Interview With Lionel Chetwynd

MJ: Would you tell us, give us a brief overview of your career in film and television over the years?

LC: Ok. I began writing what we call television specials out of New York. Actually, the first thing I did was a stage play in London, a musical, then I found my way into special...the very early dramatic stuff on television was done on film as opposed to tape, in sort of the early to mid 1970's, then went on to features, then came back to miniseries and television, then did cable films and features, and I guess there's about 45 of them now in the last 20 some odd years. Less than 25, but more than 20.

MJ: Which film do you find that you're the best known for, best recognized

as being involved with?

LC: It depends on the age group. For older people there's a film called

"The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz," which was quite successful in its

day; Richard Dreyfuss' first credit. It was mine. I was very fortunate. I

was blessed with an Oscar nomination for that, which was very helpful in a

career sense. And for a long time, that, you know, that was the thing

wherever you went. And at first people would say, "I saw your film and I

loved it." And then a little time would go by, and they'd say, "Yeah, I

remember that film. It was a few years ago. I loved it." And then, "Oh, I

saw that film when I was in high school," and then "My father took me to

see that film when I was..." you know, so it kind of goes... I did "The

Hanoi Hilton," which was the story of the American prisoners of war who

were held in Hoalo Prison in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, some for as long

as eight years. That film then became something for which I was well known.

It was told through their point of view, and I tried to plumb the questions

of honor and fidelity and group identity in the face of great ordeal. So

that was the film for the while, and then I did a film called "To Heal a

Nation," which was the story of the building of the Vietnam Veterans

Memorial, and I hope I'm going to be best known for a film I've yet to do.

MJ: What's the title of that one?

LC: "The Film I'm Going to be Best Known For."

MJ: When you do a film like "Hanoi Hilton," for instance, what part were

you involved in the development of it, and can you just take us through the

process?

LC: In "The Hanoi Hilton" I was approached by a friend of mine at the time,

Steve Dart. He said he had this, would I like to do it? And I said, "Yes."

We went around, we got a development deal on it at ABC, actually,

originally to do four hours. Did that, developed it, then Steve dropped

out, and I continued carry it around. Every time I went to a meeting I'd

have a copy under my arm.

MJ: A copy of the script.

LC: Yeah, yeah. And eventually Golan/Globis, Menachem Golan had been a

fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force, and so he identified with it, you

know, the predicament of guys who'd been shot down, and so he decided, "We

can make the film." So typically I'm involved from the beginning through

the sale. And then if I'm producing it, then right through to the very end.

If...sometimes just a writer for hire, and I write it, and send the baby

off into the world, and hope the foster parents do well by it, you know.

MJ: How long does it typically take, the entire process, from beginning to

end?

LC: Well, it could really... that's an enormous variation, you know. "The

Hanoi Hilton" took me ten years from the time I started to the time we got

it made. I mean, ten years. A lot of things happened. I got a lot older.

Then we did "Ruby Ridge," which was the story of the FBI siege at Ruby

Ridge, where Randy Weaver was killed. That's four hours, it's an enormous

undertaking. I began that just before Thanksgiving, which would be November

of the one year, and it was on the air in May. In the air, I mean, you

know, so that was... so it can vary in that. That would be about six

months. Six months to ten years, you know.

MJ: Who are some of the actors and actresses that you've had a chance to

work with over the years that we might know?

LC: I'm very lucky with that, actually. The very first film was Richard

Dreyfuss, and then Randy Quaid, and did two more with Randy. Let's see, we

had Orson Wells in "It Happened One Christmas," that was fun. More

recently, Alan Arkin, more recently Robert Duvall, which was a tremendous

treat, Ben Kingsley, Matthew Modine, my wife Gloria. My wife Gloria Carlin,

who's been in a lot of these films. She co-starred with Stacy Keach in "Two

Solitudes" which was the story of the French and the English in Canada in

1917, which was the great conscription crisis. The French did not wish to

be, the French being Canadians did not wish to be conscripted into the

Anglo army. She was in "Goldenrod," that was with Tony Lobianco and Donald

Pleasance, Stacy Keach was in "Two Solitudes," who else.... Oh, Jean-Pierre

Aumont, the great Jean-Pierre Aumont. There was a lot of them. Eric Roberts

who was in "To Heal a Nation," Steve Guttenberg, all of those people that

became t.v. stars were in "Miracle On Ice," the story of the team that won

the gold medal, remember the American hockey team... Lou Gosset in "Sadat"

