, you know, he is just a being. He is a being. And it's his endeavours are so destroyed by the beings around him. It's kind of sad. The campus computer again. That damn thing doesn't have a mind. It's not meant to have a mind. That's what makes it perfect for this place, right? I remember one day Rip came onto the set in a particularly stompy mood. I loved Rip, I must point out. I thought he was a wonderful guy. Really sort of Hemingway or Mailer or something about him. So thoroughly American, East Coast. And he said, he headed in for Nick that day for some reason. He said, You're going to treat me like a dog. I'm going to react like a dog. Nick looked at him and said, we won't be shooting Mr. Torn today. Took the camera off and just left him there on the set, fuming. We were all agape every morning, waiting to hear his last night's exploits. Come through barbed wire fences and be found in ditches. I'll tell you what happened last night. Every day and night was a huge adventure for Rip. in a great manly way. He's a great guy. What are you talking about? I'm talking about the things you pursue, Nate. Young things. Rick Dorner plays a professor who has affairs with his students. Buck is in a homosexual relationship. The film gave me an opportunity to use that without being part of the plot. Characters who inhabit the plot, that's part of their life, but it has nothing to do with, really with anyone else but their own lives. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. Tell you what, why don't you go get a job with that great company of yours? I believe I will. I believe you won't. Artesia is where we went down to. It's an extraordinary place. The weight of the sky is just something indescribable. I mean, it's a magic place. It really is New Mexico. I'd never seen real cowboys, and I mean, these cowboys were nothing like the film cowboys. They were skinheads with tattoos and rings through their noses and ears, and they would dance with their spurs on. We went to a nightclub, and a makeup artist came with us. His name was, was it Justin? makeup artist, and his wife, Marilyn, this gorgeous wife that he had. He was sort of a slightly fey young man. And a cowboy came over to us and he said, how long are you all in town? And he hid behind me and said, just the week. It's just as an old village in England in the medieval times, immediately someone comes in. Suspicious. Oh, God, now. To go down to Devon, to some of those villages, if you walk through the door, the entire pub stops talking. They all look at you. I mean, even to this day. And even for an Englishman to pick up roots and go and try and live in a village other than the one that he was born in is very difficult. He'll never be regarded as being one of the crowd all of his life. I think that's a quality of human beings. Those policemen just... They look all modern, but they're quite immediately suspicious. Oh, are you all right? It's all right. You're all right now. We're on the fifth floor. Oh, God. This was our way of going up and down. We don't know how he traveled, really.

His musculature is slightly either atrophied or it's affected tremendously by the gravity of the earth. He has walking problems as well. I mean, it even comes down to very mundane things. Very often sailors, certainly captains of ships and sailors and fliers get a different kind of, can be motion sick. when they're not in control of it, when they're not in charge. But basically it was a different kind of movement. I wanted to have him in natural form. This is not his natural environment. And people get sick in all kinds of ways in their unnatural environment.

