Interview with Fritz Lang,

Beverley Hills, August 12, 1972

The full transcript of a 1972 interview with the great director, who discusses his
work in Germany and Hollywood,
Michael Gould, Lloyd Chesley
•
24 DIC 2018
This is the first time the transcript of this interview has been
made available in its entirety, although an edited version
(entitled “The Lost Interview”) was published in Movie Maker
Magazine in February 2004. At the time of the interview, Fritz
Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was recently
home from hospital, recuperating from an operation.
The interviewers, Lloyd Chesley and Michael Gould, were
recent film graduates from York University in Toronto. Gould
is the author of Surrealism and the Cinema: Open-eyed Screening 1972),
one of the first English language books on this topic. One can
access the complete audio of the Lang interview by buying an
electronic version of the revised book at his website. Lloyd
Chesley is the owner of Legends Comics and Books in
Victoria, Canada.

FRITZ LANG: Danke schoen.

LLOYD CHESLEY: Interviewing you here in the Hollywood
Hills, and you started off in Austria, and you’ve been an
expatriate it seems all your life, does that seem strange? Do
you not think of yourself as any single nationality?
LANG: No, not at all. Don’t forget, I am born in Vienna, I was
working a very long time in Germany, one of my best films I
made in France, and then I was working here, so I became a
kind of an international mind. I don’t belong to anyone. And
I don’t think that what I am or what I do is important; I think
films are important. And generally I am very much opposed
to interviews because a film should speak for me, not I.
CHESLEY: Don’t you think that if a work of art is sufficiently
interesting, for example, we can go on watching any single of
your films time and time again—I guess it was my fifth or
sixth time watching Man Hunt—if you can discover information
beyond that, don’t you think that’s worth going after?
LANG: What kind of information? No, I tell you one thing: I
think if a film doesn’t tell you anything that a film has to tell,
then the director is lousy.
MICHAEL GOULD: We did find that with your best films we
came up with the least questions.
LANG: Come on. I will try to answer them.
GOULD: One thing that interested me was that other than
working with Dudley Nichols twice, you never worked with
any other screenwriter more than once.
LANG: Oh yes, in Europe, constantly. Ja, but don’t forget
here it is very difficult because it depends on the studio
where you work, you know?
GOULD: Do you think not having a script collaborator
hindered or helped you?
LANG: I tell you one thing, I think that generally speaking the
script writer, the script creator, is very, unfortunately, not
judged correctly here in Hollywood, you know? Not as much
as an actor or the director. And I think that is very wrong,
and when I work with a writer I was always working hand in
glove, very close.
GOULD: From what stage?
LANG: That depends. If it is my idea, from the beginning on,
or if there is an outline, as it was, for example, in Fury, there
was a four-page outline. And in this outline was only one
thing that interested me, for example. It was my first
American film. It was that one could make a film about
lynching. But the outline, itself, puts the emphasis on
something else. So when I found this in the chests of MGM—
and they have a very good writer, Bartlett Cormack—we talk
what I wanted to do. And I said “Look, there is one idea—we
can make a picture about lynching in the United States.”
And about the same time, or a little before, there was a
lynching and I spoke very lousy English in these days, and I
collected all the newspapers which I could get, you know,
and we cut out all the reports about the lynching and what
happened there, and we started to work together on the
script. Does this answer your question in a certain way?
CHESLEY: Yes, but it raises another question. The lynching
theme is a very serious and what we would call a “heavy”
theme, and when you were back in Germany for the most part
you were dealing with fantastic fantasies and fairytale-like
romances, and then, well I suppose it was with M, you made
this abrupt switch which I think no one could even predict.
LANG: No, that’s not quite correct. It’s not quite correct.
But, look, don’t forget when I was in Germany, as I told you, I
was born in Austria, yes, I became interested in the German
human being and I wanted to make some films about the
romantic German human being in Destiny, or the German after
the First World War it was the Dr. Mabuse films, or the German
of the legend it was the Nibelungs, or the German of the future
it was Metropolis and Woman in the Moon. And then I became a
tiny bit tired, and then there was something to do with my
private life about which I don’t want to talk, and I got tired
about the big films. And I tried to do something quite
different and I made M.
CHESLEY: Big films is right. That is the way to describe
what you made. Those are probably the most super-
spectacular films ever done. Metropolis and Die Nibelungen are…
LANG: No, I wouldn’t say that. I’ve seen many French, not
too many, French films and so on.
CHESLEY: I think of, for instance, in Metropolis to have the
luxury of breaking off into a little tangent the story of Babel
and yet to have those thousands of extras and immense set.
LANG: I don’t know if you read about it. There has been
written a lot of lies about Metropolis. There were never
thousands of extras; never.
GOULD: What was the number?
LANG: Two hundred fifty, three hundred. Not more.
CHESLEY: I think of that shot where there’s a man in the
foreground with his back to the camera and then in the
background there’s a huge stairway and all of a sudden it
floods with the slaves running . . .
LANG: Ja, but it was never more than two hundred, two
hundred fifty. No. It depends how you use a crowd, you
know.
GOULD: The question of spectacle raises something else I am
interested in. A financial matter. Your German pictures
were really expensive, I imagine. They seem like some of
the most expensive films made at that time, and yet when
you came to Hollywood a lot of your films were, I guess,
budget films almost.
LANG: Look, don’t forget one thing. After the war, after the
First World War, there was an inflation, you know? And let
me say, to give you an example, when a worker in the studio
went home, let me say after six o’clock, we are shooting at
six o’clock, you know? And the studios were about, by car,
three-quarters of an hour from Berlin, at Babelsberg, which is
now East Berlin. He came home and all the shops were
closed. And the daily money which he got, because it was
inflation, he got his salary in daily money every evening. The
next day he couldn’t buy anything, practically, out of it. So,
let me say in the Nibelungs I think I had one hundred and fifty
knights, you know, the uniform would have cost a fortune, but
when it came to paying it was no more than if he would have
paid one knight at the beginning of the film. You know, it is
something which is very hard to explain. It was the first
time, I think, in history that a country had such an inflation.
