INT: Okay so you were talking about THREADS.
MJ: Somebody once said and I think it was a great idea; if they had their way they would get the joint chiefs of staff to stand in the Mojave Desert in their underwear in the middle of the night five miles from a nuclear test so they could feel the heat on their skin [hits hands to chest] and then maybe we wouldn't have so much talk about when to winnable nuclear war, because it would be a physical reality to them. And I thought, I can do this. I can actually show the physical reality. I can show the emotional reality of what people cannot because it's so big to think about--don't want to think about. It was given great, kind of, personal importance for me. I was on my second marriage and my first and much wanted child was about to be born in 1984 and I thought I do not want he or she to be born into a world like this. There is maybe something I can do in my own tiny, little way, in my own tiny corner of the world, to change this. So that was my, kind of, passionate commitment to doing THREADS. I wanted to be totally on top of all the material. [Holds up a paper wheel nuclear bomb effects calculator] This wonderful thing came out of my research, it's a nuclear bomb effects calculator. Not many people have seen these, it's kind of a slide rule thing. And you can calculate with given bomb, given distance, what buildings will be knocked down, whether ear drums will be punctured, lungs hemorrhaged, how deep broken glass will penetrate into the skin, what the radiation count is going to be at a certain...Horrible stuff. Horrible stuff. I immersed myself in that stuff imaginatively. You want to play with it? [laughter] [INT: No go ahead, it's just, my mind is racing.] I mean I filled my head with visions of everything around me that I could see in an English city, not there. Just rubble, smoke, desolation, burned, injured, radiated people, but still having their own personalities. What would happen to them? And that's what Barry Hines and I worked on to try and tease out, and it got more and more ambitious and eventually the movie timescale spent 13 years in the life of these characters. Not just from the moment the bomb dropped, but from the next generation. One of the characters was pregnant at the start of the movie and then her child is where we end in the movie giving birth to her own offspring, deformed. Well you don't see it but you assume it's deformed. Having done that the movie wasn't over for me. I couldn't get those visions out of my head. They were so deeply implanted for months and months and months afterwards I would wander around the streets and just be unable to see intact houses and buildings and I would just see rubble. But it was a, I think, some tribute to the effectiveness of the movie and many people contributed to it, that nobody slept in England that night, I'm told. You know, normally--traditionally you do a TV movie in England, it goes out and the phone starts ringing immediately and it's all your friends saying, "Hey saw your movie. I thought it was great..." Silence. No phone calls. Nothing. Next day: nothing. And then people gradually say, "You know I didn't sleep that night. I just couldn't get the movie out of my head. I couldn't get those images out of my head. I just couldn't sleep." Two weeks later I was in Washington [Washington D.C.] researching another project--fact based drama I was gonna do--and had heard that Reagan [Ronald Reagan] had seen it and that George Schultz had seen it. I was actually in the Senate [United States Senate] in Washington [Washington D.C.] and I thought, "Jesus. They saw it. They saw it." And there was actually a front page cartoon on THE LONDON TIMES that day that said, "Reagan peace talks," something or other and the caption underneath was two people talking saying, "Do you think he saw THREADS?" I don't know whether it had any effect on him but it had an effect on the dialogue.

INT: I did see it. And let's just talk about the making of it [THREADS]--
MJ: Almost didn't make it. [INT: Excuse me?] Almost didn't make it. [INT: Go ahead.] Before we started shooting a frame of it I'd heard that ABC were making something similar. It was called THE DAY AFTER--Jason Robards--and it seems quaint thinking this way now 'cause, you know, television and movies are so competitive--I thought well if they're gonna do it then I won't do it because it should only be done once. And it should be a one-off thing that people see once in their lifetime and it should be salutary. And if I do it and they do it it'll be like it becomes a species of disaster movie and everybody will be doing it and that just diminishes the whole thing. It should be shocking. Then I saw what they'd done, and we resumed production. [INT: So you actually stopped?] Yeah. I mean we--I stopped the preparation. It wasn't particularly costly at that stage, we were writing the script and we hadn't yet engaged Actors and...all the rest of that. But I thought they'd chickened out. They chickened out and they shouldn't have chickened out. I mean it was an honorable thing. I'm sure everybody thought they were doing an honorable thing but they used all the techniques of moviemaking and they shouldn't have, because that carries a subtext with it that everything is going to be okay. There were tracking shots. There was a shot of casualties laid out in a high school gymnasium and the camera craned up like this [lifts hand] and it was a kind of conscious homage to the Burning of Atlanta. And I thought this isn't about fucking homages. This is about real life. Excuse the language. But you can't do that. The sense at the end of that was that the bulldozers that are gonna rebuild America are just off the side of the frame and they're gonna come in. And so I decided that we would go ahead with THREADS and we would do it, not as a movie but as a--almost like a subjective experience; that you wouldn't see the overall picture, you'd hear initially in the build up to war you'd hear news bulletins and see newspaper headlines but once you were in it there was nothing over the horizon that you couldn't see. You were just totally immersed in it, in the lives of these characters.

