Jimmy Stewart

Jimmy Stewart.

Jimmy Stewart was interviewed by Joan Bakewell at the NFT in 1972.

Here he discusses his life as an actor moving from New York to Hollywood, Westerns, John Ford, and the horse he always rode but could never own.

Interview © BFI 2002

A wonderful life

Joan Bakewell: Ladies and gentlemen, Jimmy Stewart.

[Applause]

It's a Wonderful Life. I believe it's your favourite movie?

Jimmy Stewart: Yes, I think so. I don't exactly know why. It just reminded me of a time when Frank Capra told me the idea of it. It was the first picture I did after I got out of the Service and it was also his first picture. It was after being unemployed for quite a while after the War. Frank called me one day and said, 'I have an idea for a movie, why don't you come over and I'll tell you?' So I went over and we sat down and he said, 'This picture starts in heaven'. That shook me.

[Laughter]

He said, 'You're in terrible trouble and you are about to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge and an angel comes down and he tries to save you, but he can't swim. So you save him'.

[Laughter]

And then Frank got a little mixed up. He said, 'This sounds terrible doesn't it?'

So I said, 'Frank, if you want to do a picture that starts in heaven, where I have a guardian angel then I'm your boy'. That's the way it started. I must say that it is my favourite and I was very interested to find in Frank Capra's book - and it was the first I knew of it - that it's his favourite.

Actually, the idea of the picture came from a Christmas card. A little short verse on the card, and then he got the idea of the picture.

JB: Well, let's go back to how it really started for James Stewart. Your father had a hardware store in Indiana, so it wasn't in the family line of business for you to become an actor. I understand that your parents were never reconciled to the fact that you were an actor. They never quite approved.

JS: My mother approved, my father just didn't accept the idea of my being an actor. I think that's the reason he kept the hardware store in operation, because I think he was pretty sure that I was going to be found out sooner or later, and he wanted to have a job for me to come back to.

[Laughter]

JB: He nonetheless was pleased when you won an Oscar, because didn't he find it some use in his business?

JS: Yes. The night that I won the Oscar, he called me very late and said that he thought it was fine and that I should send it back to the hardware store and he'd put it on the knife counter. That's what I did, and it stayed there twenty years under a cheese bell.

[Laughter]

I remember I was nominated - I forget what picture it was - but I was nominated for another Academy Award, and a man that ran a theatre in Johnstown, which is about ten miles from Indiana, asked if he could borrow the Oscar because a picture of mine was running. My father assured him that I was going to win this one too, but he wasn't sure about letting him have the Oscar. After the awards, I didn't win, my father called me up and told me that the man from Johnstown had put all kinds of signs in the theatre saying, 'This year's Academy Award winner...' because my father had said I was going to win. And I didn't. But this guy asked if it would be alright if he took the Oscar and put it in the lobby and put a sign saying, 'This is what it would look like if he had won'.

[Laughter]

JB: Is it true that your father took exception to Anatomy of Murder and complained about it being filth.

JS: Yes he did. He called me up saying, 'What's all this I hear about you making a dirty picture?'

[Laughter]

He not only wouldn't go to see it when it came to Indiana, he put an ad in the Indiana Evening Gazette telling people not to go and see it.

[Laughter]

Of course, it did bigger business than any other...

[Laughter]

New York

JS: About a year-and-a-half later he sneaked down to Homer city, which is about six miles from Indiana, and all by himself went to see the picture. He called me up again, very late, and said that he didn't think it was that dirty...

JB: You joke about it, but he sounds a fairly formidable parent and some considerable opposition to you becoming an actor. You went to Princeton university and got a good degree in architecture, and your friend Henry Fonda says that you are really an actor in spite of yourself - that you were really set on an architectural career. Was the acting an accident?

JS: Well, I guess in a way it was an accident. I was going to be an architect. I graduated with a degree in architecture and I had a scholarship to go back to Princeton and get my Masters in architecture. I'd done theatricals in college, but I'd done them because it was fun.

Then I was asked up to a stock company that was run by George Logan and ... Margaret Sullivan and Henry Fonda. I was asked to come up for the summer - not to act but to play my accordion. I played the accordion in a tea-room next to the theatre.