GOULD: What I meant more was that you, as a director, were
making bigger films with more money in Germany and you
had to work more economically in the States.
LANG: No. You know, that’s not correct. But, as I said to
you, I got sick and tired of these big films which I made and I
became much more interested in the human being, itself, you
know.
GOULD: You notice that in the changes in your performances,
too. Your silent performances are totally different . . .
LANG: . . . and that’s another thing; don’t forget one thing.
The German audience is one audience and the American
audience is another audience. Right?
GOULD: Right.
LANG: Let me say, for example, I remember when
the Nibelungs were shown here in this country, I remember Mr.
Pommer [producer Erich Pommer], I don’t know if you know
the name, he showed them in Pasadena, you know. The
audience didn’t understand it. They have no fun with it, you
know, because they didn’t know the legends. They had no
relationship to a legend. The only legend, for example,
which in my opinion the American knows are the westerners.
Right? So, for example, when I got the offer to make
westerns—the first one was [The Return of ] Frank James and the
second one, I forget, what was the second one?
GOULD: Western Union?
LANG: Western Union. I knew what I had to do. I had to not to
make a film of reality, I had to make a film which was in
reality a legend. And it was something very peculiar,
especially after I made Western Union I got a letter from some
old-timers, and they wrote to me and they said “Dear Mr.
Lang, we just saw Western Union”—and they liked it very much
and then they said, “We have never seen a film that shows
the west as it really was except in Western Union.” Which isn’t
true, it was not true, but it was the west they dreamed about,
you know, in the past they wanted that this is reality and
therefore they believe it to be reality. Does this answer
partly your questions?
CHESLEY/GOULD: Yes.
CHESLEY: So then along with making psychological dramas,
for want of a better word, things like Scarlet Street, Fury,
and You Only Live Once, you were still making your fantasy and
myth films when you were in the States. And the westerns.
LANG: It is very hard to explain, you know. The creative
process is something very peculiar. It has nothing to do with
my work in Europe, nothing whatsoever. It is something
quite different because you have . . . You see, I like
audiences. There is a saying that an audience is stupid, it
has the mind of a sixteen-year-old, fourteen-year-old, thirteen-
year-old girl. I never had this. I like audiences and I try to, I
think I tried . . . I like to put something in each film which I
made, something which people could discuss at home,
something that it was not only pure entertainment—I have
nothing against entertainment films. I think, let me say, if
you are a worker, you should eat something. This is
something to eat. I think so, no? If a worker goes, let me
say, after a hard day’s work to a movie he doesn’t want to be
preached this, and this, and this—he gets bored, no? But if
he—I’ve spoken very often about this—if he gets something
which entertains him and there is something which makes
him think about some social things which are not quite
correct, then he can talk it over with somebody, let’s say with
his wife when he goes to the movies, right? And then he
says, “look what was this?” and then she says, “No, that was
not quite as you said it was because he said ‘so and so’.”
And then he says, “So he said something different? So let’s
go see it a second time.” And then they go, and then I not
only make two people who want to see the film once, I make
two people who want to see the film twice. But they discuss
something beyond entertainment, and that is, I think, in my
opinion, what is important.
CHESLEY: While we’re talking about entertainment, let’s talk
about action scenes.
LANG: What do you call action scenes?
CHESLEY: Shoot-outs and fights.
LANG: What?
CHESLEY: Shoot-outs and fights. Let’s say the shoot-out
[LANG: shoot-out] at the end of Western Union in the barber
shop [LANG: Ja]. That’s one of my favorite shoot-outs. How
do you come up with a scene like that? Where do you start?
How do you plan the shots?
LANG: First of all, when I go and start to shoot in a studio I
know exactly what I want to do. I am not one of those
directors—and now I am not saying that these directors are
wrong—who see things in the studio and starts to change his
mind when he sees the set and so on. I work at night at my
desk, so I know exactly what I want to do. I know the set, I
have the floor plan in front of me and I know exactly what I
want to do. And afterwards … I cannot describe the creative
process. It’s something very difficult.
GOULD: So, do you go so far as to storyboard each shot, to
draw out each shot?
LANG: Ja. Each shot, each close-up; and I’ll tell you why.
Let me say I have a set, if I shoot all in one direction and not,
as many directors do, one shot here, one shot here, one shot
here, one shot here, I have not concentrate to switch the
lights. Therefore, I can save money; not to save money, not
to make a film cheaper, but I use this money in another way,
you know? I make a rehearsal, I go with my actors through
every single shot, and my cameraman knows this. And then
we shoot everything in one direction and then we throw the
lights around and shoot in the other direction. So, for
example, when you talk about the shoot-out there, I try to
know everything. This is hardly giving you an answer. It’s
hard to say, I know it.
GOULD: Would you just have one rehearsal with the actors?
LANG: Much more, much more, much more.
GOULD: And what about improvisation on their part?
LANG: Why? No improvisation.
GOULD: No improvisation.
LANG: Look, there is possibilities of changing something. I
change something when an actor comes and says, “Look, I
cannot speak this line,” which is sometimes possible. But I
don’t change the meaning of the line, you know. Do you
understand what I mean? I try to give him other words that
he can explain exactly what the line said before. But I don’t
change anything.
CHESLEY: You know what you want from your actor, but you
can’t really know when you walk in how to get that from the
actor.
LANG: I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t like what many
directors do: to play the part for an actor. You know many
director say, “Look, I have no time to explain it to you for
Christ sake. Now I want to show you what you should do.” I
don’t want to have twenty-five little Fritz Langs running
around on the screen, you know, and I think, and therefore I
talk with every actor before I start shooting, in the
preparation, you know, about the character; and we can talk
for hours. Regarding the script, if he doesn’t understand
something in the script, or if he says, “Look, to me it looks
silly that we just do ‘this and this,’” then I have to try to
explain to him why, according to his character, he has to do
it. You know? Does this now answer something? You
look at me as if you . . .
GOULD: I wanted to know why you used Sylvia Sidney three
times for your first three American films. Was that just
chance?