INT: Well I want to talk some more about the specifics of it [THREADS] but I want to pick up on something you said that was rather, to me, rather amazing. You said you decide.
MJ: Yeah. [INT: You weren't going to make it for the reasons you gave. Did you have the power to make that decision?] Yeah. [INT: Look, how did that work? I mean can you imagine, could you imagine--] I wasn't costing the BBC very much money. By that stage they were paying a Screenwriter and me, but no one else was being paid. I was on my regular salary anyway and if this movie didn't get made in one way it would be great for the BBC because it would let them off the hook. If the movie did get made it would let them off the hook of the war game. So they were kind of ambivalent about it and they trusted me to, you know, say, "I don't think we should make this," or "I should make this." And then it went higher up, obviously, through the organization. [INT: Right but you'd made them pregnant with the idea?] Yeah. [INT: Right and so--and you were able to get them to abort it, not knowing ultimately you were gonna make it. I mean and--] No I just said, "You know I am having second thoughts about this. Let's let--why don't we wait and see what happens." [INT: And how long of a wait was that?] Not that long. Not very long. A few weeks. [INT: Oh I see they had already--I see, they had already shot the--] There was some anxiety about the effect that THE DAY AFTER would have on commitment in the U.S. and in the U.K. to the Western deterrent. Would it undermine commitment on the public's part? And it didn't. It came and went and as I expected having seen it, it was not the powerful thing I had wanted. So I then said to my immediate bosses, "I think we should go ahead with this. You know pass it up the chain and see what people think," and they did. And the word came back, "Yes, we should continue to do this." And I said, "I want to make in uncompromising. I don't want to stint on anything because it is too graphic or too horrific, because you get one chance at doing this, and this is it."

INT: Okay lets just stay with this for a minute 'cause I think it's a very important point, and again I'm gonna go into the specifics of your film [THREADS] in a minute, but with the comparison to THE DAY AFTER there is a larger question. In the United States too often films are applauded for their subject matter, not for their execution, and certainly not as their execution as a film. THREADS is a film as you indicated which is so authentic that it is, in some places, almost impossible not to turn your eyes away; which is it's intention. Now that you've been--you've lived in both places an equal amount of time if not more here [United States]--you want to just talk to that point for a minute about the difference between that philosophy as you experienced it in Britain and the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] versus your experience here as a filmmaker?
MJ: I think it would've been difficult for anybody at ABC to make THREADS because they grew up in the, grew up in the--it was a good movie. You know it was a good movie, it just wasn't the right movie. And I think everybody did a great job, but they were bound by the conventions of moviemaking. And I was a documentary maker. And I didn't see anything wrong with making this look as rough as possible--shaking the camera. From the beginning to the end of the movie there was no dolly, there's no tripod, there's no crane, the camera's--[INT: No music.] What? [INT: No music.] Initially the soundtrack is full of news bulletins and radio shows and everything and then from the moment onwards from the bomb dropping, it's silence. No birdsongs. No nothing. It's just the wind and the dialogue such as it is. And that was a conscious decision not to do it with music. But I think I find a kind of truth in that and it's like Dziga Vertov, MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. Do everything that you can. Put the camera every place you can to tell the truth. You--if a person is running, run with the camera, if a person falls over, fall over with the camera. And that was very much the philosophy of doing THREADS, you know to... At one point Andrew Dunne, the brilliant Cinematographer who shot it for me, had to walk backwards over rubble through smoke--couldn't see anything, just tracking the heroine backwards and at times it was just black. And there was an Assistant Cameraman behind him, guiding him through but, I don't think anyone would have done that in an American film at that time. And I didn't know that I was doing the wrong thing. I was only doing the thing that I thought gave it the most truth, the most immediacy. [INT: And so let's talk about the making of that film. I mean how long--do you remember, do you remember what the--how long the shoot was?] 17 days. [INT: 17 days?] 17 days. The budget was 400,000 pounds. The budget for THE DAY AFTER was $17,000,000. [shrugs]

