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"The Most Indefatigable Perfectionist": Dana Andrews on Director William Wyler
From: Columbia University
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Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Hollywood star Dana Andrews (1909-92) dazzled audiences in the 1940s as a leading man in movies like The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Laura (1944). His success continued during the '50s with My Foolish Heart (1950), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) and While the City Sleeps (1956). In this 1958 interview with the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, Andrews talks about working with William Wyler and other famous Hollywood directors. |
 s a director, Wyler is probably the most indefatigable perfectionist I've ever seen. He will do a scene over and over and over again, and I think sometimes he doesn't know exactly what he wants--in opposition to some directors I know that do know exactly what they want, and their minds aren't malleable to accept something that might even be better. I think that he's waiting to see what develops, which is more or less a rehearsal type of creation right there before your eyes. And when he gets it, he knows immediately. He's been criticized by a lot of actors I know, who say they don't think he knows, and that Take 2 might be as good as Take 26. This is not so. When it does happen, he knows it's there. But sometimes he doesn't know how to explain to the actor what he wants, and sometimes I think he himself doesn't know exactly. But when something does happen that's acceptable--print it. He'll take maybe one more, for safety, trying to do the same thing. |
 For instance, there was a scene in a picture that had happened on about the 15th take, which was a gag scene. We had actually shot it about 14 times. In the scene where I wake up the next morning in the girl's bedroom--he wanted to put across the idea that the man didn't know where he was; at first he was just curious because he'd been kicking around for years in the Army and it didn't make much difference to him. He'd been pretty drunk the night before, and he didn't remember anything about having gone to sleep there. So he tried my blowing the canopy bed, and looking around casually, and then suddenly knitting my brow, various things--we tried one thing after another. He had a peculiar way of saying, "Once more." You could hardly hear what he said; he'd sort of say it between his teeth. We did this over and over. Finally I said to him, "Mr. Wyler, the man has probably been rolled a few times; not knowing where he is, he might immediately reach in his pocket to see if his money is there. We can put over the idea that he doesn't know where he is and doesn't have any idea what has happened." |
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| Dana Andrews talks about the director William Wyler. | |
So he said, "Let's try that." We did it that way, and boom, that was it. We printed that. That is a little spot in the picture that people always mention when they talk to me about the picture. |
Now that I've worked on the stage here in "Two for the See-Saw" for four months, I find something I didn't know--that so many things happen in the process of developing a character that you don't get an opportunity to profit by in the making of motion pictures. A friend of mine, David Wayne, said to me the other day, when they were working on "Tea House of the August Moon," in about the third or fourth week of rehearsal, suddenly a scene took on a completely new character--new things came out, new dialogue was added--and it was terrific. Someone made the comment, "Do you realize, if we were making a motion picture, we would never have this?" This, I think, is one of the differences between making a motion picture and doing a play--you really get the benefit of rehearsal. I think Mr. Wyler to some extent tries to make up for that lack of opportunity by doing it over and over again. It's very tiring for the actors, but sometimes he gets things that he would never otherwise get. |
Mr. Wyler is much more meticulous in some details than others. This is a sort of a European thing, I guess, although all his experience in directing is in Hollywood and he used to do Westerns. I remember in making The Best Years of Our Lives, there was a scene where I was supposed to be selling a bottle of perfume in the drugstore, and he wanted the sequence where the lady looked at a box of perfume, and I took off the large top to the box, then another smaller, and a smaller one and a smaller one, and finally the thimble-sized bottle of perfume was in it. When we got to the scene, I remember there were 200 extras on the set, with a complete drugstore, actually, imported from outside, on the stage--every article, pills, everything. They didn't go out to a drugstore; they thought it would be better to have it on the stage, so the actual drugstore, ice cream and all, was there. Mr. Wyler stopped production for three hours to get a new box made. He had to have one made. He had a guy searching and also had the property man making one, and they finally came up with one that was satisfactory to him. There were 200 extras sitting around. This must have cost $5,000. But he didn't want it without that little touch. That is just indicative of the care with which he directs. |
