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At this point Mark had to go to the signing, but I was able to grab the Editor of the restoration cut, Bryan McKenzie, and Post Supervisor Brian Hamblin for a nice talk about the struggles to make this new version.
So, Bryan, Brian. How long were you involved?
Bryan McKenzie: Five months?
Brian: Hamblin: We started it in, I believe, October, starting with going through the vaults finding out what they had.
Bryan: The few things they had.
Brian: And we started ready getting heady in about January. And then we finished the first cut before it went to Cannes.
Bryan: And then I think we finished in September, right before we screened it at the DGA.
Brian: So it was right before that.
Were you both fans of the film beforehand?
Bryan: I was. I had seen the movie in 1980, truncated, obviously.
And were you both brought in by Richard Schickel?
Bryan: I usually edit for Richard, so yes. I edited his documentary on Chaplin.
So you had mostly worked on documentaries, and this was for both of you your first restoration?
Bryan: Well we had done some restoration work on Chaplin, and some restoration on another project, but as far as a dedicated full blown restoration, yeah, this is our first time.
Well, there’s not a lot of examples like this, where you can go back like this, you can talk about THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and there’s nothing you can do. I guess there’s a couple of the Orson Welles films could probably be tinkered with, but what’s left to be reconstructed?
Bryan: Well, what’s left when the director’s not around? You could always go back and do the new version of BLADE RUNNER , but that’s already been done by the director, and now there’s a couple of versions out there.
Were you both Fuller fans beforehand?
Bryan: I was. We actually made a documentary that made it on the new release, which was a funny thing because we had that interview with Sam Fuller, which when we originally did the series “The Men who Made the Movies” they decided not to use it because we were told you couldn’t make a film out of it. But one day I started looking at the interview and I didn’t know enough about Sam Fuller, but watching the interview with him, I though “Boy this guy’s interesting, so let’s figure out a way to make a film out of it.” So we did.
For TCM? I ask because Schickel did a series of these back in the seventies.
Bryan: He was doing them in the seventies, and then he did another set of them in the nineties. It was supposed to be for the nineties one, but we didn’t do it at the time. And then we redid the seventies series, and added back the extra one.
So, as Schickel mentioned on the DVD, and I think we know now that the four and half hour cut, you guys both think is a total myth, right?
Brian: Total myth, well, he (Bryan) knew the assistant editor.
Bryan: Yeah, and he didn’t know how long it was, so I don’t know. But I think three, three and a half, as a rough cut, as a thing that needed to be edited down. I think where the four/four and half came from - because I’d always heard four, and word actually increased while we were making the reconstruction- was that Sam wanted to do a mini-series, that would have been an hour in each location, so that’s the four hours. But we had the shooting script, and there were scenes on the back of the script that he had cut in, and he wanted to go back and do more of this, and do more of that. If he’d been able to go back and shoot that stuff he could have had four hours.
But there were also the 32 minutes of additional scenes, which you guys did the commentary for.
Bryan: Yes, and we’re sorry that you can’t turn the commentary off, and watch them without the commentary.
Brian: That’s not our fault.
Was there anything else left that wasn’t included? Or is that pretty much everything?
Bryan: There are a couple of shots here and there that didn’t make it that didn’t make the deleted scenes, but it’s mostly coverage
Brian: There are a couple of shots we didn’t have the audio for, or it was beaten up, or there was a reason they only took one take, and it wasn’t included
Bryan: It was interesting to have all that stuff and then say “Should we put it in, even if it isn’t a good scene?” Richard Schickel says…
With the Sam Fuller scene
Bryan: Yeah, maybe we put some stuff in that he wouldn’t have if he re-released the movie, but yeah, with the Sam Fuller scene, yeah, you have to have him in there, even if the scene makes no sense, really.
The scene’s almost like a weird retroactive nod to Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW.
Bryan: Well, that’s what’s funny. When I first read that in the script I thought “Coppola did this, playing the guy with the camera.”
But they must have been shooting around the same time, so it’s one of those Hollywood similar thought moments like DANTE’S PEAK and VOLCANO.
Bryan: Although what I like is that really was in accurate uniform, he really looked right.
Brian: And that was actually the camera he used in World War II. To shoot Falkenau footage when they liberated the Falkenau concentration camp
Now I heard in an earlier interview that you guys hoped to get some of his 16mm footage from World War II on the DVD. Am I mistaken?
Bryan: Yeah, no, you’re right. We had it all.