INT: 17 days. How much preparation time, I mean, to get those sets ready? And also you ought to talk about where that was shot cause as I remember it wasn't all in one place. You, I remember--
MJ: Mostly it was. It was shot in Sheffield because it's, as it were, bang in the middle of England. But also it's kind of a very kind of radical city--has a steel industry--had at that time a steel industry. It was a communication center, it made obvious sense, but also the people there were removed from London. And there were a lot of anti-nuclear groups and various people. I put a firewall between myself and them, but they rounded up extras to be in scenes. For nothing. They weren't Actors, they were just crowds demonstrating against the war initially or fleeing across the countryside vomiting and whatever from radiation sickness. [INT: But didn't I read somewhere that you found an abandoned mine or something, then you had to fly somewhere? Maybe I'm misremembering?] No I think that was LIVE FROM BAGHDAD. [INT: Oh that's right. That's right. Okay.] The ruins of Baghdad. Ruins and ruins. [INT: That's right, okay. That's right, okay.] No there was a housing estate of row houses in Sheffield that was due for demolition and so we were able to say, "Stop demolition until this date if you would," to the offices of the city council, "We're going to shoot it as it is now as if it were inhabited and then we're going to destroy it and set fire to it and so on." So that was our main set. [INT: So do you remember how much preparation time you had for that?] Not very much. [INT: Not very much.] Not very much. Had a great, great Designer. And I said to him what I've said to designers many times since then, which is, "I'm not gonna shoot over there, don't do anything over there. I'm gonna shoot here [holds hands in a frame]. Save that money, put it here." And you--we had rubble everywhere and if there was something which was not removable like, you know, a piece of architecture or whatever, or you couldn't disguise it, we through a tarpaulin over it and that was it, then we just shot and put lots of smoke in the scene.

INT: Okay I am going to pick up on something you just said. You said--you say to the Production Designer, "I'm not going to shoot over here, I'm gonna shoot over--I'm going to shoot over there, I'm going to shoot over here." Is that your general philosophy, I mean, [Mick Jackson nods in agreement] and so you sort of--this is really just a question--so you eliminate the possibility that the Production Designer might present you with something that would tempt you to include? You would rather make the choice up front yourself?
MJ: Yes. It's--I guess training, working on things where there's a tiny, tiny budget. I mean BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] budgets are tinier than tiny, they're kind of microscopic. And I know generally how I'm gonna shoot something. It's a kind of arrogance but, I storyboard in my head and I edit in my head and I know that's where it's going to be and over here [points behind him] is not somewhere I particularly need to come around to. I know a lot of Directors want that freedom and they like to turn up on the set and say, "Hmmm, what are we going to do now?" I know at that point what I'm going to do but, you know, I'm obviously ruling out some things in order to focus the resources into what I desperately need, right in front of me, here. So by in large Designers [Production Designers] don't trust that, and they think they're gonna be called out on the day when the Director will say, "We'll do a 360 here." So they put up things like police tape across the backs of...you can't shoot it. But anyway, I do do that, yes.