was really interesting. That was... He played Anwar Sadat, and it was just

extraordinary fidelity. That was a real treat. And, as I say, watching Bob

Duvall play Adolf Eichmann is not without its fascinations, really quite

amazing, quite amazing. So I've been quite fortunate with that.

MJ: What was it like working with Richard Dreyfuss on his first film?

LC: It was like being around a lot of dyna... lightning, you know? I mean,

he was incredibly frenetic. He's calmed down somewhat now, though he still

bounces off the walls, I mean, he's...

MJ: Literally.

LC: Totally kinetic energy, I mean it's all there, and it's all happening

all the time. Electricity's coming through the air, you know, it's just

breathless when he comes in the room. And he was very intense then, he was

very intense, and everything was personal. He's changed a bit over the

years. But we're still good friends, and we're very different politically.

He's very liberal in his views, and I'm moderately conservative, so we

still argue and have a good time. It's been interesting watching Richard

from the beginning to where he is now, through the winning of the Oscar. He

is a success story, not simply in terms of his career, but as a person, and

where's he's come to, and how he's matured.

MJ: Do you consider yourself a director or a writer, or a director-writer,

or...?

LC: It depends on the job I'm applying for. I mean, basically, I'm a

writer, that's how I came to do what I do. I still think it's the most

important part of the process, I think it's more important than directing.

I enjoy directing if it's a film I am really committed to, you know, and

"The Hanoi Hilton," I didn't want anyone else to touch it. I felt I had a

sacred trust, you know, but it's the writing that I love, and the writing

that I get excited about doing. The rest of it is more mechanical, I think.

MJ: How have you seen Hollywood change over the years, even the process of

bringing projects forward and so forth?

LC: Two things that happened, which seem to be contradictory, but, and it's

very curious. On the one hand, I've seen what I think is a deterioration in

the presentation of ideas and characters and human life. I was watching a

documentary on Alfred Hitchcock the other night, and he said, "Drama is

life with the boring parts cut out." And you really can't say that about

Hollywood movies. With the rise of the director, Hollywood movies have

become really smash and grab, and you know, splatter blood on the walls,

and do whatever it is you will. So on the one hand, I think there's been a

real, a genuine deterioration in the craft of storytelling with human

terms. This has been matched at the same time with an extraordinary rise in

the self-righteousness of the people making the movies, that everyone seems

to think that they're curing pediatric cancer. I mean, you know, people

come out with films that are... and everyone's, "This is an important film,

this is relevant," relevant being a terribly important word. Those are the

two things I've noticed. It seems to be when I first came here, I came out

to Hollywood 19 years ago, 20 years ago, people understood that this was an

entertainment medium, and that the primary, and your primary responsibility

to the material was kind of a fidelity to truth, you know? And that's no

longer the case. I mean you see these incredibly exaggerated views of...

and films have come to dwell, like daytime talk shows in the United

States, on the strange and the odd and the bizarre and the grotesque and

the... You know, you watch these shows, you know, "She slept with her

boyfriend's mother" or whatever it is, shudder, and that seems to have

happened to this part of the popular culture as well. Interesting that the

Oscar nominations all this year were mainly English films that dealt with

smaller themes, so maybe there's a longing inside the community to get back

to what, you know, to the days of films like "Hud" and "The Last Picture

Show," and those are both Larry McCurtry. But that type of film. Maybe

there'll be a return to that. But that's what's missing.

