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Quint sits down
with Peter Fonda to talk about 3:10 TO YUMA and DIRTY MARY CRAZY
LARRY! Holy Crap!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. This was probably my most interesting
interview at Comic-Con. Peter Fonda, man. I never would have
imagined I’d get to sit down with this guy, even for as
short a time as 15 minutes… and considering his prolific
and interesting career, that’s a very short time.
Still, we talk
a lot about one of my favorite films, DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY,
in which he is the Larry of the title and Susan George is the
Mary. So, this interview is divided by 3:10 TO YUMA and DIRTY
MARY CRAZY LARRY.
I’m not going to pretend I understand everything Fonda was
saying, but I can say I dug every second of it. He was pretty
much exactly what I hoped for when talking to him. Very nice,
a little out there and always laughing.
Enjoy the far out interview!
Quint: I’m
a really big fan. DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY is one of my favorite
movies, so…
Peter Fonda: (laughs) I had such a great time doing that film
and made such a pot of money, it’s unbelievable.
Quint: Oh yeah?
Peter Fonda: Yeah, generally speaking, when you have a profit
participation on the back end, you never see a dime… the
studio’s not going to let you have it, but it only cost
us $1.25 million to shoot it and it make so much dough they couldn’t
hide it.
Quint: That’s awesome.
Peter Fonda: I can’t tell you how much, FOX would get pissed
at me… I’m sorry, can I say that?
Quint: "What are you talking about?"
Peter Fonda: "This is for print?"
Quint: I’ve probably seen it a dozen times now. I first
saw it when Tarantino brought it to Austin. He does a film festival
there…
Peter Fonda: I’ve heard that, but I didn’t know that
he took DIRTY CRAZY there…
Quint: Yeah and it was one of the early ones and I was a young
man… I was a teenager and it blew my mind. It was so much
fun and Susan was so…
Peter Fonda: Susan George was great.Adam Roarke and I… every
day we would go to work and driving out… the two of us in
the same car, which is not usual… normally one actor wants
to have their own car and I’ve been out in busses going
to set… I’ve worked with Roger Corman. “Roger!
Where’s my trailer?” and he would say “See that
tree over there?” (laughs)
So Adam and I would go to work and we would do all this crazy
stuff like The Three Stooges back and forth and our gig was to
try to make the teamster laugh. We had a point system, where
if there was a shake of the shoulder, that was two points. If
there’s a smirk, that was five points. The ultimate part
of the game is if we got him out of the car walking away, like
he could not handle our…
By the time we got to the set, we were both so high in the sense
of energy and being nutty and crazy that we could do all of this
stuff.
You don’t see us, we were driving along and we have done
the scene… they’re still rolling, so I’d say “Look
at that” and Adam, not knowing what I’m going to do
was like “Yeah!” and (makes a sound like a car running
over something in the road) and he’d look back and “Man,
that was a baby…” “Yeah… five points.”
We’d just keep on feeding each other, so when it came to
the screen, there was a dynamic between our two characters that
you could feel, you could sense… so it transported above
just being one long car chase, which it really was and incredibly
cool stunts, but it wouldn’t have been as interesting or
dynamic for you had we not had characters that you wanted to
watch.
Quint: Yeah, well certainly.
Peter Fonda: And I loved that part and the interplaying character
being Susan George… She was perfect for it.
Quint: And then you have that great… the great cherry on
top, where you get out and you get away just to have that thing
come out of left field.
Peter Fonda: I wanted to do a different ending.
Quint: Oh, you did?
Peter Fonda: I came up to Leigh Chapman, the writer, and I told
her I said “Here’s what we should do… In a lot
of my films I’ve been dying… so this is what we ought
to do… get there and say ‘Hey it’s OK, we’ve
made it we’re in Daytona and I’d turn back and look
at him and we go like that. I turn back and hit the train. The
first way is I turn back and look at him… a turn look…
and we’d go airborne off a raised railroad track… just
give me a car that’s fast enough and I could take all four
wheels off the ground… Just go up there and have us suspended…
Cut to the same scene ‘hey you can slow down, we made it…
we’re in Daytona’ and I turn back and come back and
we hit the train.” The first part they’d be like “he
made it,” then “what’s that? whoa, he didn’t
make it…”
[Quint laughs]
Peter Fonda: We better see that again… That’s when
business happens… repeat business. I couldn’t believe
that in a little town of Livingston Montana, that played for
four weeks… There’s six thousand people in Livingston!
Quint: They loved it.
Peter Fonda: For four weeks…
Quint: I’m going to get so caught up in this and they are
going to be upset that we’re not talking about 3:10 TO YUMA…
Peter Fonda: Talk is what I do... walking is another thing I
do when motion pictures are happening… Walk and talk is
a necessity…
Quint: (laughs) Well, if you’re going to be an actor that’s
a pretty big part of it…
Peter Fonda: Well… Lionel Barrymore did pretty good in a
wheelchair and he couldn’t even walk, but he sure could
talk well.
Quint: Well yeah, then there were the earlier days where people
just walked and didn’t talk, so…
Peter Fonda: (laughs) That’s very true…
Quint: Have you ever seen the Glenn Ford Van Heflin film?