It's science fiction, but also life. It's human science fiction, isn't it? The scene's a human scene. It's disquieting for that. It's not so strange. Are you okay? I probably think that's true. It won't be so strange. Whatever we find out won't be that different. Disquieting, because it won't be familiar. How the familiar is different anyways. Obviously can't keep his food down either. Egg white, was it? We had a very enthusiastic prop man, Tommy Rayburn. That's right, Tommy Rayburn. Enjoyed all the foulness and the phlegm. Any phlegm required today, governor? This scene is just joy and lunacy. They're not hurting each other, but they're quite lonely people, but not hurting each other. What's the Bunuel film with the two girls playing the one part? Obscure Object of Desire. Obscure Object of Desire is an example, in a sense, of found art. For whatever reasons, two girls play one part. I've heard the story told a couple of ways. I've heard that it was an accident of availability, and I've heard that it was planned. Well, maybe it's some of both, I don't know. Or the black and white sequences in If. I've heard different stories on that one, that they were planned and that the color film wasn't available for those sequences. I don't know how this scene would be today, although there's not an official censorship in America. It isn't a governmental thing, it's self-censorship. You can only say in generalization, I don't believe in censorship. In me, there's some sort of self-censorship. Trouble is when nobody is trusted with their self-censorship. Who to trust with their censorship? He senses Dr. Price in this scene. I wanted to keep it as natural as possible. What are the other senses, not some extraordinary sense? Are the other senses that could be human senses that we've just not explored deeply enough? got diverted from in a technological time. I mean, they're not totally extraterrestrial senses. It's possible one gets sixth sense, one has a sense that something's happening. We talk about it, but we're putting it onto the back burner, but it's not so alien. You want to have people say, I knew you were going to telephone. Well, I'm damned. We've all been through those experiences. I was thinking of you only this morning on the phone. But we just dismiss that in awe and aghast at morphing or something. We cannot understand that other sense, those other senses at all. We understand how to do things. We've followed for the past few hundred years that tradition. technical science, haven't we? We've followed a technical science and not the others called mystical or whatever and all those words are pejorative, you know, and so that's become shrunken, the shrunken science. It's the tiny little shrunken things that alternative nonsense and it's only because they haven't been nurtured very much in the past few hundred years. It was only a brief moment in time, as Mr. Hawkins might say. One of these days you ought to try one of these. I think possibly if I do generate the feeling of Newton successfully, it's because of the deconstruction that Nick was able to perform on the basic material that I brought to the role. I was quite plastic in that way. It was virtually easy for Nick to guide me into any area that he wanted to, like the good alchemist that he is. And I think there's a shadow of the life that I was living there, but it was merely a shadow. But I guess in reality, the reality is on the screen. The shadow was in the real life. If that makes any sense to you, I don't know. Yeah, it sounds rather like Verlaine, who said, I write stories and then let them happen to me. Yes, absolutely. The planned accidents of life. I couldn't agree more. Sure. Candy Clark is an amazing actress. I saw American Graffiti, and she was wonderful in Graffiti. It's a tremendous film in its sense of reality. All those young people were not like actors. They all seemed the real thing. And from a class structure that wasn't unusual, it was not rich, it wasn't desperately put, it was just like a wonderful... I enjoyed it tremendously. As a foreigner, when I was watching it in England, it had a... great sense of life, and to put someone as real as that into it would have even more of a strangeness. When I started, when I filmed schools in England, I loved going to the movies, and of course they were great films, but they weren't in the culture of England, of Great Britain, they weren't something that was admired, it's quite strange, even today, it doesn't come under the Ministry of Arts, it comes under the Ministry of Board and Trade, where everything else, the ballet and the theatre, it all comes under the arts. But I was just a kid going to the movies, and I liked cinema, mainly American movies, obviously. I thought, well, the best thing to do would be to try and work in a studio. And I got a job in a cutting room. And then, worked on this dubbing, it was a cutting room where we dubbed French films into English, so I was in the lowest, lowest possible position. I was watching the editors and they were doing this lip-sync work on editolas then they had in those days. In the lunch hours, I'd sit at the editor and have it run it back. Again, this time thing happened, you know, running back in life and forward, running backwards, you know, put people back... It was so fresh to me. They always seem to lead such interesting lives, people who travel, people who write stories. The thing that fascinates me about Nick's films, all of Nick's films, is the way that buildings always look like some meddling by human beings. They look like an intrusion from the city shot in Walkabout to this, the city shots in this. Something that man has sort of contrived to, these nonsensical things that man has created. Eyes, eyes, always eyes. Nick likes eyes. Endless stuff about eyesight and seeing, which of course brings us right back to the seer. to Tiresias et al., but that's too heavy even for me. I was only involved in certain changes in dialogue in a very minor way. Some improvising, mostly I think in the fight scene where I get killed. As an actor, I just say what they want me to say. If they want me to improvise, I'll improvise. If they ask me for a better way of saying it, I'll try and find a better way of saying it. But I don't approach a part as an actor as a writer, I just work for the director. And if the director really wants me to say that, unless it is hopelessly ungrammatical or lacking in any form of coherent syntax, and the character I'm playing seems possibly to have gone to college, I won't argue about it. But there are a few places where I or Nick and I played around with some words. But for the most part, I think it's all from the script. also in a story like The Man Who Fell to Earth, in a scenario like The Man Who Fell to Earth, where the interrelated metaphors are so complicated that to start arguing about specifics in dialogue can be a really time-consuming and ultimately fruitless task. You kind of have to go with the flow, as they say, when you're working in a film of that nature, I think. It is what I admire about the guys I call the maverick filmmakers, is they have their own peculiar eye and their own peculiar ear, and you sort of tend to give yourself over to it. Nick tends to laugh off the literal questions. As I recall, and we used to joke about it, I used to say, oh, this, you know, today we're going to do the scene that really doesn't make any sense instead of the one we did yesterday that only makes partial sense. But it was... It was a friendly joke. The dialogue, in the same way as the images, make a kind of circular poetry, a kind of wandering around what another director or another writer would lay down as the points. The apprehension of it would be immediate and literal, and you could move on to the next thing. I don't think Nick ever moves on to the next thing. He just keeps zigzagging, moving around the thing and trying to sort of capture it like a game of Go. It's very hard to talk really about somebody else's intentions in making a film that's that dense. It may or may not be dense in meaning. That's for the estimable film critics to say. But it is dense in texture. And this one particularly, the allusions to the musical allusions, the allusions to various pieces of art, the allusions to architecture and Americana artifacts. The film is just loaded up with them, not to mention the endless reflections of pop culture in all the television references. And, of course, dozens of sort of inside jokes that partly are personal comments, but also partly are just layering of meaning. You know, each time one sees the film, you can get another sort of amused giggle or another knowing aha if you concentrate on yet another image that Bowie is watching, for instance, on television when the 16 or 20 screens are going at the same time. No involvements, no complications, no danger. None at all. Hello, Tommy. I remember that I came to the set the first time with between three and four hundred books because I didn't have a permanent place because I was on the road such a lot. I used to take my entire, at that time, entire library with me and I remember sitting in a very stone state in the living room in the hotel and Nick and Candy came in to talk with me and I was rushing from one book to another from the complete works of Francis Bacon. with a section on, I think it was New Atlantis, the description of the recording studio, to some tome on Israel Regarde or something like that. And I was just reading paragraph after, and Nick said at the end, he said, your trouble is, David, you don't read enough. I was so insulted. I didn't know it was a joke. That pretty much shows where I was at. I had absolutely no idea. that he was taking the rise. Somebody has pointed it out later. It's a joke. It's a joke, David. What did he mean, I don't read enough? Look, I've got 300 books. Some of them first edition. Reich, coincident... And it was coincidentally. I can't say it was in any way preparation. I was reading Listen, Little Man at the time. Well, it must have had some bearing on... trying to tell the world of some imminent danger and not succeeding. And that's pretty much also part of Newton's agenda. Makes me feel so good. Gives me something to believe in. Everybody needs that, a meaning to life. I mean, when you look out at the sky at night, Don't you feel that somewhere out there there's got to be a God? There's got to be. That somehow there's a certain destiny, fate, prescience, a certain inevitability about their coming together. I think that happens in life, too, that we have some sort of sense that we have our own but there's something mixed in with predestination. It isn't as linear as we think it is. I guess that's what perhaps could be differently described as predestination if we don't think of it as an entirely linear affair from back to front. Our will is to change it, but it will happen again. in a different form, but it is all happening at once. You can come in, Tommy. Don't be embarrassed. We did a lot of handheld work. We were shooting in natural locations, and they were virtually motel. A lot of them were just motel rooms. And the question of fitting people in, we just had no space for dollies. It was before the Steadicam. The operator was a wonderful man, Gordon Heyman. There's an extraordinary relationship between director and the operator. He is the eye, he's your eye, and I was very lucky. I've enjoyed working with him many, many times. He's an extraordinary operator, but on many occasions, even he couldn't get into the room with me at the same time and the actors. I had to operate myself on a lot of that handheld stuff. But I didn't like doing it. He's such a wonderful operator. We've handed song sheets out today of an old English hymn. I presumed, I don't know why, probably because I was arrogant enough to think it so, therefore I acted upon it, that I had been asked to write the music for this film. And I spent two or three months putting bits and pieces of material together. I had no idea that nobody had asked me to write the music for this film. In fact, it had been an idea that was banded about. And I constructed a thing which in the death never became the soundtrack to the movie, but became the album Lo. Some of it went on to Station to Station, but another chunk of it went on to Lo, which was the album that I did with Brian Eno in Berlin a few years later. I'm rather glad that happened. So am I. Well, as it happens, the Lowe album then was performed on Friday and Saturday night this weekend by Philip Glass. It was turned into a symphony. So I think The Visitor, it would have been The Visitor. And I think that's quite lovely that this should be coming out again in its original form alongside Lowe, which has been sort of dusted off and released again. When Lowe came out, I was really... quite thrilled that it came out. Only David could know that, but prompted somehow by the film or the experience. But I remember, as David said, he worked on it. We had a time thing, and so that was not abandoned, but it was nothing formal, and it drifted away, and I think... became involved in another concert tour and drifted away, but it went away. It went away. Leave me alone. Leave my mind alone. I was rather glad that it, because it gave it another connection and somehow continued on. Yeah, there have been links all the way through. So I had to move on. We moved on and I'd known John Phillips and I showed him the stuff and he loved it and he knew David and it was all right with David. And some time later, David sent me the album of Low. He said this was the music I think I would have done for Man Who Fell to Earth. In fact, he used a still from Man Who Fell to Earth on the cover of the album. It's an extraordinary album, Low. It's a wonderful stuff. The train, you know she talks about like going on trains in Oklahoma with her granny and the train that he left on Bloody train. I remember, Nick, when the train come, it was nothing like the thing that he did. Am I correct in this? And that train rolled up in the middle of the desert. He went blue in the face. Then he went red and then white. What is that? It's your train, sir. That's not a train. It's a fucking dog kennel. But we live with it. And as it happens, it has an endearing quality, the train. It's so sweet to look at that and then the freight train that I see from the window. And there's our train. I think Candice, one of Candice's best little monologues is her monologue in the car waiting for the train to go past. I love that scene. Sooner or, as I say, sooner or later, all things are connected. All knowledge, all action is connected. but not necessarily in a constant flow. No matter what we do, sooner or later it is known. You're always seen. It came out of a joke when Paul and I were working one night. Either one of us, I can't remember which one, had been somewhere in the afternoon. Perhaps we'd said, oh, I'm busy this afternoon, I can't make it. And the car was parked outside another house. And quite out of the blue, someone said... Oh, I saw your car in Chelsea this afternoon. What were you doing in Chelsea? You are always seen sooner or later, you know. There's a scene when we realize this stranger is coming down a coal heap, slag heap. And a person comes in on the brow of the hill and sees him. That's all. He sees him. Much later in the film, when he's asked, Did anybody see you? He says, no, nobody. Nobody saw me. And of course, he was seen. I guess in the normal course of narrative, we would have seen that man who saw him go away and say, yeah, he's moving into the little town. And no, we don't know. But someone saw him. And we're always seen. It's very difficult not to be. I love our rides in the country. Don't you, honey? This scene is the closest thing, without trying to get into special effects, of a crossing and an immediacy of time. Here, this pioneer family, they see something, this vehicle. It's not a space vehicle. It's something that is going to happen in the world, a motor car. That's the science fiction part of it. that only that little pioneer family, that little group, couldn't even say, what is it? Look at that, and they look, and it's gone. They would probably dismiss it, or when they reached wherever they were going from their camp, they would say, we saw this strange thing. Sure, yeah, yeah, listen, let's put the child on. That would be dismissed. This is a science fiction film with not a lot of science fiction tools in it. Let's say without quoting other films, there are many science fiction films that have a certain familiarity, so you're happy with it. The spaceship, the alien with a big head. We were trying to make it disquieting, an alien sense of film. What we were trying to aim at was that sense of even the familiar is strange. Even the familiar is strange, looked at in a different way. thought about in a different way. It was all shot on location, the whole film was shot on location, except for a tiny bit in the special effects studio. A couple of days at all. We were there in New Mexico, eight weeks, nine weeks maybe. I think five days in Los Angeles. The distances were the main thing. Pretty big area. The White Sands and Santa Fe and Artesia. Nick's is an extremely difficult editing pattern, and I don't think it could ever be submitted to a storyboard because much of it is made up afterwards. I've seen flaws in what we call standard continuity quite a number of times, but they don't matter because that's not what the scene intends to do. There are peculiarities of the clothing or lack of it in one of the love scenes. Things sort of get on and off with a mind of their own. But that's not what the scene is about. It's about, oh, there's this, I remember this. Oh, yeah, and I remember that. And there's that. Your memory doesn't reconstruct it all and then put it all right if you're thinking about a number of things that happened in the course of an evening or the course of an hour or the course of a minute. You don't then just re-edit it, put it all together in its proper form and rethink it. And to a certain extent, I think Nick shoots or thinks or edits like that. You know, there are guys like Nick that you think he should be on a MacArthur brand or something. Just let him go. Let him go out and shoot the stuff. Sometimes it's not as good as others, but who cares? He just ain't a studio guy. But... I think he could make a great traditional film. I'd love to see him do it. What is the nature of this project? Here I am, older, but no wiser. No one else seems to age. They look very young. Candy looks like she's about 15. Get yourself some sleep, Mr. Farnsworth. Good night. What does that mean? Some of the makeup took several, well, not several hours, a couple of hours. It wasn't bad. I think the wig could have been improved upon, but that's hindsight. The main problem was because of an early start to get the makeup on, I couldn't even begin to go out drinking with the English crew the night before. Nobody's a freak. What do you see in the cards? Nothing. See, see. All about seeing. What does he see in the cards? What do I see through those glasses? Filmmakers like Nick express a number of very personal concerns. And those personal concerns are not necessarily immediately apparent to somebody who's watching the work. They are obsessive in both the nature of the text and in the way they're made. I don't think Nick makes it easy for an audience. And he doesn't make it easy because he wants to make it hard for them. He makes it difficult because that's the way he thinks. Our audience, our general film audience, is simply not trained to put disparate elements together in a narrative. They are concerned, as studios are concerned, with the basic idea and the explication of that idea, not on the lowest level, denominator level necessarily, but to make it, no matter how arty the thing is, to make it understandable from scene to scene so that nobody gets lost, so that nobody has to think during a film, oh, I see, that connects to that and that connects to that. That's supposed to happen automatically in most movies. Nick doesn't make them that way. I don't know why we should think of films any differently than we think of music or painting. Those of us who think about them seriously don't. You know, there is inevitably not going to be as big an audience sitting in the opera house for a difficult piece written in the 12-tone style than there is going to be for Mozart or for Verdi, for that matter. But that doesn't make the audience for the difficult stuff any less passionate or the work any less good. it simply by its nature makes for a smaller audience. Is that Mr. Pondensworth's house? No, sir, that belongs to Mr. Newton. I think, you know, we are all strangers in a strange land, even in our own families we are alone and that the idea of trying to make some kind of contact words don't help tremendously in making contact with people it's very difficult to make true contact without sight of person i've always unless that's a state and a tragic state of of blindness but then The lover's oldest question is, what are you thinking, darling? What are you thinking? Not what you're saying. Do you love me? Of course I love you. What are you thinking? I was thinking about you. Now, what are you really thinking? Actually, I was thinking about a divorce. The contact, we're always trying to make that contact. I think with cinema, we try to do that. I felt that... Is there anybody out there? You know, we do it with our work. We express ourselves with our work of who we are, very much. And I think every kind of work, all work, is part of our offer. Fortunately, or in the cinema, it's more obvious, or in the theatre, or an artist, or a painter, or a writer, it's more directed. But they're only saying, hello, is there anybody out there? If three people in the audience say, I know what he meant, You know, this touched me. Your emotions have been in contact with that person. You know, that's a very, it's a thrilling thing. I mean, it's, when I've given in on points, which you have to at times, you know, because there are doubts, everybody has doubts about the truth of themselves. Lots of thoughts come into mind. Am I doing this out of arrogance or am I doing this out of willfulness or God knows what. so that when that doubt comes up, and in many, many cases, sometimes, not always, but many cases, I haven't got what I felt across. Well, damn, I wish I'd done that scene. I haven't been that truthful. But that's what we're doing with our work. I think we're trying to make contact, knowing somewhere behind it that you never will finally do it. Just getting close, just getting close. The painter is never finding, oh, that's my masterpiece. That's it, isn't it? Only nature has masterpieces. The rest is, never quite made it. Otherwise it would be complete. Now they had a similar physicality, the fine skin, the bone structure, very fine, very slim. And that gave them, in that passage of time, they became more comfortable. There's a shot when they are lying in bed that seemed to be comfortable for both of them. Wanted them to lie in those patterns. You know how it is with the intimacy of a relationship. You begin after the initial... months or whatever of sleeping away that you in a head on your arm that actually gives you pins and needle in the hand you know you don't want to disturb but then you gradually get the pattern of your physicality that matches and you adopt each other's behavior patterns each other's expressions unknowingly because it's a way of communicating it was also linked with a thought i had that how often old people with long, long years of relationship through manner, attitude, but even physically grow to look alike. I think a pertinent point is that his choice of music is Roy Orbison. I thought that was so lovely because of all the rock stars, Roy seemed like the alien. He really wasn't quite the same as anybody else. and his strangely shaped head to his glasses, and everything about him pointed to him being the outsider. I love the use of Orbison. Orb, of course. The gynecological aspects of this scene always intrigue me. It's one of my favorite. The still that was taken from this I thought was fabulous. the gynecological chair. In the stirrups. Yes, and a slightly mummy-looking character that I sort of mummy unleashed, mummy with his head wrapped off. So mummy in a gynecologist's chair made perfect sense to me. The fact that he could, in fact, hear all those TVs and take in all that information. Yeah, but the curious thing is that now, this was pre the telecommander and the clicking through the stations. Now, I mean, my kids watch TV. four and five programs at a time through the commercials they just that's the damnation for the four networks isn't it there's the telecommander and they have on every television set you can put in the center of what you're watching and have a look at all the other stations have all 18 screens on at once why not the fact that he's picking up all the human needs it seems to him and sort of being introduced to the ideas of violence, the superficial elements of sex and love. And that lovely betrayal shot, of course. Billy Budd. Yes, Billy Budd. The extraordinary Terrence Stem. Absolutely incredible. But these obsessive images of violence and destruction and being connected eventually with the sexual act, which really, I mean, I presume you agree, but these are probably some of the most hostile, and violent sexual scenes that one can think of in a movie. The bodies in the sex scenes are almost slug-like as well, in the way they're shot and the lighting that's used. Quite repellent. The selection of images using a telecommander is quite extraordinary. I mean, it does go into a oneness, what Mr Newton says. You see everything on television. It doesn't tell you anything. You keep on seeing it, you have so much choice. It's rather like nature in a way. It sounds weird, but very difficult to contemplate anything singly in nature, isn't it, when you go out into the countryside? If you come with a fixed idea, nature and circumstances, they're waiting for you to see it, not, oh, God, it's sunny, I thought it was going to be, you know, we had this written as a... A rainy day, and I'd always thought of it as a rainy... You'd always thought of it as a rainy day. Or, well, it's sun shines out. Get it? Or, conversely, I saw the lovers on the beach in the setting sun as they say goodbye. And it rains. That's nature. It's also part of the film. Mr. Farnsworth. Yes, Sprite. Is everything all right? Well... To tell you the truth, I'm baffled. I've been here for so long, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. There's always somebody talking about something a little different than what they're really talking about to the person they're talking to. I'm afraid I know nothing about liquid gas, Dr. Brice. I mean, if Nick sees something that reminds him of something, he'll shoot it. He shoots the metaphor as though it's a literal thing. But it occurs to me over the years, looking at films of the guys I admire, from Houston to Tarkovsky, if I can set up sort of a giant parameter, there is a kind of subtext that's as powerful as the text itself, where it is, of course, most commercially successful is where the text is most apprehensible to an audience. That's on the Houston end, where it is... further and further from the programmatic, moving toward Tarkovsky, for instance, it becomes more poetic and less literary. And Nick is edging toward the Tarkovsky, I would say, finding new ways to express fairly old ideas, which is what, of course, artists do. Tomorrow, Dr. Bryce. Huh? Who are you? Don't be suspicious. He hasn't got any other power than possibly extensions of our own. Maybe more refined. Maybe we'll have Mr. Newton's senses and understanding in 50, 100 years. Maybe. Who knows when. But they're not... They're only extensions of what could possibly be human brain power ability. What is it? The imagination's only bound by experience and can't imagine anything beyond our experience. Mr. Newton has been away, hasn't he? Yes, sir. He come in this morning. Making use of the moment, the chauffeur was, in fact, Bowie's chauffeur who arrived with him and comfortable with him. It fitted well to my thought of things, I guess. I think, looking back, I think it did because it seemed, as David said, right. Right with the driver who then stayed the driver of Mr. Newton in the film. He is the driver. While I'm watching it, it's growing for me as well. I'm thinking, how on earth did that happen? It's very difficult to say. This was the plan I had. and seizing the moment that, say, oh, yes, I always wanted the big limousine. But there was, I can't really refer to it that way. Mr. Newton is waiting, sir. Dr. Bryce? I'm Newton. We've met before. I've always thought of... film in general as the closest thing to a time machine. I remember as a boy, I loved the story of the time machine with H.G. Wells. I think it's something, because we've lived with the two generations, we've lived with the cinema, we have pictures of the past and the future. We'll be able to look at the past all the time and see it and listen to people from the past. I know that there was a little poem by Derwent May The poem talks about watching dead people a lot of the time on television. John Wayne. Children become fans of dead people. That's never happened before. This century has been the most extraordinary thing. I suppose I think that was the thing that drew me tremendously to the story, this time sense. And that's what I tried to get into the film, the sense that time wasn't... so particularly delineated. It seemed a great story about time, you know, they age in it at different speeds.