MJ: Around about the time of "Hanoi Hilton," there were quite a number of

Vietnam themed movies. There was Oliver Stone's movies, there was movies in

the late '70's. What did you think of those competing films, and some of

them were more successful than yours. Why? Why was that?

LC: Well, I have managed to never comment in public upon "Platoon"

particularly. Here's the thing about those films. They were done from many

different points of view. The country itself had been very conflicted about

what Vietnam was about, and why we were there, and why these things have

happened. The thing that made "The Hanoi Hilton" different than the other

films was, it was an attempt to look at the experience through the eyes of

the men who had been there, specifically POW's, what they saw as prisoners

of a closed society, what they learned and understood about the North

Vietnamese. That they weren't... you know, the popular opinion in Hollywood

was that North Vietnamese were sort of these pacific people, who left to

their own devices would were saffron robes and sell rafia work to tourists.

Well, that's because the ones that got in there... It's a closed society.

You're only going to see, hear, and learn what they want you to see, hear,

and learn. What the POW's saw was not that at all. They saw very

sophisticated, highly manipulative people, understood how to play the p.r.

card, were way ahead of us in that sense. At the time, that was a very

unpopular view, and so the film did not enjoy the great.. and the company

that made it, Cannon, was going under at the time, which didn't help, did

not enjoy anywhere near the success of "Platoon." But it probably held its

own with film like "Hamburger Hill." What's interesting about "The Hanoi

Hilton" though, is the steady sale of cassettes in all the years since

then. We're up to the hundreds of thousands of cassettes. It's still an

enormously popular film. It led me into a long term relationship with the

Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Now I'm on the National Sponsoring Board of

that. It is the most popular film, Vietnam film amongst Vietnam veterans.

It is the film that they will tell you if... it comes up constantly on the

surveys, ahead of "Apocalypse Now," ahead of "Platoon," ahead of those. So

that's one of the good things about... film's forever, you know, once it's

up there, it's forever. And maybe long term, "Hanoi Hilton" will be seen as

valid, as as valid a discussion of what that war was about for the people

who fought it, as these other films, which at the time just hit. You know,

I mean, Oliver Stone has a capacity to touch what the people want and need

to hear at that particular moment. He knows how to do that. He's very much

a man of his time. I have not been blessed to a man of my time. He is very

much a man of his time, but, you know, that may not be a man for the ages.

You don't know.

MJ: Your wife was in "Hanoi Hilton." Tell us what role she played, and

also, what is it like working with your wife?

LC: Gloria played... The character's name in the script was Paula. It was

widely interpreted as Jane Fonda, but Jane Fonda was only one of many

people who went there. There was also a woman called Cora Weiss, who was

the one who went there and then reported back to the Vietnamese what the

American prisoners had told her. And that resulted in some cruel

mistreatment, and in one case quite possibly a death, or more than one, you

know, I'd have to get back into that to know what, exactly what that was.

But it was called the Jane Fonda role, and she took a lot of heat for it,

because it was interpreted... Gary Franklin in particular got really

unhappy...

MJ: A movie critic.

LC: Oh yes, right, yes. A movie critic, a self-proclaimed custodian of the

conscience of Hollywood. You know, how dare we beat up on a great American

lady. So Gloria took a lot of heat for it. It's wonderful to work with her.

I mean, you know, we've been married all our lives, since we were

teenagers, raised our children together, and it's terrific to have her

around, and she's a great script editor too, from years of reading my

material, and she's very courageous. She's a fine, fine, wonderful actress.

So whenever I can, then we try and do that, and the film we just finished,

called "Color of Justice" which we shot in Toronto and in New York, which

is about race and the criminal justice system, she plays the female lead in

that, with Judd Hirsch and Gregory Hines and F. Murray Abraham and Bruce

Davidson. So, you know, that's good. When that happens, it's great.

MJ: You've recently teamed up with Ted Turner to make several films on the

Bible. What is that about, and what is the importance of those films to

you?