[Laughter]

I lasted one night. They said my playing spoiled people's appetites. Then they gave me various jobs as a prompt man and as small parts. I was offered a very small part in a play going to New York, so the time came to go back to college and I just felt that having this tiny little part in this play on Broadway was a lot more exciting than going back to school. That's the way it started.

JB: In that part on Broadway you were about three minutes on stage and you had about eight lines. You nonetheless caught the reviewers' attention. Now that's luck and talent. It must have surprised you - did it make you feel there was a career in acting ahead?

JS: There was a lot of luck to it. But it was a very good bit. It was an excellent part.

JB: All three minutes of it?

JS: All two minutes of it.

[Laughter]

I always stayed for the first curtain call and people always said, 'Who's that?' But this got me started in acting. The theatre in New York in those days was very exciting - there was tremendous enthusiasm. The Theatre Guild was in high gear; experimental theatre was going great guns. Here again, chance came in - all of us were so lucky to be there at that particular time.

JB: It must have been a very exciting time as a young man in New York. You shared a flat with Henry Fonda. You must have felt like the young turks of the theatre at that time.

JS: Yes. I think so. Not all of us were working at the same time, but enough of us... Hank Fonda knew how to cook rice. We lived pretty much on a rice diet. We had an apartment on west side of Central Park. The rent was very reasonable. We found out later that it belonged to a gangster called Legs Diamond and it was a front to his headquarters. It was fine. They didn't bother us...

[Laughter]

Harvey and Hollywood

JB: By 1935 you had an offer to go to Hollywood, and you never really went back to the stage. You went back to play Harvey in 1947, but once you'd left Broadway at that age, you never looked back to the stage, you never hankered to be a stage star.

JS: I think that's true. I'd like to do more stage work now. I'd like to do Harvey again. I did it two years ago with Helen Hayes in New York. It was a joy. I was so glad to do it again because I never thought I did it right the first time. Age-wise I was much righter for it. It was tremendously successful. It was amazing that a play that seems dated in this world... A man whose best friend is a six-foot white rabbit... But it caught on, especially with young people - they surprised me most of all. A lot of people would say, 'Of course they like it: you're doing your thing, you got a big rabbit...'

[Laughter]

'It's an escape from reality - you get drunk and you get a big rabbit. Fine.' But not at all! The kids didn't say that. The kids said that Harvey, the rabbit, was my way of confronting reality. All I was doing was having a friend who I could depend on to face reality with. That's pretty smart with the kids.

JB: What was it like arriving in Hollywood in 1935 with an MGM contract?

JS: It was very exciting right from the start. They wouldn't let me in the studio when I got there, but then I didn't have my contract with me. My agent wasn't with me. It was exciting from the very start. Again, I think that chance and good fortune were with me, because I started getting training in the craft of doing movies at a time when the big studios were at their absolute peak.

They had these enormous contract lists of players: Garbo, Crawford, Frank Morgan... You found that you were working all the time. You were doing tiny little parts in big pictures with stars. Then you would get a big part in a tiny little picture that they also made. In the meantime you were learning your craft by acting, which I've always thought was the only way you can learn it.

JB: You often worked on several films at the same time.

JS: Yup, I was working on five at once.

JB: How did you know which one you were playing?

JS: I had to be briefed every once in a while...

[Laughter]

They also had a great test programme - a test department in the studio. I did numerous tests, and one I tested for an actual part one time for The Good Earth. This meant a lot of make-up. I had a bald head - I was a Chinese peasant. It was testing for the part of Chang. Chang, if you remember the Pearl Buck story of The Good Earth, Chang survived the famine. I was quite proud of this make-up that I had. I was to do this scene in the fields with Paul Muni who was playing the lead. He looked at me and said, 'That's a helluva tall Chinaman'.

[Laughter]

So they, er... So they dug a ditch.

[Laughter]

I didn't get the part. They gave it to a Chinaman.

[Laughter]

I found out why they tested me later. They found that I was the only one under contract...I weighed about 132 pounds, I think... They found that I was the only one under contract who looked like he'd been through a famine.

