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Lillian Gish and the Universal Language of Film
From: Columbia University
| By:
Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Lillian Gish (1893-1993), after starting out as a child actress, eventually made her way into silent film, teaming up with director D.W. Griffith. In 1912, she made her first film, An Unseen Enemy, and in the two years that followed made another 25 films. In this excerpt from a 1978 interview with Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, Gish talks about her work with Griffith and about the universal message that cinema sends its audience. |
Question: In your preparation for roles in films, and for the stage, you must do a lot of research. |
Lillian Gish: Yes. The best example was Intolerance. Forty-two centuries of history--Babylon to the twentieth century. I helped with research on the Crucifixion, on the St. Bartholomew's Massacre in France ... [D.W. Griffith] said, "It's not necessary for you to only know what your character is. You must find out what's happening in the world at that time." |
We had no one there to do research, so everyone had to help with it and tell what they found. |
Q: Did you find that you relied on your intuitive feeling about parts, too, in reading a script? |
Gish: I'd want to discuss a character. Mr. Griffith would say, "Don't tell me, show me. I haven't time to listen. Get up there and show me." |
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| Lillian Gish discusses preparing for Intolerance and working in Hollywood. | |
Everybody had to find their character. He had the plot worked out of his head, and all the scenery. Nobody helped him design the scenery. That Babylonian set--biggest that's ever been built in the world of film anywhere. All out of his head. Every costume out of his head. He couldn't just think then what the actors had to do. You had to. That's why he had trained, disciplined actors. You couldn't be ill, and you couldn't be tired.
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Q: Now, here's something that's a little off the track, but it interests me. The sensory cues, the smells of the business--when you think of the difference, of arriving on a set in California, with the pepper trees and the eucalyptus and the orange groves and the plaster and the sawing of wood and that marvelous feeling--what happens today? Is it a plastic sense, when you walk on a set? |
Gish: They don't build sets anymore. For instance, I did a television story out there. They rent houses, or they'd rent the Biltmore Hotel. They paid $1,000 a day for the lobby, and working upstairs, some of the rooms--well, think what it would cost to build that. And it's real. When we made A Wedding, we went to the Armour house outside of Chicago, the Armour estate, and everything that's in that film is in that house, or outside. And the church in the village. |
Q: Do you think this is a good thing? |
Gish: I think unions brought it about. It's so expensive to do, to build it. |
Q: But it must not have the same feeling as the time when you were working in California, because it's a completely different atmosphere. |
Q: You're walking onto properties that are in use. |
Gish: And if I'd want to move some of the things on the set, I could do it. The unions, now, they do it. We are not allowed. The property man does it. The electrician does it. |
I knew all about lighting, because I grew up with--the place where they developed and printed the film was right across from my dressing room. If I had any time, I'd be in there with Joe Aller, watching the developing of the negative and then the printing of it, because I knew the mood we were trying to get better than he did, and I'd tell him in the printing if it should be light or dark. |
Q: You brought your own cameraman? |
Gish: There was a place in Hollywood called the Hoover Art Studio that made still pictures. And we were always being sent to get still pictures. |
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| Gish on Night of the Hunter (1955). | |
Gish: To advertise your film. Anyway, I went to this Hoover Art Studio, came back with "heads" [close-ups] of the character I was playing in Hearts of the World, and I said to Mr. Griffith and Billy Bitzer [the cameraman], "Look how that cameraman makes me look. Why don't I look like that on the screen?" |
Mr. Griffith said, "Well, if you're so smart, go get him, and have him make you look like that on the screen." |
Gish: Yes, Sartov. Henri Sartov from Denmark. |
Q: Did he teach you lighting? Did you ask him? This thing of lighting interests me. |