INT: What about--two prong question here. Let's just stay talking about the staying with THREADS and finishing that up. The Actors in THREADS, I know you've talked about the extras, but the principles. Were they experienced Actors?
MJ: Some. Some of the older ones were experienced. They'd been in soap operas and things. They weren't well known. I think--I thought if you can't use people whose characters are well known because they're in a soap opera then use people whose faces are unfamiliar. [INT: And was this your first experience with Actors?] Yeah. [INT: So--] No second. Second. [INT: What was the first?] Sakharov [Andrei Sakharov], PEOPLE FROM THE FOREST. It was a kind of--not the one with Jason Robards [SAKHAROV]--the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] one about Andrei Sakharov and his path from being a leading nuclear scientist and the hero of the Soviet Union to being an outcast dissident. [INT: Another outsider.] Outsider, there you go. And that's interesting--I mean--[INT: Go ahead]--I digress for a second. Again BBC budgets, tiny, tiny, tiny and here's something that takes place in the Soviet Union over a number of years. How do you do it without spending money? And I thought, well let's use the Soviet cinema as a kind of metaphor of kind of the society around him and let's shoot it with Eizenshteinian [Sergei Eizenshtein] montage. Cause that's cheap. A shot of this and a shot of that and a shot of that. And so that's the way it was shot, really. I cross cut scenes with Sakharov [Andrei Sakharov] with scenes from ALEXANDER NEVSKY. The Battle of the Ice with, kind of, his visions of nuclear holocaust and mice falling off the edge of ice and stuff like that. [INT: So did it--was the first shot of the film one of the NEVESKY [ALEXANDER NEVSKY] films?] No the first shot of the film was actually a lone individual skiing down a pristine ski slope just leading a track behind, and the second shot was the top shot of a maze with a rat in it.

INT: I noticed that one of your signatures of your films is to have some sort of disorientating opening shot.
MJ: To every scene if I can--[INT: But particularly--] It's a strategy. I use, initially unconsciously and now deliberately, of bringing the audience into the storytelling. Conventionally film grammar used to be you'd have a wide shot; you'd know where you are, then you isolate a house here and there is a front door opening and a character is coming out and you move in on that character and you see them and then you get to this shot [frames face with hands]. I like to say, you know, if the audience is with you in this movie, they're wondering what is gonna happen next and you cannot tease them, not frustrate them, but involve them in the story telling. So my typical editing pattern for a scene would be an insert--a hand doing something. "Who's hand is that?" And then a closer shot where you could not quite see where the person is, but you can see who it is, who's doing it, but you don't know the context. And then a wider shot, and maybe another tight shot and then a wide shot. So the audience is thinking, "I bet that's so and so, and I think this probably means that he's decided to do so and so." So that's a conscious kind of storytelling decision. [INT: Right, so the Sakharov [Andrei Sakharov] story that you did [PEOPLE FROM THE FOREST], that was your first dramatic film? How did that happen? How did you get the opportunity to do a dramatic film?] Working in a bureaucratic structure like the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] kind of encourages you to be sneaky, and to do things in the little niches and corners of the BBC. Which is how THREADS got made and how this movie [PEOPLE IN THE FOREST] got made. There is a little department called Science Features that produced things like NOVA, essentially. And I worked in that department and managed to find little ways of getting a little bit of money here and a little bit of money there and occasionally they would make a little dramatized movie on a vaguely scientific subject. Sakharov [Andrei Sakharov] was a scientist so that was the kind of angle. And then you're on a much smaller budget than you would shoot a normal television drama and you were able to do something that was interesting and kind of broke the rules a bit. [INT: And that was what? An hour film or two hours and--] An hour in a half. [INT: An hour and a half] Yeah.

INT: So the THREADS sorta put you on the map as a Director? I mean did--
MJ: I hadn't thought of it in those terms until the next day; someone was criticizing it politically and saying, "No I'm sure the Director will win all kinds of awards for this, but I think it's horrendous that it should be done." I thought, "Wow." I really hadn't thought of it in those terms, that this would put me on the map, but it did. [INT: But did you--at that point you knew that you wanted to be a dramatic film Director--] Yeah. [INT: And you saw this as obviously the first step. You didn't--] Not at the time. I mean that was in my head as a long term goal but I was just so tunnel vision into this project I really didn't think outside of it. [INT: So you didn't know after you did that, that you might not go back to documentary?] I think I did actually. I think I did, went back to doing some documentary--[INT: You did?]--in the same department and then--[INT: I see. I see. So--] In that same department found the same kind of ways of getting the LIFE STORY, the double helix movie [THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX, British title LIFE STORY] off the ground. [INT: That wasn't that--was that--no but you had other things before--long before that. I mean you had a film that I don't know anything about called WHY THINGS GO WRONG.] Oh that was a documentary. [INT: Okay.] A little half hour documentary. [INT: Okay. So according to what I have here the next one is the YURI NOSENKO film [YURI NOSENKO, KGB], 1986.] That's right. That was a co-production between the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] and HBO. [INT: Right. Okay. So that is--] And my doing that was, yes a result of--[INT: THREADS]--achieving a certain amount of notoriety because of THREADS. [INT: Okay.]