[Laughter]

JB: You made something like 24 films in five years, so although you speak of it as a very enjoyable time, it must have been the hardest working time of your career.

JS: No, I don't think so. This was the time of training, when you were learning your craft, and I don't think that you can work too hard at that particular time. Here, again, luck came into it - the major studios were ideal training ground for people. So good fortune was on my side.

JB: The 23rd of those 24 movies was Mr Smith Goes to Washington, and the 24th was Philadelphia Story. By that time, did you have a sense of growing confidence when you were offered Mr Smith?

JS: Yes, I was so impressed with Frank Capra, right from the start. This wasn't done for MGM. In those days, the big studios would trade you like they trade ball players. You would be traded to another studio for another actor, or you could be traded for a script, or a studio would trade you and the other studio would be allowed to use the studio's back lot for a while.

[Laughter]

A lot of the pictures I made were on loan-out. But this was a part of the business that was very exciting and very good for a young actor learning a trade.

JB: What did they trade you for?

JS: I don't know. One time they traded me for seven horses. Seven stunt horses.

[Laughter]

Mr Smith

JB: Mr Smith Goes to Washington was hailed as the best film of its year. When you read the script for that did you realise it was going to be a landmark in your career?

JS: No, I didn't. I just looked and said I've got an awful lot of dialogue to learn in this one. I didn't realise then that it was ahead of its time. When I think of the feelings of anti-establishment in the pictures they do now, this picture was anti-establishment in a way. It was against corruption in high places.

Actually, the picture opened disastrously in Washington. I wasn't there, I was making another picture, but Frank Capra was there and it opened in Constitution Hall. All the senators were there, and Frank Capra was in a box with his wife with the vice president and his wife, and several other senators. They, as the picture started going, became very quiet. After the picture had been going for three quarters of an hour, the film broke. Frank didn't know where the projection room was exactly, and he found himself outside the building, crawling up a ladder. He finally got to the projecting room it was running again.

When he got back to the box, though, everyone had left.

JB: It wasn't a movie to take senators to see, was it?

JS: I guess not.

[Laughter]

Frank was barred from the National Press Club.

JB: They took it that badly?

JS: Yes, they did. Somebody in the Senate, the story is, said that someone should watch the whole film to see if they could sue Frank. But it was quite a successful picture.

JB: You were nominated, I believe, for an Academy Award for that film. In fact, you won your Academy Award for Philadelphia Story. Was it fun to make.

JS: Yes. Miss Hepburn and Cary [Grant]... The whole thing. I, frankly, have always felt that they gave me the Academy Award for Mr Smith instead of this picture as a sort of consolation thing, 'Ah, poor Jim, the competition was too tough last year, but we'll give it to him anyway'. This is just a personal opinion, I don't know.

JB: Your acting looks effortless. Can you explain the effort that goes into this?

JS: Well, I think one of the main things that you have to think about when acting in the movies is to try not to make the acting show. It's such an intimate thing that you have to make a thing believable without using the device of acting. That doesn't make any sense at all.

[Laughter]

Over the years I've developed a theory about the idea of the natural quality, which isn't a natural quality at all, because acting in the movies is one of the most unnatural things you can do. You're surrounded by technicians, there's no continuity, you do little bits and pieces... You have to approach it from a different angle. I'm beginning to believe that, in films, what everyone is striving for is to produce moments - not a performance, not a characterisation, not something where you get into the part - you produce moments that create a feeling of believability to what you're doing.

The moments sometimes don't work. Sometimes nothing happens. William Wyler has always been famous for taking a lot of takes. There is this story that he did this scene with a bunch of very competent people, a very important scene in the movie, and he'd already done it thirty times. One of them came to Willie and said, 'I want to know what we're doing wrong. What do you want us to do?'

And Willie said, 'No, you're doing it fine. I'm just waiting for something to happen'.

That's what I mean by creating moments. Another thing that happened over the years that bears this out is that people come up to me and say, 'I like that picture you did'. Now, they won't remember the name of that picture or where they saw it, they won't remember who was in it or who directed it. But they say, 'You know the picture. You were in this room. You were some lawyer or something. This fella was over there and he turned to you and said...I forget what he said...But you looked at him and, boy, that was some look'.