Peter Ford: Absolutely and I venture to say that Jim Mangold
is the kind of director… I don’t know how familiar
you are with his films, like his first film, HEAVY, is really
dynamic and worth seeing. Jim doesn’t do remakes… In
fact, it was a tough shoot… a lot of cold weather and a
lot of wind and dust and it was just so dusty, it was unbelievable…
it would come out of my nose and ears showering at the end of
the day and we had to go to a place called Diablo Canyon, outside
of Santa Fe, New Mexico… None of us liked it… Jim didn’t
like it, but it worked great for the character of the film. I
came to Jim and I said, “I’ve got it.” “What?”
“3:10 TO YUMA: RETURN TO DIABLO CANYON.” “I’d
never do that,” he said. I said “Oh no, we’ll
call it a Jimmy Goldman film.” He kind of looked at me funny…
Jim Mangold would
not do a remake. I think what he did was he saw the dynamics
of Elmore Leonard’s short story and realized inside that
dynamic, there was a character driven action film and that’s
a great thing, when you can mix that… it’s almost an
oxymoron those two words… a character driven action film
is what Mangold is able t o deliver in 3:10 TO YUMA and in that
sense, it not only transcends the original, which is kind of
bland… they didn’t get into really investigating the
characters the way Jim did with Christian [Bale] and with Russell
[Crowe] and with all of us in fact.
This action-western is infused with characters that have their
own dynamics that are undeniable and can not stop watching. When
you can deliver that… it’s like UNFORGIVEN, you can
not stop watching, because you’ve never seen that before
and my mantra is about that, because you know my first film was
in western, THE HIRED HAND, as a director… that expected
violence is accepted violence…unexpected violence is unacceptable.
That’s where I like to go. Because you see Randolph Scott
and John Wayne… you know “lead is gunna fly, somebody’s
gunna die…”
But in THE HIRED HAND you had no idea when this moment of violence
was going to come. It came out of nowhere and it was like “ah…”
and then there was a long bit of character development and then
at the end “bam bam bam…” heavy heavy action and
you don’t expect it… it’s unacceptable and you’re
left gasping.
[At this point he slips into talking about the 3:10 TO YUMA clip
that played during the panel, involving his character defending
his racing stage coach from robbers with the help of his shotty]
You expect some violence when dealing with a gang of robbers
and Pinkerton agents and I’ve got a shotgun… I mean
these guys don’t stand a chance against me. In three loads
I put… three times eighteen do the math… that’s
how many 30 caliber balls I put out in three pops.
Where everyone else was loading a six shooter… they’ve
got take that little plunger and casings out, because they expand
when they get hot and then by the time they’ve got their
second one in, I’ve already put out 38 rounds of 30 caliber
bullets… this is deadly… and that’s the way it
should be then, if this guy is a bounty hunter and he’s
protecting his stage, what better way to cut people down than
with a shotgun?
Quint: Yeah, definitely.
Peter Fonda: So you know that somebody is going to get hurt,
but you don’t… when Mangold does the turn around on
it, you didn’t expect that to happen. You knew something
was going to happen, but that you didn’t expect and this
is “Whoa,” and then inside that are these characters
that are delivered… Christian Bale playing this rancher
who is on such hard times and he has a bum leg and he has all
this stuff going against him. His ranch is going to be taken
away from him. He’s been dried up by the big money guys
that want to take the ranch away for the railroad that’s
coming threw… That all is typical western stuff, but the
dynamics that Jim Mangold puts inside that elevates it to a new
level and the action and the violence… although it can be
expected, the way it’s delivered is unexpected, so it’s
like “Wow, I didn’t want that to happen…”
When you see something like that as an audience, you see…
you did not want that to happen, you’ve got a good story
going.
Quint: Well, there’s
something about the western that really lends itself, especially
to this kind of story where it’s just these two big personalities
just clashing… just these two great actors being the leads
and then the great supporting cast like you and…
Peter Fonda: But there were supporters… we supported these
two great actors Gretchen Mol, myself, Ben Foster, who you’ve
probably talked to already, who is great in this movie and Dallas
Roberts, Alan Tudyk… Kevin Durand… these are good strong
characters.
Quint: You’re allowed to be kind of big and you’re
allowed to just have these… I don’t know, there’s
something about the western really lends itself to supporting
those kinds of characters and that’s one of the reasons
why I’m kind of depressed that we don’t get many more…
Peter Fonda: That’s true. Well, we’re going to have
two more that are coming after 3:10 and if it swings well then…
the axiom in Hollywood is “Westerns don’t make money,”
Well then explain UNFORGIVEN to me… explain DANCES WITH
WOLVES… explain all these…
Quint: The movie industry was formed on the back of westerns…
They carried…
Peter Fonda: I understand why we do westerns in movies, it’s
the American Mythology and within mythology you can discuss today’s
terms in yesterday’s idiom, like in science fiction…
you take today’s terms in the future idiom, so this is a
great way of developing character. You can teach without preaching.
