Did Kubrick and Frankenheimer go over the script before shooting?

 

Frankenheimer always had a reading before filming began. He had everyone sit around and go over their lines. Stanley didn't have a reading. His approach was more technical. On Paths of Glory we had a German photographer who had been an air ace. But nothing would stop Stanley from moving the lights. He wanted to achieve a grainy effect to make it seem more like 1918. I never saw a director do that before.

Frankenheimer and Kubrick came out of New York. Kubrick had made experimental films, Frankenheimer began in television. Did their backgrounds carry over in Hollywood?

Frankenheimer came out of live television where you didn't get a second take or a third or a twelfth. The moguls like Jack Warner hated television. They called it "the idiot box." They were all getting older and didn't want to change. But when they saw the way things were going, how they were losing viewers to this new medium, they brought out directors like Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet to try to adapt. Stanley Kubrick was a throwback to an earlier era. When I started in the back office at Metro, Albert Lewin was shooting The Picture of Dorian Gray. I went into the army, and when I came out seventeen months later, Lewin was still working on the picture. At Stanley's memorial service, someone asked me if it was true he did seventy-eight takes in Paths of Glory. Yes, it's true. It was the execution scene. It took seventh-eight takes for four guys to get killed. At one o'clock in the morning, James Harris, Stanley's business partner, came out with the production manager and urged Stanley to wrap it up. I never saw Stanley get mad before, but he said: "I am going to stay here as long as I want. Now, please leave."

Both Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster were stars who had their own production companies. How did they interact with each other in Seven Days in May?

On the set, people are always trying to do their best. I am not trying to sound like an ambassador for American film, but when people are trying to do their best, tempers run high. You have a concept that nobody else has. These were guys that say what they think and when they open their mouth, they talk. It's a highly volatile game, and when you get two highly visceral guys like that together, there could be fireworks.

Burt had just come off The Leopard which Luchino Visconti had shot in Italy. He was a bit frayed with the experience over there and was quite tired. He had come to work the next day almost, and the first scene I had with him, he was having trouble getting the words out. He turned to me and said, "Would you like to have lunch?" We had lunch, and he didn't say anything about it. After lunch, everything went fine. You look at these Turner Classic movies. A lot of these actors had been on the stage. Burt was a circus performer. They understood timing.

He was wonderful. As a kid, I watched him in those Fox movie houses in the thirties. I grew up on him. I told him, "It's such a pleasure to meet you." He said, "Thank you, Mr. Anderson." One day, I watched him work. Right after filming, he turned to the wardrobe man and said, "Bill, don't take the coat and fix it up for tomorrow. Leave it like it is. We're continuing the scene." He wanted the coat to look the same way. How'd you like that for an actor?

John Frankenheimer had made The Manchurian Candidate (1962), another movie about a political conspiracy. Did he talk about Seven Days in May's political implications?

The first thing Frankenheimer said to me was, "Get this book." It was Dwight Eisenhower's book in which he wrote about the warning he had given in his farewell address about the danger of the "military-industrial complex." That's what made this picture important. It highlights what Eisenhower said: Watch out for the military and business. The same thing that is going on today.