A past master of his craft: an interview with Fred Zinnemann.

In 1929, in Berlin, a group of friends collaborated on a silent, low-budget feature film called Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday). The codirectors were Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer and the cowriters were Ulmer and Billy Wilder, while the young trainee cameraman, who assisted cinematographer Eugen Schufftan, was Fred Zinneman. With Zinnemann's death at his London home, on March 14th, there are now few survivors, apart from Wilder, of the distinguished generation of filmmakers who moved to Hollywood from Austria and Germany in the Twenties and Thirties.

Fred Zinnemann was an Austrian Jew who was born in Vienna in 1907. He remembers the anti-Semitism of his school days: "At best we were treated with an ironic sort of politeness, but what I needed was human contact and respect." The young Zinnemann rejected medicine, his father's profession, and the law, which he studied at the University of Vienna and - having been inspired by King Vidor's The Big Parade and Erich von Stroheim's Greed - instead attended an early film school, the Ecole Technique de Photographie et Cinematographie, in Paris in 1927. He then worked as an assistant cameraman in Berlin before setting out alone for America in 1929, arriving in New York on the day of the Wall Street Crash.

The same year Zinnemann worked for Robert Flaherty on an abortive European project, during which he gained a lifelong respect for the documentary pioneer's independent spirit. His first credit as a director was for Redes (The Wave, 1934), a Mexican Government film that used the fishermen of the Gulf of Vera Cruz as nonprofessional actors to tell their own story. When the film was shown in Los Angeles in 1937, it won the young Zinnemann the welcome security of a contract with MGM, and the direction of eighteen short subjects over the next five years. After his first B picture, Kid Glove Killer (1942), he made a breakthrough with The Seventh Cross (1944), an A picture that Zinnemann thought particularly timely because of its recognition of the existence of 'good Germans,' albeit in a prewar setting.

Zinnemann was briefly suspended after turning down successive assignments, but The Search (1948) and the location-shot film noir Act of Violence (1948), his last film under his MGM contract, gained widespread critical and industry recognition. Act of Violence provides social substance to the generic conflict between light and dark, as Robert Ryan's figure from the wartime past undermines a sunlit Californian success story. More important, however, for Zinnemann's rising reputation, was his collaboration with independent producer Stanley Kramer, an association that produced The Men (1950), High Noon (1952), and the adaptation of the play, The Member of the Wedding (1952).

The Search and The Men illustrate the documentary elements in Zinnemann's early work. The director wrote in 1948 of using "the raw material of history in order to make a dramatic document," and The Search is most effective in its use as nonprofessional actors of displaced children, some of them recently released from concentration camps, amidst the ruins of postwar Germany. Capturing these real emotions, from children who feared the worst from adults, was the nearest Zinnemann came to dealing in film with the Holocaust, in which both his parents perished in the early Forties. In The Men the personal drama is set against the experiences of real doctors and patients in a Veterans Administration Hospital, although this authenticity, and the understated playing by Marlon Brando and Teresa Wright, are undermined by a thunderously intrusive score by Dmitri Tiomkin.

High Noon has not always been well received by either critics or directors of the Western genre. Yet there is little doubt that the distinctive look of the film, from the bleached skies to the motifs of clocks and converging railway lines, owes most to its director. And Gary Cooper's performance suggests something subversive, a Western hero caught between private anxiety and vulnerability and the dominant assumptions of the time about how men in authority should behave.

While some auteurist critics have seen Zinnemann's direction as impersonal, a more positive view would stress the strength of his commitment to notions of realism and authenticity within the classical Hollywood tradition, and explore his thematic concern with questions of individual conscience and identity. Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane and Paul Scofield as Thomas More have become classic icons of liberal cinema, while it was Zinnemann who fought Harry Cohn to secure the casting of Montgomery Cliff as the doomed 'lone wolf,' Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, in the Oscar-laden From Here to Eternity (1953). Zinnemann's unglamorous depiction of the Army barracks setting in 1941 Hawaii contributes to a film that was a brave statement for its time, and which still works as a drama of how individuals cope, or fail to cope, with organization.

Zinnemann's relative detachment - what John Fitzpatrick calls "compassionate distance" - is most successfully seen as a style of its own in The Nun's Story (1959). The film's slow pace, the careful depiction of the rituals of convent postulants, and the different emotional tone of the African scenes, all provide an intensity to the interior struggle of Sister Luke (Audrey Hepburn). The ending, as her return to the world outside is treated neither as triumph nor tragedy, is a reflection of the director's ability both to be involved with his characters and to draw back from imposing a particular interpretation.