Brian We had hoped to include it, but the fact that it was a twenty minute, M.O.S. [Trivia note: M.O.S. means silent, and came from German directors saying “Mit Out Sound”] movie about the concentration camp. They just liberated it, and literally all the S.S. guards were pulling out the bodies and prepping them and burying them. It’s very graphic. The other thing is that we were trying to get the rights to a documentary where Sam talks about all of that, and we wanted to get a portion of it, but Sam narrated the entire film, so you’d know what it was. But it didn’t fit right in the context of the feature and the deleted material we had on the disc so we felt it wasn’t the right way to go about it.
Bryan: It’s awfully graphic, and hard to watch without someone telling you what you’re looking at. What would have been great is to get Christa (Fuller, Sam’s widow) to narrate it because she could talk about what actually happened that day. Very interesting. The Colonel, I think it was, really insisted they somehow make an example of the people who ran the camp, and they made them dig up the bodies, and they made them line them up, and they made the camp look at them, and he was very insistent about making his point. Kind of outside orders, he hadn’t had any orders from anyone. She probably could talk about just that story.
Brian: It’s in a documentary by a French filmmaker that’s coming out on DVD, and it’s called FALKENAU, THE IMPOSSIBLE
Bryan: Emil Weiss, the filmmaker, took him back to Falkenau. It’s an amazing movie.
When did they shoot it?
Bryan and Brian: Mid eighties.
It’s a strange parallel to TIGRERO.
Bryan: Yeah.
I am absolutely in love with this cut, it seems to me there’s one part where you couldn’t get the original narration from Lee Marvin, the original voice over
(laughs)
Brian: There are a couple parts.
The one that stands out to me is the “Heart Attack” line
Bryan: Yeah, yeah yeah, there’s a lot more dialogue in that scene that we cut out, because… we were told the guy we got could do a perfect Lee Marvin. Subsequent to actually taping the ADR, we found a bunch of other people who actually can do a perfect Lee Marvin but we didn’t have them at the time, and it just didn’t work.
Brian: The problem was we had lost two rolls of sound. Only two rolls, we had a hundred and something, but the two rolls we needed were now for scenes we were adding in to the movie. So a lot of stuff in the snow, during the bulge , actually comes from several other sources. But we really don’t have that one take.
Do you think that’s because it was shot before the movie (Sam shot some footage while the film was in pre-production in California, knowing he might not get snow in Ireland or Israel during production).
Brian: We also lost a roll that was shot in Ireland, so I don’t know if there’s a rhyme or reason for what was lost.
On some level, though that “Heart Attack” sequence does stick out, it does point out how inimitable Lee Marvin is.
Brian: He’s Lee, and you can’t fake it.
I don’t think Marvin was ever better.
Bryan: He’s good isn’t he?
It’s such a phenomenal film, and I was thinking about it, none of the character really have an arc, the arc is the war, the story is the war, it’s not about the character’s changing, it’s about the war and Fuller was a journalist first and foremost, and you just get that in everything. He’s telling you the truth, he’s shooting straight, and I think it’s the best American made war film. I want to thank you guys for doing this, it was my favorite film of last year, well it and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND.
Bryan: That movie was incomprehensible to me.
But it’s not really fair to compare them.
Brian: Everyone who got involved with the project, even if you didn’t know much about Sam or really didn’t know much about THE BIG RED ONE, anyone who got involved with it really started to champion it. Going in I didn’t know much about Sam Fuller, I really wasn’t a big fan of the film beforehand, but once you started to feel the camaraderie, once you started seeing what was there, you know the more heard about Sam, and how he was larger than life, and you got know all the people involved, you know I’m totally a convert now. It was hard, but it’s totally fantastic now.
Does everyone do a Sam Fuller impression?
Brian: Yes.
Bryan: Yes, everyone does a Sam Fuller impression.
Even Richard Schickel?
Bryan: He does in on the documentary.
Brian: This was a restoration of passion.
Do you guys have favorite Sam Fuller films besides this one?
Bryan: I love WHITE DOG. It’s going to be playing in a week.
Where?
Bryan: The Egyptian. (May 13 at 7:30 PM) You see the Criterion F FOR FAKE?
Oh, I got that Criterion disc, and
Bryan: Isn’t that a great disc? Have you seen CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT?
I haven’t seen a complete cut, and I don’t think it’s been released stateside. They’re restoring it as we speak, supposedly.
Bryan: I have that on tape.
I have a couple of those, like Ophul’s THE RECKLESS MOMENT, FIXED BAYONETS is another one that’s so hard to find, and it’s another one of the best war movies ever made.
Bryan: I love THE STEEL HELMET.