a space vehicle, right? We thought of him really, Mr. Newton, as no more than an astronaut from another, a slightly more advanced civilization. Not that he was just, would know about things, rather like one of our own that landed on a planet that was 50 years behind us. This story, the story of a... traveler from another place, an alien. The science fiction side of it, of course, appealed to me because I liked the freedom that science fiction gives you. Is this a weapon? A weapon? It's too small for interplanetary travel. I assume that it's a weapon. Does that matter to you? Yeah. If I thought that you were building a weapon you were employing me to help you, I'd have to quit the project. Deadly suspicious. We're living in daily in a science fiction type age. As far as machines and technology is concerned, every day something science fiction-like. All the extraordinariness of time and destiny is just dealing in material. I think there's very little in this that's startling in its material sense. I remember when Paul Mylesburg and I were working on the script, we thought he would be dealing in software to keep undercover, not come up with laser beam eyeballs or some extraordinary way of converting grass into gold, but something that was only a little bit ahead of its time. I remember when they talked about the camera, We thought about a camera, buy the film, throw the camera away. That would make a lot of money. Just buy a roll of film, the camera attached to it. And everybody said, oh, that's ridiculous. Why would they ever do that? And about five, I thought, well, maybe in 50 years' time, it would be difficult to think of things like that. Unless it's too absurd, which we thought that was. And six years later, I was at Los Angeles airport and saw Fuji. I brought out that camera. Now people buy film, throw the camera away. Maybe they saw the movie. Fuji saw the movie and thought it was a good idea. Well, anyhow. Per adua ad astra. I beg your pardon? That's Latin. Latin? You must know that in England. Royal Air Force, their motto. Yes. Per adua ad astra. Through difficulties... You could make a case, I think, that the literal level doesn't apply, that he isn't an alien, that he doesn't come from another planet, but he is one of society's peculiar outsiders who lives his life as though he were, etc. When I see this film, I think a lot about men like well, I'm not going to say his name, but a figure in American literature who was in his youth one of the sort of white hopes of American literature, but who descended slowly into a kind of madness where he actually did think, when I first met him in Europe, he did think that there were alien forms in the world, people from other planets, and he alone could recognize them. This was after publishing a novel or two that were highly thought of, and he was considered to be an up-and-coming major literary figure. And as his schizophrenia took hold of him, he became more and more part of the world he'd constructed, the crazy world, and less and less a part of the real world so that he finally wasn't able to write at all. And when... Bowie sits alone at the end of the movie with his hat covering his face. It always reminds me of this guy I'm thinking of sitting in a cafe where I met him in Rome, and others like him who are victims of their own peculiar genius. New Mexico has a certain mystical sense to it which i wasn't aware of i must say at the time it was inevitable because the the space launch program was there also wasn't aware of the times when it came out it was probably for pragmatic reasons and then it was the film commissioner was one of the main reasons probably in the budget but but i guess it was really always going to be made there It was a right prophetic little number in terms of the hardware and stuff. The film possibly preempted some of the things that came after it, with its holograms and its instantaneous printing cameras and the spherical ball that plays music and whatever, the way it was dressed, I guess. You see, at another level, for me, the film remains a story of betrayal. rather than anything else that has the dressing of science fiction. For me, it has that spiritual thing, the Christ story and whatever has elements of that in it. The moment that Newton realizes the cameras have taken his pictures, for me, is a religious moment. It harks back for me to the Bible story of Jesus knowing that he's going to be betrayed. Newton knows he's going to be betrayed. It's quite obvious. But he seemingly doesn't do much about it. So there must be some other reason for his being here. Coming to conclusions about people, that's what a lot of what the film is about, coming to decisions about trust and betrayal. Mr. Newton made his money out of software. He had to hide himself, you know, so it was not... super technology. It was just a little before it's not meant to be able to be disguised as software. Cosmic yuppie. That way I don't think that the hardware got in front. I hoped it didn't get in front of the movie. I mean, maybe Blade Runner's a good example looking back now at it. I mean, the hardware was so fantastic in it. They got in front of the intention. You see it happening, don't you? morphing now these michael jackson face changes in his video now you see on every commercial it's hardware is very quickly accepted yeah it's over you know it has very little to say in itself at all i mean it's just used cosmetically like that but i think that the one thing possibly sorry to go back to one of my things because it's not the intention of this interview at all but to pick up on that point i don't think he would have had such sustaining power if it was just a question of pushing forward the cosmetic, and I use that pun lightly, aspects of Ziggy. I think there was something more inherently disquieting about him, from his sexuality to his isolationist positioning, to the fact that he possibly had a deviant kind of plan in his mind that is not the accepted norm with rock singers. So I think, you know, the hardware It's reduced down to such a sort of a cheap currency these days. I'm not at all impressed with hardware. Or anyway, the way that it's used, the way that it's presented to us is cheap, very cheap. The frightening thing is that the acceleration of technology and our capabilities for inventing it is so vast and it's accelerated to such a point that we are now totally incapable of understanding that which we've created, we really have created a monster. Do you think we'll eventually evolve into creatures who think and talk ably in fragmentation, which is the only way to go if we're to make any kind of use of this kind of, I think probably so, plethora of information that we have? Because there's far too much now for any of us to really absorb. And we're just increasing it daily. It's a no-win situation. So we have to evolve to that kind of being to be able to cope with the things that we've invented. Because they're far raced far ahead of us. Our things know much more than we do. Yeah, in specifics, we know far more of a pattern, as you say. Speaking in telegrams, I think people will speak in... Yeah, we are. Look at the things, look at the way we watch commercials. Soundbite. Yeah, soundbite. Soundbite. Soundbite. What I miss is sort of the in-depth implications of the things that we say. Sometimes conversations are reduced to soundbites, I find, which is terribly annoying. You might cover more ground, but you don't cover it as thoroughly at all.

