ED: So, I had a meeting with the Producers [of SE7EN] and, you know, told them my whole plan on how to shoot the movie and everything else. And, you know, gave them some casting suggestions. You know, I said, "The older officer, I think it would be great if he was African American." You know, and the person I had suggested was Fishburne [Laurence Fishburne]. [INT: Great idea.] And so, you know, I went away and then later on, you know, I asked my Agent at the time, I said, "So, hey, heard anything about SE7EN? You hear anything?" She said, "Yeah, you talked your way out of a job." I said, "What?" She said, "They were getting ready to throw that script in the garbage can." She said, "You told them how to make the movie. After you told them that, they said, 'Yeah, we can get an A-list Director, we can get an A-list Cast to come in and make the movie.'" You know, so they didn't know how to make the movie, I told 'em how to make the movie, but they went and got another Director to make the movie. So, SE7EN was one of two scripts that my new Agent at the time gave me. The other one was SURVIVING THE GAME. And so, you know, I met on SURVIVING THE GAME and I said, you know, "I'd love to get an African American Actor in the lead role." 'Cause Mason, you know, wasn't race specific. Although, it was a New Line [New Line Cinema] film and actually who they originally wanted for that role was Charlie Sheen. [INT: Oh, wow.] You know. So, I think that was because of PLATOON. But I said, "Well, what about Laurence Fishburne?" And they didn't want Fishburne because they were blaming him for the failure of DEEP COVER, which was a great-- [INT: DEEP COVER was a failure?] Yeah. [INT: It's a classic.] Yeah, I mean, critically, it was a critical success, but it didn't make enough money for the studio. So, they figured that, you know, Fishburne was not bankable material. And they said, "But if you do want an African American Actor, one person we would definitely consider would be Ice-T." And I said, "Okay." And I had recently seen Ice-T in TRESPASS, and I thought he did a good job. You know, I thought he did a pretty good job. I wasn't as impressed with him in NEW JACK CITY, but TRESPASS, you know, I thought he did a better job. So, I said, "Okay, maybe that'll work." And that's how we pulled that together.

ED: And it was interesting 'cause I had a chance to meet and work with Fred Caruso [Fred C. Caruso], who was my Producer. You know, Fred had been a Co-Producer on THE GODFATHER and he had produced David Lynch's films. He had produced BLUE VELVET and I think he produced the next one, too. But Fred was great, you know, and you know, we tried to figure out where we were gonna shoot this. And so, what I didn't know, you know, I didn't know the politics behind SURVIVING THE GAME. It was a great script. Loved the Writer. We got along really great. I started casting it. And I had Ice-T, but I had to get the other hunters. And found out that... I think the first person I met was Rutger Hauer. And I heard all these stories about Rutger Hauer, you know. "Oh, Rutger, yeesh. He's a rough one. You know, be careful of him. You know, he's a tough guy." And I said, "Oh, okay." Made an appointment to meet with Rutger at this hotel. He came in, he'd been riding his motorcycle. He came in. Man, we sat down, we talked for like four hours straight, just rapping. You know, he was just so cool. I just fell in love with the guy. He was just an amazing, you know, forget that he played Roy Batty in BLADE RUNNER, you know. Actually, the first time I had ever seen him, I saw him before BLADE RUNNER in a movie called NIGHTHAWKS with Sylvester Stallone, where he played this terrorist. And he was ex-you know, I said, "Oh wow, who is this guy?" And he was great to work with. He was amazing to work with. And then there was another character we were trying to get, we were first after Dolph Lundgren. But Dolph Lundgren didn't want to do it. And then, we found out that Gary Busey was available. So, we went after Gary Busey and got him. And then found out that F. Murray Abraham was available. You know, and then found out Charles Dutton [Charles S. Dutton] was available and wanted to do it. So, you know, I'm putting together this great Cast, you know, for these hunters, you know, who are gonna hunt Ice-T in the wilderness.

