Behind the Scenes: Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962) with Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif

I was just getting ready to do Pulp Fiction, and I read an early manuscript of Rum Punch. And I thought, hey, this is really good. Rum Punch was a book that came to us in galley form. We were like, man, this is a great next movie. We should do this. And then we started to option it. We didn't know if we could commit 100%, because what if I decide to do something else? What, are you going to throw me in jail? No, they didn't want to do that. So I felt like we were taking advantage of them because I could change my mind. We just let it go. And then it just came back. Way after Pulp Fiction, we were able to pick up three Elmore Leonard novels. And I thought I was going to do another one of them. I didn't think I would do Rum Punch. And I was just getting ready to give Rum Punch to another director that I knew. And in reading it again that night, I fell in love with it the exact same way I did a couple years before. And so I went and told Lawrence, my partner, Lawrence Bender, I said, you know, I think Rum Punch is what I want to do next. He called me about a year before he went into production and said that he had decided to do Rum Punch rather than either Freaky Deaky or Kill Shark. Speak. All right. Athena sort of rose to the top, I think, in terms of his consciousness. And I was really happy because I've always loved the book and I've always wanted to make it. I didn't tell Elmore Leonard that I was placing the film in the South Bay. I didn't tell him I was changing Jackie to black or anything. I just kind of talked to him about the piece a little bit and asked him some questions and said that I would, like, get back in touch with him towards the end, ask him a couple more factual questions. But I decided to just give him the script. Mark it. I think we were both a little worried that Elmore Leonard was going to get, like, what did he do to it? I mean, what did he do to my book? He wrote to me, no, he called me, I mean, right before I went into production on Jackie Brown. He said, I've been afraid to call you for the last year. And I said, why? Because you've changed the title and the color of the main character? And he said, yeah. I said, well, that's all right. Do what you want, you're the filmmaker. And he really liked the script. Then he came back and said not only did he thought it was the best adaptation of his work he'd ever read, he thought it was maybe the best script he'd ever read. It made me feel really good. Cut! The reason why for me that this really works is that Quentin really captured the essence of Elmore Leonard and captured the essence of the story and the book in the script and on screen. Jackie Brown is a wonderful script, and I thought it was a great film for Quentin to do because it's much more serious, and it's also older people. It's a wonderful follow-up to Pulp. You know, he has it in him, and we weren't out to make Pulp Fiction 2. We were out to do a completely different movie. I didn't know how Quentin would be able to adapt the book or novel to his style of filmmaking. And action! Quentin said, it's about 50% Elmore Leonard and 50% me, and that's about right. There's a lot of things in the book that aren't covered, but the human relationships and the caper, of course, were there in the original, but Quentin, of course, made them his own. I told Quentin, I said, if you and Elmore Leonard had a child, this is what this is, because it really, I think it maintains a lot of that same feeling. Mark it. Action! Hey! All right. Why are you here? I was waiting for the phone. Good luck. Have you guys been on it since afternoon? I guess I'd better find another one. Thanks anyway. Cut! He has the same kind of sensibility that Elmore has, and he was able to take scenarios and create dialogue around them that made a wonderful kind of cinematic sense of that novel. I think he respected the material, and he wanted to use what he could, and he found out that he could use perhaps more than expected. I'd read Rum Punch, I'd read The Switch. I'm an Elmore Leonard fan, and when I read it, I was going in there to compare it, you know, and see how much it was like those books. And it was pretty true to the books, except it's got Quentin's humor and speed to it. This is Jackie Brown's Cabo Airbag. In it, she's going to smuggle the half-million dollars from Ordell that she's brought in from Mexico. And the one thing about working with Quentin is he wants everything authentic. So we're going to really shoot the scene with a half-million dollars, and this is, if you guys wanted to know, that's what a half-million dollars feels like. It was just an explosion, the 70s, which I think is probably why everyone's interested in going back and looking at it with a magnifying glass to see what it was about. It's documented now how knowledgeable he is. It's like weirdly encyclopedic, I mean, weirdly in a good way. Well, Quentin's educated, I think, from a broad scope of interest in film, and I think that's what has made him the filmmaker that he is today. He liked the rough, tough exploitation pictures of which I certainly made a few contributions. I remember the first time he walked by my trailer and heard all this noise coming out of it, and he kind of peeked in and realized I was watching Hong Kong film between shots. It just brought this big smile to his face. So we actually talk about a lot of the same things, and the fact that he's an only child and lived in front of the television