But reflecting on music, I mean, there's obviously a need to get away from hardware because I think the most vital and dynamic music at the moment is made on very low-tech machinery. And there's even a thing of trying to dirty up tracks coming from urban music and from rappers and such. There's a feeling of ignoring the high-tech thing altogether. to get away from it, to sort of avoid it. And I guess in the arts, the return to figurative painting, to get away from the conceptualism of neon light bulbs lying against a wall and all that, there's a big return to needing that tactile, organic feel again. You know, what happened with sound originally, I've always felt has either come too early or too late. to the cinema. In silent days, they were just using images to tell the story. Then this great miracle, you could actually hear the people, just as great a miracle as seeing them. This other miracle came that their voices were still alive, which is in some ways even more mysterious because not only are there pictures of them, after all, the pictures are closely allied to portraits and things, so we can see what... I know King Charles looked like, or President Lincoln, but to actually hear him. And now came this amazing thing, sound. And we hear Caruso. And we hear people. But it either should have come at the same time, or else earlier, or else much later. It had really been established, the telling of pictures, by telling of stories with pictures. But it came, and what happened? They rushed to novelists and people that had only, dealt not with the visual image, but with the written word, to write the dialogue for the people. Because people got suddenly immersed. We were just getting to understand reading pictures. It held up film for a long time. You can stay on here. The house is yours. I've transferred enough to your bank account.