ED: We still didn't know where we were gonna shoot it [SURVIVING THE GAME]. I think New Line [New Line Cinema] would've been happy if we shot it in Griffith Park, but we weren't gonna shoot it in Griffith Park. You know. You know, so, you know, Fred and I went, oh wow, we went to Colorado, checking out the forests in Colorado. We went up to Northern California. We went to Idaho. We eventually found, wound up going to Washington state. And what was really interesting was that, also had a chance... in the movie, Ice-T's character, his best friend, his hanging buddy, you know, is an older homeless man, 'cause they're homeless guys. So, it was an older homeless guy. And just trying to find out, you know, you know, he was supposed to be in his seventies. And who was available at that time. And I remember going after Jack Elam, you know, but he wasn't interested. One of the amazing things about that time, Ice-T had just come up with a song called Cop Killer. And because he did that song we could not get security for the film where we decided to shoot. The police would not do it. And the old friend was played by an Actor named Jeff Corey. And Jeff Corey had been a victim of the HUAC, the House on Un-American Activities [House Un-American Activities Committee], you know, Joe McCarthy [Joseph McCarthy]. You know, the red baiting stuff in the early ‘50s [1950s]. You know, because he had been in movies in the ‘40s [1940s] and then I guess he refused to testify or something like that. And so, he couldn't find a job for many years but kept himself going by having an acting school where he actually taught a lot of up-and-coming young actors. And then, finally, eventually he was able to go back to acting.

ED: But he [Jeff Corey] had this owl-like face, you know, and just a really great Actor and a beautiful guy. And when I first got he and Ice-T together, they just bonded. I mean, you know, I was just surprised. I was hoping they could bond, but they found a way of bonding because they had both been ostracized and both, you know, getting all this shit from the government. You know, Ice-T from the police departments and Jeff Corey, you know, from the American government. So, they really bonded really, really well. And so, we decided we were gonna shoot [SURVIVING THE GAME] in this place called Wenatchee, Washington, which is about a four-hour drive from Seattle, up in the Cascade Mountains. And, you know, I selected it because it has a couple of really raging rapids, river rapids, you know. And there's a scene where Ice-T's character gets washed down these rapids. It has these big mountainous cliffs and, you know, it was a real adventure story, you know. And, you know, he's supposed to jump off this cliff into this raging rapid and go down. And so, scouted the locations. You know, the rivers were raging, you know, it was quite amazing. Meanwhile, I found out later that our Executive Producer on the film, David Permut, had had a deteriorating relationship with Bob Shaye [Robert Shaye], who ran New Line [New Line Cinema]. Apparently, they started out, you know, I guess David Permut had like a four or five picture deal with New Line. And I guess they started out as friends, but I wasn't reading the trades. And apparently they were dogging each other in the trades every single day. So, by the time it got to SURVIVING THE GAME, it was the last picture in the deal between 'em. So, basically for New Line it was the fulfillment of a contract. It was a contractual fulfillment. And I put together this great Cast and because of that, they presold the film overseas based on the Cast. So, before we went to camera, New Line already made its money back. [INT: Oh, wow.] They'd already made their money back. So, they fulfilled the contract and Bob Shaye's attitude was like, you know, "Fuck David Permut, I'm not gonna help that movie at all." So, we had no support from New Line because they already had their money back, you know.