LC: Well, the Bible was a series I undertook in cooperation with a... it's

a co-production with Rome. They had done one on Abraham, and it was sort of

coming apart a little bit, and that was when they called me and asked me

was I interested, and I said, "Well, yes I am," because I'm a member of the

Biblical Archaeology Society, I'm fascinated by Bibles. If you look around

my room, you'll see I have a Bible collection. And so I jumped at that, you

know. I mean, look, the Bible is the central book of wisdom of western

society, you know, this part of the world. For me it's a book of questions,

not a book of answers. It is about, and the reason that is, is because it

is about free choice, it is about the fact that... I mean if you could take

the Bible and say, "What the Bible means in one sense, when it talks about

God, is God is that thing, that entity that can do anything." It is the

totally omnipotent entity, right? God can choose to do anything God chooses

to do. So God says, "I'm going to jump over this building," God jumps over

the building. Now, I can't do that. I can't choose to do anything. I have

limited choices. I wish I could jump over this building. I wish a number of

things, but I can't. But to the extent that I do have free choice, to that

extent I can be like God, I can emulate God. That is a divine spark in me.

It is a divine spark in all people, the ability to choose to do right or

wrong at any given moment. And not all religions believe that, you know.

Islam, I believe that, well, Islam is a form of the word of "submission."

It is much more about, you know, cupping your hands to capture the

blessings of God. Eastern religions, some of them are much more fatalistic,

I mean if you take Confucianism, others are right in free choice. The thing

about the Bible was, if you could do the Bible stories that remind people

that they can choose to do right or wrong, they can choose to be who they

are, then you will... and these are the questions that are posed to you

about how you would use your free choice, 'cause that's what the Bible

stories are about. They're stories that say, "Look at the questions that

these people have to deal with. They might not have chosen correctly. How

would you have chosen?" you know. Then in a society like America where we

are under the social pathologies that affect this country, the general

breakdown in civility. The loss of a central set of beliefs that unify us

around common virtues and common ideas that lead to a common destiny...

That, you know, that that was worth the effort to do it. Like I said, we're

not curing pediatric cancer, but it was an opportunity for once to do

something about something that used to be very important in American life,

and may well have helped America achieve its greatness, that has somehow

been forgotten. So I got really excited about it and enjoyed it, and it was

a terrific experience.

MJ: How many have you done of these?

LC: I did ten hours. Two hours, the first two hours with Jacob, it was

directed by Sir Peter Hall, and that was with Matthew Modine and Lara Flynn

Boyle And Jacob is a very interesting story. He goes off to his

father-in-law because of arguing between the brothers. It was all this

great stuff. Then the next was Joseph. That was four hours. And that was

with Ben Kingsley with Paul Mercurio, the boy from, young man from

"Strictly Ballroom." And that's a great story, that's a great story of

triumph and quest that really talks about, and addresses questions of

loyalty, of family, of obligation. Sorry.... Of loyalty, of family, of

obligation, and Ben Kingsley was a treat. You know, he had to try to... I

remember when I did Moses. Now Ben Kingsley was Moses, and Frank Langella

was Pharaoh. We did four hours of Moses. and that's also... deals with the

issues of freedom. I mean, you know, the, you know, I mean whole story of

that journey, are these people coming to understand that it's harder to be

free than it is to be a slave. And the yearning amongst many of them for

that slavery, for that life, which with all of its bitterness, removed from

you all kinds of responsibilities. And that brought us to the end of the

first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, the Torah, and then

other people went on to Judges and Kings which is more interesting stuff to

do, but is not really about ideas, it's about behavior.

MJ: You moved quickly from Bible characters to Henry Kissinger and Richard

Nixon.