I don't want the house or your money. I want to be with you. You don't know anything about anybody. Yes, you know certain bits that you've found out or that inevitably have been revealed. And the promises. It's about secrecy and lovers' promises of, tell me, tell me, I won't care. Did you, fucker? Did you? It won't matter to me. I just must know. All right, I did. Oh, my God! It is quite human, although alien, but the alien is the human, and he says, all right, if you must know, how do you like this? It's not dissimilar from the reaction that would be just on a simple confession to an affair. You want to know who I am? I'll tell you. The lovely irony of this is that she walks into the scene dressed as a Japanese girl, and with her... I'll show you what I am, takes her Japanese wig off, if you'll show me what you are. So he does. You won't find anyone who'd do for you like I've done for you. Great screen acting is in reacting. And years ago when I was working as an assistant, I'd watch the movie stars of those days. When I was working in England, a lot of... American films were made in England then, and American screen actors would come and give lines away because they knew that nine times out of ten, when the film came to be cut, it would be on the reaction rather than the line of dialogue. Let's say a man comes home and his wife or girlfriend has been out in the afternoon in some love affair, and we see him pass by... the sitting room and calls in, do you have a good day today, honey? You're bound to be on the woman's face because you've known what has gone on in the afternoon. You won't be on the man asking the line and miss what her reaction is.

such a lovely shot this. I've seen this shot borrowed so many times since this film. Just added to the general vocabulary of filmmaking, that shot. In those days, Contacts tended to be the hard contacts, these great huge plastic things that really hurt the eye. They really, really hurt very badly. And I had two sets. I had the hard ones that went in that were the cat's eyes. And then on top of those, I had the little rubberized ones that went in. But the cat's ones gave me a lot of problems because I was particularly dehydrated. at that stage, and the desert didn't help. I just never seemed to be lubricated. Oh, it was all... Because they fit right over the eyeball. Yeah. God, the contact lenses went very early days for those contact lenses, and nice having them fitted. When we went down to the opticians, David was a bit worried about his eyes, and obviously I said, I couldn't, I don't know how you can do this, but... Candy was amazing. She said, oh, I don't mind. They both went down. Because Candy plays the part of the wife as well, you know. And this optician, he'd got them back. They'd been made up. He said, well, try one in. Put it in Candy's eye and went, suck onto it and could not get it out. It was stuck. He could not get it out. It fitted too exactly on.

right over the ball, this yellow cat's eye. We were, I think, about an hour and a half. He was trying to puzzle out if we were going to get her to a specialist, and finally it came off. She never, can you imagine? The thought of it to me made me feel quite ill. You're terribly naughty, Nick.

I worked for a cameraman called Joe Ruttenberg. He was a great American cameraman. He taught me a lot about cinematography, how different it is from straight photography and what you learn from what you can give to the scene and what you can understand and how closely you have to work with the making of the film, the atmosphere of the film, not for the beauty of your own photography. He once said to me, This has nothing to do with having, because I then started taking photographs in stills. And he said, that's good. Understand what you're doing with photography and how to, but you're not out to get a fellow of the Royal Society of Photographers. You know, it's the movie that is important. It's the movie. I hate the idea of an art film. It's film, you know, that it's trying to find the truth of the film. That's all I'm not... If you set about making an art film, that's as ridiculous as trying to set about a solely commercial film. It's always confusing. What touches people? Who knows? Who in the hell knows? There are no formulas. Nobody knows. Some great commercial art has become great art, because it is the truth of the matter. Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings were posters. They became great art because they were wonderful. They touched things, you know, la goulou. They had the moment where you could see the reality. It was the first look at reality. You could see the pain of his life. You know, this desperate, crippled man's life was in the joy and the thrill of those pictures. It is art because it involved people and touched their emotions. I really don't believe in the idea of art films and commercial cinema. I think that all film... inevitably has an effect. For me, the word entertainment, it means involvement as well, to be entertained by something. That's why every word has a different kind of connotation to whoever uses it. Poets use words differently with another sense to them from their exact dictionary meaning. To me, the word entertainment means involvement and to be involved in something to become to entertain conjecture over time and to think about something not to be so slightly involved that you're distracted only that's a pretty oh god she's pretty and that's great what a great dancer i wonder if i put the cat out oh hey that's nice that's pretty that's good i like that and oh tomorrow i've got to see the boss you know that's distract just trying to be distracted To be suddenly involved, taken into something, that is what has come to be, oh, do I have to think too hard? Is that an art film? They begin to say that's an art film. You've got to think, you've got to become involved, so lost in it that it's touching some thoughts of your own. Our desire can turn to disgust so quickly. It's a choice, isn't it? That happens so quickly in our own emotions. Desire and disgust. I can't do it. I always thought it was a shame that she was so repulsed by him because I thought he actually cut a very attractive figure as an alien. Probably a lot more attractive than Newton himself. In his human guise. I think it was probably the squishy bits he didn't like.

The film isn't over when it's shot. It's not over, as in Eureka, it's not over until it's over. I mean, it's still a living thing. It's still being made. It isn't just that all the scenes are shot. That's how our life is, isn't it? It isn't just this exchange, me watching this film and trying to remember it. I'm also trying to put in to what I'm talking about, the film, to how my reaction is sitting here talking in this room. with the film running in front of me. My mind's racing through all sorts of periods of time in an effort to explain what I was trying to explain in the movie. It's very difficult. It's not as detached from me as, oh, I did that because of so-and-so and so-and-so. I'm not quite sure. It was just attitudes and emotions I was trying to put over. So I was shooting it and... It was occurring to me and things were changing at the time. And now looking at it, and since then I've changed because that has grown on me. Something of that has been left on me. But to go back and look at it, to define and delineate what it was that actually prompted me, it's very difficult. It's rather like the question, did you have a happy childhood? Yes. But it's not what you're thinking. So it's very difficult. That's why I like shooting a lot. And I like it to be open. I like it to be open. You don't know what's going to happen. You never know what's going to happen. We'll be different. No matter what you plan, it will be different. I thought we'd have a happy time here. It's like going on a second honeymoon. You can't do it. It will be different. Life is always different.

it's a drying planet of some kind, we're obviously, as our own, but, um, technology had out-technologized itself, but to a sort of simple, into a simple form, but a different, a different route, not the internal combustion, far beyond jet propulsion, but some sort of sail and some heat, who knows, but something that that looked primitive in terms of that culture, but seeing that remnants of something that had been very advanced, but gradually through lack of resources, through lack of material, had fallen into dereliction, and not just didn't go, but wasn't being done that way anymore.