and at the movie theaters, I did too. So we just actually are almost, you know, kind of carbons or negatives of each other in a sense. I'm just a little older than he is. I'm a big fan of black exploitation films. I love black cinema and everything. And, yeah, this is, you know, I mean, this movie is what it is. It's not a black exploitation movie. It takes its tone from that. I like to call him the Rain Man of filmmaking. If you talk to Quentin about an obscure film like Bikini Models of the Amazon or some strange film that you would never think of, he will not only know the actors and the director, but he'll know who did the costumes for it. He loves the genre. He's a huge fan of the 60s and the 70s. It was a good time. It was a time of innocence because we were, the 70s were the rewards of the 60s and the 50s. The marches, the restrictions were down. We had more freedoms given to us, and all across the board, not just the black community. I know that he spent a lot of time in the black community and going to films and hanging around people, so he knows what he's talking about. I get my inspiration from my community. I'll look at Black Enterprise and see all these women who are doing phenomenal things. That inspires me, and it's cyclical. They inspire me, I inspire them. The audience knows because we are basically, you know, representing them, and I think that's a part of developing who you are in your humanity, being interested in other human beings. The most integrated place I've ever seen in my life was a project, a housing project in Tennessee where you had all the poor blacks and the poor whites living right next to each other in this housing project. And everybody was cool with everybody else. They were just all completely in the same boat. I'm not very critical of what he does, or I don't question it in certain ways like a lot of people do, or his right to say things or write things that other people say, especially like the word n***a, so I just kind of deal with it. You know, Clinton is who he is, and he's very literary. I have to say, my feeling about that is the same as my feeling about characters like saying, you know, cuss words or violence or something like that. If Elmer Leonard had written more violent scenes in the book and they had been organic, I wouldn't have hesitated about doing them at all, all right? But I wasn't trying to crank it up for that. There's a very distinctive style, and not only that, all of his scripts have words in them. There aren't, like, 14 pages of descriptives where you don't have people talking for, like, 8 pages because they're saying, OK, he gets in the car, he walks down the street, he jumps over this, he runs his way. People are talking, and things are moving with dialogue. Marker. Settle quietly. Camera set. OK, ready guys? Here we go. So you're starting off pretty provocative with this first little tidbit. OK? Action. Fidel has a guy working for him named Lewis. Did you two meet? Yeah, this afternoon before I came here. You know, Quentin's been a Pam Greer fan forever, and then when we met her on Pulp Fiction, I was like, this woman is such an awesome lady. He called me in for an audition for Pulp Fiction for the role that Rosanna Arquette played, but they'd already hired Eric Stoltz, and I guess Quentin after a while said, he's not going to tell Pam to shut up. You know, I said, maybe that just won't work. She gave a great reading, and I could have cast her, but just wasn't quite right. And he said, but we're going to work together one day. And I said, oh yeah, right, sure, you're going to go through the roof with this, and I'll be seeing you at premieres or something. But I did a good reading, we had a great time, and when I walked in, there were all my posters from 20 years ago when I was a little piss and vinegar kid. And I said, did you put these up because I was coming over? And he said, no, I was going to take them down because you were coming over. I'm a big fan of Coffee. I'm a big fan of the director Jack Hill who kind of discovered Pam, and they did The Big Bird Cage and The Big Dollhouse and Coffee and Foxy Brown. He has been a big fan, has had posters in his office forever. He's been collecting them, and I didn't know I was a cult figure. He informed me. I've watched Pam for a long time. I guess the first time I was standing there rehearsing with her and I had my hands on her throat, I'm sitting there saying, I'm about to choke Coffee. It's kind of chilling to be there and doing that, and kind of exciting in the same breath. And it's kind of hard not to fall in love with the way you're standing there looking at her. She's so good, she's got so much energy, and she's vibrant, and she's tough when she wants to be. Yes, and her standing up against Samuel L. Jackson, that's the action in it. That's the story. A big thing about her character is the fact that she's in her mid-40s. A lot of people, if they were making a movie, they would just immediately change that to 32 or something like that. No, no, no, that's a big thing that she's in her mid-40s. And so I had to find an actress that is mid-40s, looks like she's mid-30s, looks wonderful, all right, and looks like she can handle anything. And I was trying to think of who that would be, Quentin had the confidence to say, Pam will have all of that I need for Jackie to really, now we've got Elmore Leonard's characterization, and he writes so descriptively well, and we have Quentin Tarantino's energy and excitement and timing and style. Now Pam will bring all this from the street. She's intimidating. I