- Nonfiction filmmakers were afflicted by two problems, one technical, the other spiritual. Technically, they did not have the equipment to do the sort of work I had in mind. Spiritually, they didn't care about the work because they'd been mistrained. They'd been mistrained because their equipment was so heavy and complicated that it made it impossible to shoot in situations where you could really capture reality. This problem couldn't be solved until somebody figured out how to cut the equipment down to a load that anybody could carry.
- Richard Leacock and I ran into a guy who knew how to carve up a camera, and we had him carve one up for us. We had him chop it down and change the gears from metal to plastic, which would cut down on the sound it made when it was running. The front end was rebuilt to take a zoom lens, which these cameras couldn't do; The thinking was that if you change how movies are made, it might be possible to make a different kind of movie.
- I thought a bit about what it was about Ernie Pyle and his writing that made an impact on me, and I think it had to do with the fact that he was recording what life was like for these men - the little details of their days.
- The first time I dealt with him (John F. Kennedy) was to make Primary (1960). I found him very refreshing. Straightforward. He had questions, we had answers, and we made a deal. He was quite different from Hubert H. Humphrey, or anybody else for that matter. My proposal to him was that we would simply see what happened to him in his life for a certain period of time. There would be no interviews, no lighting, no direction. We'd just see what happened. He liked that idea.
"Later, when I showed him Primary and our film on Fidel Castro; over two nights, again I found him straightforward, smart, curious. When I showed him Primary (1960), he'd been elected but not sworn in. About 10 minutes in, he yelled, 'Hey, get Joe up here.' Joe, of course, was his father [Joseph P. Kennedy]. He liked the movie.
"He hadn't seen himself this way before. If you think back on how television was, and how in some ways it still is, you realize that Kennedy had never really seen himself in action. He only saw sound bites-little pieces of himself giving a speech someplace. In Primary (1960) he saw himself day after day in different situations. There had never been a film like that on a president. That was the whole idea.
"After the screening of Primary (1960) he said, 'What do you want to do next?' I said [that] I'd like to do a film about a president in a crisis, having to make decisions with his back to the wall. He liked that, and again, think about why he would like it. He'd seen images of presidents before, but they had no connection to the job as he knew it. They were all just pictures of people shaking hands in front of automobiles. He thought about it and said, 'Yes, I can see the idea. Imagine if I could see what happened in the White House in the 24 hours before we declared war on Japan.'
"I was staggered that the president would not only get the idea, but take it away from me and run with it. The process of making Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963) started with Kennedy saying, 'If you want to do a film like that, you better come down to the White House and shoot in the Oval Office for a while and see if I can forget you.' In the Oval Office the president is absolutely alone unless he invites someone else in. It's an intrusion. But I was feeling my oats at the time, so I said 'I don't want to shoot a picture of his man at a desk. I want to shoot a picture of a man with his back to the wall, making decisions.' He'd been very pleasant up to that point, but then a steely look came into his eye, and he said, 'You'd better come down and shoot a test.' - On the making of the ABC Special 'Adventures on the New Frontier': "You saw the president serious, angry and laughing. You saw him slapping his sides and kidding around with his sister. Nobody outside the White House had ever seen a president depicted in that way before. Even during Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963) you saw a more somber president, during a more one-note, difficult time.
"He forgot about us so completely that at one point he was talking about joint maneuvers off Cuba. The country hadn't gone into Cuba yet. A general who was there had to remind him there was a camera in the room shooting. He looked at me and grinned. I grinned back, and we walked out."
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