I've never really watched a film of my own before, from beginning to end, after it's been made. Certainly not after this length of time. Because my life is there. I can see the moments as I watch the shots. I can see the moments and the day that I spent doing them with the people. It's a very strange sense of living one's past. Awesome, rather frightening. The lack of dialogue here. It was the only time I've ever spoken to a critic. The one line he picked out, who didn't like the movie, but the one line he picked out was David's at the end, that all things begin and end in eternity. He said it became such ridiculous. as all things begin and end in eternity, which is from a poem of Blake's. I thought, I can't resist this. I told him I won't do it. And I said, I was just curious. I'm going to have no quibble with you. You know, you don't like the movie. But I was just curious why you picked on that line. He said, I just thought it was, well, you must understand, Mr. Roble, you see film very quickly. But it just struck me as really trite. I said, don't you like Blake? It seemed to fit so perfectly, and he's such a mystical poet, Blake. But the one line of all, it's rather amusing, the one line, I mean, there are many, Paul laughed. He didn't pick any of my lines that were stupid. The one line he picked was William Blake. I'm better than Blake, Paul. Embarrassing. The one piece of poetry that was Shakespeare. That's crap. It's fantastic. I've seen their footsteps in their places. I've seen those things. We've all seen them. That's for theorists. I'm a scientist. I'm not a scientist. But I know all things begin and end in eternity. What are you going to do? I should have had Bryce say bullshit afterwards. Oh, not more of your bullshit, Mr. Newton. Turn that down, will you, Trevor? People from another place. are often like aliens. And I like the idea that a person in another society, that's something we haven't quite got used to yet either. Even on our little planet, we're still strangers in a strange land wherever we go. We bring our needs and desires that grew out of our particular little community. Still, we're not... We're not yet world travelers in the complete sense, let alone space travelers. In many ways, it seems even as far to go before the world is that familiar with itself. You can see the breaking up of whole countries again wanting to be small and their needs are particular to themselves, communities. So that interested me, the fact that it could be analogous, that Mr. Newton, there's a point in it when he says, when he's asked, where are you from? And he looks down across this great plain and on an empty road. It has the sky in the background, but he just says, I'm somewhere down there. Down there. Down on the ground or down there towards the sky? Anyway.

Science fiction kind of has its own agenda, aesthetically. And it intersects, I think, with the way Nick's most peculiar mind works. What's the time? It's late. Past midnight. There's time on my side. This is a new world. Jim Lovell's in the scene, which was rather like this. Jim Lovell. And I always wanted an astronaut in it. We tried Bennett and it was perfect. Jim Lovell was the one, Apollo 13. He was available. The others had dispersed about the place and had become... Quite private, secret people. It was an experience that had changed their lives. It's quite interesting to find the history of the astronauts, what happened to them all. The early ones, from Gagarin, who apparently ended up in an asylum. The experience was totally extraordinary to look down on the world. There's been conjecture about Gagarin having been put away because at the time it was the height of the Cold War to look down on... The Earth, I think, what the... You know, how well-conditioned is a Russian astronaut to look down and think, this is all bullshit, you know, this fighting. That's all it is, you know, this is it. What do you think about the future of private enterprises? What she had to do was very difficult. to extend that kind of emotional tantrum over a period of some hours, however long it took to shoot. And she's not playing against anything except her own instincts. If you follow your instincts, like I think Nick does, his instincts tell him to shoot certain things and do certain things even without knowing what he's going to do with them later. You don't necessarily have to think up how interesting it could be beforehand. If you have enough material and enough interesting instincts, then you come upon the ideas that are valid or dramatic or workable, sometimes long after the fact. I mean, it's happened in almost every film of any worth I've been involved with. You see things that you never possibly could have conceived of early on. It's like action painting. Pollock didn't know what he had until he was through, and he didn't know when he was through until he saw what he had. It's a more difficult way to make a film in many ways because you're on a tightrope all the time. I don't think you ever know in dailies quite what you've got. You know you've got a lot of pieces, and the pieces may or may not look interesting today and less interesting tomorrow. So there's a kind of anxiety built into that kind of filmmaking that isn't in traditional storytelling. A director like Nick, I think, tries to open as much space as possible between the planned and the unplanned. Most directors don't do that. They don't like to for very good reasons. They have complicated time and budget scimitars hanging over their heads and a very specific story to be told in a specific amount of time.

I was looking forward to this scene for obvious reasons, because it's fun to do this kind of stuff, although it was physically difficult. It took a number of takes. Each one was slightly different, and by the time these gentle giants, who were two members, as I recall, of the Albuquerque police force, I think they were detectives or retired detectives possibly, they were really nice guys, and they were trying to be as easy with me as they could. I was pretty black and blue by the time it was over. At the beginning, I thought they were being too gentle, and I said, you know, I'm obviously not going to hurt you guys. I'm going to slash and kick and claw and sputter. But at the same time, I had to be somewhat of a geezer, not at the top of my form physically. But by the time they dragged me down the stairs the fifth or sixth time, I felt like a battered geezer. I'd never been in a science fiction film, which is a genre I particularly like in films. I got to die in it for the first time in a film, I think for the first time. And subsequent to that, I've been killed a number of times. But defenestration is a really interesting and peculiar way to die. I knew it would be beautiful to look at. I knew it would be interesting. But even if you remove most of the reasons, I probably would have accepted it anyway, because why should anyone not be in a Nick Rogue film? The image is so dramatic. And the dummy, of course, the dummy added to it by losing its shoe, which was one of God's gifts. Nick and I talked a lot about what I would say. For some reason, he said, why don't you say the name Ruth as you go out the window? It could have been Mary or Louise or it could have been any name. I didn't really think it did anything but sort of distract to say a name that had no reference to anything. I wanted something, just a moment of So it could be a scream, could be a name. Something dredged from Farnsworth's past, he calls a name. And I thought, a woman's name that would only have to have one sort of syllable, not Mary or something, you know, a name. A name that would form part of a scream. And Ruth, I thought, Ruth. I said, just do a couple of wild tracks on shouting Ruth. He said, I don't think I can do that, Nick. I said, why not? He said, I'd feel awkward about it. I said, why? He said, my mother's name was Ruth. Here we go, big guy. Very cool. Bernie was very cool. That was marvelous. He's not bad. He's part of the system. the establishment. In reality, I guess it represents government, but what is government? Society's own protective mechanism. If you're in the system, you can still be a good person, especially when the system isn't overtly bad. Afterwards, one can look back and blame things. History is becoming like that today, isn't it? You know, the stories of Columbus now. That's 500 years ago. Are we going to destroy, in a Marcusean way, destroy history? Probably the heroes that we have today in 500 years' time, they'll be saying, how could they have done that? And that is the way the world has formed. This man is in the system, but it isn't a bad system. It's a confused and ignorant system. We are continually living. if the world is evolving in an ignorant system. You know, they thought there was the age of enlightenment at one time. Well, it wasn't. It was more enlightened than the last. Maybe we're more enlightened than the last, but this isn't the age of enlightenment either. We're living continually in an ignorant system, or only as aware of what, at the point we are now.