LC: Ah yes. Henry and Dick. Well, that was a book, now, that book

actually... Richard Dreyfuss and I acquired that book originally. Richard,

and Judy James was his partner, were the ones that first got interested in

the book, "Kissinger," by Walter Isaacson, who's now the editor-in-chief

of......managing editor I guess of Time Magazine. And that was 600 pages,

and begins with Kissinger's grand... It's called "Kissinger," it had

nothing to do with Nixon, called "Kissinger," and it's set in Germany,

and it begins with his grandfather back in... and ends some time in the

near future I think. But we chose to do... what I wanted to do was just try

and find some manageable piece. You know, they say, "Ontology replicates

philogeny," or the other way around. The point being, like RNA, can you

find that little molecule within the cell that describes the whole

creature. And... carefully reading the book, you know, we said, "well maybe

the way peace came to Vietnam would be a way to do it." And it's important,

because that administration was where... this had been coming for some

time, since Kennedy, but it crystallized, this trend of confusing policy

and politics and personality became totally confused in the Nixon years.

And that's where we started to go wrong. You know, personality is a good

thing when you're running for office, which is politics, but when you're

governing, it shouldn't be about that. It should be about policy. And I

think that's the problem we're having right now, is that by the time you

get to Bill Clinton, I can't distinguish. You know, I mean, at least in

that administration you could clearly see how policy was in conflict with

the politics of the situation, and how personalities would resolve it. You

know, the thing of, to do about this White House is you can't tell the

difference. It's all the same damn thing, you know. And so I thought it

would be really interesting, and the coming of the peace in Vietnam was, by

the time we were done, it was no longer "Kissinger," it was "Kissinger and

Nixon." You know, it really was a two hander, because you couldn't

understand one without the other.

MJ: If we look back at all of your work so far, and granted, you have more

works coming...

LC: We hope so, yeah.

MJ: Is there a theme running through it that we could recognize, or should

be able to recognize?

LC: If... It's funny. Someone asked me that the other day. I thought, "God,

how pompous to think you have a theme to your work...your body of work..."

I mean, the things that interest me are ambiguity, you know, trying to find

the truth in ambiguity, you know, I love "Rashomon" that's why. It's a...

You know, that should form part of the cannon too that we learn. The... it

was done here as a film too called "The Violator" which was very

interesting, not as clever as... well, maybe, in its own way. I'm very

interested in ambiguity, I'm very interested in the relationship of people

to God, and why people do what they do. So much greatness is achieved by

impulsive behavior. So much evil comes from impulsive behavior, you know.

Where there are not individuals who strike out in a new direction... you

know, there's always a great danger of stasis, and that ambiguity of when

they move forward, whether they veer to evil or to good is fascinating, and

I would like to think, you know... because it's when ordinary people...

That's what I loved about Sadat, you know, and he was so good, Lou Gosset,

'cause Sadat was a very ordinary man who should never have, never have

stepped into the stage, the world stage the way he did. And yet he did, and

he made it work. It happened for him. You know, what do people do in

those... so this is what I thought was interesting about Kissinger and

Nixon, and of course, you know, Eichmann, which is, you know, I mean, you

know, there's a guy who just struck off and he went off to be evil, and the

examination of that. Any of that make any sense? I'm not sure.

MJ: So you're often capturing, consciously or not, individuals who strike

out on their own, and do their own thing, rise up against something?

LC: It's very often one takes, one is taken to that, yeah. Sometimes people

strike out on their own, and sometimes they simply find themselves there. I

mean, that's what happened with Randy Weaver. I mean, he just, he didn't

intend to end up there.

MJ: Or Moses.

LC: Or Moses. You know, Moses particularly, you know, "Why are you doing

this to me," and "Get out of my face, God. I don't want anything to do with

this." Sometimes you just find yourself there. Somedays, you know,

sometimes in life you wake up and say, "I don't know I got here. Now how do

I deal with it?" And I guess the impulse is usually to walk away, you know?

But some people don't. And then they can create change I guess. That's

interesting but... like I said, at the end of the day, that's... they're

only movies, you know. They're not...

MJ: What projects are you working on these days?