Oh yeah, and it’s interesting how much of those earlier films ended up weaving their way into THE BIG RED ONE, you get the frostbite sequence, you get the guy who can’t kill another man, which are straight out of FIXED BAYONETS, all these characters named Griff.
Brian: Yeah, there’s a guy named Griff in every one of his movies.
Do you guys think you’ll ever do a restoration again?
Bryan: If somebody wants us to do one.
Brian: The problem is, as we mentioned in one of the documentaries, is that studios have their own teams, and not just anyone can go in and do a restoration, and most of the studios have some sort of contingency where they try to restore their own films. So it’s a very unique situation, that we as an independent production company were able to go in and restore this, it’s unheard of. People have been trying to this for twenty five years. But we just happened to be at the right place at the right time with an executive who loves movies, and loves Sam Fuller, and got I, who had the wherewithal to say “You need to do this now, it’s a timely piece,” and was able to navigate the waters and get it done. We’d love to do it, but there’s not a lot of them, and who knows where it’d come from.
How much of this restoration was done on computers? Film Comment mentioned how much of this was done digitally that it opens a lot of doors for restoration, and that it’s not as expensive as working directly with the negative.
Bryan: We never would have been able to do this on film.
Because all the different kinds of elements and the lost frames.
Brian: If we had done it on film, the studio wouldn’t have gone for it, so we had to compromise, but if we had tried to do this five years ago we have needed a suite and it would have cost a million dollars in hardware and software And a lot of it, surprisingly, we were able to do on suped up Macintosh G5’s, with software pretty much anyone can buy. So we found the best solution for what we could afford, and it rivals the best stuff out there. The funny thing about this is that Sam’s films always have the guerrilla feel, scrappy (Brian does a Fuller impression) “Just make the damn film!” and that was the same approach we were forced to follow. I think Sam was probably laughing about it, that it’s gotten this big.
What was the process of the restoration?
Brian: Well first you find the film.
Which was found in Kansas?
Bryan: Yeah, in the vaults, in the Warner Brothers vaults.
What, with a bunch of leftover prints from Batman?
Brian: They have a large vault out there. I don’t what all is in it, but this was a Lorimar film originally, who was acquired by Warner Brothers, so Kansas is like the “Island of Homeless Prints.” But the biggest thing was trying to figure out what we had. The archive guys would take stuff, like the negatives that had no trims (Another film note: Trims are outtakes of a few frames, usually a foot or less.), so it obviously hadn’t been used in the original version, and then transfer that so we had it. We had no paperwork to go by, usually you do something from a line in the script or some sort of shooting log, or edit log, we didn’t have any of that stuff. So we’d get, like, five or six scenes, something from one campaign, and then there’d be a couple shots from Sicily. After enough time we could put together shots that looked similar with something else. Then we’d get the sound holes, and we’d get sound from somewhere else. The only thing that tied the film together was we knew how many shots we had taken from each scene, and what was scripted. We’d call the vault, and say “What do you have?” And they would say “What do you need?” “What do you have?” “What do you need?” Back and forth and eventually and then eventually they gave us some stuff and we’d need shot 173 A, 173 B and 173 D, takes 2, 4, 7, and we’d need this scene and this scene, and they’d say “well, we found it, but we’re missing these five shots,” and slowly the scene would be built, very, very slowly, it was a painstaking process, and then eventually we’d have scene 173… actually 216, and you built 216 and you’d have the master shot, you’d have two takes, you’d have parts A, B, C, D, but you only had a couple of shots or takes from each one. Maybe you’re missing one piece of cover altogether, but it’s not enough to concern you, and that’s pretty much how it evolved. When we redid the soundtrack we were stuck because we had what’s know as LCRS, left center right surround, four channel early Dolby surround, and we had to convert it to 5.1. We had that in English, and we had a bad mono DME, Dialogue Music and Effects, but it was all mono, so we had, in clips, but it was unsorted, and we had another in English, and we had some of the original takes, the whole soundtrack was actually more difficult to build because we had to pull so many different sources. Literally scene by scene, and we never knew what we’d be able to use for each scene. That was probably the most challenging part to bring it up to a standard that works now, but that doesn’t sound new. Because we didn’t want it to sound like they just made the film yesterday, we didn’t want it to sound like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. We didn’t want it to sound like a Battlestar Galatica television thing.
So you were trying to get a 2.0 surround sound, like an enhanced 2.0?
Bryan: No, it’s 5.1.
Brian: What it was, was that we didn’t want sound like… we wanted to have the rifles sound like real M-1’s.