LANG: When you work the first time with an actor or actress
there is always a kind of strange relationship, you know? It
is something very peculiar. Let me say, for example, the girl
has to step on a ladder and jump down, you know? So you
go the actress and say, “Look, Miss so-and-so, I apologize,
but when do you have your tender days?” She says “Why?”
I say, “Look, there is a scene where you have to jump down
from a ladder and I don’t want you, when you don’t feel well,
that you do such a thing.” So she tells me about it. There is
immediately a kind of a relationship between a director and
an actor which is a peculiar relationship, you know, a kind of
intimacy which is nothing personal but a professional
intimacy, you know? And then you start to talk with her and
talk with her and if you have an actress like she was, or later
on I liked Joan Bennett very much. You have a feeling, you
know, you make a hand movement and she knows. So
naturally you try to use this up because it saves you time and
if it’s good for the part, why so why shouldn’t you use her?
CHESLEY: Which actor did you find the most sympathetic?
LANG: Darling, I never speaking about actors. You cannot
ask me, “how is this director, how is this actor?” I think
that is very unfair; neither if the European actors are better
than the Americans, or if the European actresses are more
sexy. These are questions which I don’t think have anything
to do.
GOULD: Here’s a question, which may be in the same
category. What do you think of Godard’s films?
LANG: What?
GOULD: Jean-Luc Godard’s films.
LANG: I know Jean-Luc Godard very, very much. I like him
very much. I am not too happy about what he’s doing now.
GOULD: Since Weekend? Since when?
LANG: Since . . . what’s his Chinese girl?
GOULD: La Chinoise.
LANG: La Chinoise.
GOULD: And why don’t you like what he’s doing?
LANG: [Long pause] Switch it off, I will tell you.
[The tape recorder is turned off.]
LANG: You speak about financial success. Look, when a
film is finished and it runs in a theater, the financier, or the
people at the studio who are responsible for the money, they
want to know how many people were in the theater, right?
Because they want to know if they will get their money back.
I go to the theater, too, and I want to know how many people
have seen the film today, but I am not interested in the
money, I am only interested how many people do I reach with
my ideas. That is the difference. So I don’t know, so when
you said “is it a financial success?” at the moment it doesn’t
interest me. It would interest me if it is a success that the
audience wants to see the ideas, if I like them or not, you
know. He is very ardent. He doesn’t belong to the party, he
is a very ardent defender of Communist ideas, especially of
Mao’s ideas. I am only interested in the reaction of the
audience.
CHESLEY: I didn’t really finish the discussion of action. I’d
like to talk about fistfights just to find out this one thing:
when you’re standing on a set and you’ve got two people in
front of you, how do you set it up so a punch looks like it
hurts as much as it does in your films? I think particularly
of The Big Heat where Glenn Ford smacked a guy right across
the vestibule.
LANG: Glenn Ford. Glenn Ford is a very, very clever actor,
and he knows exactly his limits. When you talk with him the
first time there are no limits, he can do everything. But so you
find out what the limits are. And he knows exactly how to
fight, you know. So you rehearse, slowly, everything, you
know, and then either you do it in one shot or you do it in ten
shots, that depends. But you rehearse it exactly.
GOULD: What would be the difference between action and
violence in your filming? Some action is not necessarily
really violent—I think that’s what Lloyd was talking about.
Other action almost socks the audience out of . . .
LANG: Do you know M?
GOULD: Yes.
LANG: Do you remember, once the child is killed we see that
the murderer has bought her . . no, that she was playing with
a ball, right? And then he buys her a balloon, right? Now,
we see just a … and then the ball rolls out and comes to a
standstill. Then immediately we know the girl is dead and
we then we see the balloon flying away. Right? Now, this is
action, in a certain way. It is not violence. But I want to
show you something now. Supposedly, I’m not talking about
tact, now, and supposedly it would be today when you could
show much more without being censored, right? At the time
when I did M it was ’32 or ’31, what can you show? You can
show one thing: how a murderer rapes a child, right? Let me
say he slits her up, right? Fine. Aside, that it is very
horrible to look at it and very tactless, it is only one way and
many people would look away, but if you don’t show it, if you
just let the audience know what happened, then every single
man and woman in the audience can imagine the most
horrible things that she can think about it, which is quite
different than what the neighbor might think, correct? And
then they help me, I don’t show anything, any violence, and
still the audience helps me and I don’t have to show them the
horrible thing of how a child has been raped? Correct?
Now, I always thought that I never showed violence, which is
wrong. I don’t call the ‘shoot-out,’ which you talked about, I
don’t call this violence.
Have you seen the Gary Cooper film, Cloak and Dagger? You
remember the fight? This fight is violent. I was very proud.
Gary Cooper, who usually never made a fight—his double
made the fight—he made this fight. And I had an interview
like this and I said, “I never made a violent fight,” now wait a
moment, I remember, and I think because I am, let me call
myself a liberal, which is not very correct, but let me call me
that, and I hate fascists, and this was a fight of a decent man
against a fascist, so seemingly my hatred got the better hand
of me, you know?
GOULD: [Laughs] I’m glad it did.
CHESLEY: Violence. It leads us on to the whole question of
censorship which is coming down hard on violence these
days. You say that as if you would rather just do action and
keep violence off the screen. What kind of effect do you
think it has on an audience? Is that a discussion piece?
LANG: I tell you, I think it has already has. I think the
American audience gets more and more used to violence, and
more and more you hear, when you read the papers. When I
came to this country in 1934 there were not so much
murders, there were not so much fast shooting as it is now.
The average American is violent. And the past, when the
Mayflower people came, they were not so very nice to the
Indians. They killed them off. Then the violence started.
Let me say, somebody would say they were wild people, so
and so, they threatened the people. OK, but this violence
became more and more and more and more, and today I am
very unhappy about what’s going on in the United States
about violence. It is just that you get, what should I say,
carelessly, you know, you get used to it, you know what I
mean?
CHESLEY: Do you think movies add to that? Do you think
that the little kid who goes to see a violent movie . . .
LANG: No, not the children, no. But then you come to a
certain age. Look, it is absolutely much better if you would
talk against it, if you are not of my opinion.
CHESLEY: Well, I don’t have an opinion on that subject.
LANG: But you should have. How old are you?
