The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Touch of Evil
269
thing with DPs is you’ve got to see their eyes, and the eye light and everything.
Orson just said, “Fuck that,” because of economics, I’m sure. He had people in
complete blackness. I was saying to Rob Hahn, “Let’s go for that, let’s have dark
and light,” which Rob does very well anyway, but to really push it as much as
possible with the knowledge that we can’t because it’s color. It’s about not being
afraid of taking big chances, not worrying about seeing people’s faces.
Tell me about your favorite scene.
Oz: My favorite scene, without question, is one of the five-minute scenes.
It’s when they’re in the room and there’s about eight people. Quinlan is
there, and they’re talking to the Mexican kid. The Mexican kid is supposedly
being used by this woman, and then Vargas goes in and sees the
shoebox in the bathroom.
That whole five-minute scene is absolutely amazing to me. Trying to
block eight people in a room with all the dark and light, the depth, and the
foreground, the background, the close-ups, the wide shots, and shooting
up. I mean just one shot, five minutes. Now, it’s not unusual that there’s one
shot that’s five minutes. I mean, Christ, Kubrick did a ten-minute shot, and
Orson did another five-minute shot, in the same room the second time we
were there. That is the most staggering scene to me. I can’t get over how he
had to, economically, you know. He couldn’t keep on cutting and having a
new deal and shooting in a different direction and relighting. He just kept
the camera steady and moved everybody around and created his own closeups
and wide shots. It was fantastic.
Welles, in talking about his style and vision, said that editing was the
most important element. He goes into this great hyperbole about how
directing itself is “not an art, or at most an art for a minute a day.”
Oz: I think he’s right, except if he was here I’d disagree with him. Look at
what he did in those two scenes. You’ve got to have those scenes blocked. In
a way, he’s editing as he’s shooting. He edited that five minutes because he
created his own close-ups, his own wide shots, his own mediums, his twoshots,
his eight-shots. So, in a way, it was editing. He didn’t just cut the film.
He moved people around to create the editing as he’s shooting it. Just the
fact that the scene exists belies what he says.