You can develop a problem and you can make it somebody’s
problem inside what would be and probably be there… You’re
not going to be in the old west. You watch this movie and you’ll
see your dynamics set in the old west and suddenly those dynamics
are something that you forget it’s your dynamic and it becomes
the dynamic of everybody on the screen and therefore you become
a part of it.
If we’re able to do that in a motion picture, we’ve
got the audience. You’re used to watching things happen…
“Oh yeah… we’ve seen that,” but when you
forget you’re in a motion picture looking at a screen and
you’re in that screen… now we’ve put back the
dimension the camera loses, because camera’s only have one
eye, so we lose one dimension… and we can never put that
dimension back, at least none of my movies will, because I am
not into 3D. Other people are… that’s great for their
type of movies, but for my senses, all the people that make the
movie… the entire company… it’s not the cast and
crew, it’s the company and if you all work together…
all we’re trying to do is put back that dimension in that
lens. We can never do it, but if we all get there, there’s
something that will happen that’s so magical that when you’re
in the theater watching it there’s a chance that I might
transport you out of that seat and into that screen and you forget
you’re watching a movie.
I can do this as a movie maker. I can go to the movies…
I love the movies… I love the theater too; I’m a trained
stage actor. I can go and say “God that was a great cut…
that editors are on their… that was so cool… man that
was brilliant to have done that…” I can be away from
it and I don’t lose a bit of the story by saying “that
was a great cut…” then suddenly drop out of that and
be in that moment so much so that I’m going to discover
it like those characters are going to discover it. When you’re
in that discovering mode with the characters on screen, it’s
eye opening, then you get as close as you can to what I do on
stage.
Quint: Well and then there’s also an audience experience,
because you can actually feel that when you’re in an audience
and you’ll know that you’re not the only one transported
and there’s something about that shared experience.
Peter Fonda: That’s right. On stage however it’s the
sex of what I do… because we have intercourse with the audience
and you feel it right away… there’s a dionysm that
you can’t get on film, but if we do our job well as a company,
your job as the audience is taking it up and you’re transported
into the film. If that happens, you want to see it again. If
you want to see it again, we a have a repeat audience… if
we have a repeat audience, we have a hit film… then we can
make another western.
Quint: Yeah, we need to change that axiom.
Peter Fonda: Absolutely.
Quint: Well, what are you doing now? What’s up next for
you?
Peter Fonda: Well, this and normally what I’ll say is Ben
and I’ll get on a plane at an ungodly hour on Monday morning
to go to Boston and normally I’ll say “if there’s
film in the camera and money in the bank, what time do you want
me there?” If there’s no film in the camera and no
money in the bank, you’ll see me when I get there, but you
know what? I got paid a lot of dough for this movie and I owe
it to the studio, the people who paid me that money, to get every
chance to get their money back.
I’ve been
doing this for forty-five years and I’ve learned how to
do it very well and I don’t like doing it in terms of getting
up that early to do a morning talk show, so what I’ll do
is on talk shows, you know you’re talking to people driving
cars to work… how boring can it be… and you’re
listening to people that you listen to everyday, but they’ve
never heard me on that show and it’s radio, so they can’t
see, so I’ll just suddenly take off “I know you’ve
been looking at this jar I’ve got sitting here, it’s
kind of murky, but you have to believe me… this is Hitler’s
brain” and they’ll look at me, because they didn’t
expect that and two of the DJ’s whoever it is… the
radio jocks… I’ll say “oh yeah, the thing is I’m
trading this to a fellow in Paraguay who’s got five slices
on Lenin’s brain, so if you know anything about history,
you’d realize that the Soviets actually sliced up Lenin’s
brain to figure out why this guy was doing what he was doing…
he’s a fucking commie… excuse my use of the French-Canadian
idiom, but you know the people in the car are like “What’s
he saying?” and suddenly they’re listening to the show
and all of a sudden I’ll be like “Do always wear your
bra outside of your clothes… I love lingerie, but that really
is sexy…” that captures it, so suddenly the drive to
work becomes very interesting and what I’ve done, rather
than being very bored having to get up from bed early to talk
to a morning show it becomes exciting to me and I’ll walk
out feeling incredible…
So I’ll take something that I don’t like doing and
I make it fun and you would never know that I’m not liking
any minute of it, but I’ll never let you know that, but
I know that you know that I know you know…
Adam and I would do this all the time. Look… in DIRT CRAZY
it was always… “Look, I know you know, but you know…yeah
I know that you know I know,’ and we’d just go back
and forth until we’d get that level and then start the scene…
And Susan George’s watching this like a ping pong game going
“Where do I fit in this?” Which is exactly your character
in that movie!
With that I was
pulled away. Told you it was an experience. And I can say having
heard it first hand and listening back over the audio that the
transcription is accurate, even cleaned up slightly to make it
a little easier to read.
I have one more
picture to share with you before I call it a night (I have about
5 or 6 hours I can get before I have to be on the road to actually
catch the 3:10 TO YUMA). If you remember, I ran a talkback no-prize
Caption Contest for my Dane Cook/Jessica Alba interview. I got
another one for ya’. I couldn’t resist.
Much respect to
Mr. Fonda. I had a blast with this and a great time talking to
the man himself. Can’t wait to see the flick.
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