Mr. Wellman, on the other hand, is actually less sensitive to delicate things, although he certainly directed a beautiful picture in The Ox-Bow Incident. But Mr. Wellman is, not without cause, called Wild Bill Wellman. He's a very dominant, two-fisted sort of a man. I have been told--and I think I've observed it very frequently--that this covers up a very sensitive interior, but nevertheless, it's pretty successfully covered up. |
For the actor, sometimes it's very difficult to probe down and find out what he's actually trying to say. |
When we were making The Ox-Bow Incident--I had some discussions with him about this afterwards, and we were very good friends--and I said, "Do you realize that when I was in one of these very teary incidents where I was about to be hanged, you cracked some very funny joke, after you'd said, 'Roll the cameras'? Then you turned to some assistant to make this joke, and I was hard put to get into the scene." |
He said, "I was afraid you'd ham it up if I didn't." |
This is his oblique way of keeping you from getting too teary, or hamming it up. But he might at least have told me that he wanted it a little less hammy, because I think by that time I was able to take that kind of direction. He's what you'd call a two-fisted man, a man's man, and I think in subtle, delicate themes, you won't find Mr. Wellman very proficient. For instance, The High and the Mighty. I would say there's nothing sophisticated about him. Some depth--but the sort of thing that is more taciturn, not very voluble. He likes things to be unsaid--as Hemingway says, "The iceberg ..." |
I did The Night Song with Dore Schary. |
As to Mr. Cromwell, he is of course an actor himself, and is certainly very well able to explain to an actor what he wants. |
Unfortunately, in the picture I did for him, there was nothing very complicated about it. I think, given something worthy of him, that he would certainly be able. I think Mr. Cromwell, though, is a little less likely to create something different, than any of the others you've mentioned--particularly when we come to Mr. Milestone. I did three or four pictures with Mr. Milestone, and sometimes he stumps description. Although he "lets things happen," he's something of a poet with the camera. He's a terrific raconteur, and he has the format of a scene laid out, the beginning, the middle and the end, for each scene. As a matter of fact, he has an artist along with him, and he sort of rehearses it and draws the sketches of the camera layouts he wants. He was a very good cutter before he was a director, and he works more or less by inspiration, it seems to me. He sits and looks over the script, and gets inspirations as he goes along. He studies the script and rehearses it beforehand. But then things happen, on the set, that he never thought out and never has discussed before. Something that happens will give him an idea, and he'll rearrange the whole thing, even though he has the sketches. He will get away from them. He's very flexible, I'd say. He also is more of a man's type of director. |
So many of the things that were in All Quiet on the Western Front were done with the camera only, for instance. That's what I mean by a poet with the camera. Did you see Walk in the Sun? So much of it was just faces. He would cut to a face, a lot of times--documentary. I did another thing with him. He has an Academy Award for doing comedy, too, you know--the first Academy Award for comedy. I think it was Two Arabian Nights. This goes back to Douglas Fairbanks's day--it was one of the first talkies. |
I suppose I'm prejudiced, to some extent, because he's a very close personal friend of mine. But I don't think I confuse these things; I think I can look at him objectively. I think one of the things Mr. Milestone does, in present-day motion-picture making, which has hurt him professionally (and I told him this) is that he takes a script which is written by a very capable writer and will very frequently try to rewrite the script. He's very, very dogmatic about what he wants. He'll change the script around and fight with the writer, and very frequently comes up with an inferior script because of it, because he is not a writer. He's a great raconteur, and he knows the construction, basically, but he's not able to write, and he tries to do this. He was very closely associated in the old days with Darryl Zanuck. As a matter of fact, one of Zanuck's first pictures he and Milestone did together, at Warner's. Zanuck was able, in two pictures that I did with Milestone at 20th Century Fox, to hold Milestone down. He'd say, "Now, Milly, you stay away from the writing." |