INT: As a documentary filmmaker and a narrative--in a narrative form where the story is really pushing everything, once you go into dramatic films you have to deal with the major element of Actors and acting. [Mick Jackson nods head in agreement] So we know how you have your visual sense, we know how philosophically how you came about subject matter. What about working with Actors in, and you can use YURI NOSENKO [YURI NOSENKO, KGB] because it seems to me that's the next major film that you did and you were working with a--I don't know what Tommy Lee Jones is--where his career was at, at that point, but he--]
MJ: He had just done THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG so he was--[INT: He was--] On the upward curve of stardom. [INT: Right. Right. Why don't you talk about that film a little a bit, about your involvement and the making of it, and the work--especially if you can think back about working with Actors and whether you had any training of that. Did you self-educate yourself? How did you deal with that?] I think back from now to that as a very unhappy film. Unhappy because the relationship between the two entities that were making the film, the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] and HBO was unhappy and I was in the middle of that. I mean the American system of making things to a deadline is not the same as the BBC way of making things to a deadline, so there was always questions about timing, you know. "This has to be done now. No this can't be done now, we haven't got the right actor yet." That was one thing. The--[INT: Who was saying, "We haven't got the right actor?" Would that be BBC or were there--] No that would be HBO saying, "We're not going to green light this movie until we've got the star that we want." [INT: Okay.] And the BBC was saying in it's bureaucratic way, "This is scheduled for week 43, therefore it will be done in week 43." Quite the opposite of what I was telling you about THREADS earlier. [INT: Right.] That was kind of off the radar project. [INT: Okay.] Now this was a big thing, you know, collaboration between two networks [HBO and BBC to make YURI NOSENKO, KGB]. [INT: Okay.]

MJ: Two flies in the ointment [in making YURI NOSENKO, KGB]. One--for me--the Writer [Stephen Davis] wanted this to be his break through, and so therefore he wanted to be involved intimately in every stage of it, and I was a comparatively unknown Director and I found that intimidating. In personal terms, what I do is not a spectator sport. When I'm working with Actors, it's me and the Actors and not someone looking over my shoulder saying, "Why don't you--remember to tell them about so and so." And I had a difficult time defining a space where I was the Director as opposed to the Director and the Writer. I met with Tommy Lee Jones in the Piano Hotel in New York to discuss doing this. I couldn't even open my mouth and the Writer [Stephen Davis] who was sitting next to me said--started saying, "I see this movie as being about so and so and so and so." And Tommy [Tommy Lee Jones] actually shut him up and said, "Stop. I want to hear it from him," and pointed to me. So there was some tension on the set and it got to the somewhat absurd state of the Writer hiding on the set behind bits of scenery and behind pillars so that he could hear the dialogue being delivered and make notes about what line hadn't been done correctly and what had been in the rehearsals and I just said, "I can't function that way, I have to work with the Actors separately in rehearsal. I'll talk to you about it, but I don't want you there 'cause there's only one Director. They can't be looking like this." [moves head all around] So that was a little awkward. [INT: How did he get the by credit by the way?] The Writer? [INT: Yeah. It's, as I remember it, it's the title and then it's by--I can't remember his name.] That's common practice, or was common practice then. [INT: I see.] The title, by, means the Writer. [INT: Yeah.] There was no equivalent of 'a film by' at the BBC. [INT: But yeah, but yes, but it took precedence over the Director?] Yeah. [INT: Okay.] Quaint days. [INT: Okay.] The other thing I did to cope with it was a DP [Director of Photography] that I had worked with--wonderful DP [Director of Photography], one of my great friends who I shot a lot of these documentary series with--he [David Feig] saw the this opportunity of working in the U.S. [United States] as a way of establishing himself as a Cinematographer to be known in the States as well as BBC things. So he [David Feig] took the most meticulous pains over lighting every shot. And the combination of those two things forced me to do what you notice, which is not shoot bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, because there wasn't time for many of these set-ups. They just took so long to light. And there wasn't room to move the camera because it was lit for this one position. You couldn't move the camera around. So the movie turned out rather--ended up rather more static than I had intended to with rather less editing than I intended. And very much constrained by what I could tell the Actors to do and not have to report back to someone who was saying, "I have the chapter and verse researched," which he'd done and I hadn't. And this is real people who really worked for the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and these are real issues and you can't change them.