His music on this was played by Cliff Townsend, who's Pete Townsend's father. He died recently, years ago. Wonderful sax player. The world had overtaken his ideas. He was... their tool and not something that they could draw on, locked away, put away, tamed. You want a great spirit, a great spirit, a great chance for change, a great chance. He's being controlled. Who cares? Given up. The idea that he has his martini, he has, you know how couples catch each other's vices, as well as virtues, hopefully, but they catch each other's vices, you know? And he drinks like... Mary Lou. That was just Polaroid glasses at an angle to the sun, putting a polar screen on the camera. As you turn the polar screen, it blackens the glass. But it's quite effective without an optical. You can do it in the camera. It's just an optical device. Maybe having been a cameraman, that might have been a help. Nick. Interestingly enough, he serviced his directors as accurately as any cinematographer has ever done and with apparent, complete, literal understanding of the text. Pictures like Fahrenheit or Far From the Man in Crowd or pictures that are seen through Nick's eye and yet are films made by very strong directors. Rogue. perfectly well understands what the story is and how to tell it. But from his first film, from performance, you can already see all the concerns that obviously had been spinning around in his head. That thing that he loves to do, which he's done in almost every film, that juxtaposition of two different channels of activity, usually lovemaking opposed to something a bit more violent. and busting up the time inside the individual sequences, breaking it up in a sort of Godardian way. So Nick and lots of other directors since Godard have used that in numerous ways. And I think it reflects what memory does. If you think about a long, passionate love scene from your own life, you don't think of it in continuity. You think of moments of it. And so those guys, those directors, better reflect memory sometimes than just the straightforward telling of a sequence from moment to moment to moment in almost real time or in exact real time. It frees people of great talent and people of no talent to do things they weren't able to do before, which is, I guess, true about every step forward. in art. He asked me to help take him. I'm helping. With the third man, the scene was the outsider, you know, the man outside. And she said, poor Harry, poor Tommy. Poor Harry. Nobody understood him. You know, you betrayed him. Holly Martin and Dr. Price are very similar. Human beings, human nature is very similar. You know, Carol Reed in that great movie. Dealing with, not just with a spy story, but human frailties and betrayals. It's not just the yarn, but Holly Martin was a friend of Harry Lyme's. Or apparently. I don't want to hurt him anymore. Poor Tommy's been hurt enough. I've worked with Rip since then. There are certain actors who think, oh, I would just want to be around when he's performing. He's so surprising as an actor. His range is extraordinary, but he is always surprising. He doesn't draw on something that has worked before. I guess everyone does to a degree, but that's how people become, you know, the star system very often inhibits great actors. They find a vehicle that has suited them, and their agents and managers guide them. They say, listen, you always have to be the hero. They become a product more than the artist. And very often they want to do something else. But it's a corporation sometimes. This is a $12 million a year corporation and you have to do that. And they want to sometimes do a film to try and get them back to their beginnings. I just wanted to be an actor. I wanted to have a range of portraying different things. Well, listen, you're a star now. We want you to act the same way. It's rather sad, that aspect of many actors that aren't given the opportunity of men and women. Industry takes them over. There's our watcher, our observer. So at a rational level, one presumes that indeed the establishment already had pre-knowledge that that capsule was going to land. They'd been tracking it. But at a spiritual level, it rides along perfectly with Nick's maxim that you're always being watched, whatever you do. Yet again, Nick, someone is always watching you, Nick once said to me. David, whatever you do, don't forget, however alone you think you are, someone is always watching you. And unlike the, you don't read enough line, I thought he was joking. But that's the way the world... There's never any mention of the amount of time that's gone by in the film. There's absolutely nothing. We don't realise how closely bound to time. I mean, time slots on television and 30 seconds... I've lived through... a period where commercials in England used to be two minutes and a minute and a half. The idea of a 30-second commercial, a tension span in time, has changed. But it's still very much in our life. We have our human clock. So in talking to the artists when Paul and I were working on the script, with that in mind, it was astounding how often mentioning time came up, and I wanted to eliminate that. Even with that in mind, just to show how powerful our sense of time is, there was a scene with Rip Torn where they ask him how long he's been there at the space station, at Mr. Newton's complex. And he said, I've been here three months already. And it slipped by the contingent. I told everybody, you know, any mention of a period. We were post-syncing, Rip. in New York. And I said, I need to stop, play that back. And he mentioned three months. And we changed, I had to take it out. But I mean, it did slip by. And at the end of the film, we had the end of picture party and I'd got the artist's little presents and things. And Candy Clark had never owned a watch. She said, I can't, I love that idea because I've never, actually I've never owned a watch. That had also gone out of my mind. Her end of picture party present was a watch. She said, I cannot believe this. We've just spent three months making fun and you've given me a watch. That's an end of it that just slips by. Would you have done anything different? I've been asked many times about movies. Would you have done that? Of course I would do it again. Yes, maybe I'd cut it a bit tighter or maybe put in an extra line of... an expository title, but I think people today really want to judge it on what the film originally wanted to express for itself, not for another dip into the bag. Then the whole audience should say, well, I like that bit. Obviously, nothing is... is so perfect that there's not a frame out of place. They really bugged me the way he picked his nose. I'd like to have had it where they didn't pick his nose. I really didn't like the way she put the potatoes in the pan. I never do my potatoes that way. It can be endless. That's how versions come about. It's when the opinion people get in. And it comes out of nervousness, and I guess I understand there's a lot invested, and they're trying to safeguard the investors, but rarely, very rarely, I can't really recall films that have done so much better by taking five minutes out. And I guess that's why when it's released in its original version, I think it's a wonderful thing, because... at least then the film is speaking to whoever sees it how it wants to speak. It's not changing the words. We see that with politicians all the time. This is taken out of context. You're quoting me out of context. At least we see the whole speech. We hear the whole film. It isn't out of context. If we didn't like it the first time, we can at least say we didn't like it the second. Make up our own minds about it. That's why I think it's very important that films can have their say, the film must have its say, you know, completely its say. There are all kinds of aspects of the film that I find quite contemporary. The alcohol being one of the major stars of the movie, the degradation and destruction that it can bring to so many relationships is made very clear if you want to read it that way. That could be quite a point of the 90s, I think.

I think that its basic concept of the destructive forces that we exert on ourselves and each other, the humiliation and violence and revengefulness that we bring to our relationships is probably more understood now than it ever was in the 70s. And I think it pinpoints it far ahead of its time. I don't think that it is intrinsically a 70s movie. I find it gains strength and passion through the years. By our standards today, what was considered censorable then is absolutely lukewarm by today's standards. Something else is more censorable. I mean, we see changes, don't we? Uncle Tom's cabin is censored and sex isn't. Violence isn't. I mean, it's bizarre. History is censored and rewritten. I mean, everything is... That's a confusion of censorship, isn't it? Censorship is very bizarre. It's only about control, crowd control. That's all. It has nothing to do with morality. It's about crowd control, governmental crowd control, or whatever the group it is. However, the cyclic factor in this is that the great hostility and overwhelming dynamic feelings that are brought to the surface in their love scene Newton and Mary Lou's run parallel with the emphasis on violent sexual encounters in the last couple of years on screen. So, yet again, it's bang up to date in that particular area. The blue light, that's the one thing that, it's the slug-like look of everything under that blue light that I found. I find that very disturbing. Yes. Saying things to each other, what they can do here. I can do anything, which is wonderful. What is going on? Is this the person I knew? Of course you're not. Never the same person. Weird thing, it's only when they're older that they resort to other tools for eroticism. Yeah, they're getting into it. No, it's okay. This is a game. This scene doesn't offend young people because they think, is that what they need to get off on? They're jaded. You don't want to go back. Nick did take our basic personas and manipulate them to suit the needs of the story that he was to tell. Quite rightly. Now I'm very wary of people presuming that if they know enough about your life that it'll explain your art. I think that's not a sound foundation for judging an artist's work at all, because you're not expressing a private thing that is revealed. I don't think it's very interesting half of the time. I tend to find always that the work of the artist generally is much more interesting than the artist themselves, because they release these unknown sides of themselves. An artist very rarely knows what it is he's actually doing when he's creating something, and he often reveals depths of his unconscious that he had no idea he was revealing, and taps into aspects of himself that hitherto he'd not touched before. That's very apparent in Nick's work, and I think it's quite apparent in some of mine, that you get into corners that you've never been in before, corners of the soul more than the mind. think you're working from the mind some of the time but actually you're working from the soul people like putting people in boxes well essentially with a great great star from another form is almost at a tremendous disadvantage taking on another aspect of his creative art because He's only become a great star by impressing people with some sort of truth, and truth in that, in his work, and that's what they believe is the truth of the whole person. But, you know, a great star, a great actor, writer, performer, singer, very difficult to say, but this isn't, I can't express the whole of me. And that was something that... It was very difficult to rehearse. They would have to use another level of truth in them. It sounds pompous, but it isn't as pompous as it sounds. Nate could probably make a deal for you. I'll bet you you could probably go back. I always have great feelings of inadequacy when it comes to explaining any kind of art, anyway. I've always totally... You feel tongue-tied and inarticulate because you know you're only touching on most of the time the superficialities of it or the outside skin, so to speak. Someone like Eno holds to a completely different theory that if an artist can't explain his work, then his work's invalid. But that's a very postmodernist sort of thing. And I'm not sure if I buy that at all. But he's more concerned with concept than he is with sort of the thing that touches you spiritually Although he denied that, but it's true. Their relationship is almost static until key moments. We live our lives secretly to ourselves. We bottle it down and let it come up and go ahead day after day. But key moments happen. It's difficult to say how one envisages a film. I like to keep it fairly... I mean, a lot of people like to plot through the whole sequence of events and storyboard and have an overall picture of what will be the final movie. I have a very, very sketchy overall picture. I find it very difficult to rehearse scenes before coming to the set. And I suppose this is another reason why this story that leaps in time was attractive to me. Because, how can I put this? All knowledge is connected. We know that all things are connected. But we don't necessarily know how they're connected. And we don't know when they will be connected. And so, in general, the narrative flow in a story or a novel or a... the theater where one's bound to be rooted on a stage and you can't leap from scene to scene, it has to have a connection. I mean, just physically it has to have, not necessarily emotionally, but physically it has to have a connection because you can't just cut away from the actor on the stage. This is where the theater is... I've never felt that theater has anything to do with the cinema. The cinema and the theater are completely different mediums. I mean, that might sound... juvenile to say that, but people do confuse the idea because it's a drama. They have similarities. In fact, they have emotionally completely different effects, basically, because the theater is a state where you have a fixed audience, and the artist and the play is unfolding in front of his fixed audience, and in the cinema, it's a movable audience. You rush the audience outside. How many people are in the audience? Either two or two thousand. You rush them outside to have a look at a car pulling up at the curb and then rush them back inside to look at a woman looking at her watch and then you see a thought in their mind that you can't express in any other medium really at all.