Gish: Andy Reed, our head electrician, he's the one that taught me. When he left or I left Griffith, he wrote it all out. I knew it, but I thought I might forget it--the lighting for different moods, because you change your face with different characters. And Andy and I worked together; I was allowed to test people coming into the studio. That's how Griffith taught me about camera, leading up to when I could direct. |
Q: Because he knew that this was in your head, that you wanted to produce and direct? |
Gish: I wanted to know all there was to know about film, every part. |
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| Night of the Hunter's kitchen scene. | |
Q: I have a quote about filmmaking, and I'd like to have your comment on this quote. "The motion picture tells its story directly, simply, quickly, not in words but in pictorial pantomime. To see is not only to believe. It is also in a measure to understand. This is the motion picture, simple and unsophisticated. This is the universal engine that is the cinema." |
Gish: It's the universal language, combined with music. It speaks to all the world. |
Q: I was researching motion pictures, and I read this, and at the very bottom I noticed your initials. Later on I went back. You wrote that for Encyclopedia Britannica in 1937. |
Q: Along with Cecil B. DeMille, who discussed direction, and-- |
Gish: Universal Esperanto. |
Q: Yes, universal Esperanto, you called it, yes. You talked of the informative and aesthetic Esperanto, film, the universal language. It was very exciting. |
Gish: To me, and I still believe it, this has been a most exciting century. Look at the inventions. Look at the automobile, the flying machine. We go to the moon. But no machine is as powerful as the motion picture, because that is the only one that reaches the hearts and minds of mankind. With music and a basic story, you can go into the jungles of the most primitive tribe and be understood. Now, what else is that powerful? |
Gish on the impact of glamorizing evil in <I>Night of the Hunter </I> (1955)
Q: Well, I'll leave that, and for a minute I'd like to talk about a film, Night of the Hunter. Now, you have written that the evil character, as played by Robert Mitchum, was ordered rewritten by Mr. [Charles] Laughton for it to be somewhat more sympathetic. Do you feel there's a change in the characters that are being played nowadays? In other words, are we glamorizing evil? |
Gish: I felt it when I worked with Charles. You know, he came to New York and went to the Museum of Modern Art and ran all of Griffith's pictures. They called me from over there and asked if I knew that Charles Laughton was running all our old films. |
I said, "Why?" And they said, "We don't know." |
I said, "That's strange. I hadn't heard from him." |
Soon he called and told me what he was doing, and asked if I'd come over there and have tea with him. He had James Agee doing the script for a film he was to direct, his cameraman, and two or three others of his crew. |
He said, "We're running your pictures because I remember when I first went to see film, the whole audience sat up like this, leaning forward in their seat," he said. "Now I go to see them and they're back in the chairs eating popcorn. I want to sit them up in their seats again. I'm studying these films. They're going to let me send them to the Coast, so everyone who works in this film will know what I'm after." |
Then he said there was a part for me, and would I read David Grubbs's book. It's an interesting story of good and evil. Of course, when I was in films, to play evil convincingly was, we thought, more difficult to do. |
While we were filming, Charles came to me and said, "You know, Mitchum's worried about this part. I don't want to spoil an actor's career. I'm going to soften it." |
I dreaded that. Do you know the film? |
Gish: Remember the scene in the kitchen where she has the children and he goes across, she has a gun, and instead of going across with evil, Laughton had him yip in a funny way, howl, that got a laugh, and that softened it. They laughed at it. Instead of playing it for sheer drama, he played it for comedy. And it did weaken the story, but it didn't kill that film. It was a fine film. |
Gish: Yes. It's a classic today. |
Q: Now, to continue with that, do you find in the roles that are submitted to you this whole idea of glamorizing evil? Is there a trend happening? Is it happening today? |
Gish: No, it happened before I came into film. Griffith did not approve of the Keystone Kops, as he told Mack Sennett, who had worked with him for a year, that it taught children disrespect for the law. |
Gish: Now, I ask you, years later, what's happened to our country and the world? Evil, killing a man, killing a woman, killing a child--oh, they try them, those poor, dear criminals. They send them to the psychiatrist. They're just ill. This is the day of the dear, dear criminal and the bad, bad victim. |
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