[Laughter]

A great many times, you remember that moment too, and you thought it was pretty good. Every once in a while.

I was making a Western in British Columbia and we were on the Columbia Icefields. It was raining and there was heavy mist around, so we couldn't shoot, so we were all huddled around a fire. Suddenly, out of the mist, came a man, and he was not a young man. He had a beard - it wasn't exactly a beard he just hadn't shaved for a while - and he was a miner type, he was dressed like a miner. He came closer to us and he said, 'Which one of you is Stewart?'

'I am.'

He came over and looked at me and said, 'Oh, yeah. Yeah. I recognise ya. Well, I heard you was here, and I thought I'd come up and say hello. I've seen a lot of your picture shows, but I think the one I liked best - you were in this room...'

[Laughter]

'And your girlfriend was in the next room and there were fireflies outside, and you recited a piece of poetry to her. I thought that was a nice thing for you to do.'

And I remembered exactly the moment, exactly the film, who was in it, who directed it, and I also realised that that picture had been released twenty years before. That man made a tremendous impression on me. To think that I had been part of creating a moment that this man had liked and had remembered for twenty years. I'll never forget it. That's what I mean by the moment.

JB: By the time you came to play Philadelphia Story with Hepburn, you played with Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow - fairly formidable ladies. Were they difficult to play with?

JS: No. They were a joy. All of them. [Pause] You're not going to get me into trouble...

[Laughter and applause]

Good guys

JB: Let's throw the questions out to the audience. Yes?

Q: Did you ever long to play a real baddy, rather than the good guy?

JS: No, not particularly. I played a murderer after The Thin Man years and years ago. It was either the second or the third of the Thin Man series. They gave me the part because I was supposed to be the one they least suspected, and I ended up jumping out of the window and killing myself or something... I never particularly thought about playing the heavy.

JB: It's always assumed that it's more difficult playing the good guy. It's hard to put forward honest integrity without coming over as pious. Which you don't. Has it ever been a problem?

JS: Well, that may be true. It's much easier, for example, to play a heroin addict and you're withdrawing - you tear the ceiling off - that's much easier than it is to come in and say, 'Hello.' Or, 'I love you'. When you judge it in that way, the heavy isn't as difficult.

JB: Have you ever felt that the good guy you're playing is coming over too good?

JS: Yes, I've felt that in some of the things I've done. It's very difficult. One of the main things you have to remember is that you have to make it believable. I think that's the basis for the whole thing. You have to make it believable.

Q: You've made four films with Hitchcock, which do you prefer and how do you feel about the ten minute take in Rope?

JS: I suppose Rear Window... Working with Hitchcock is just a joy and it's something special. I would say that John Ford, Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock are the giants of the crowd. I think Rear Window is probably my favourite.

JB: Why?

JS: He was so clever in his use of the camera to give movement to a completely static thing. That hasn't happened very often. This has been disastrous for a lot of people with less talent than Hitchcock.

As far as the long takes in Rope, nobody but Hitchcock would think about a thing like this. But he did it, and almost got away with it. I always told Hitch that it would have been better to put seats around the set and sell tickets. Had people got a chance to see how we shot this, it may have been that more people would have come...

[Laughter]

JB: Was he a difficult man to work with? Do you like his working...?

JS: Oh, yes. I think he knows the camera. He knows what to do with film as good as anybody that's ever been in the business. Going back to this long take thing, it's amazing what we got away with in that thing. As you know, there's about, with loose ends and everything, 928 feet of film in a magazine, and that's about eight minutes.

The idea was to do it continuously and then do a dissolve so that the impression you get is that there are no cuts. We found that we were moving through the set - it's the first time that the crab dolly was used - I remember at one point I would take a cigarette from the table, move back and play the scene, and then when I came back to put the cigarette out, it wasn't a table it was a man holding an ashtray.