CHESLEY: I think it’s an important subject.
LANG: How old are you?
CHESLEY: 22.
LANG: And you have no opinion?
CHESLEY: Well, I used to have an opinion, but now I’m
wondering about it.
LANG: Why?
CHESLEY: Because I think I may have been wrong, but I’m not
sure.
LANG: Wait a minute. What was your opinion?
CHESLEY: I grew up watching lots of violent movies. And I
don't consider myself violent.
LANG: Wait a minute—movie or television?
CHESLEY: Both, you know, television . . .
LANG: And you were thinking what?
CHESLEY: Well, I never thought that violence on the screen
really had an effect on an audience, I thought it was up to the
individual.
LANG: In a certain way, yes, but as I said you get used to it.
What do you think?
GOULD: I can only speak on an individual level.
LANG: No, come on, speak.
GOULD: I don’t see anything wrong with violence on film on
any level. I mean, that’s just another censorship of another
sort.
LANG: No, I tell you, I tell you one thing. Maybe I’m wrong.
But maybe it is something else. I remember a western, you
know, where there was a fight and after one man was
wounded and the gun dropped from his hand, you know,
usually there was no reason to prolong this because the man
was defeated, but in this film the victor went up and stamped
with his foot on his right hand and you hear the bones break
so he could never use a gun anymore. That, I think, is
unnecessary violence.
GOULD: Have you seen Hitchcock’s Frenzy?
LANG: No. I heard about it. Switch it off.
[The tape recorder is turned off.]
LANG: . . .which I think is enough.
GOULD: When Gloria Grahame gets the hot water in her face
[in The Big Heat] we don’t really see that either.
LANG: Ja. It was in. It was in. It was cut out by someone,
I don’t know.
GOULD: Then why would you put that in? Even without it,
that’s very violent.
LANG: There is violence in that, correct, but it was the
violence of the evil people.
CHESLEY: Do you not think that if violence is a general trend
of the American mind, if it’s in everybody...
LANG: It’s growing more and more and more and more.
CHESLEY: Yeah, probably.
LANG: It’s growing more and more and more. Look . . . I tell
you one thing. 56,000 people have been killed in Vietnam. I
can’t understand with the best of intentions how anyone can
be for the war. What has been achieved? Huh? That
everyone talks only about the 56,000 Americans that have
been killed. What about the 100,000 of Vietnamese people
that have been killed? What do we have to do over there?
Give me an answer?
CHESLEY: Wrong person to ask.
LANG: You have to think a tiny bit. What do we have to do
over there? We have an undeclared war, right?
GOULD: Well, we know what we have to do.
LANG: What? What?
GOULD: Pull out.
LANG: Naturally.
GOULD: But I’m not going to argue with the man in the White
House.
LANG: Why not!? That is your duty, to argue. Look, I’m
going to tell you one thing. You know what I don’t
understand, that nobody has said, “Look at the North
Vietnamese.” There is no war declared. First we see some
people come and bomb, and then they catch someone, they
are mercenaries. They are not prisoners of war because
there is no war. Is this correct? Ja?
GOULD: No, of course not.
LANG: Is not correct? Why not? Is there a war? No.
Congress has not declared war.
GOULD: Do you read the newspapers?
LANG: Certainly.
GOULD: It doesn’t depress you too much?
LANG: It depresses me very, very much. I am very unhappy.
I am very, very unhappy about what’s going.
CHESLEY: Do you see a hope in American youth and various
movements?
LANG: Ja. Hundred percent, a hundred percent.
GOULD: Well, let’s take this back to the movies.
LANG: Oh! I thought you had it on.
GOULD: It is on.
LANG: OK.
GOULD: Have you seen any new films?
LANG: I see hardly you now.
GOULD: Here’s a very silly question, but you’re about the
only person who could answer it [laughs].
LANG: Is this the only silly question?
GOULD: In Metropolis, I’ve seen it about five times and I’ve
seen different prints in different cities, and every print I’ve
seen, when Maria, the robot, does her dance in front of those
men in black tie, there seems to be a series of jump cuts.
LANG: I don’t know. Darling, I don’t know. The film is
almost 50 years old, 40. . .
GOULD: I was just wondering if this was in the prints or in
the original. She seems to have her head on one side, and
then all of a sudden it is on the other, and she’s doing all
these weird contortions.
LANG: Darling, no, there are no jump cuts, definitely not. I’ll
tell you what happened. People cut one film up, two films,
frames, I don’t know. I tell you when I was in East Berlin
they wanted to reconstruct Metropolis and I couldn’t help them.
I don’t have a script, I really couldn’t tell them how it was.
GOULD: Do you have any prints of your films?
CHESLEY: That’s a question I have. Michael asked you the
other day if you were going to watch Man Hunt and you said
‘no,’ that you don’t watch your old films.
LANG: I just watched it in case you wanted to ask me.
CHESLEY: I was wondering why you wouldn’t watch your old
films. They’re good movies.
LANG: Look, when you sit weeks and months with a writer,
you go scene by scene through a script, right? That’s the
first time that you go through a script. Then you sit with
your architect and go scene by scene and you say, “Look, you
made here so-and-so for a set we don’t need this one, it costs
money, you know, and you make here a door here and here’s
a desk, and now why don’t you make the door here because
when he has to walk out he has to walk ten paces without a
line. Here he can go immediately, so it is not boring,” and so
on. Second time. Then the cameraman, third time. Then
you go and work with the actors, so you go four times to a
film before you start shooting. Then you start shooting.
Then you start cutting. And then when you have the first
preview you see all the things you have never seen before,
and then you try to avoid all this, and then if you are finally
finished, it’s finished.
GOULD: That brings up a question of editing control.
Throughout your career did you always have the same kind of
control over the editing, or did it vary?
LANG: Always. I insisted on it. I insisted on it.
GOULD: Were there never any specific issues that you ‘lost’
on? Say, with a producer like Harry Cohn?