LC The current one that is now finished and is going off to begin its life

is a co-production between Yorkshire in England and Barbra Streisand's

company here, Barwood. It's the story of Darian Fry, who was a man, a very

foppish man, a very particular and precise man, who went to Marseille in

1940. Marseille was really what Casablanca was, but they figured, "Hey, a

movie called 'Marseille' won't sell. 'Casablanca' will." And he there found

Marc Chagall and Hana Harand and all of these refugees, and he brought them

out. This foppish man ended up climbing up mountains and doing all kinds of

extraordinary things. very... Just an extraordinary man. Which is in

keeping I guess, what we're talking about. And that is about now to go off

to casting. And lying behind that is a film for Ron Howard's company

Imagine, which is about current politics within the Catholic church, and

it's a thriller, set against the background of the Vatican, and the Roman

Catholic church in the United States. And then one about Jeffrey McDonald,

the Green Beret doctor, who Joe McGuinness said was guilty, and has done 20

years in prison for crimes I am absolutely persuaded he did not commit. And

after that... And then I'm doing some documentaries for PBS. And after then

I'm going on holiday.

MJ: Would you tell us about your family for a moment, about how you've

managed to stay married to one woman all these years?

LC: 'Cause I was lucky. She didn't throw me out. No, we got married as

teenagers, I don't know, and Gloria's a great believer in past lives, and

she believes that that was fated, and she's probably right, because it

worked. And we've been together... We have two boys. The younger one, well,

the older one, he's a linguist, speaks, like yourself, speaks, he speaks a

little Japanese, he speaks Mandarin and Arabic and Hebrew and Russian and

French and that melange of languages. And he is currently in the Far East,

where he's working as a journalist. And my younger son is also a

journalist, worked with the Wall Street Journal an

d U.S. News &World Report, and has recently left there to take a job as a

film reporter at the Hollywood Reporter. He was a professional baseball

player as well, has his masters in journalism. He played in the Big Ten,

the Big Ten league, Northwestern. So he's a serious ballplayer. He's a good

ballplayer. It's very exciting to have a kid who played professional ball.

His first paycheck he ever got from a professional baseball club, I got,

you know, one of these big blow-ups, and I'm going to frame it and give it

to him to hang on his wall.

MJ: How did your kids survive this sort of Hollywood environment, growing

up here in the Beverly Hills area? What did you think, and how did you

raise them differently?

LC: Well, you know, we talk about that, and we've talked about that

recently, especially, my younger son is back here now, engaged. We've

talked about that. I... I don't know, I just really... We loved our kids

very much, we just really loved them, and we were there with them, and you

can live here and make a living. It may be tougher if you're a producer.

You really have to be out there and having brunch and doing all those

things. But that was what good about writing. I didn't have to go on

audition, I'd send them the script, it was either good or it wasn't good.

And so during the years the kids were growing up, we were pretty resolutely

bourgeois. We were very middle class, I was very active in Little League,

relics are all around, and never worked on the weekends, never went to

brunches, never went out, spent all that time with the kids, that was just

all that time. And we rarely went out at night, we just, you know, it was a

job, and this is where we worked. The interesting thing is that, so you

think that you're presenting a view of normality to your kids, right? You

know, but they're so smart. Neither of my kids will ever be in this

business. They formed a very negative opinion, correctly so, I think. Boy,

listen, I'm cynical today. You caught me on a cynical day. But they

withstood it because they have character, it's nothing I did. You know, the

thing about kids, I've come to believe, after watching a lot of it, is it's

all luck. I know wonderful parents whose kids are just totally unable,

totally incomprehensible, and I know terrible parents whose kids are just

gems, you know? So, you just love your kids, hold your breath, and hope

that, you know, 30 years later you can say, "Well, ok, it worked out so

far."

MJ: Tell us about some of the travels you've been making around the world

since.......recently.