mean, she's tough. And at the same time, she is the sweetest, nicest, so tender, just really, I love her. We just started, literally we're just in rehearsals, and I was thinking, well, when the film's over, I wonder if I'll be able to stay friends with her, if she's just going to disappear, because she's this great, she's this great soul. I do think that Quentin's fascination with Pam turned into something really special when he wrote Jackie Brown, because he wanted her to soar and shine in a certain kind of way, so he puts things in her mouth and he gives her things to do that are very enhancing and exciting. He was so excited about working with one of his all-time favorite actresses that, of course, that passion made it so exciting. It was thrilling, and I got just as excited as he because he was just so enthusiastic about working with her. I think that with Quentin's name and Quentin and Pam Greer together, it's such a kind of exciting one-two punch. And then it's not like we think, oh, we've got to put stars, we've got to put actors. It's funny, Quentin has a really great saying. He says, I treat actors like stars, and I treat stars like actors. The only thing that's weird about like, oh, so you revive people's careers, that's your thing. I go, well, my thing is casting the right actor for the right role. I didn't just plug in John Travolta in any old role because I've always wanted to work with John Travolta. At the end of the day, I'm casting the right actor for the right role, all right, and it's just, I'm looking further than the list. Pam Greer would be great in this. Robert Forster would be great in this. But if it ends up now, they're doing great and like, you know, the career has taken off and they're in the game again in a big way, it doesn't get better than that, and you couldn't have it happen to better actors. I've always been a big fan of Robert Forster. I was always a big fan of his as an actor, and I've always liked his work a lot and wanted to work with him. Some years ago, he sold a script to a guy I know, True Romance, and when he sold him the script, he said, and this part goes to Robert Forster. Eventually they took the movie away from this guy and sold it to Tony Scott apparently, and Christopher Walken did the part. He came in and auditioned for Reservoir Dogs and wasn't quite right, but really loved him. I was reading for the part that Lawrence Tierney eventually played, but when I read for him, Quentin said, you know what, this might not work out, and if it doesn't, don't worry, he said, one of these days I'm going to use you. And in the time of reading the book and writing the script for this, I thought of the different people who could be Max Cherry, and he was definitely one of the ones that kind of kept coming into my mind and everything. He probably saw Alligator, and he probably saw some of the old stuff, and he saw something and apparently said, that guy's going to work again, let's let him work. He called me about a year before he went into production and said that he wanted Robert Forster for Max Cherry, who was the bail bondsman. I said, Robert Forster? I haven't seen him since Medium Cool, which was, I think, 69. He says, oh, he's still around, he's still working, and he was perfect. There's a lot of casting directors that basically just don't do their job. They know who all the other casting directors know, which is basically everybody who's on that A-list and hot B-list. But then there's actors like Robert Forster who have been around forever. And you say, where did he go? He didn't go anywhere. He's been working. A lot of his stuff has gone straight to video, and some of it's not good, and some of it is, and that's what it is. But his work is always good. When Quentin said he wanted to cast him, I was like, hmm, that's a really good idea, but why don't we see other people? And I was doing that kind of thing. And Quentin's like, no, no, no, I want Robert Forster. He's perfect for this role. And then I bumped into him in a restaurant, and it was just like, bam, he's the guy. And I just gave him the part. Then when I met him, I really understood what he was talking about, because he's such a sweet man. He did say it was Robert Forster. He said he'd always envisioned him, and that he'd been thinking, thinking, thinking, and he says, no, it's definitely, definitely, yeah. I really like him, Pam, you're really going to like him. And now I'm trying to look for his film, I'm trying to look for his shows, and I'm saying, yeah, yeah, I remember. I remember he had this dark, very calm power, and I said, oh, yeah, that's what you're saying. I wonder what it is like now, you know, from surviving and family and, you know, you don't know how many marriages and divorces and children and tragedies and life stuff that you've been through and what you're like when you come out of it. And he's come out with, you know, great humility and character and charm and a smile, and it works, it works very, very, very well. I'm a fan of Robert Forster's when I was a kid, and I was actually very, really impressed with him when I first met him, a little nervous around him and stuff. It's interesting. He's a very understated guy. I used to watch his television show, and I watched several films of his. We actually get along very well off camera. It's kind of interesting because those 2 characters kind of butt heads, but sometimes you have to have that kind of rapport off camera so that when you do the things that we have to do on camera with each other, you know, you're able to do them and not have any