LANG: I made a film, I think it was While the City Sleeps, I don’t
know. There was a scene with Ida Lupino and Dana Andrews
sitting in a bar—and I had seen something similar in a
restaurant in New York. And she orders a drink and he’s
already drunk, you know, and she opens her purse and takes
a small frame out and looks at it and smiles. And you know
immediately that she is naked, she is on the make for him,
and you see the barkeeper who looks over and he would like
to see, too, and Dana Andrews wants to look at it too,
because everybody knows now that they will see Ida Lupino
naked; and Dana Andrews grabs her wrist and the little frame
falls over the bar. And the barkeeper jumps on it and looks
at it and now you show it for the first time, and it’s a naked
baby of about, I don’t know, six weeks or something on a bear
rug and the audience laughs. I made it and the producer
wanted to cut it out. “It’s not funny.” I said, “Look, first of
all you have no right to cut it out. After the preview you can
do whatever you want.” So I had to fight with him because I
don’t want to have a fight five days, and finally we left it in
and it comes to the preview. Now, you never know what an
audience will do so I am sitting there, hold my tongue, and
the film goes and now it comes. And I am waiting and
waiting, and the audience starts to laugh and applaud, and
the producer runs out and meets my cutter outside and the
cutter says, “You see, Mr. so-and-so, Lang was right.” He
said, “Yes, he was right here, but I will show it at a preview
until the audience doesn’t laugh and then I cut it out.” Look,
against this there is nothing that you can do. Against the
stupidity of human beings you are powerless.
CHESLEY: Another small question.
LANG: You don’t like that?
CHESLEY: I do.
LANG: Well, I don’t either.
CHESLEY: We’ve seen the Nibelungen each of us, twice, and
that is without knowing any of the fable personally, or
anything like that. We’ve never read it. Who killed
Kriemhild?
LANG: She, herself, Brunhild.
CHESLEY: No, we were thinking of the second film, Kriemhild’s
Revenge. Kriemhild. Who killed her?
LANG: I don’t know the name now. It is according to the
original, somebody who is sick and tired about the whole
killing, you know, a famous knight.
GOULD: On the prints we saw it just seemed to be
somebody’s vassal, just stepped out of line and . . .
LANG: I tell you, the first part, an acquaintance of mine has
it, is totally correct as I cut it. The second part I have never
seen the correct print here in the United States.
GOULD: OK, what about the difference in styles between
part 1 and part 2? There’s a lot more movement in part 2.
LANG: No, but wait a moment. We had four cultures. The
first is the fairytale culture: the blacksmith who teaches him
to make sword, right. Then the dragon, and then the wizard
who sits on the tree who gives him a cap who makes him
invisible. That is the fairytale, right? That’s one culture.

There is the culture of the kings of the Burgunds. You see the
elegant robes they wear, they are a little stylized, right? It is
a highly cultivated people who are already going down in
their development, you know? Then you come and you come
to Iceland, where there is the virgin queen. It is the third
culture. Then, in the second part you see the Mongols, the
Huns. This are absolutely realistic wild people—that is the
fourth style. Therefore, when the two styles clash together—
the highly educated and already on the downhill Burgunds
with the fresh-from-the-East coming Huns—you have the
clash of two styles, correct? And that was something which
I hope comes out.

CHESLEY: That’s interesting. Let’s talk about Man Hunt a

little, specifically.
LANG: Why?
CHESLEY: Because we just saw it.
LANG: Ja, what do you want to know?
CHESLEY: The character of Walter Pidgeon and the
relationship of [his character] Thorndike to Joan Bennett is
very unique in what starts out as a kind of hero story.
LANG: Why?
CHESLEY: There’s no real . . . the love story is totally unique.
LANG: Ja, but wait a minute. In these days you don’t have to
show a love story when you see a naked woman.
CHESLEY: They don’t even kiss.
LANG: What?
CHESLEY: They don’t even kiss. Their one possible kiss is
stopped when a policeman walks up.
LANG: Correct.
GOULD: He is very much a white knight.
LANG: No, but look, when Goebbels offered me the leadership
of the German film [industry], the same evening I left Berlin.
So, naturally, at a time like this I think, "what should I say?"
Or otherwise would I rather end up in a concentration camp,
right? And I looked out the window and it was already too
late to get my money—that is another story—but, thinking
what can happen to me till I leave Germany. And do you
think if the most luscious girl would have come I would have
gone to bed with her? No. I have other things to do. And
that is exactly what happened to Mr. Pidgeon. Hmm?

There is a girl who is a whore. Did you see the scene where
she’s in bed and crying and she doesn’t understand that he
doesn’t sleep with her because she loves him? And maybe
she loves him twice as much, maybe she wouldn’t love him if
he would have gone to bed with her. But everything which
he does to her is something so new. For example, there is
one scene, which I forgot that I did it, I tell you very frankly;
and he kisses her hand and she looks at him. It has never
happened to her that anyone kisses her hand. Is it really
necessary to show naked breasts for such a thing?

GOULD: Let’s talk about love scenes, because no one ever

talks about the love scenes you’ve done, and I think you do
great love scenes. I’m thinking about the one with the frogs
in You Only Live Once, and the scene on the bridge in Man Hunt,
and there’s a nice one in Cloak and Dagger, too, with Lilly
Palmer.
LANG: Ja.
GOULD: What do you think is the importance of love scenes?
LANG: Look . . . you will undoubtedly believe that love is a
very moving thing and important thing in human beings,
hmm? In the life of human beings, right? It’s the same thing
in a film.
GOULD: Would you say the film revolves around its’ love
scenes?
LANG: No, it depends.
GOULD: Is that where you get your audience?
LANG: No, it depends, it depends. Look . . .have you seen—
what was the last thing I saw before I went to the hospital?—
have you seen Slaughterhouse Five?
GOULD: Yes.
LANG: These scenes with the girl were very decent despite
that she has naked breasts. Right? They are very decent,
but I, personally . . . come, switch it off.
[The tape recorder is turned off.]
LANG: Just making is not love. [Laughter.]
CHESLEY: The way I look at Pidgeon’s character is that he
seems to be someone who realizes everything important too
late. It’s not until after Bennett is dead that he realizes first
that he wanted to kill Hitler, and second that he was in love
with her, it seems. Was that an important theme for you in
the film?