Arguably this detached, observational style also makes The Day of the Jackal (1973) an effective entertainment. A similar style is less successful in a drama with a weaker individual, particularly in Behold a Pale Horse (1963), in which the opening newsreel footage of the Spanish Civil War raises unrealized expectations of a stronger political analysis. The film nevertheless features an unusually sympathetic depiction of a guerilla leader, played by Gregory Peck, who keeps the Republican flame alive from across the border.

After the success of From Here to Eternity, Zinnemann directed nine films in thirty years, before his retirement after Five Days One Summer (1982). A Hatful of Rain (1957) and The Sundowners (1960) were quietly received, and Zinnemann's comeback film in critical and commercial terms was A Man for All Seasons (1966), from Robert Bolt's classic play. There are striking images and performances here, although Paul Scofield's certainty and asceticism as Thomas More keeps the audience at a distance.

Julia (1977) brought together Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, symbols of the Sixties left, in a lush rendering of a slight, supposedly autobiographical story by Thirties icon Lillian Hellman. In the story Hellman calls herself "a kind of Puritan Socialist," but the Hellman character of the film seems uncertainly defined. For Hellman the playwright to define herself solely in terms of her relationship with Dashiell Hammett and the ever-receding myth of Julia is hardly credible. Only with the meeting of the two women in a Berlin cafe does Zinnemann, with simple staging, allow the actors time and space to suggest the emotional core of the story.

Once, when Jack Warner was finding fault with Zinnemann's efforts to film Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the director sent this reply to his boss: "Will cooperate but request greater courtesy your future messages." The message captures the mix of charm and steel that observers of Zinnemann saw as characteristic of him. When I visited him at his London home last November, just four months before his death, he struck me as self-effacing but also as fiercely proud of his achievement, an attitude that was in part a response to his awareness that critical opinion - if not that of leading directors - had in recent years moved against him. Nevertheless, Zinnemann's virtues as a director - in particular his commitment to the human consequences of his films and to the cinema as a collaborative art - have become more evident as they have become rarer in global filmmaking today. - Brian Neve

Cineaste: Would you say that Robert Flaherty influenced your style?

Fred Zinnemann: Flaherty wrote me a letter of introduction in 1931, and as a result I got a job at Goldwyn. He influenced me in every possible way, not only technically, but also in what I learnt from him by being his assistant, his whole spirit of being his own man, of being independent of the general spirit of Hollywood, to the point where he didn't worry about working there. That's probably why he made only five or six pictures in his life. But he influenced me in his whole way of approaching the documentary, which he really initiated with films like Nanook of the North.

I learned from Flaherty to be rather uncompromising and to defend what I wanted to say, and not let someone else mix it up. He had the true feeling of a documentary director - he took life as it was. This influenced me enormously because I found myself almost subconsciously following his style in films like High Noon, The Men, and particularly in parts of The Search, which I made after the war. This was not really a documentary but it was in a style beyond the then fashionable approach, which involved a mandatory happy end and marriage as the solution to all problems.

So, first of all, my choice of subjects pushed me in that direction, and time and again there was a documentary kind of treatment - in The Nun's Story, The Day of the Jackal, and even Julia. I've always tried to base my films as closely as I could on the reality. Even in casting, if a woman was described, as in The Search, as a Czech, then I really wanted a Czech, not a Hungarian. There are so many subtle, subliminal things that go into making a film, that I have to insist on getting that particular kind of nuance from the authentic person, rather than getting an approximate idea of 'virtual Czech' or 'virtual Hungarian.'

Cineaste: I like The Search very much, especially the scene with the children in the ambulance who suddenly fear that they are being taken to their deaths, and flee. Was that influenced by Italian neorealism?

Zinnemann: It was influenced by Flaherty, not by the new realism in Italy. At that time nobody had even heard of Auschwitz, and very few people knew anything about what had happened in Europe. It was a new approach to picture making at that time. I think we were the first Hollywood company that went out on a distant location, because before then the factory process was much more strictly observed by the studios. They wanted to have complete control of making a film, so they avoided working on distant locations where conditions were not controllable by the studio. They would send out a second unit to photograph a background, bring the background material back, put it on a screen, and then play the action in front of it. So you could get a Chinese rice field with a non-Chinese actress playing Chinese. We could have made The Search in Hollywood, obviously, just as we had to make The Seventh Cross in Hollywood because it was wartime, and one could not go to Europe. But I learned all of that when I directed my first picture, The Wave, which was commissioned by the Mexican government.