ED: And, you know, we're out in the wilds of Wenatchee, Washington trying to make the best movie [SURVIVING THE GAME] we can. Four days into shooting, it was about an hour drive from the hotel to the cabin, 'cause, you know, it starts out with this dinner scene at the cabin where the hunters are, you know, 'cause they're gonna hunt down Ice-T. That's something he doesn't find out 'til the next morning. But they treat him to this wonderful dinner. And, you know, when it came to doing the dinner scene, I had talked to the Writer. I wanted, you know, the dinner scene to be kinda like the equivalent of the dinner scene in JAWS. My favorite scene in JAWS is when they're sitting around the table at night and then Robert Shaw tells that amazing story about being on the SS Indianapolis, you know. And so, the Writer, you know, wrote a scene that's something like that. And it was quite amazing. And there's a story that Gary Busey's character tells Ice-T's character about how he had been growing up and he was raised with this dog, and this amazing dog. And then one day the dog disappeared. And he didn't know where the dog was. And after a week, his father comes to him and says, "Okay… gonna come with me." And he takes him out to this shed. He said, "Okay, for the past week your dog has been in there. I've not fed him, I have not given him water. He's hungry." He says, "That dog is now going crazy." He says, "Today you're gonna be a man. I'm gonna put you in that room, I'm gonna put you in there. I only want to see one of you come out alive. Either you or the dog." Now, when Gary Busey read the script and we first were talking about it, he didn't know how to deal with it. He was like, "Whoa, this is a crazy story. I mean, do I make it funny? You know, do I deal with it as a comedy?" And, ultimately, I had to finally tell him, "No, it's a true story that came from a member of the Aryan Nation, the white supremacist group." This father, you know, in the white supremacist group was gonna what he called "make a man" out of his son. Starved his dog for weeks and he was gonna put him in this basement with the dog. And he only wanted to see one of 'em come out alive, either him or the dog. And that just like blew him away 'cause it just, he said, "I watered his garden." Gary Busey said, "I watered his garden," you know.

ED: So, we did that scene [in SURVIVING THE GAME] and after shooting it one night, for some reason, F. Murray Abraham decided he wanted to drive himself home. Normally, you know, dark roads, no lights, in the mountains. He's driving himself home and he goes through an intersection, he had the right of way and all of a sudden out of nowhere this car comes and just like slams into him. He's spun around to the other side of the road, his face goes into the steering wheel, he wound up breaking a hand, three ribs, his face got dinged into the steering wheel. The driver and another passenger in the other car were killed and another person had to be airlifted out to a hospital. So, Gary, I mean, you know, so F. Murray Abraham, he had to go into the hospital. And we had to shoot around him. So, if you ever see the movie there are some scenes where they're out in the woods and his stunt double was subbing for him and he's in the background and he's got goggles on and he doesn't say anything for a few scenes. Because, you know, the real F. Murray Abraham was in the hospital, nursing three broken ribs, and a broken hand. And his Agent is trying to tell him, you know, "Look, just go home. You know, they'll work... I'm sure insurance will work it out somehow." And Murray said, "Hey, I almost got killed. I gotta work man." He said, "I can't be sitting at home someplace thinking that I almost just got killed." He said, "It's gonna drive me crazy." So, I love this man for life because he came back to work. And, you know, his hand was in a cast, so that's why his character never takes his gloves off, you know. You know. And he can only do like maybe like one or two takes and then he'd have to sit down and rest 'cause he was on painkillers. [INT: Oh, my god.] And, you know, we, you know, Murray, you know, he's one of my heroes 'cause, you know, yeah, he plays Salieri in AMADEUS but, you know, in my movie he came in and he did it and did a beautiful job. And even one time, you know, he had to run through a stream, you know, with his hand in a cast and he actually tripped and fell and put his hand out. And it really... yeah, you know, with a broken hand? I mean, it really went a little bit further. [INT: Yeah, that's no good.] So, it was really, really, really, really painful. And so we were getting behind schedule. And my Producer, Kevin Messick, you know, he wanted to go back, he flew back to LA to try and talk to Bob Shaye [Robert Shaye] to see if we can get some more money. And he's talking with Mike De Luca [Michael De Luca] and Bob Shaye walks by, he looks in at him and he says, basically from what I understand he says, "Look, if you're here to try and get more money, you can just get the fuck out of here right now." You know, he wasn't gonna do anything to help the movie. You know, just because of that other thing that was going on. So, you know, it got into a thing where, you know, "You got to make the schedule? Just tear pages out the script." So, it got like that.