LANG: Everything is important on a film. Every single
scene is important on a film. If a scene is not important you
should throw it out.
CHESLEY: That brings me to something else, which was the
way George Sanders spoke German. Did he speak German?
LANG: I couldn’t tell you. I liked George Sanders very much,
and if I wouldn’t have been in the hospital I would have
written something in the papers about him [Note: Sanders
had died several months previously]. I was very much,
personally, hurt that after he committed suicide in Spain, that
nobody, there was not one director, who wrote how
wonderful Sanders was on the screen. I never worked with
anybody who was less problem. Unbelievable.
CHESLEY: The second to last scene of the film is a montage
between newsreel footage of the armies invading and
newspaper shots and Pidgeon in the hospital. Did you put
that montage together?
LANG: Ja.
CHESLEY: And did you collect the stock footage yourself?
How would you put together a montage like that?
LANG: We got the montage from daily shots which we got
from European films.
GOULD: And you put it together, as opposed to . . .
LANG: Ja. It was not in the script and I don’t know who had
the idea, if it was my idea or my cutter.
GOULD: The scene where he gets off the boat in London, it’s
dark and foggy and it reminded me of the sequence in
Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.
LANG: By the way, you know all the shots were made on the
lot of 20th Century Fox? There was a lake, and when they
follow him with the dogs that was made in it, but otherwise
the valley where he creeps up on George Sanders, it was
made in the studio. It was faked in the studio.
CHESLEY: How about the very opening where he is on the
cliff, there’s that shot that looks at his muddy footprints and
leads up to him on the cliff with the rifle. Was that a set or
was that . . .
LANG: Studio. Built in the studio.
GOULD: What do you prefer?
LANG: I definitely prefer studio.
GOULD: Why?
LANG: Simple, I make a shot of you, hmm? And five hours
later I want to make a close-up out of you. The same
lighting. But when I make it outside the sun is in the
morning there and five hours later it’s there, so I cannot make
the shot anymore because it's different lit. You know what I
mean?
GOULD: Yes.
LANG: Think.
GOULD: Do you think it’s a bad trend in the last ten years to
use a lot of locations?
LANG: There are many trends which I personally don’t like,
but this is something else. I don’t see any necessity. For
example, M, everything is shot was made in the studio, you
know?
CHESLEY: Speaking of M, that reminds me of something. My
favorite character in the film is the leader of the gangsters.
LANG: Ja. He was afterwards a very famous actor. I forgot
the name now [Gustaf Gründgens]. He was a very, very
famous actor, afterwards, not at the time when I worked with
him.
GOULD: M was made in 1931 and that was your first sound
film.
LANG: Ja. That was my first sound film.
GOULD: You made Woman in the Moon in 1929. How did it feel
to wait so long to get into sound? Were you anxious?
LANG: No. When I made Woman in the Moon—Girl in the Moon—it
was my own company and the release was by UFA and one of
the higher echelon from UFA was in the United States and
had seen sound, heard sound—the first [Al] Jolson film. And
then he came back and asked me to make sound when the
rocket starts. And for me it was wrong. It was breaking the
style of the film, you know? So I said “No.” So UFA said, “If
you don’t do it we break our contract, we don’t pay you
anything.” I said “OK, then we will see.” Then my lawyer
said to me “Look, Fritz, you cannot make the same things.
You have to deliver everything which you promised in your
contract to UFA.” It was my three architects, Gerda Maurus
and other people—about seven or nine people. I had to deliver
them to them. I didn’t get paid for it, and this went on for
eight or nine months and UFA hoped that I would finally
collapse, which I didn’t.
But I got sick and tired of all those things and I didn’t want to
make any films anymore. I wanted to become a chemist.
And about this time an independent man—not a very good
reputation— wanted me to make a film for him, and I said
“No, I don’t want to make any films anymore.” And he
came, and came, and came, and came and didn’t get me
along. So finally I said “Look, I’m going to tell you one thing,
I will make a film, but you have nothing to say for it. You
don’t know what it will be, you have no right to cut, you have
nothing to say, only to give the money. He said, “Fine,
understood,” and so I made M. Otherwise, I would have
never made the film in these days without a love story.
Never.
CHESLEY/GOULD: Wow.
LANG: And this was the time which passed, you know, that I
won my suit with UFA and then we started to write the script,
and originally I was thinking about something else. I talked
with my wife, Thea von Harbou, and I said, “What is the most
insidious crime?” and we came to the fact of poison letters;
anonymous poison letters, you know? And then one day I
said no, I said I had another idea. That was long before,
contrary to the newspapers, before this mass murder Kürten
thing in the Rhineland, you know. And if I wouldn’t have had
this, that no one has to tell me anything, and so on and so on,
I would have never, never have made M. Never. Nobody
knew Peter Lorre. It was his first film. No love story. No
famous actor.
CHESLEY: Would you compliment Peter Lorre as highly as an
actor as you did George Sanders?
LANG: Certainly.
CHESLEY: You never used him in the States, though.
LANG: Didn’t I say to you that I didn’t talk about actors?
CHESLEY: Let’s talk about music, then. I really liked the
music in Man Hunt, you know?
LANG: On television, no? They must have put it on later on.
Do you remember M? I like music only when it belongs to
the film. I don’t like music as a background. You know, it
might be, for example, in a love scene it helps, I grant you
that, but if a love scene needs music, uh-uh.
CHESLEY: One thing I do notice is that your action scenes
generally don’t have music.
LANG: No. Never.
CHESLEY: I thought that music would make an action scene
less violent; kind of add to the choreography nature of it.
LANG: I don’t know. But it doesn’t belong. That’s my
opinion. Look, for me it is wrong. Period. For me. What
anybody else does it’s OK.
GOULD: We started the interview talking about how you must
be interviewed an awful lot in recent years. In the last few
years there’s been a great deal of film consciousness, lots of
books coming out, film schools—we’ve been to a film school—
things like this. Do you think that’s good or bad?
LANG: I think it’s very good. I think it’s very good as long as
people like you don’t want to argue about certain things.
You said before, you don’t want to fight.
GOULD: I didn’t say that.