Although he would do things with the camera that were not in the script, as far as the dialogue went, and the basic characters built up in words, Zanuck was able to keep him off that, which I think is a very good idea. |
In Purple Heart, there was a scene at the end where they walk out the door. In the script it says, "So they walk out the door"--presumably to be executed, which they were. He suddenly said, "I want a shot of them coming down that long corridor." You know, Mr. Milestone and I worked this out together. I had heard, in some dramatic radio presentation about the Air Force, the Air Force song ("Wild Blue Yonder") played almost as a funeral dirge, because great tragedy was involved. So I said, "Why don't we do that?" |
He said, "That's a good idea, but I'll tell you what we'll do." (This is how we worked this out together.) "We want this to end on a note of triumph, so we'll start it out this way, and then we'll cut to these faces as they march along. 'All right, we're going to die, but let's die for a reason'--like this." |
This really gave the music department a time, because to change the tempo of the music, which had been prerecorded, was a job. They finally had to go back and rerecord the music, which cost them quite a bit of money because they had to have another music session--to do it to our footsteps. Milly said, "I can't have the scene go to the music; I have to have the music go to the scene." So we started out at a very slow pace and worked this up, and it ended right on rhythm. |
This was not in the script, you see, but here there was no dialogue, so he got no friction from Mr. Zanuck, and I think it really set off the picture a good deal--the music, and these cuts of the men's faces. |
I think it is apparently easy to answer the question as to what makes one star a sure box-office drawing card, another not. It is a combination of things, of course. No one thing is responsible. But I think something that you can certainly say is responsible is the parts that they have appeared in at a certain period in their lives, and the way that they have been handled by their agents or by the studios or both, or by independent producers--and luck, in some instances. Here on Broadway, for example, no one knows what is going to be a hit and what isn't. The actor can't have a great deal to do with that, either, because something you may think is good may not be good. At the period, when, for instance, I did Laura, Mr. Zanuck wanted John Hodiak for that part because he had just recently arrived in pictures and had done Lifeboat, with Tallulah Bankhead, and there had been considerable comment about his being a very sexy man, a masculine, virile type of fellow. I went to work to try to get the part, and finally did. After I got Laura, and while I was making A Wing and a Prayer, just before Laura came on, I went out on a Saturday evening (which I hated to do) to find out how to fly a plane. This is what the director wanted me to do. I told the assistant director, "You don't have to know how to fly a plane," because they cut above your shoulders always in a plane. You can't see what's being done with the hands, and it doesn't matter. But anyway, I had to go. I went there, and it turned out it was a very good idea, because I had about a two-hour talk with Mrs. Zanuck. At the end of the conversation--this is after The Ox-Bow Incident and other A pictures, but I was more or less second to Tyrone Power in one and Henry Fonda in the other--Mrs. Zanuck said, "I'd like to ask you a question. I've talked to you for two hours now, and I've seen you in a number of pictures. I thought you were a very fine actor, but I've never thought of you as having leading-man charm, shall we say. Now I've talked to you for two hours and I find you very charming and very attractive. At what stage did this happen? When did it happen?" |
Well, I had to laugh. She said, "Don't laugh, I'm very serious. I want to know." I said, "Well, it's the part, Virginia." Wouldn't it have been silly, in The Ox-Bow Incident, if I'd acted like Errol Flynn and said, "All right, boys, hang me, but you'll find out you're wrong." This would have made me look like a hero or a silly leading man, but it would have ruined the story. It was written in there that Tyrone gets the girl. Benny Thaw saw the picture and he said, "The other man should have gotten the girl, he's a better character," but this was the way the script goes. |
This is one of the peculiar things on the screen. It's on the stage, too, but you can see through the subterfuges more easily on the stage than on the screen because they have the ability to cut out the unflattering parts. The part makes it. |
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