The Wave was, in a sense, also a legacy from Flaherty because it involved people who were friends of his, like Paul Strand. The director, Henwar Rodakiewicz, had a conflicting commitment, and asked me to take over. The government at that time was liberal. It was just before the great Mexican President, Cardenas, who was himself an Indian. So what we were doing was following the government's socialist program. I was at that time still politically naive, but what I found exciting was that it dealt with oppression. I had always thought that human rights were above property rights, but I belonged to no party. I was never politically organized.

Cineaste: Were you happy with how The Wave turned out?

Zinnemann: I was surprised that anybody wanted to look at it, because at the time I had no idea whether I communicated with anyone. It was an experiment. So I was very pleased that there was that much attention given to it. But I was not pleased with the ending. The earlier part was better, and I was very happy to be working with fishermen who were not actors but fishermen. It makes a hell of a difference, even down to the way they tie their knots. This, to me, is the essence of picture making.

Cineaste: Were you impressed at this time with Soviet filmmaking, and especially with Eisenstein?

Zinnemann: Enormously, yes. Eisenstein, and Potemkin especially, was important in my development, not only because of the concept of montage in shaping the film but also because it was about oppression.

Cineaste: What aspects of The Seventh Cross appealed to you?

Zinnemann: The Seventh Cross was bought by MGM and written by Helen Deutsch, who was a good writer. It was at a time when we were fighting Germany, and every German in the eyes of the American people was a monster. The book and the film made the point that even in Germany there were people who had the courage to go their own way and stand up against what was happening. I thought that was very important and exciting. Of course, the fact that Spencer Tracy was playing the lead made it even more exciting, because I was still really an apprentice.

You see, I go by the old idea of guilds, in which there are three stages. You are first an apprentice, then you become a journeyman, and, if you are still in one piece, you eventually become what they call a master. This sounds pretentious, but it is a fact that at that stage you have more or less mastered your craft. I do not particularly like to think about myself, but having done so, I feel that my apprenticeship was over after I had completed The Search. When I returned to America I made Act of Violence, and I felt that I already knew what I was doing, rather than going by instinct, as before. From Act of Violence until the end of The Men, I was a journeyman, and after that, for better or worse, I felt that I had arrived at where I was the person in charge. Maybe those early days were really the best, who knows?

Cineaste: Act of Violence has a distinctive look to it, with the location shooting and high-contrast lighting.

Zinnemann: The cameraman, Bob Surtees, was a brilliant photographer, and an old friend I had known in Germany. We got to know each other in 1928 when we were both assistant cameramen and used the same dark room. Bob was a very creative, marvelous photographer, one of the best that I worked with. I've had good luck working with wonderful cameramen. Another interesting thing - you don't mind if I ramble? - is that directors normally like to work with one cameraman and stay with him, like John Ford and Gregg Toland, and so on. People have asked why I did not do this. The answer is that I cast cameramen like casting actors, in terms of the style of the picture and what I hope the photography will bring to it.

If you make a picture like High Noon, and you want to make it feel like the world felt in the days of the Civil War in America, that kind of gritty, dusty feeling, you had to get a cameraman who knew how to handle that, like Floyd Crosby, who was not the greatest man to photograph a woman. But if, on the other hand, you had a picture like Julia, where you had two actresses who were close to forty, or just beyond forty, and who had occasionally to look like teenagers, you had to have a very good portrait photographer, and that was Douglas Slocombe. He was a wonderful cameraman, and great at this kind of romantic, warm feeling. Had Julia been photographed by Floyd Crosby, it would have looked totally different. So I changed cameramen as the material dictated.

Cineaste: What was the political atmosphere like in the late Forties? Was it a great shock when the House Un-American Activities Committee began its hearings on Hollywood in 1947?

Zinnemann: One could not say that it was a shock in terms of surprise, because everything was moving towards that. There was increasing tension, brought about by the fear in America of the communist conspiracy, the notion that there were lots of communists under the bed. In fact, there were quite a few crypto-people, most of them not even card-carrying members. But there was a tremendous suspicion, and the American people in normal times are not suspicious. The McCarthy thing did not come as a surprise, but it developed gradually as his speeches and radio appearances went on. People became politically suspicious, and they were helped by many of the politically far-right. This whole phobia about communism went on and on, and is still going on, although now they are called liberals. It was not a shock. It was something that one saw coming, just as one had a sense that war would be coming in 1939, when all the sabre-rattling started to become reality.

Cineaste: In Kenneth L. Geist's biography of Joseph Mankiewicz, the director H.C. Potter is quoted as saying that you were blacklisted for a time during this period, when your name was used by a group that was declared subversive, and that you appeared before an American Legion Committee to clear yourself. Can you confirm this?