Bryan: But we didn’t want to fill everything, we didn’t 200,000 screams in the background on D-Day, or a hundred tanks in the left channel during the Kazarine pass sequence. We wanted it sound like it came from the film, and wasn’t too technologically advanced. So it still had that fingerprint of Sam’s method. The way Sam would have done it if had to do it now, and had $200,000 to produce it this is what he’d do.
You used as much of the original sound as possible?
Bryan: Yes.
But then replicate them, or is this a lot of new sound effects?
Bryan: A lot of the sounds we used were old sounds, yeah. We went back and got sounds from the time as opposed to recording new sounds In some cases there was nothing we could so we used the old soundtrack and we would layer over. With the gunshots, in certain battle scenes, the four horsemen would be firing their rifles, and we just have to layer over new rifle shots, and drown out the old rifle shots, because we couldn’t untie the dialogue, or something like that. Same with explosions. But you know, we would add things, surrounds, and add stuff so it was more effective, but was still in line. We did take some license, like in the final scenes, where Mark Hamill is shooting in the oven, where it goes into that scene where he’s shooting the German, we actually timed out how many shots, and when he’d have to do the clip change, we wanted to fix a mistake that was in the original film, which had him firing too many shots before reloading. So we fixed that.
Brian: And some of that is going on the IMDb, and being irritated by the nit-pickers that don’t see the bigger picture. So it was like, alright we have the chance to shut the nit-pickers up, so, I mean, people bitched about this?
I only nit-pick the new STAR WARS movies, that’s it.
(laughs)
Bryan: Yeah, well those are bad. You should ask Mark about that.
(Laughs)
I figured since I’m with Ain’t it Cool, I figured it would be best to not mentions STAR WARS at all, because that would be what was expected. Do you guys have a favorite addition? A favorite additional sequence?
Bryan: I think the Sam footage. The day I found that stuff, I had one take of it actually, because that’s one of the ones we had to track down, and I went” Yeah we’ve got the Sam scene, all right!” Also the one, who does the D-Day run?
Brian: Robert Carradine
The sequence with the cigar?
Bryan: Zab’s D-Day run, and I only had the master take to start with. People had talked to me about that scene, this was something Sam did on D-Day, so the first time I saw that take I was like “got it, yeah.”
That’s one of my favorite moments, you know, PRIVATE RYAN, THE THIN RED LINE, they’re great films, but that moment, or when the guy gets the toilet paper shot out of his hand, I mean, that says everything. Him grabbing the cigar, not even caring about the guts.
Brian: That was something from another one of Sam’s movies, Sam was always having people sitting down on dead people, eating their food, that’s in RUN OF THE ARROW. My favorite scene, additional scene? Because it’s so different now would be the addition of the Hitler youth. Cause it’s creepy and it added this mystique, and it put them in a situation that wasn’t a typical WWII combat situation, where they’re stalking snipers, and then it’s got this odd twist that it’s a Hitler youth. And at that point in the war there were a lot of Hitler youths, being taken to the front line.
It’s all more odd because he actually kills one of their guys
Bryan: Doug Warner, yeah.
Brian: I think I like best, I guess it’s now reel 8? Probably the last set of scenes to get in the show, and they’re all new scenes, we go from the old castle, to the Hitler youth, we do the Schnapps and we have the old people, and it’s like, “Here we are, the Americans, and we’re raping and pillaging Europe, we have Schnapps with the women, we’re spanking the German kids, we’re picking on the old people, we’re just brushing everybody aside to go in and save Europe.” It’s kind of an odd comment.
I love THE THIN RED LINE, but everything that film does, Fuller, I think, accomplished in this movie.
Bryan: But no one knew he had accomplished it.
Exactly, but the film asks you to question, how right is some of the stuff they’re doing, you have the wonderful sequence with the French Vichy at the beginning which was in both cuts, where they are shooting at each other and then they’re hugging. (brief pause) The narration, we haven’t talked about the narration.
Bryan: Right! We now wish we had taken it all out.
Is there any hope for that happening?
Bryan: I don’t think so. What I felt like doing narration wise was that some of it was necessary and other bits were just distracting.
So you cut some of it?
Bryan: So we cut some of the lines, and the kept the rest in, but I was watching it, probably in Santa Barbara, and though we should have just dropped it, and that it would have played better with no narration. So, yeah, I wish we had done what Sam had wanted and had no narration.
Especially since the narration was written by Jim McBride (though some word may have come from Christa Fuller that Sam wrote it - at this point, I’m not sure). But I think it’s nice because the film is so episodic, that it’s nice to have the bridging, but I think it was Jonathan Rosenbaum that said it’d be nice to see it without the narration.