I think Paul and I were working on something else at the time when I read the book, and it wasn't as though reading a book and thinking, oh, this is a great job. It touched off, and it seemed to me a great shell for thoughts or attitudes that I held at the time towards so many aspects of life in this film about being, as I say, not necessarily only science fiction, but he's a man away from his family. I mean, there are many things that... that made connections that I thought one could find within the shell of the plot, things about life. I think that that's why I'm drawn to many stories. I've always felt that the plot, though it's essential, of course, but it's really a shell inhabited by the characters and who they are, what kind of people they are, honest, dishonest, and whatever. The plots of all our lives are interesting. but how we inhabit them is more interesting. I wanted to get away from a normal sense of the passage of time through... It's more sometimes in... in a conversation, sometimes in a cut, sometimes in a dislocation from one office, in the case of Buck Henry, appearing in one office. The next moment, he's in a completely different office. There's a similar scene. Well, something must have happened. Some passage of time must have gone by. And not in a helpful way. We suddenly find ourselves in a different situation as if we strung out our own lives. cutting out all the lead up to it. We suddenly projected into a different place, but apparently doing the same thing. We're sitting here today, next week, probably having a similar conversation in a way, in a completely different place or next year. But it goes by, what is that expression? Time flies, but it takes a long time to live. It doesn't go by in an even way. And I wanted to get that sense of difficult to get away in any form of drama from the passage of time. You know, there are all kinds of phrases they use in movies. It's a time cut. You know, our lives are full of time cuts in a way. In hopeful times, time passes quickly. In depressed times, time passes slowly. It's never referred to throughout the whole film how long it's been. how long it takes. By not doing that, you're taking away another crutch, another familiarity from the audience, another disquieting thing. We had this extraordinary clock now, you know, it said nothing, nothing could be more than 90 minutes, you know, it's a two-hour film. You forget how that came about, you know, the two-and-a-half-hour film couldn't be shown for so many screenings, you know, in a theatre, because they had two, four, six, eight. and maybe at 10 o'clock, a fifth screening, whereas if it's two and a half hours or two hours and 15 minutes, you can't get the audience in and out, and you get three screenings instead of five. That's the reality of it. And so then they trained an audience to have a different time clock. It's nothing to do with the audience feeling that way. If it had been more profitable and they'd been happier to train an audience to sit for four hours in a movie, it would be, God, this movie isn't long enough. That would be completely reversed, I'm certain of that. We're trained to, you know, it's conditioning. We're conditioned, tremendously conditioned by forces, powers, and life. You know, we're conditioned. How can such an insane phrase as our attention span, you know, attention span is conditioning. I've had it said to me, oh, the Americans, attention span, well, suddenly Americans are born with different attention spans. It's conditioning. It's ridiculous. I don't know, maybe in the north of India, they're sitting looking at a flower for four hours. But if that Indian had been born in New York, he'd be able to look at it for two and a half seconds. It's nonsensical. It's conditioning. I'd already sort of been really tantalized by the idea of fragmentation, because I was quite a William Burroughs fan, you know, through the early 70s. And that in combination with Nick's realization generally that certain coincidences, things had collided in such a way that presented a third piece of information which none of us were aware of. And it would delight him when he saw these coincidences make sense, this order coming out of chaos, which of course has now become, again, in the 90s, The Order in Chaos is a substantial theory in science which was never thought or never sort of conceived in the 70s. And that element I think I took away. I invested that in a lot of my work throughout the rest of the 70s and sort of I guess it reached its own particular zenith it had with the work with Eno. My work was certainly informed by the coincidence and fragmentation process of working in this film with Nick. Very definitely. The act and fact of coincidence. And I changed my hairstyle. During the whole of the film, we'd see Beefeater's gin. Beefeater's gin. And that's her drink. Mary Lou's drink is Beefeater's. I thought, well, at least they would send us a crate. You know, you get some product placement, get some product placement stuff, material stuff. Because I like beef-eated gin. And not a word from them, and I think the publicity people were writing or saying, you realize, is there any chance of getting supplied with a couple of crates of beef-eated? Not a word from them. This was right at, I think, the last two days of the film. They go into the liquor store, and Candide goes and gets her. Oh, he's getting beef eaters, I think. And she said, anything you want, honey? And he said, I think I'd like to try this. We changed to Tanqueray. I thought, screw beef eaters. They didn't need to supply us with one bottle. We'll change it, but it was too late for Tanqueray. They didn't get it either, and neither did we.

At the end of a film, in many ways, unless you're in a tremendously, tremendously powerful position already, if you put up your own money, I guess you can do it, but then comes that dreaded word, opinion, before... The public are allowed to see it comes with a lot of opinions, you know, I'm sure. And we're bombarded with opinion and thoughts. Every kind of ruse is used by people with opinions because they can grab onto any kind of thought to expound their opinion. They can use either statistics or they can use the fact that you don't understand the community that you're in. And they have that weight on their side because, again, you're an alien. And in a lot of the ways, everybody else is an expert and you're the non-expert just trying to express an emotion. But then the experts come in and they usually have opinions.

Sandy Liebeson, actually, who produced the performance, said, I don't know how this film ever got made. I said, what do you mean? He said, there is no reason why any company should have ever made this film. There is absolutely no reason, as a producer and as an executive. He said, I don't know how it got made. And the producers at the time... I think they weren't looking at the subject. They weren't looking at the people involved. They were looking at, oh, that's a movie with David Bowie. They looked at record sales and they looked at everything except, probably has David except the script. They looked at everything, which was very lucky. I think this script was the casualty of this movie. Which was very lucky that it got made as a lot of things to really by accident. We sneaked by with it so that we had quite a lot of freedom, in fact. I don't think we even realised it ourselves at the time, but there was a certain amount of arrogance comes out of it. Only looking back does one think, oh, well, at the time, I'm sure we thought, oh, they want us very much to do this thing and they love it. Of course, they weren't looking at it at all. It was a complete mistake. Go ahead.

Strangely enough, I was thinking of you just the other day. How did you find me? Your record. It took me a while, but I traced you. Did you like it? Not much. I didn't make it for you, anyway. He says, I didn't like it. He says about the music, I didn't. Did you like it? Not much. Some odd lines that in films generally that I don't know how they happen, they're kind of miracles. I think that Scorsese has an enraging bull that is great because it's not only about the scene, it's about all kinds of life. It's when Jake and Sugar Ray, you know, he's in them. is beaten by him and Jake and what it looks like. But I'm still standing, Ray. I'm so sad when I look back at these things sometimes. I wonder where all the bric-a-brac went. The rings and the passports and the personal items. I had a very close friend, a girlfriend in Berlin when I was living there, who unfortunately was dying of cancer. And she underwent chemotherapy treatment and went bald. And I gave her the fedora. I'd kept that fedora all those years, and I gave her the fedora. She wore that until the day she died. Poor girl. But it had a good home for its last few months. So I know where that went. Mr Newton at the end, when the wait is up, I think Mr Newton's had enough now. He'd had enough. Not the boot. That's when I'd like to have ended it on a belch, just an involuntary human sound of relief. Finito. They won't meet again. They won't meet again. He didn't really tell him about Mary Lou. He won't look for him anymore. He's no longer a visitor. He's one of us.

What is that line? Do you know what makes God laugh? People who make plans. And he's saying, hello, is there anybody out there? No, comes the resounding reply. There's nobody out here for you, Mr. Rupert. Somebody must be.