ED: And Murray [F. Murray Abramson] was like really cool. You know, he really wanted to thank us for being so patient with him [on the set of SURVIVING THE GAME]. He actually bought out a restaurant one night and threw a party, a really nice party. And the only thing was to get into the party you had to wear red, you had to wear something red. So, you had to come up with something red, you know. Most people, you know, red tie, you know, red handkerchief and other things. The most original idea came from Rutger. Rutger Hauer had a young lady with red lipstick kiss him all over his face. So, he walks in with all these red lipstick marks on his face, man. He was... beautiful, beautiful, beautiful cat, man. Beautiful cat. And an old friend of mine from New York, Eddie Joe, came all the way out from New York to PA on the film with us. You know, so, hanging out with him and John McGinley, hanging out with John McGinley was a lot of fun. Having an old-fashioned pot party with F. Murray Abraham in our room at night was amazing. And, you know, and Rutger loved Eddie, Eddie loved Rutger. And I don't know if they ever saw each other again, but it's amazing how these things happen. They wound up dying on the same day. They both passed away on the same day. And, you know, and I have a picture of the two of them together, you know, when we were shooting SURVIVING THE GAME. So, you know, it's, you know, just those amazing things.

ED: So, SURVIVING THE GAME came out. Well, I finished it. And I was able to get Stewart Copeland to do the score, you know, Steward Copeland from The Police. He did a great score. Showed it to Bob Shaye [Robert Shaye] and going in to show it to him, everybody tells me this, "Okay, just letting you know, he never likes anything he sees the first time." I said, "All right." So, I'm prepared for him not to like it. And after the movie was over, he stood up, he said, "Man, I really like this movie. Good job. Good job." Walked out, but that was it. He still wasn't gonna help the movie. Hardly any advertising, you know, and all that. So...

ED: But it got me my next film, which was DEMON KNIGHT [TALES FROM THE CRYPT: DEMON KNIGHT], The TALES FROM THE CRYPT movie, DEMON KNIGHT. And, you know, I went in and, you know, they called me for it. I forget exactly how that happened, but I went and had a meeting with Gil Adler [Gilbert Adler], who was the Producer of the film. And I got them into see SURVIVING THE GAME while I was doing my sound mix, my final mix, so they could see the film. And I got to do DEMON KNIGHT. And it was really cool. I brought in Christiaan Wagener, who was my Production Designer on SURVIVING THE GAME, and brought him in to do DEMON KNIGHT. And, you know, it all takes place at night. And it's set in the desert at night. And I'm thinking about this, and I'm saying, "You know, that's gonna be painful, if we got to shoot nights out in a desert." And so, I said to Gil, I said, "Is there any way we can find a big soundstage or a warehouse? You know, let's not do this at night, let's do it in a more controlled situation." And one of my favorite Japanese films is an anthology film of ghost stories called KWAIDAN. And I had read that they, you know, directed by Masaki Kobayashi, a great Japanese Director and I read that they shot, you know, a lot of it was interiors. They built whole country sides in interiors and they actually got a decommissioned airplane hangar and they'd built all their sets in there. And so, we found out that there was actually a decommissioned airplane hangar at Van Nuys Airport. And so, we were able to build the house and all the interiors and everything in that airplane hangar, which meant we could do regular hours. And, you know, casting it, you know, was great. I had a chance to work with some really good people. But it was interesting because the Producers were, you know, Joel Silver, Dick Donner [Richard Donner]. Remember Dick Donner had wanted to turn JUICE into a comedy, and Walter Hill and those guys. And I didn't have any real dealings with them until post. You know, shooting went swimmingly well.