[Laughter]

We moved all through the thing. Of course, the moving of the cameras made too much noise, so the sound department was sore. Hitch solved that by doing one for the camera, then we took all the cameras and all the equipment away and just put microphones in and then we did it again just for sound. Amazingly enough, he was able to use the soundtrack that we did separately from the film. This was because we were so worried about making a mistake - you didn't want to get to 800 feet and have to start again. This showed in our faces. We would get this stare...

[Laughter]

It was a good idea, but only Hitchcock could have it, and it didn't work.

[Laughter]

[Some dialogue relating to clips shown]

Westerns

JB: Let's talk about the Western now. In the 50s you made a whole sequence of Westerns for Anthony Mann. I think it was one a year that you were doing for him. Did you enjoy making them?

JS: Yes, very much. I sort of got into Westerns... It was a sort of desperation move, really. I had several pictures that didn't go very well, and I just realised that I would have to try something else. I'd always known how to ride - my father insisted that I learn how to ride when I was a kid.

Actually, when I turned the play Harvey into a movie, a script that had been around town for years called 'Winchester 73' was put in as a sort of package deal - they wanted to get rid of the script. I did Harvey, which didn't do very well, then I worked with Anthony Mann and we did the western and that went very well. So that got me started on the Western track.

JB: Questions.

Q: In one of your films...I can't remember the name...you flew an aeroplane. Did you fly that yourself?

JS: Yes. In that particular instance it was impossible to film while you were flying because there was nowhere to put the camera inside the aeroplane. They did a couple of shots from another aeroplane while I was flying next to them.

Q: Do you fly as a hobby?

JS: Yes.

Q: You are a pilot?

JS: Yes.

Q: Thank you.

[Laughter]

Q: A lot of the characters in Mann's Westerns were quite ambiguous, yet moralists, yet they had an overriding obsession with revenge. How much of this came from your interpretation of the character, how much from Mann and how much from the writer?

JS: I really never thought of it in that light. I wasn't conscious that that was happening. I always felt that in a lot of them it was the plodding, determined man who had plenty of human weaknesses but through it all finally made a go of it and got away with it. But I never really went much deeper than that.

JB: Did you and Anthony Mann discuss the motives and behaviour of the characters, or did he say here's the script, let's go and shoot it?

JS: There wasn't too much discussion, no. It was pretty much get the script down to size and tight, then get out on location and get the excitement and vitality up there on the screen and make it believable.

Q: Would you like to make a modern-style thriller now?

JS: Yes. Hitchcock has a wonderful idea that I hope he'll do. We've been talking about it. But I'd like to work with Hitch again.

Q: Is there any chance that the London stage will see you in Harvey, or something else?

JB: Would you like to bring Harvey to the London stage?

JS: Yes I would.

[Applause]

We were in the process of doing it several years ago, and Margaret Rutherford was very interested in it. But it didn't work out. I would like very much to play Harvey here. And Harvey likes it too.

[Laughter]

Q: You look quite like Roosevelt tonight. Would you have any political objections to playing Roosevelt?

JS: I look like Roosevelt?

[Laughter]

Well, I'm a Republican...

JB: You played Glen Miller - is there a difference when you're playing a film that's a biography? Do you feel obliged to go into the background of the person you're playing?

JS: Well, I think it's alright up to a point. In Lindberg's case I didn't really go too far into it. I played another biography of a man named Williams, they call him Carbine Williams, who actually invented the Carbine rifle while he was in prison for murder. It was the other way round. He came to me and told me the way he wanted himself...

[Laughter]

In a way I listened you know, the fella had shot a couple of people...

[Laughter]

John Ford

Q: How did Capra and Lubitsch help you to find those moments you were talking about?

JS: I really believe that they were looking for those moments too. I think that that's the way they work. That's the way that John Ford works. Ford is much more brusque about it, he claims that most good things that happen in the movies happen by accident and I'm inclined to agree with him up to a point. In the craft of film-making, it's better not to be over-rehearsed. Film isn't the kind of thing that you can rehearse a lot. You really don't get up to speed until the camera's going.

