Haskell Wexler Quotes
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When people have problems with their mortgages and jobs many feel they're a failure, they didn't work hard enough or speak well enough: It's their fault things are going so bad. When they see their bodies right there [at occupations], we have something profoundly in common.
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The helicopter was a U.S. Navy helicopter. There were no civilian helicopters available to film companies, so they just made some stuff out of two-by-four wood. And I would straddle a two-by-four out from the helicopter with a camera and what we call a high hat, which is a low metal stand.
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I don't know where you're reading all this stuff, but it's pretty accurate, yes. It was in 1942. I was on a ship called the Acceloph coming back from the Red Sea and we were sunk off the coast of Africa by a German submarine. And I was in a lifeboat for 14 days and landed and lived with the Pondos in South Africa while - who took care of us and took care of me. I had some wound in my left leg.
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I think that the whole voyeuristic attitude of filmmakers or of me personally - of shooting documentaries and so forth - is an important issue. And it was an important issue to me, personally. And the whole question of when - when do you put the camera down or when do you keep shooting to get the shot. And a number of times in my life I've had that question hit me very hard.
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I rationalize out, well, how much help could you really be, you know? And maybe if people saw this, they'd realize the brutality of war and figure out there's got to be some better way than killing human beings who are just trying to farm a field.
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I had a rope around my waist, and the rope was attached into the helicopter in case I fell off. And the shot was a shot that began with Kim Novak going out of a house and getting into a bus. Then it was supposed to go over the countryside and find a freight train on which Bill Holden was standing. And then after seeing a good look at the freight train, the camera was supposed to move up into the sky for the end credits.
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I was shooting all this time. And there was only one guy who helped to pull him. And I had to think whether I was going to keep shooting or help the guy. And so I kept shooting and then they put him in this little clinic, and I photographed through the window while they had to amputate his leg. And I felt very strange because I didn't - I felt I could have helped, but I didn't help. But then I also felt elated that I was getting a shot that would be important to the film.
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The idea of accountability in Vietnam, Nicaragua and now Iraq - the media never has that in its quiver. When you see time after time there is no possibility of Nuremberg war crime trials, we're doomed to have it repeated.
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When I search myself carefully I do think it's from my mother. I even feel strange saying that. Most people, I believe, when they're asked profound questions about their own persona are not really able to enunciate it, because it's a combination of so many things. But certainly influences early on that I felt from my mother. I wouldn't say she was "political" per se; she was sensitive to other people.
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In Virginia Woolf I had a thing which the grips called the paraplegic which was a wheelchair thing that I had made up years before where I could stand on this bicycle-like device and be pushed down the hall, and then step off it with a handheld camera.
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There was no actually stock footage in Medium Cool. I wrote the script. I wrote the riots. And I integrated the actors in the film in the park during the demonstrations. But nowhere was it like we had stock footage and then later, in editing, integrated it into the film. It was all done at the time.
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I'd say to anyone trying to break into the business: Don't just be interested in movies. Be interested in life. Be a person. Be in touch.
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I've been in wars and in riots and hung out of many helicopters in the early days. And there's a detachment that happens when you look through the camera. You're looking for the shot.
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I think that it gave me a really strong feeling of my life force and a confidence in myself. I felt like I was a man. Before that point for some reason, I always felt I was a boy laughter. In fact, they called me the baby on the ship 'cause I was the youngest guy on the ship. But I always felt that way.
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I felt that that experience, because of the responsible nature that I found I acted all during that traumatic time, that I felt that I was a man.
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Most people, I believe, when they're asked profound questions about their own persona are not really able to enunciate it, because it's a combination of so many things.
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Now, I have to - in my defense, I have the say that general knowledge of the deadly nature of cigarettes was not primarily in my mind and nor was it on these poor cowboys, who - many of whom who've died of emphysema since we were shooting.
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Lighting was very primitive. And still it was really the way to learn because sometimes some of the modern technology is so extreme and so compartmentalized that we lose sight of exactly what we're doing.
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From my image of digging around in the mud like a grunt, I preferred fighting the war from ships.
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That force - which the system tried to laugh at - when it finally broke through and the movement was recognized, the media said they were "just a bunch of spoiled kids, dope smokers who don't know what the hell they want." To demean it as something laughable - but that didn't work for very long. It's still an ongoing struggle; they're trying to find out how to fight. It's very exciting times.
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I used it in a shot where Richard Burton goes down the hall to get a gun in a closet. And I wanted to get some excitement, and the hallway was too narrow for the dollies that they had at that time. So it was quite useful.
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When I was in Vietnam with Jane Fonda, I was shooting a farmer in a field - just a pastoral scene. And while I was shooting him, an explosion occurred right - he blew up right in my lens, so to speak. And he had stepped on a landmine.
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We, as film-makers, are privileged. We can make people cry or laugh. We can make them think and feel. It is a great privilege and a great responsibility.
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Well, of course the general idea was dreamed up by the advertising agency and so my job was to realize that. And we down to Lubbock, Texas, usually and onto a ranch and we would pick cowboys who looked the part and photograph them under dramatic situations - rounding up wild horses or running through streams and then reaching in and taking a drag on a cigarette.