Zinnemann: Yes, probably. I'd forgotten that, but it may have been true. Many filmmakers were attacked at the time of the famous Directors Guild meeting. This was the meeting when John Ford, who was far right, turned it around and really destroyed De Mille and his whole group. At the height of the McCarthy business, C.B. De Mille and his group, who were the Board of the Screen Directors Guild, decided that all members should take a mandatory loyalty oath. First of all, they said that any new members should take it, but then they decided that everyone should, as an expression of loyalty to the country. Well, a lot of people felt that they did not need to demonstrate their loyalty and objected to the idea of being coerced into doing it.

There were then about 600 members in the Guild, no more than that. Of the 600 there were fourteen who said 'No,' who were, I believe, communists. There were about 500 who voted 'Yes,' and about fifty-five or fifty-six who did not say anything one way or the other, including myself. So we then received a polite reminder from the Board, a letter saying that such and such a day would be the deadline, and please be sure to sign, which I did not do. Next there was a cable, which sounded very tough and very officious. Again I did not respond, and at that point scare tactics started, with people on motorcycles coming late in the evening, asking for the signature.

There were about ten to fifteen of us, with John Huston being very prominent at that point. The only thing we could do was to call for a general meeting at which the whole membership would have to vote - a referendum in other words. But, in order to be able to call a general meeting, you had to be a member in 'good standing,' and what the C.B. De Mille people had done before was to pass a bylaw saying that in order to be in good standing you had to sign the loyalty oath. So, in the end, twenty-five of us signed this thing, and the well-known general meeting did take place.

It was a good feeling to stand up against these people, but of course you didn't know quite what was going to happen. It was all right for the very successful, who were sure of their jobs, but for the young directors, without a strong record in the industry, it was more difficult because there was a blacklist. There was a bush telegraph among the studios as to what color you were - black or red or white. And it is possible that, in connection with that, I went to the Legion, probably to sign that oath, without which the meeting could not have been held.

It is curious that I don't remember it. I am sure that it must be true. Certainly there was never any question of being asked about names - ever. In order to call a general assembly of the Guild the rule was that there had to be twenty-five directors in good standing who could ask for such a meeting. And in order to be in good standing you had to sign the loyalty oath. Which is why Potter and I and a number of others signed it, not for any other reason.

Cineaste: Did the political pressures during that period make it more difficult to make more realistic or socially conscious films?

Zinnemann: Generally, very much so, but in my case, no. I don't know how it happened, but I know that, at the time that we made From Here to Eternity, the Army was absolutely sacred because of Korea and the victory in WWII. So one would have thought that to make a picture like From Here to Eternity, which was critical of what went on inside the Army, and what it did to individuals, would not be possible. Except that Harry Cohn, who was a very bright showman and someone with a sense of what the public would accept, bought the book. Everyone thought he was crazy. It took him two years to get a reasonably good script - in fact, it was a very good script - by Daniel Taradash. Then I was asked if I would like to direct it, which at the time was amazing, because it was the prize assignment of the year at Columbia.

I was not aware of any overt difficulties, except certain things that the Army could not live with. They did not want us to show what happened in the stockade where Sinatra got beaten up, which was fine with all of us because you saw the result of it, with Sinatra coming out and falling dead. The other thing was that the real villain of the piece, the captain (Deborah Kerr's husband) was promoted to the rank of Major in the book. The Army insisted that he get his comeuppance, by either resigning or being court-martialed. So this was the one, unavoidable compromise, but it was worth making because I could not have made the picture without professional soldiers who knew how to march and drill. If you had a lot of extras slouching around, it would have been nonsense. We also had the free run of the entire location in Hawaii where the thing really had happened. But those were the only difficulties we had with the Army. We had some problems with the Church, but they were very understanding about the beach scene, which was very startling at the time.

Cineaste: When you made High Noon were you aware that Carl Foreman intended it as a comment on Hollywood in the McCarthy period.

Zinnemann: No. I read much later that Carl saw the piece as an allegory of his own personal experience. I did not think of it in political terms. To me the film was about conscience and degrees of compromise. Most people, when they encounter such a situation, will rationalize their way out of it, they will always have a reason why they can't help. This was the main theme, from the coward, to the man who really would help if he were not the only supporter, as against the drunk and the kid, who are so out of touch with reality that they want to help the Marshal.

Cineaste: How did you regard people such as Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets, who named names?

Zinnemann: It is hard for me to say, given that I was not in the same situation. I hope I would not have done it, you know, and I hated it. Maybe they were weak, but you can't judge other people unless you really know what's behind it. Eventually you find out that they were victims of something that may have happened when they were small. The whole question of why somebody is a criminal is difficult. You can't just sit and read headlines in a newspaper and be sanctimonious about it. So I don't approve of Kazan or Odets at all. In Kazan's case the important thing is that he made some fantastic pictures and contributed a tremendous amount, in theater and film. At the same time I admire Arthur Miller very much, given the way he behaved at the time.