ED: Although, I had to convince Joel Silver, you know, who was going to play Jeryline, who winds up becoming the heroine of the movie [TALES FROM THE CRYPT: DEMON KNIGHT]. And I had just seen the Hughes brothers' film, and their first film, and was really impressed with Jada Pinkett [Jada Pinkett Smith]. And I said, "Okay, I'm gonna push for a young Black woman to save the world, you know. And, you know, I was thinking a couple of different reasons why because, you know, at that time usually it's the Black folks that get killed by the monsters first. [INT: That's right.] You know, so, I figure, "Okay, nobody's gonna suspect that she's gonna be the last woman standing." You know, and I was able to put a really good Cast together with that. You know, Jada came in and, you know, she had to have a meeting with Joel Silver, you know, so she went in and convinced Joel that she was the right person for the job. And I was just able to, you know, get some really great Actors. And Billy Zane came in. And my mother wanted a role in the film and, at the time, the demons were still being worked out. At the time, the demons were basically people wearing black suits, you know, with hats and dark glasses. But they're all gonna get killed, so I couldn't see, you know, killing my mother in a movie. [INT: Amen.] So, I said, "Sorry, mom, you can't, you're not gonna make it in this one." [INT: That's right.] So, she didn't make it in that film.

ED: But, you know, it really worked out really good because we had control [on the TALES FROM THE CRYPT: DEMON KNIGHT set], we could work day hours, you know. We didn't burn the Crew down. And it's interesting 'cause while we were shooting, one day while we were shooting was the big OJ car chase thing where he was on the highway in the Bronco, you know. So, the soundman had a little TV set right there so we could see what was going on with that. That was crazy. But DEMON KNIGHT really was good 'cause it was, I had a chance to work with some good Visual Effects Supervisors, you know, Tom McMaster [Todd Masters] was the Makeup Effects Supervisor and we came up with the idea of the demons, you know, and designed them and he did a beautiful job with it. And it equated me, it put together me and Steve Lovejoy [Stephen Lovejoy] as my Editor, who wound up becoming my Editor for, until just a couple of years ago when he retired. So, you know, we did so many things together.

ED: So, DEMON KNIGHT [TALES FROM THE CRYPT: DEMON KNIGHT] was good. And it did pretty good. I went to see it opening night, I was still living in New Jersey at the time. And went to see it at opening night at a theater there, and it was a packed house. But I noticed something when I left, you know, 'cause I had my tickets and I looked at my ticket stubs for DEMON KNIGHT and the title of the movie on my ticket stub was an entirely different movie. It was a different movie that was playing in the theater that night. And another film that premiered that night was John Singleton's film, was HIGHER LEARNING. But, you know, I started finding out that that was something that was going on with a lot of African American films or films by African American filmmakers where the tickets that people had were no-- [INT: The tickets thing.]--didn't have the same title as the movie that the folks had gone in to see. And somehow those ticket titles got changed. So, there was, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a thing going for a long time if maybe the money that certain movies were making wasn't being correctly reported. So, that was a weird thing. So, did DEMON KNIGHT and then the next film I did was BULLETPROOF. So, yeah, I did BULLETPROOF and that was done. And then, I started doing some movies for Showtime, when they started. They were doing movies before they went to series, I was doing a bunch of movies for them. First movie I did was a movie called BLIND FAITH, and I was able to get Charles Dutton in that again. Which was really cool. Charles Dutton. And so, I wound up doing several movies for Showtime.

INT: What would you say was, you know, the difference doing theatrical movies versus movies for television? And can you talk about, you know... You know, it's interesting because in your body of work you've done so many different types of movies. Like is there a through line, a common theme? Like what is it you are looking for? What draws you in to the movies you choose?

ED: It's always story. It's always an interesting story. It's always a story that I can approach from an interesting direction, which for me is usually visually. I guess part of me, I'm always gonna be a photographer. So, I'm always trying to figure out ways of using the camera to tell the story. How to visually tell the story. You know, my heroes are visualists, you know. You know, my heroes are Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, you know, David Lynch, you know, my filmmaking heroes, Martin Scorsese. You know, working with Spike [Spike Lee], you know, and in my own directing thing, Scorsese was a big influence on us, you know, how he used the camera to tell the story. Or to get at the emotion of a character in the film. So, yeah, you know, so always, you know, trying to see if there's some way I could do that. But also, you know, if it's an interesting story. I get a lot of scripts where sometimes after page five, I know where the story's going and I throw it away. You know. You know, 'cause you want to be surprised. You know, you just want to be surprised, you want to come up with something that you can, you know, have fun with, you know, and be surprised by.