This is an entirely different thing from the stage. On the stage, for some reason, the proscenium arch presents, for some reason, a platform and you can rehearse like that. In the movies it's a different thing. In the movies there has to be a point at which things go out of control and nobody really has their finger on the whole thing, nobody knows exactly how the thing's going to come out. This, to me, has been one of the things of magic in picture making, and one of the mysteries also. It gets back to creating those moments. Ford is always very well prepared, he has great assistants who prepare everybody in the scene for what's going to happen. But then he stops short of letting everybody know that everything's going to be alright. There's still that time where everything goes out of control and everything goes up for grabs.

When the moment happens, somehow everybody knows it and everybody knows it's right.

JB: Isn't that rather unnerving? Is there a danger of losing your grip at that point?

JS: Well, it's living dangerously in a way. But it's more exciting and I think you need it in film-making. Film itself is very technical, and I think you need this period when things are a little out of control for it to work right.

I remember a picture I was doing when I came out of a saloon and there were 200 people in the square and I was supposed to get into a wagon and drive out of the square. Well, Ford told us to go in one direction, but he had his assistants tell the crowd that we were going in a different direction, so when we charged into the crowd the crowd didn't know. There was great confusion and people got pushed by the horses and screamed and ran and yelled. It was a wonderful scene!

[Laughter]

[Clip]

JB: The Western really is legend. It's nothing to do with reality but it's a marvellous formula.

JS: Well, it's pretty much John Ford's way of life. He has a tremendous love and respect for our West, and this is the way he operates. He prints the legend.

JB: Do you love the legend yourself? Do you enjoy Westerns?

JS: Yes. I think this is one of the reasons why the American Western is so popular, and has been so popular all over the world really, that it's about a time that was very interesting in our country. It was the settling of our West. I think people all over the world are interested in that. It was pretty much straight down the line - and that isn't legend, it really was. I think people are interested in that.

JB: Broken Arrow, which you did in the 50s, was one of the first Westerns where the audience was invited to feel sympathy for the Indians. Were you happy to see the balance redressed in some way?

JS: Yes. I think that was a little ahead of its time. The Indian came out on top for a change. I married a little Indian girl played by Debra Paget, and two days before the picture was to start somebody looked at her and saw that she had sky-blue eyes. They said, 'Gee, we can't have a blue-eyed Indian'. And someone else said, 'Fix it up'.

So they made contact lenses for the little girl. This was early, when contact lenses weren't very popular or made as well. But they made contact lenses with brown painted on the lens. They were miserable to wear.

We were up in Arizona and we were playing a love scene beside a beautiful stream and I looked down into her eyes and she had three eyes. One contact lens had slipped so that she had a half-moon of brown and a little half-moon of blue.

[Laughter]

So everything closed down for a couple of hours. There's always a script girl who has to put down what happens every minute so that it can be sent in with the report for the day's work. I went up to her and said, 'I'm just interested - we've been shut down for a couple of hours and I was wondering what you've put down in the book for what held us up.' She showed me, and it was there in big letters: 'Leading lady's eyeball slipped'.

[Laughter]

Hats and horses

JB: I believe in all the Westerns you made you rode the same horse and you wore the same hat.

JS: Yes, I had the same horse. The hat wore out, I just had to change it. I'm very superstitious and I still have the hat and I keep the hat on the set and that cancels out the curse...

[Laughter]

JB: What happened to the horse?

JS: The horse was amazing. I rode him for 22 years. I never was able to buy him because he was owned by a little girl by the name of Stevie Myers, who is the daughter of an old wrangler who used to wrangle horses for Tom Mix and W.S. Hart. He retired and he gave this horse to her. He was a sort of a maverick. He hurt a couple of people. I saw him when I started making Westerns. Artie Murphy rode him a couple of times. He nearly killed Glen Ford, ran right into a tree.

[Laughter]

But I liked this darned little horse. He was a little bit small, a little quarter horse and Arabian. I got to know him like a friend. I actually believed that he understood about making pictures. I ran at a full gallop, straight towards the camera, pulled him up and then did a lot of dialogue and he stood absolutely still. He never moved. He knew when the camera would start rolling and when they did the slates. He knew that because his ears came up.

