INT: What do you expect of the assistant during pre-production?
DM: Their most important job during pre-production is to lay out the schedule to his satisfaction, taking into account the runs of the actors, to save as much money you can, to compact them in terms of sets you're working in. So the first generally makes out his own schedule, and this is almost always the one we adhere to with whatever changes or modifications that need to be made for costs or number of days we've got. Always looking to keep the number of days way down, because that's where the cost is. The first is generally at that point getting his assistants, lining up his own requirements for each set, looking at the floor plans or going to the actual locations. When we're on location, which I enjoy, I always take the first with me to every location to get his input into that. We work together, the staging of extras, and so forth. A very important part of his and my preparation for the start of shooting. We always know what's going to happen when we start shooting, and a good first assistant director can save you a lot of money and headaches. [INT: It seems as though the scheduling has fallen even more into the hands of the first assistant?] That is true. I like it. I like to have him work out the schedule as he sees it and get his reasons for the choices he makes. He can save you a lot of money.

INT: The design of a picture from your point of view, tell us about that. To what extent do you do it?
DM: I do it as much as I can, trying to be as specific as I can all the way through the picture. And discuss those aspects of what I want to see with the screen, often sighting other pictures of the past, or stills, or photographs to use as a visual reference. I do try to do that as much as possible. I find without exception that when I get on the set that I haven't begun to talk it through as much as I'd like to. It's time consuming. If you can get the basics set in with those key people then hopefully you can get them to run with it.

INT: Why would you have a set built rather than working on location? You said a moment ago you like locations.
DM: I love locations. Often you will find that the interiors of buildings that you otherwise like just don't allow enough space to photograph. And more often than not I've found the exteriors on location and interiors at the studio on a set works. There is an intangible quality of reality of shooting on natural interiors, even with the crowded nature of a small bedroom, squeezing to get the crew that is necessary in, I like that wherever I can achieve it. [INT: Do you think that characteristic gets to the audience?] I think yes, in terms of a reality. There is something real about a real bedroom and the way it's dressed and the pictures on the wall. And it gets into the actor's performance. There are plenty of times when you're doing a period piece where it does not seem to be practical to use interiors, you've got to build and dress them to your needs.

INT: Let me get a few specifics from your book. In MARTY, two actresses rehearsed alone and you felt it would be good until you saw the result, subtext being played all over the scene. Tell us about that.
DM: Well that was my first film and I learned a great lesson with that one scene between BETSY BLAIR and an actress playing her sister. PADDY CHAYEFSKY had written a very definite subtext, in which the 2 girls were not always in sync. They were sisterly and rubbed up against each other every once in a while. I made the mistake of running off to lunch during their rehearsal and asking them to run through the scene a couple of times together. They did, and when I came back, the scene was totally different. They had uncovered all the subtext. Instead of a calm scene between two sisters there was head butting, and I never could get it out of the scene. That element was still there, and I finally ended up cutting the scene. I certainly learned a lesson from that.

INT: Your comment about the movie MARTY versus the TV show was that it was a somewhat warmer script. Tell us what you mean by that.
DM: HAROLD HECHT, who was a partner of BURT LANCASTER saw the TV original the night ROD STEIGER and NANCY MARCHAND played it on TV PLAYHOUSE. HAROLD it turned out came from the Bronx section that PADDY had written about. It also turned out that HAROLD, a little man, saw himself as MARTY, or saw MARTY in himself. I think he was essentially a lonely man and seeking contact with outsiders. HAROLD was very inarticulate. He never made any direct open suggestions, but he kept sort of nudging PADDY around a little bit saying that he was so vocal in explaining his condition, that he didn't need to say all those things, we know that. PADDY bristled and said, no, he needs to say that. And finally PADDY gave in and ultimately in the writing, just by taking out a line here, a word there, the character was softened a little from being the intense man who ROD STEIGER played, a man who you felt almost if this relationship with the girl didn't work out he could almost kill himself. Both from that point of view and the casting, ERNIE BORGNINE and BETSY BLAIR playing the two leads. And HAROLD really had that in mind from the beginning. He wanted a picture that would have the emotional impact that the original TV play had, and length, so new scenes had to be added, but he did not want just a repetition of the show which had played just a year before. He wanted it more an average Joe kind of character from MARTY. PADDY and I realized this and were reluctant. We wanted ROD and NANCY to play it and HAROLD wanted to find someone new and nudged us into the new cast. PADDY and I both agreed in later years that HAROLD had been right. We were at the right place at the right time for both instances.