self-consciousness about it. It was fun, you know, you get feelings when you're doing scenes with someone that things are going right and that they're clicking, and every scene that I did with Robert had that feeling. Sam Jackson, I never worked with anybody as good. See, this guy's from theater, so he prepares the way I try to prepare. Quentin said, yeah, Sam's gonna play Wardell, and I said, ooh, another nice robe. Sam, he just says Quentin's lines probably better than anybody else alive. Some kind of karmic meeting somewhere in there that when Quentin writes the stuff, it comes out of my mouth kind of naturally. Sam is just a riot. He cracks me up, and we had a great relationship as Melanie and Wardell. You sort of like him in spite of hating him, or I do anyway, Melanie does. I'd say Sam Jackson is about the most graceful actor I've ever seen. He's just totally graceful, the way he works. It's really, really impressive. Sam has a lot of power in his work, intensity, and he has such a presence, and I was just fascinated by it. Now, I've seen him play the character in Pulp Fiction. Where will he go on this one? That was my curiosity. And he's just done a phenomenal job, just phenomenal. I actually create a lot of stuff around my characters, and I bring stuff to them, like this whole thing, like something that I brought with me, because this is who I thought Wardell was, and Quentin, there's all this other stuff that he's bringing, and we find a way to meet and take the stuff that I bring, the stuff that he has there, and the kinds of things that he wants to do inside a scene and make some kind of magic happen. Samuel L. Jackson added a lot, I thought, to the part. In fact, there was a scene, one scene in particular, where the scene starts up on the balcony of an apartment house, then they come down, and then they're standing by the trunk, and he wants them to get in the trunk. And they expanded on that scene from what it was in the book because they liked it. Sam is just perfect. He was almost too perfect, all right? You know, it was like, no, he was just terrific, and there's a little part of Sam that is Wardell. I've been having kind of that kind of year this year, and then all of a sudden, the first day, we're on set together in that bar, sitting there doing this huge scene with Robert De Niro. You still want to do your job, you want to be involved in your job, but in the back of your mind, you're still saying, this is Robert De Niro, I'm actually doing a scene, I'm acting with Robert De Niro. Robert De Niro was somebody that we were actually talking to about working on another project, we were circling around. It was kind of funny how Bob got the script because I wasn't 100% sure that he would respond to Lewis, and before I'd even built up the courage or whatever to send it his way, Harvey Weinstein had slipped it to him. He's so great in this movie. It's a character that you really haven't seen him play, and it's an amazing performance, it's very subtle and very funny. He's got some funny lines and everything, but it's really a character that's internal. It's a character where the characterization is all done through body language, like the way the guy stands, the way he sits, the way he smokes his cigarette, all those kind of things. That's one of the things that Robert De Niro does as well, if not better than anybody else, is inhabiting a character through behavior. I had no idea what he was doing until I saw the film, and then I realized, oh my God, he is discovering the world again after being locked up for four years. He's got his own thing going. It's going beautifully, it's so specific and subtle and just pays off so great. I thought De Niro was great, the way he played the part. This guy had been to prison and he had learned a few things, but it also, you see some wear and tear on him. From the first shot, between him and Sam Jackson, you just really know who Lewis is by just the way he's holding that little drink of his and his kind of slumped-over thing and just kind of half listening, half falling asleep, with both Ordell droning at him and these girls getting him. It's not until you go to the mall that you actually have any plot function in the movie. Lewis' character is very much freed of the plot. You literally get to know him the way you get to know somebody in real life. You get to know him through hanging out with him. Bridget was someone that Quentin pretty much had in mind as well from the beginning. She was perfect casting. I know Bridget pretty well and I like her a lot, but we've never really got a chance to work together and I always wanted to get to know her more, because you know how it is, you know, actors and stuff, they're over here and I'm over there and da-da-da-da. He said, read The Switch, which is the book that Elmer Leonard did, which introduces a lot of the same characters before Rum Punch, which would be Jackie Brown. She said, Quentin wants me to read for Rum Punch. God, great, great. And I particularly liked that character who had just been living off of men now for a good 15 years by the time she gets to Ordell. It was a very important thing to me, being from California, that the girl's a California surfer girl, and that's a very special look. It was a different experience than I've ever had, a feeling of working on a character before having read the script. And as opposed to playing it cool and seeing her and seeing a bunch of other actresses. Again, wait, months and months before I was finished with the script, I saw her on an airplane and then just gave her the