[Laughter]

I could feel him under me, getting ready. He always moved. Pie, that was his name. I remember in one picture, the bad guys were in the saloon and I had a little bell on the saddle that was sort of an identifying thing. The baddies were going to get me because they knew when I had come into town because of the bell. The camera started panning on Pie's feet as I get near the saloon and the guys are getting ready to kill me. And then the camera goes up and there's nobody on Pie. And of course I'm back behind and I kill the whole crowd of them.

[Laughter]

Somebody came up before we did this and said, "How are you ever going to get the horse to do this?" I said, "Well let me talk to him." And there was a feller who worked with me a lot with the horse by the name of Jack Sanders, wonderful little Western feller. And I talked to Pie. It was three o'clock in the morning with all the lights up. And I said, "You just start here and go to the other end and stop." And Jack Sanders was at the other end. They said, "How long is this going to take?" I said "Do it right now" and Pie did it. And the last picture that Hank Fonda and I made, The Cheyenne Social Club, Pie was getting old. We did it in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Pie got sick and I couldn't use him the whole time. And, unbeknownst to me, Hank painted a picture of the horse in watercolour. He's an excellent artist - watercolours, oils, ink, lithograph, anything. He has an amazing talent. When we got home, he brought me the picture and two days later Pie died. It was a great loss. But I have Pie in our library and I consider him a friend.

Violence

Q: In The Man from Laramie you get shot through the hand in a very violent close-up. What's your view now of the current crop of violence in the cinema, which carries the use of explicit violence even further?

JS: I don't approve of violence for violence's sake. I think unfortunately that a lot of the current crop of films use violence where it has nothing to do with the dramatic content and substance of the story. In that case mentioned, that was a very violent act but I think that it was a very important and valid part of the story. I think that's the case in so many of the things that are in question today, about what's right and what's wrong to do in pictures. I think one of the problems of the rating system is that they are giving guidelines but they are giving them to the wrong people. They are giving them to parents and they should be giving guidelines to people who are making movies. They are dealing in different types of nudity, four-letter word come in categories. This is the way they are doing things at times and it has absolutely nothing to do with the dramatic content and substance of the pictures themselves. This is where I think things have to be changed.

Q: Could you tell us something about Firecreek and how seriously people involved with it take the business of defending land?

JS: I thought it was a very interesting story. It was written by a man called Clemence and directed by a guy called McEveety, whose only experience had been in television. I think it said a lot of things. I don't know exactly how to comment on the issue of land. I think the story stated that very well. I don't exactly know how to comment further on that.

Q: Do you intend to make films in England?

JS: Yes. I'd like it very much. I made my last film here in England in 1950. It was the Nevil Shute story No Highway in the Sky. That was when my wife was getting ready to have her twins. We certainly didn't know it at the time and I had to leave before the picture was finished. She called me up when night at 3 and said "we're going to have twins." And I said "please, I have to get up early tomorrow morning, what else is new?"

[Laughter]

And we talked and we went to the studio the next morning and I was talking to an electrician about it. He said "Do you have twin insurance?" This was the first I'd heard of it and, of course, it was too late now but I remember my experience with No Highway in the Sky was a very pleasant one and I hope I can do it again.

Q: Do you have any strong views on the issue of censorship in the cinema and the theatre, in relation to the question about violence?

JS: I think there is something wrong with the rating systems now. I would rather not call it censorship. I would call it self-discipline. We used to have that type of self-discipline. We used to have self-discipline in the picture business, through the Hays office and the Breen office. I grew up and learned my craft in it. We had rules. I play golf with Fred McMurray all the time and we are sort of contemporaries. We often come back to this. There used to be a rule and everyone accepted it - if you were playing a scene in the bedroom and you were on the bed, whether it was with your wife or your mother or your sister or a prostitute, you had to keep one foot on the floor. I remember many times they'd say "Cut" and someone would say "Jim, get your foot on the floor."

[Laughter]

We didn't mind it. And I believe that there were some pretty good romantic, interesting, nice pictures made.

JB: By way of a challenge really.