LANG: You said it!
GOULD: I’m a Canadian citizen.
CHESLEY: As someone who makes very dramatic, in-depth-
type films, do you think that this move to a lot of
intellectualizing and people going to sit in the movie and
saying, “Oh, look, he did that, oh look he did that,” and they’re
not sitting there and getting in on the action that’s going on…
LANG: Look, I really don’t’ know what you mean by this
question. Explain it to me. Do you know what you just said?
CHESLEY: Yes, I know what I said.
LANG: You understood what you just said?
CHESLEY: Yes. I’ll try and make it clearer. What I mean is,
an audience goes into a film and they can take it if they don’t
try to consciously think of what you were doing, of what the
director was doing.
LANG: The moment the audience thinks what the director
was doing, the film is not good. Hmm?
GOULD: Well, there are two levels to watching a film.
LANG: Not to an audience.
GOULD: We’re talking about an audience that is becoming
more aware of what a director does on a set.
LANG: That has nothing to do with the film. Do you really
think that an audience knows that? Nobody knows that.
CHESLEY: I know, but they can spend so much time in their
seats thinking they do know . . .
LANG: If a film gives them time to think in the theater and to
think what the director has done, then the film is rotten. If
one doesn’t feel with the characters in a film—go home.
GOULD: Well, obviously. But you have a lot of audiences
today that, say, go see Frenzy and think they know a lot about
Hitchcock and you’ll hear comments like, “that was a
Hitchcockian thing to do.” They seem to . . . do you see
what I’m trying to get at? They’re not just accepting a
Hitchcock movie on that one level.
LANG: Look, I don’t want to talk about other directors, but
what you said before about the violence thing in Frenzy; if
people want to see it that is their business. And I don’t think
that I have any right to judge or to criticize another director.
GOULD: OK, we’re back to you. When you look back at the
German part of your career and the films you made in
America, what do you think?
LANG: About what?
GOULD: How happy are you with the films you made?
LANG: Look, the question comes if you have many children,
which one do you like the best? Can you give an answer?
You have not many children. We’ll talk when you have
some.
CHESLEY: We did a course in our school, which was
specifically about European directors, including you, who
came to Hollywood and did a lot of films there. And one
thing we were interested in in the course was, to put it
bluntly, whether they went up hill or downhill on their arrival
and . . .
LANG: Wait a minute, wait a minute. “If they went up hill or
downhill on their arrival,” what does it mean?
CHESLEY: If their careers took a turn for the better or the
worse.
LANG: Ja, OK, OK.
CHESLEY: For example, Bogdanovich’s book is slanted
towards the theme that you improved when you came to the
States and I was just wondering what you thought about that.
LANG: But wait a minute: I told you at the beginning, it is
different when you work for two different audiences. The
European audiences are another audience as the American
audience. Right?
GOULD: Well, didn’t you make films partly for yourself also?
LANG: That is in a certain way correct, but still you make it
for an audience.
CHESLEY: On your arrival in the States—I think Fury is a
great film for an American audience, they’ll really like it—and
that’s your first film. How did you find out how you wanted
to approach the American audience?
LANG: When we wrote Fury, Bartlett Cormack and I, our first
hero—the part that Spencer Tracy played—was a lawyer, you
know? There were two or three sequences, you know? We
had no producer at this time. [Joseph L.] Mankiewicz
became the producer much later and he had not very much to
do with the film. He was a writer and it was his first job.
The so-called supervising producer called us and said, “No,
children, that is wrong.” And we said “Why?” Because we
felt if we make the hero a lawyer he can talk more, right?
And this man said, “No, it must be somebody with whom the
audience can identify himself.” Joe Doe. That was the first
lecture; and the first direction which I got about American
audiences. We were to rewrite the whole first two
sequences for a gas station attendant, Spencer Tracy, right?
The first very important lesson.

In the German films we would always see that the hero in

most of the films was a superhuman being, a kind of a…
Superman, you know? In America it should be the average
American citizen so that the audience can identify with this
man or with the woman, right? First very important lesson.

The second thing was when I made… certain things in

German, I don't know and there were gossiping women I
dissolved into geese kaa-kaa-kaa-kaa-kaa, you know, gossiping;
and then the same producer said, “No, it’s not necessary.
The American audience … it’s not so dumb that they don’t
know that chatting women, gossiping women are like geese.”
So we cut this out, too. That’s the second lesson. So you
learn, hmm?
GOULD: When you went back to Europe and did The Thousand
Eyes of Dr. Mabuse and The Indian Tomb, all of a sudden after about
twenty years you were making two fantasies again. Was this
because you were tailoring it to your audience?
LANG: No. They wanted it. That was very peculiar, they
wanted me first to make The Indian Tomb and I felt I would
make it for them, then I can make films which I wanted to do,
you know? I made the film for $1,000,040, the Indian films,
with a group of Indians and so on. But as you know, with the
German industry going downhill more and more, there was
nothing doing over there.
Now we come to one very important thing, maybe. What I
have against today’s movies is mostly what I call “special
cases.” I’m exaggerating now and I try to make it comic but
you will understand what I mean. What happened when Papa
made love to Momma and just, you know, when he was ready
to come the cuckoo clock said cuckoo-cuckoo and Papa
stopped, and Momma said ,“Don’t stop, don’t stop,” and he
said, “Now wait a moment, this damn bird is finished, it is
midnight.” So after a while they start again and then the
child was born. And because the parents were stopped in
making love something went wrong in the life of the child,
you know. And then this child made another child; there was
something wrong with them. These are special cases. This
is what I resent in today’s filmmaking. There are never, or
mostly never, like in Fury, a case of lynching and so on, or
like in M, the child murder, can be of today. It is an eternal
problem, you know. If I would have to make a film today, if
I could make a film with my eyes, you know what I would do?
CHESLEY/GOULD: No, what?
LANG: I would do a film about a young girl, let me say of
fifteen, who is pregnant and how she has to face life. That is
something which has happened twenty years ago and will
happen in twenty years ago. Do you know what I mean? Do I
make myself clear?
GOULD: Yes. In Peter Bogdanovich’s book you mention
something about a project you had for Jeanne Moreau.