LC: Recently, we had a research trip I had to take to France, to Marseille,

in fact. So we went to London 'cause, you know, I was born there, and

friends and family. We went to Marseille, but then it's cheaper to fly

around the world that it is to go back and forth to Los Angeles, so we kept

going, you know, and went to Hong Kong to see it before the turnover, and

then to Taipei to visit my son, and then we had..... gonna to go to Japan,

it was Gloria's first time going to Japan, and we didn't have much time,

not enough time to go to Kyoto. So I thought, "Well, you know, we'll go to

meet them, we'll go into... I know, we'll get a hotel, and we'll go into...

and she can look at the Ginza," and you know, and we're looking at the

options with a limited amount of time. And a friend of ours who knows

Japan, certainly a lot better than I do, said, "No, don't do that." He

said, "Stay at the airport." And I said, "Well, you know, I like Japan, you

know." "No, no," he says. "Stay at the airport," and he said, "20 minutes

from your hotel is this village of Narita. Go there. Go and have dinner at

a place called The Chrysanthemum," which is unpronounceable to me. And

that's what we did. And I was astounded. I thought, you know, Narita would

be, like, I don't know, like Narita was the airport. And in fact it there

was this glorious temple. It was this small community of narrow streets and

sounds and smells that was wonderful. It was just, that was one of my...

Really, I remember that was my, honestly, I will remember that as one of my

high spots of all the visits to Japan, better than Osaka, better than any

of those things, just that quiet moment, and quiet. And you can hear the

wind chimes, and the temple is outstanding. So now I've been telling my

friends, "Whatever you do, make sure you get to Narita," you know. Nobody

believes me. They all want to go to the Ginza. I'm very interested in what

we have traditionally called the Far East, from California, I guess, it's

the real, you know, the Pacific Rim. And hope to go there more frequently.

I think the... there's something very important to be learned about

societies that can modernize from the economic point of view, can

democratize socially and politically, and yet not lose a long standing

cultural identity. And there's something to learn there. I would like to

learn that. I certainly won't go into that. I should think, you really

learn that in Japan, and whether one can learn it, the extent to which one

can learn that from China, I guess we're going to see over the next few

years as China changes. But there is something very seductive about that

part of the world.

MJ: Assuming you still have much work ahead of you, how would you like to

be remembered as a director, as a man, as a writer? What would you like it

to be said about you?

LC: Oh, boy. "Bill Clinton; his place in history." You know, that... the

one I really would like to think... this is very pretentious you know, to

talk like this about one's own work, but, when I was starting out and I was

having trouble, Bill Goldman told me two things, he said to protect the

part of you that writes," and he said, "Always find the truth in that." I

would hope that over time the things that I have done will stand up to the

test of truth, that they were truthful, that I didn't change facts to suit

my point of view. That that may be the difference. You know, "J.F.K." is

not my favorite film. I would like to think that that's what people would

say at the end of the day. "Well, you know, right or wrong, at least he was

trying to be truthful, to be honest." That's got to count for something.

And that hardly anyone ever got killed in any of my movies. It's very rare

anyone gets killed in one of my movies. In maybe 40 movies, maybe 10. They

were all real people, I mean, you know, so... but they weren't violent, I

don't know.

MJ: Truth.

LC: Truth. It's about truth. You've got to find the truth in it in the end,

you know. And that's the truth in the thing itself and a larger truth. I

have a thing on my wall that I used in a film that I did, that I wrote and

directed, called "So Proudly We Hailed," which is about neo-Nazis. It's a

quote from Martin Neimoller, in Dachau in 1944. He was a Protestant

clergyman. He said, "In Germany they came first for the Jews, but I wasn't

a Jew, so I didn't speak up. And then they came for the trade unionists,

but I wasn't a trade unionist, so I said nothing. And then they came for

the Catholics, but I wasn't a Catholic, so I didn't speak up. And then they

came for me, and by then there was no one left to speak up." So there's

also that larger truth about the world in which you live.

MJ: Thanks for joining us today.

LC: Thank you. It has been my pleasure. Thank you.

MJ: Thanks for joining us today.

LC: Thank you very much. It's been my pleasure to be here.