INT: And what would you say is the difference between the, you know, is there a difference between the theatrical movies and the movies you started doing in television?

ED: Yeah. Yeah. Usually, it's the shooting schedule, you know. The stuff I did for Showtime, those usually had 20-day shoot schedules. And they had to shoot in Toronto. You know. You know, when I did BLIND FAITH it was trying to create the Bronx of 1957, and New York in 1957 in Toronto. You know, and we were able to do it because you know, there's some good technicians, some good artists up there. I did another movie called STRANGE JUSTICE, which was the real inside story of the whole Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill thing. And, you know, so I had to shoot that up there as well. And, you know, I was really trying to be as close to reality as possible and was trying to also figure out how to get inside their heads because the script was a pretty much one-on-one reproduction of what happened, what everybody saw on their television sets with the hearing. But I felt it didn't get inside their heads, it didn't get into what really might've been going on with them. And I had this crazy idea that came from two places. First of all, what room can I find that's gonna look like the Senate Hearing Room? Also, and I started thinking, "Well, if I can't find a Senate Hearing Room, what if I just have the whole trial in a limbo?" And then, I kinda hit on this idea, what if it's in the real Senate Hearing room and looking at the footage, all the coverage was in one direction. The video cameras were in one direction. I said, "What if we're able to turn it into psychodrama? To really get inside their heads, to get inside what they must've been feeling." So, I came up with the idea and I worked it out with the Production Designer. I said, "What if we recreated the wall that we see in the videos, if we made that with theatrical scrim? If you did it, if you had your painters paint it to look like the marble walls that are there. But when Clarence Thomas stands up and as he's swearing himself in, we take the front lights down and bring up the back lights so that the whole place becomes nothing but silhouettes." 'Cause I was thinking, you know, you had people like Joe Biden in it, you had Ted Kennedy in it, and I'm thinking, "I don't want to get Actors to play these people. I want to, you know, if I can make them more abstract and basically turn them into silhouettes where only you see their nameplates."

ED: And then it was something I worked out because who we were able to get to play Clarence Thomas [in STRANGE JUSTICE] was Delroy Lindo. And Delroy liked to have a lot of preparation. I got Delroy Lindo to play Clarence Thomas and I got Regina Taylor to play Anita Hill. And I got Mandy Patinkin to play Kenneth Duberstein, who was the mastermind behind coaching Clarence Thomas on what to say for his hearings. And Delroy wanted preparation but for what I was gonna ask of him, there only but so much preparation he could get. What we were able to do was send him down to Pin Point, Georgia where Clarence Thomas was raised and grew up, just to get a feel for the place. Because I was gonna ask him to stick to the words of the script but imagine what Clarence Thomas must've been feeling and go off, you know. And for me it was kinda like the equivalent of visual jazz, you know. I was gonna create a structure and I wanted him to improvise within that structure.

ED: And that was a great thing that I had with Showtime, is the guy in charge of production there was a guy named Mike Rauch, who had been a Producer and an AD [Assistant Director] in New York, you know. And he was really supportive of me, you know, because when I told him what I wanted to do [on STRANGE JUSTICE] and I said, "Okay, it's gonna be like this." I said, "We're gonna shoot it two ways. We're gonna do the psychodrama thing and I'm gonna let him really go off, you know. Right? And really try and get that emotion that Clarence Thomas and Anita [Anita Hill] must've been feeling at that time. But when we cut the scene and people watching it on television, we're gonna light it like the video. We're gonna front light the scrim and we're just gonna have the people in the room, you know." And so, I told him that was gonna, you know, if there were gonna be any problems you are always gonna have the one-on-one reproduction the way it really looked. You know, and he says, "Okay, then go ahead." You know. So, you know, he supported me in that.