LANG: Ja, I know, I know, what was it? I know.
CHESLEY: The Diary of a Career Girl?
LANG: Ja, about a career girl who . . . There was a time here
in Hollywood where there were career girls who said
everything can be sacrificed for a career. And I didn’t have
time to follow it up; I wrote an outline and I didn’t have time
to follow it up anymore and I wasn’t interested too much in it.
CHESLEY: Sounds like an interesting theme in light of
women’s liberation.
LANG: Ja. Maybe you are right, yah. I didn’t think about
that. But women’s liberation has something else. I suppose
you would have to make long, long research. You see, for
example, when I made Clash by Night—have you see it?
GOULD: Marilyn Monroe.
LANG: She was in all my films.
CHESLEY/GOULD: [Laughter]
GOULD: It was shown in Hollywood last week [Note: A
Marilyn Monroe retrospective in Beverley Hills that week was
held to commemorate the tenth anniversary of her death].
LANG: I was looking through three magazines, women’s
magazines, and I found out that over 77% of women had
extra-marital relationships even though they were married,
you know. So you have to try to find out what’s really going
on in life before you make such film. And about women’s
liberation I couldn’t, because I have not much experience
with young women, I didn’t talk about this, you know? But I
see many, many young people and, as I said, I believe in the
youth of America.
CHESLEY: Around the same time you made Clash by Night you
also made Human Desire and two points about both films struck
me, first of all, the parts I like best about both of them . . .
LANG: Excuse me, Human Desire, Human Desire . . .
CHESLEY: That’s Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame and Broderick
Crawford.
LANG: Oh ja, I know.
CHESLEY: The things that interested me, first of all the
documentary-like opening. First of all the fantastic
sequence with the train in Human Desire, and then the cannery
sequence . . .
LANG: Ja. What do you want to know?
CHESLEY: Those were the best parts of each film for me,
and I wonder if they’re the parts that interested you most?
LANG: Not in Clash by Night. In the other one I didn’t wanted to
make. There was a time when there was a standstill in
Hollywood and I wanted to step out of this film for reasons
which would be too long now. I would have to attack a man
who is dead, and so on, and Harry Cohn said, “Fritz, naturally
you can get out. You don’t have to do it, but then, according
to your contract you are still under contract to Columbia and
you can’t get paid and you will not get paid and you have no
right to work anywhere else as long as you don’t work.” And
you know it was the time when somebody tried to make—
three-dimensional film, and you had some glasses, you know,
and it was at a time when [Darryl F.] Zanuck wanted to make
something new, and French, in winter, with a big screen, so I
had to do it; too late. So I made Human Desire. I don’t know
any other desire than human desire. [Laughter]
So in this regard I am not very fond of this film at all. But
with regard to Clash by Night, Nicholas Musuraca, who is a
wonderful cameraman, we went up to Monterrey and we had
nothing to do, so we started to shoot a tiny bit. And after
three days we had shot 10,000 feet. And I said, “Haven’t we
done enough? Let’s stop it.” And we send it back to Jerry
Wald and we expected that he said, “You son of a bitches
what are you doing with the film,” and then we got a wire:
“Congratulations, that’s a wonderful opening.”
GOULD: This is a question that doesn’t have anything to do
with movies. I was just wondering what you did to relax?
LANG: What?
GOULD: What you did to relax? Hobbies . . .
LANG: I couldn’t relax. I made only movies in my life. That
was all.
GOULD: And now, even in the last few years? Do you listen
to music?
LANG: A good lecture. And especially now after the
operation. Don’t ask me. That’s too personal.
CHESLEY: Do you like Rancho Notorious?
LANG: In a certain way.
GOULD: Which way?
LANG: I tried to make a modern western. Some people liked
it. Marlene got younger and younger.
CHESLEY: I liked it a lot. And I must say I like it in spite of
what looks like monetary handicaps. I think especially of
the scene which you talk about in the Bogdanovich book,
where they are up on a mountain—Arthur Kennedy and
Marlene—and there’s that painted backdrop which was
unfortunate, I will say.
LANG: No money.
CHESLEY: That’s what I thought.
GOULD: Is there a way to get around that sometimes?
LANG: Look . . . you talk with the art director, right? And he
says, “Fritz, you will be able to do it.” Now you have the set,
you cannot stop it, right? So you try to avoid the artificial
things, you know, but sometimes it is not possible. It’s a
question of how it’s copied in the lab, you know. I’ll give you
ten more minutes. I’m getting too tired.
GOULD: We were just going to end it anyway. We’ve got two
more questions. Who did you admire, what other filmmakers,
when you were young?
LANG: I don’t talk about film.
GOULD: I committed a sin. I made a mistake again.
LANG: No. It’s not a mistake. Look, I admire all the film which
is good. You can learn only from a bad film, not from a good
film.
GOULD: I don’t agree with that.
LANG: I will prove it to you. If you are really an audience,
not what you said, if you are an audience you go to a good
film. Period. If you see a bad film, and you say, "What is
this? That is wrong, I wouldn’t have done it,” then you have
learned something. But in a good film when nothing disturbs
you, you never say that.
GOULD: A film can inspire you.
LANG: You can only learn from a bad film. From the
mistakes of a bad film.
GOULD: A good film can inspire you, which is a good virtue.
LANG: Ja, as long as . . . what many studios do when
somebody has a success with one film, others want to make
films like this. No, this is not good.
CHESLEY: Have you seen the American release version of The
Indian Tomb films? The American International 90-minute
version?
LANG: Ja.
CHESLEY: Unfortunately, that was the only one we were able
to see.
LANG: Look, the films are pretty good; nothing special.
Adventure films . . . have an idea in it. Every single one ran
one hour and 40 or 45 minutes. So you can imagine what you
like when you see both in 90 minutes.
GOULD: And you are happy with the one that you shot?
LANG: About what? About the 90 minutes?
GOULD: No, were you happy with the two parts?
LANG: I told you, I made one picture which made a lot of
money.
CHESLEY: One thing that interested me . . .
LANG: Because I wanted afterwards to make films that I
really would like to do.