part. Bridget's another one of those people that it was kind of a privilege for me to be able to do something with. I mean, I've watched her for a long time and know she's from a good bloodline of actors. And it was great to be able to do the stuff that we did together. I was concerned about her getting too much sun. You know, it's like, oh, okay, everyone, we're all like moms and dads on this show. Watch out, put a cover up. It's a great environment to work in. I don't know if all those movies are like this, but everybody's a lot of fun, the crew and the other actors, and he's great. It's just, it was fun to come to work. Michael is an actor that I've always loved, and I know Quentin's a big fan of his. And we've always been circling around wanting to work together, and it just kind of worked out, you know. Quentin and Michael met. He went through the whole meeting convincing me how he's not right for the part. I said, well, I don't know, I have no clue what to do. I get together with him again, and we're talking, and he wants to work with me, loves the project and everything, but oh, he just doesn't know about this Nicolette guy, if he's got the right handle for it, all right. And the more I talked to him, I said, all right, and then I went and thought, okay, I better figure something out here. And then he shows up, and bang, he was the guy. It was really funny, it was like, oh, I've never gone through that process before, that was very interesting. He's a great natural actor. I had to get over some nerves working with him because it's Beetlejuice. Michael Keane's so full of piss and vinegar. He's got so much going on inside of him, and he took that wonderful little part and really made it something interesting and great to work with. He's so natural. He's such a good actor that he's that guy, you know. I think it really worked very, very well. I was surprised that he was able to play in that and also in Out of Sight, the same character. He changed from a DEA agent, I think, to FBI and just to make it work. It was funny to see him playing the same character in both movies. When someone says, here's your playing field, and you put Michael in it, man, look out. He's playing all the positions and having a great time. We very much have a good time on the set. That's a big, big thing for me. I've worked with a whole lot of people during the course of my career and everything, and the crew just keeps getting, taking this person from this one and add this person, and then we work on this person. So by the time we did Jackie Brown, it's like we had a wonderful crew, and they're like my family. It's one of the reasons I like making movies, is making movies with my family. It's a great thing when you get to work with a friend, someone who you love to hang out with, and you respect what they do, and nobody does it as good, and you know it, and you can say it right to their face. What Quentin did is what I would expect at its best. He's clear about what he wants. In his case, he adapted it, but adapted it very well, made the script his own, more or less, as you would say, and then finally just being very appreciative of whatever I was doing. And if you have a director who is responsive to that and has that sensibility, it's a lot of fun. Quentin has found a way to come in and be very gentle and say take your time, calm down, and just kind of, you know, be in the moment. He's so great, and his films are so much fun, and he also tries so many different things. Let's try this here, let's try this here, let's do a split screen here, let's do this, let's do that. He's so much fun to work for. I think he's in the ideal position that he writes, produces, directs, and knows what he's doing, and it's something new and different. It's always fresh and fun. This guy is so generous. He's generous to everybody, and not just the actors and not just the big guys. The set was full of people who love him, and there were laughs all day long. That says something about him. When Quentin comes on the set, his enthusiasm infects everyone, starting with the actors and trickling right down to craft service and the guys out there driving the trucks. And when you work on that kind of film with Quentin, he gives the whole crew that energy, and that transfers right through to the actors and right through to the finished product. It's always fun to be a part of what he's created. Even though this was an Elmore Leonard novel first, it still has this very Quentin-esque quality to it. This stuff is so good that bringing anything to it is a matter of his asking you to, not needing to. It was absolutely fun working on Jackie Brown all the time. What a cast, what a cast and what a crew. Very smart because he keeps it very relaxed, he keeps it fresh so you can always create, and he gives you room to create. He doesn't roll over, he hears you, and you get the sense that if it's genuinely a better idea, he's got no problem saying, oh, I like that, better do that. Budget and actor schedules and locations, you're always under pressure, there's always a certain amount of time in a day you have to shoot. In that sense, it's never easy, but what we do, I think, is because we love making movies, it's not commerce first, it's art first. He is an actor. He wants his actors to be great. He does take after take and he throws you ideas as you're going along. It's a lovely process. I'm never going to move on until I get it. All right, that's just the number one thing. And we've done all this stuff to get all these people together here. The film is the least expensive thing there.