[Laughter]

JS: The Breen people weren't concerned so much with people's morals as they were movie buffs. They loved the movie. They wanted them to be good and to tell stories effectively and believably. There also was a rule on Westerns that, in a gunfight, you couldn't photograph a two-shot. You couldn't have the man that fired the gun and the victim in the same shot. Everybody accepted that. But there was a picture made - I can't remember the name, Trail of the Lonesome Pine I think - and one of the meanest heavies I've ever seen was beautifully played by Charles Beckford, I think. Wonderful, a beautiful performance. He was the most awful and terrible heavy there ever was. And in the end scene the hero shoots him in the face and kills him. When the Breen people came to see the movie everyone said "you can't have that scene it, they won't pass it with the two-shot." The director said "No, I want to keep that in. Let them look at it. Let's see." So the Breen people saw it and said "everything's fine. It's wonderful. We like the movie very much." But they said "What about that scene where the heavy comes up and he gets shot right in the face?" And the Breen feller said "The son of a bitch deserved it."

[Laughter]

They loved the movies. This is what I mean by directing this self-discipline in the right direction.

JB: That the film should dictate.

A glass eye

JB: Tell us about the glass eye for the small, rather humorous part, in Dynamite man from Glory Jail.

JS: Well, it was more trouble than I thought it would be. I had it made in Hollywood, by a man whose business it was to make glass eyes. We did a test of it. And it was discouraging for the man because the test showed that they couldn't tell I had a glass eye. This was disconcerting for the man because he's spent 30 years trying to get it so you couldn't tell it was a glass eye.

[Laughter]

So now what we had to do is change the colour of it, make it a little darker. I had a scratched cornea. I found out a lot about the human eye. It's actually a very strong part of the body and heals faster than any part of the body. A scratched cornea heals overnight. We eventually had to throw the Hollywood one out but a little man in West Virginia, an eye doctor, became interested in it and made another one. He became so fascinated in it he was on the set all the time. I don't know what happened to his practice.

[Laughter]

But he saved the thing and I could keep it in about five minutes at a time.

Q: Is there one film in the whole of your career that you didn't make that you wished you'd made?

JS: Yes. There was a film that I was supposed to do called Designing Woman. It was kind of a funny picture. Greg Peck made it with Betty Bacall. He did a very good job but I was going to do it with Grace Kelly. We were all set to go but Grace came in one day and said "I'm going to get married." They said "Now, you can do it with somebody else" but I wanted to do it with Grace because she was right for it. I'd done Rear Window with her and I wish I'd done that picture.

Q: How did you get involved in directing the television show and have you any ambitions in that direction?

JS: I liked directing that very well. I think it's called Trailer at Christmas. I did a radio series years ago called The Six-shooter, a Western series. Unfortunately it came out just when radio drama had gone out the window so it wasn't a successful series. I saved out a couple of the episodes, written by a guy called Frank Birt. He was a wonderful young writer who died tragically not so long ago. I saved three other ones. Trailer at Christmas was a Western version of Dickens' Christmas Carol. It was a very interesting thing to do and I would welcome that kind of a directorial chore if it comes along.

Q: Have any roles from the classical repertoire - Chekhov, Shakespeare, Ibsen - ever appealed to you?

JS: No. Frankly, as far as Shakespeare is concerned, I don't think I'm up to it. I don't think I would be believable. I don't think I could do Shakespeare. As far as Chekhov is concerned, I haven't given it any consideration.

Q: When you've worked with a director on three or four films are you aware that the director is working, or re-working, a particular theme that concerns him or do you consider each film separately? Particularly the Anthony Mann films.

JS: I feel that he is working and re-working. It's a great advantage to get a relationship going. It saves so much having to get used to the way someone works because you've worked before. It saves a lot of wasted motion. It's a very good idea, I think. I wish I could have had more opportunity to do it more with different directors.

JB: You have made over seventy films. What are you most proud of having done?

JS: I think I can answer that more as an overall thing of the whole idea of the movies. A feller came up to me the other day and said "I don't know whether this means anything to you but you've given me and my family a lot of enjoyment over the years." And I said to him "Does it mean anything to me? It means everything to me. That's the ballgame. That's it" And I think that if I have done that to that man, and maybe a couple more ...

[Laughter]

Then I'm proud of that.

JB: James Stewart, thank-you very much

[Applause]