Bryan: There’s a couple things I would change, but that always happens. You’re never finished you just abandon it. Or you’re told it’s going to Cannes.
Brian: Though actually there were changes that we made after Cannes.
And there’s probably a list of ten things you’d want to do right now.
Brian: Not that many, no not that much.
Bryan: The only thing that might change it now, though, is if there’s some stuff we didn’t find, and all of a sudden there’s better scenes we could include.
So are there things you think might be out there, or is that playing to the four and half hour version?
Bryan: There could be, in some cases we didn’t have the whole sequence. In a lot of the sequences we didn’t have all of the shots. There’s a sequence where there’s a conversation and we don’t have other side, we don’t have the angle, and that could show up. Someone could do the three hour and one minute version.
I then got a brief chance to speak with Samantha Fuller, Sam’s daughter. She appears in a cut scene in the film, and appears in the supplements smoking a cigar, just like her father.
You were smoking a cigar in the supplements, was that your father’s brand?
Samantha Fuller: Yeah, Cohiba.
He Smoked Cohibas?
Samatha: And Romeo Y Julietas. They asked me, I said I’ll be in the Behind the Scenes, but you gotta bring a cigar. I was little when they shot the movie, I didn’t have much to say, I was four.
How long have you know about the director’s cut?
Samantha: Forever.
You grew up with it.
Samantha: It’s always been an issue. It’s always been on his mind. I mean, as soon as someone would bring it up, he’d say “Yeah, but it wasn’t 100%”
Do you have a favorite film of your fathers?
Samantha: Yeah, this one. Or PARK ROW. Those are his two stories. Well, I watch them, it’s not as someone who can objectively watch these movies. I watch them thinking “Gosh, this is my dad’s story.” So it’s awesome to have this. Whenever I’m a little blue, I can dive right back into him. It’s a beautiful thing. So this one or PARK ROW, two that he did from the heart.
I think the thing that makes the film so appealing to me is that he was a journalist, and I think that the war films, all of the war films have that. Especially since when you watch THE BIG RED ONE, there’s that overlap.
Samantha: Yeah, but if you look at MERRILL’S MARAUDERS, you look at FIXED BAYONETS, they’re taken from stories he knows, but they’re not his stories. And even THE BIG RED ONE, he’s such an intense character, that he had to break himself up into several characters. They’re all him. Of course he put himself on Zab, that’s the most identifiable one, but they’re all him. And when you know him, you know he’s a cartoonist, you know he’s a player, you know he’s got all this in him.
Do you see the actor’s modeled their behavior on him?
Samantha Fuller: Well, with Zab especially. I assume that’s what he was like then, my dad had me when he was 60, I didn’t know him back in that day, so I look at Carradine and think that that must have been what he looked like., if that’s how he portrayed himself. He does look a lot like him in younger pictures of my dad. And that same physique, and the way he smoked his cigar, he did a really good job. But I was so little when it happen, I grew up in the shadows of THE BIG RED ONE. I’ve screened the movie thirty or forty times. I’ve added it up, that’s like a whole week of THE BIG RED ONE.
Did you watch it with your father?
Samantha: Yeah.
Did he show you his old movies?
Samantha: Yeah. Oh yeah. He let me in on everything. He told me all the war stories, the ones he left out, everything. He was a crime reporter, he went to war to cover the big murder of the century, but when he went in there, he got way more than he bargained for. He didn’t realize he was going to be down in the infantry, he was going to be shot at, He went in for four years. This is not just a little story to cover. Four years, he could have died. And it’s funny but if you look at THE NAKED KISS, for example, other movies about people being taken out of their world and put into another world. And SHOCK CORRIDOR, too. The reporter, he does in but he can’t get out! But in those movies he hides himself behind other characters, this is directly him. I can always see him in all the movies, but Zab is definitely the one who portrays him the most.
Is there anything of his sitting around that could be made into a movie?
Samantha: Yeah, you’ll be seeing some of it. You’ll be seeing it. They’ll have their rebirth. They’re still in the womb, getting ready. There’s a lot of stuff.
You hope to be behind this?
Samantha Fuller: Eventually, I’m taking my time. No rush, it’s there.
More Sam Fuller films, made by Sam(antha) Fuller? Sign me up. Again, I like to thank Mark Hamill, Dana Kaproff, Bryan McKenzie, Brian Hamblin and Samantha Fuller for their time, and especially the guys at Lazer Blazer for allowing me to opportunity.
Exceptional work, Andre. Thanks so much, man.
"Moriarty" out.