MJ: Into concentrating on the acting. And I learned a lot from Tommy Lee Jones and he was very gracious. And what I learned is that you can't bullshit the Actors, unless you were very, very good at it. He had amazing detectors for bullshit, when someone was spitting him a line and would just call you on it. And so I had to be just very honest and say, "I think this, but I'm not sure," or "I think this is right and I know this is right and please do it." But to have that kind of forced on you when you're in the process of learning the craft is irksome at the time but actually very valuable. [INT: What did you learn? I mean what did--how--] There was sometimes when you pay religious attention to the script because the script is right and even though it may difficult to say, it is the kind of language that this character would speak and you have to persevere at it with the Actor and say, "This is an actor who thinks in sentences with subordinate clauses. It's not, 'Hey let's get out of here.' It's not that kind of personality. You have to deal with subtlety of the political situation that this character is in and that requires words and you have to say them." And Tommy [Tommy Lee Jones] was initially reluctant to do that and said, "Look we gotta take whole sways out of this script..." So even though I was somewhat in a tense situation with the Writer [Stephen Davis] I actually protected the text and said, "No you have to say these." [INT: Okay at that point, about Tommy Lee [Tommy Lee Jones] pulling out the lines--this is I'm sure you'll agree, is a very indicative of the difference between American Actors ad British Actors who would no sooner ask you to change a line then they would ask you to show up without their clothes on because they feel it's part of their job.] Right. [INT: And American actors very often their first instinct is to say, "I don't need to say that cause I can show it."] And sometimes that's true. I think there's no hard and fast rule. There are times when an Actor's intervention in just showing you with a glance what's in their heads is so much better than any re-write that the Writer could have done or certainly that I could have done, and other times not. You actually do need the specificity of words sometimes. So I hated the movie. I think it turned out quite well. It got well received here. I think Tommy's [Tommy Lee Jones] performance got very well received. It wasn't the movie I'd set out to make. It's probably a better movie than I'd set out to make.

INT: How do you from this point on in--let's just talk a little bit about how you work with the Writer. I mean do you consider yourself a Writer as well? Do you, do you feel it's your job to get the story straight first or, I mean, where do you see yourself in relationship to the Writer on a film? I mean and maybe you could use this as a jumping point.
MJ: Well one of the the elements of the score, I think, is if a movie is like a music score and there's parts for the violins, and parts for the brass...I think the acting is part of that and the mise-en-scène is part of that, and the editing is part of that, and the camerawork is part of that and they're all telling stories. And sometimes they are the same stories, and sometimes the stories compliment each other. Sometime they, you know, contradict each other. The hardest thing for me as a Director is to get a script from a Writer that says, "We open on a big close-up of, and then we crane up to reveal, and pull focus to show and then into the frame walks," 'cause that means there is no place there for a Director to come in and say, "I'm seeing this film in my head with your words and this is how it opens and this is how it goes from here," because it is already there on the page. And it's one of the things that causes the most confusion, for me, on the set, when I have a script like this and the DP [Director of Photography] will say, "Well when are we doing the shot where you break focus from..." And I say, "Well we're not doing that." You have to get into the business of re-writing the stage directions, which is kinda irksome because I like to have them in my head and on pieces of paper napkins. On the set I will do storyboards on a napkin and give it to someone and say, "This is how we are doing this scene." Drawings as I start out. [INT: Do you often do storyboards?] Yeah. I get a big pile of paper napkins like this [hold up hands high]. Not formal storyboards but I just--[starts to pretend to scribble] "In this scene he's here and then the camera kind of moves like this to here and then we..." [INT: And do you do that on the set or--] Yeah. Everywhere. On the set, in rehearsal.