INT: Del, do we know where the actor begins and stops and where the character begins and stops? What's your take on that? How about the difference in casting for both version of MARTY?
DM: HAROLD HECHT the producer came from the section of the Bronx that PADDY CHAYEFSKY wrote about and wanted to do it as a feature film. He did not want just a straight out reproduction of the TV show. So it was HAROLD's suggestion that PADDY do some ever so slight modifications of the script, to remove some of the blatant self-pity expressed by MARTY in the original. And also new actors. PADDY and I fought him, but HAROLD persuaded us otherwise and we agreed. ERNEST BORGNINE played a less intense version of the character. We recast most of the rest of the piece except for 3 characters, JOE MANTELL who played Angie, the woman who played his mother, ESTHER MINCIOTTI, and the woman who played his aunt, AUGUSTA CIOLLI. Didn't bother HAROLD, he thought they were well cast. The result, PADDY and I in later years agreed, was what HAROLD wanted. He got a more amiable, less tortured MARTY than the original had been. And the same for Clara, the girl. And I think HAROLD was right. For the short version, the ROD STEIGER intensity was what was needed. That was the show that captured the emotions of the audience more than anything else we ever did. The reaction of the feature film, which was an unusual bit of filmmaking for those days, was excellent. We, PADDY and I figured, had the best of both worlds. Each version worked best for its particular circumstances.

INT: Is it fair to say that the audience did more of the work in the movie house than they were precipitated to do in their living room? Or is it just different?
DM: I think it's just different. Yes, those excessive self-pitying elements were taken out, but the film was expanded. It was a lengthier role. [INT: You mentioned also you felt you should slow the picture down. Tell us about that.] We shot the film in 16 days, we were scheduled for 20, and because of the 3 weeks of rehearsal we had the filming was done quite rapidly. Our first cut was done in record speed. We saw the first cut of MARTY at GOLDWYN STUDIOS and were absolutely stunned. We were shocked out of our shoes, the picture just didn't work. The worst thing I had ever seen. We went across the street to the Formosa Cafe and had a drink and nobody said much of anything for a while. Then HAROLD and PADDY said the last part of the picture needs to happen quicker. I found myself saying, I don't think so. I think the decision not to call the girl comes too fast for MARTY. We've got to see this decision being more agonizing for him. And PADDY agreed, and so he wrote a couple of extra scenes. And that's exactly what was needed, moment where you saw him thinking about this decision. It worked like crazy, we did 4 days of retakes including those new scenes, so we shot the film in those originally scheduled 20 days.

INT: How did you know to slow it down?
DM: I didn't. Something rang wrong as PADDY was saying we needed to speed it up. It was just total instinct, because I didn't have a clue.

INT: You watched TOSCANINI rehearse once upon a time. What did you learn from that experience?
DM: I was simply fascinated at seeing the maestro up close. He was rehearsing in studio 8H and we took a break from a Saturday rehearsal in the PLAYHOUSE and I saw that the door to the studio 8H was open just a crack. So I slipped through the door and stood mostly hidden but just peering out enough so I could see TOSCANINI rehearsing. I stood there and watched him for my lunch hour. Being a tremendous admirer of his I was just blown away. He was a wary little man and he was active as he could possibly be, flailing the baton around like crazy.