ED: And for Delroy [Delroy Lindo], it was interesting because he was feeling his way through it [in the TV movie STRANGE JUSTICE], you know. He was, you know, we were making it up as we went. You know, he actually, he said, "Okay, when Clarence says...," you know, you know, at one point, you know, he's talking about, you know, this Supreme Court is just not worth it. He says, "I'm wearing a suit which is kinda like, you know, almost a uniform, the Supreme Court." And he says, "I feel like I want to tear my shirt off." And I said, "Okay, go for it." You know, and so we're in the middle of the scene and he said, "The Supreme Court is just not worth it," and he tore the shirt off and his necktie is still there. He said, "This is just a high-tech lynching." And he took the necktie and went and made a, you know, like a noose out of it. And I'm like, "Yeah!" You know, he's killing it. And then I said, "Cut!" And Delroy go, "What the fuck? I don't know what the fuck I'm doing! Ernest! I'm going crazy! I don't know what the fuck I'm doing." I had to go and say, "Hey, you're there, man. You're there. Just calm down, you know." And I had to talk him down because he was... you know, later on he told me he was coming from fear, you know, and that was like one of the big acting lessons I ever learned. Because different Actors come from different places to get to where they got to get to. And with Delroy, I was asking him to do something he wasn't used to that I'm looking at it and he's doing a brilliant job, I think he's doing an absolute brilliant job. But he wasn't feeling it. You know, it's like, you know, what we see and what we're reacting to, a lot of times the Actor isn't feeling the same way. They're thinking, "I'm fucking this up." You know, "I'm screwing this up." That's what he was thinking. I kept having to bring him down and convince him that he was doing an amazing job. And because they had their trial sessions at two different times, even though Delroy and Regina [Regina Taylor] knew each other, they were never there at the same time. Delroy did his stuff first and he left the day that Regina came in. And Regina came in, she says, "Can we rehearse this?" I said, "Regina, I got no wiggle room. I'm asking you to do this, to improvise it, you know." And she basically just rolled up her sleeves, "Okay, fuck it. Let's do it." You know, and she jumped in and did it. What was really interesting about Delroy, though, after he finished he called me up. And he said, "Ernest, I just want to apologize for being an asshole." I said, "Well, I didn't think you were an asshole," but I know he had been slightly abusive to some of the PAs. And he said, "Man," he said, "Thank you for letting me do it. But I just want to let you know." He said, "I was coming from fear. You know, I was scared to death every, you know, what you were asking me to do, I was scared to death." I said, "Delroy," I said, "You got there, man. You know, it doesn't matter how you get there so long as you get there." And, you know, that's something that, you know, you find out, you know. John Huston was so right, you know, 95 percent, 90 percent of directing is casting. You know, and you've hired that person to create that character, but how they get to be that character is their own personal thing. You never know what they gotta go through to get there. You know, and it was incredible. And, you know, he did a brilliant job.

ED: And what was really interesting was that when we were in pre-production [for STRANGE JUSTICE], the real Kenneth Duberstein heard we were making it. And he called the production and he was pretty pissed off. But the first thing he wanted to know, "Who's playing me?" And we said, "Mandy Patinkin." He says, "Oh. Oh. Oh, really. Oh, okay. All right. Okay, well I'll tell you, I've read that... you know, I have not read the book that the movie is based on. But some friends of mine have read it and all I can tell you is you stick to the book you'll get it right." Which was really, really interesting. Because, you know, there's a lot of things that a lot of people didn't know about that case until recently that, you know, there were other women that were gonna come out and corroborate what Anita Hill was saying. And, you know, I was really trying to, you know, do it as, you know, be as realistic as possible. But, you know, that was part of the subplot of the movie, these other women that were ready to come in and say their say but weren't able to do it. But that was an interesting exercise. And the show won a Peabody. So, it was cool. [INT: That's amazing.]