INT: Okay well, this brings us to another area here--
MJ: I'm sorry, I'm rambling and--[INT: No, no, no, no, this is fine. That's okay, I'll take care of it. How much, how much preparation do you do visually? I mean when--] Vast amounts. [INT: Before you get to the set?] Vast amounts. Its a kind of Calvinist ideal of being a Director, which is that the Director should know everything about everything. He owes that to everybody else who's turning up on the set. I mean he should--in my view should not be the person who turns up and say, "Right, how should we do this?" on the first take. What is he getting paid for? He's getting paid to imagine the movie in his head in all its complexity and subtlety, if he can, and how it's gonna look and how it's gonna play, and what the arcs are. I used to, I don't do it anymore, take some scotch tape and join yellow legal pages end to end, to last about 10 yards, 15 yards. And divide that into sections, columns and plot the whole movie on that. The emotional arcs of people; whether this is a night scene or a day scene, whether the camera is moving in this scene or it's static, whether this scene follows another scene which has a similar pace in the editing or if there's going to be a change, and try and sort out how the thing will play. As I said, like the lines of different instruments in a score. [INT: Why did you stop doing that?] I didn't need to. I mean, I've worked it out in my head. It's been useful to me sometimes in something we may come on to talk about, A VERY BRITISH COUP. I showed one of these things to the lead actor, Ray McAnally, on the the first day. And I said, "I think this is your arc here in the first episode, and you do this there." "Fine. I trust you now. Don't talk to me about it again. I'll do whatever you say." So at least there was the trust that somebody had thought it out and knew what they were doing. And I liked to do that. I--exhibit three [pulls out a notebook]--I have little kind of reduced copies of the script. I--every time something occurs to me I jot a note on the big script and then I have it reduced down to this size with all my notes on it. I keep in like a holster so I can be quick on the draw on the set, and nobody else walks away with it because its too small. But yeah I do, I write notes on the characters, the feel of the--I drew sketches of the shots and everything. [INT: So philosoph--] Very hands on. [INT: Right, well, for philosophically as you just said, it's your movie and it's what's in your head you want to get up on the screen.] No, not true. I turn up on the first day with a version of the movie that I know is doable. I know the house will not fall down because I have identified where the pillars of the story are, and then it frees me. Then I can improvise, but at least I know that it will not fall down. And if anybody asks me a question, I can answer it. That doesn't mean this is the way the movie will be. Often it ends up quite close to that. But I owe it to everybody else to have thought about everything beforehand.

INT: Okay. But lets talk, but let’s talk about the second part of this, about you being liberated and… Would you say--let me give you a choice. Are you of the school that what satisfies you most is achieving the film that's in your head? Let's just talk about a particular scene, with a particular Actor, on a particular day where you're very clearly in your mind envisioned what that is to be and when you get the Actor to hit that, hit the bell. Or is your choice two, which would be: you do have that in your head, but what your real goal is to be surprised? Very much the analogy I often given on this is when listening to a piece of great jazz or someone like Sinatra [Frank Sinatra] who will be singing a song that you've heard many, many times and but he will hit a note in the most surprising place that is not what you imagined, but was for some of us better. What--
MJ: I would be crazy if I didn't say I'd opt for that one. I would be crazy. And the whole purpose of all this preparation is to free myself to be open to that. I don't rehearse very much with the Actors. I talk a lot. We read the script so that we're sure what the words mean and how the lines should be read. You know, does this word mean this or does the word mean this, so there is no kind of confusion about what the words are actually saying or how you pronounce them or whatever. But I don't like to rehearse, maybe once, because I liked--[INT: When you say once we're talking about on the day? On the set? Is that what you’re saying?] No I mean before hand. [INT: Beforehand?] Just read the stuff through with the Actors, talk a lot about the characters, talk a lot about what the story is, talk a lot about where the turning points in the story is. Point out things like, “This line in this scene, remember that the character is here saying the exact opposite of what he said 14 scenes earlier. What are we to infer from that?” That kind of analysis of it. Talk about how the characters feel at this moment, but not act it out. Maybe once just so they can get their minds and mouths around the words. But my terror is you rehearse and you rehearse and you rehearse for 14 days, 15 days, whatever and you get something wonderful and perfect, and then all you're trying to do on the set is repeat that and remember what you did. And I like to leave something still churning in their heads and churning in my head to happen while the camera is rolling on the set. Sounds like laziness but…[INT: No.]