INT: In your book you say, many things are possible when they can't be avoided. That's off of a cigarette that gets dropped into a Coke bottle by an actor which you had to use twice and no one knew. Tell us about that.
DM: That was in the film version of THE BACHELOR PARTY. The second PADDY CHAYEFSKY piece we did as a TV show. It was not as successful as MARTY. I think we had attempted to say more about modern marriage and life in the big city than with MARTY. The setting was five guys from the office out on a bachelor party looking for girls and any kind of naughtiness they could get into. They went to someone's house and watched a stag film. DON MURRAY, the lead, in one group shot, leaned forward, took the cigarette out of his mouth and dropped it in a coke bottle. I suddenly saw three shots later him drop that into the coke bottle. Nobody would ever notice with five people on the screen for them to watch, they will never ever see it and I never heard a word about it from anybody!

INT: In DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS, tell us about SOPHIA LOREN'S crying scene.
DM: It was my inexperience and my carelessness and my just not being aware. Late in the film there's a scene between SOPHIA and TONY PERKINS, her lover in which she tells him that she has killed their baby to prove that he was wrong when he said she only had the baby to get a hold of the farm. She could find no way to prove to him except killing their child. A horrible scene. The set was on the big stage at PARAMOUNT. TONY came down the hill to meet her and so the first set up turned out to be on SOPHIA's back, the side of her face and back, toward TONY, because that's the way the set was constructed. Well I made the terrible mistake, when I saw the first rehearsals, that although we had rehearsed the scene for 3 weeks before hand and she had played marvelously well, now to start to play the scene she became hysterical. She broke down in great gulps of sobbing. Sometime between the rehearsal and shooting the scene I think she had been told by a doctor that she could never have children. She was terribly upset by that, it turned out not to be true, but to play that scene just ate her. So I finally got her just to mark the positions until we got the shot set up and we shot the scene, several takes, over her to TONY. And then took the set apart, turned it around, and got the camera on SOPHIA. Of course, by the time the camera got around to her she was totally dry. Emotionally she had given everything that morning. I had the crew break early and tried to talk with her. She wanted to do it, but the gush of tears and emotion were simply not there. We came after lunch and tried to shoot it. We had to give her artificial tears so I felt I had robbed her of one of her big moments. I also regretted that I didn't know enough to try to do something to capture that moment on her on screen before we got to TONY.

INT: Is SOPHIA LOREN more vivid as a performer because she is Italian, not American? Are those ideas true?
DM: Well she's very lively, and this was her first American film. She was working very hard on her English during the film. She was more fun than you can imagine, lively, joking, and absolutely charming. Just adorable.

INT: In SEPARATE TABLES, you talked about rehearsing a shot for almost two days that was complex. Were you satisfied with that process?
DM: It related back to the problem of melding the two individual stories. Where they impact on each other and the sequence. We had struggled with that in the writing, JOHN GAY had done some rewriting before we shot the scene. The problem was that they were all sitting at separate tables around the room. We shot the other people, GLADYS COOPER and BURT LANCASTER and RITA HAYWORTH and DAVID NIVEN and DEBORAH KERR. We attempted to put that together in a rough cut, saw it, and I said no it doesn't work. And JOHN GAY rewrote again. We shot 2 days to get all the setups. The only way you could do it for all of those people, you had to shoot the whole scene with them looking to the right, then you had to shoot the whole thing with them looking to the left. DAVID NIVEN had most of the dialogue and I gathered the whole cast together just to the left side of the camera. So he played the scene several times, then I had them move to the other side of the camera. He told me it was the hardest thing he had ever done. The second time we got what we thought was the proper mixture of the pieces, and then the editor, MARJORIE FOWLER, put the scene together in its final form using some of the first take and some of the second. It was four days on that one scene. There was one spot where DAVID made an entrance behind DEBORAH KERR and I did not have a close shot of that. MARGE then took two pieces of film and she optically put them together and printed it. But it worked.