Cineaste: Was the crane shot, towards the end of High Noon, unusual at the time?

Zinnemann: It's curious, but although it is a shot that technically would have been possible before, I don't remember ever having seen anyone do it that way. I wanted to express the fact that this man was totally abandoned by everybody, and all doors were closed to him. He had nowhere to go, except to face the music. In the last analysis, I am a visual person. I'm not very good with words but I think I can express things visually that somehow connect with the audience, because audiences seem to remember them for a long time.

The crane we used was an enormous monster which could be rented for the day. Across the street George Stevens was shooting Shane, I think. We borrowed it from him for a day and it needed ten people to move it. Now you could do it with a zoom shot, but it would not be the same thing.

Cineaste: After the success of From Here to Eternity, why did you choose to make Oklahoma!?

Zinnemann: Because I was offered it and I found it fascinating to try a new medium, this huge screen. And to work with Rodgers and Hammerstein was a great pleasure. Looking back, I'm surprised that they picked me - it had no logic. They did it because I was a 'hot' director at the time. Oklahoma! had come out on the stage during the war, at a time when everyone was very depressed. Suddenly there was this gorgeous music, and this upbeat feeling about the world being a great place, and everyone took courage from it. So everyone had a good deal of affection for this particular musical, even though it has no story, other than that of who gets to take the girl to the dance.

Cineaste: Was it true that you hired a ballet troupe for The Nun's Story, for the scenes with the postulants in the convent?

Zinnemann: Yes, it is true. We needed good faces for the close-ups of the nuns. In terms of the movement of the various ceremonies we needed people who could respond to rhythm, not just extras who would shamble around. So we did get twenty or thirty people from the ballet, who were perhaps a shade too precise. You know, looking back, I feel critical of the fact that it all looked kind of glamorous. Originally I had wanted to shoot all of them in black and white and have only the tropical scenes in color so that the austerity of Europe would contrast with the bursting tropical fertility of the African scenes. But I got beaten down on that - win some and lose some. At least one could argue with the studio boss about it.

Cineaste: I was struck by the last scene, where Audrey Hepburn finally leaves the convent. The camera stays inside, so there is less of a sense of triumph than had the camera been outside.

Zinnemann: We had a very good composer, Franz Waxman, who wrote good music for the ending. I did not want to use it, and he was very upset, so we finally had a meeting with the head of the studio, Jack Warner, who was a good showman. He said that every Warner Bros. picture had music at the end. I said that if the music was upbeat, would it not that suggest that Warners was congratulating the nun on leaving the convent? So we won. I always wanted her to go out in total silence, with just one bell at the end when she goes round the corner.

Cineaste: In the recently published Sight and Sound dossier, a letter from you to Harry Cohn was published, in which you suggested that the release of From Here to Eternity be delayed in Europe. Can you explain why you wrote that letter?

Zinnemann: You would not believe it, but at the time Americans were loved in Western Europe, and were looked upon as the saviors who had gotten rid of the Nazis. I felt that showing a picture like From Here to Eternity in Europe would damage this euphoria. Cohn didn't understand the point, and, in any case, the film was making a lot of money for Columbia.

Cineaste: What impressed you about Emeric Pressburger's novel, which became Behold a Pale Horse?

Zinnemann: Thinking about it now, I cannot tell you. The film didn't really come together, and the book didn't either. At the time I could not find any other projects that I wanted to do. But I was not very happy about it, except that some of it was interesting to make. I met a lot of people who had been resisting Franco, many anarchists who had left Spain and were living just across the border so they would not lose the smells of their country. Many of them were in Perpignan. It was interesting, but it did not really feel right except in a few spots. There were one or two of my pictures that were like that.

Cineaste: How did you plan the visual style of A Man for All Seasons, and the very strong sense of the distance between Chelsea and Hampton Court?

Zinnemann: There were a few technical problems. There was no place we knew of that had the right kind of house and a river, all in one. There is a scene where the king jumps from his boat into tidal mud, so it had to be a tidal river. You had to find a time when the tide was out and the sun was at the same time in the best position for photography. That gave us one or two days a year. All the river mouths in England are full of modern shipping and modern architecture, so we had to find part of a river that looked pristine.

Somebody discovered a place near Southampton where the owner had the rights to the river. So we rented the location, which was usually a kind of garage for yachts, for five or six weeks. At the end of that river we built a wall, and then we built the same kind of wall in Oxfordshire, where there was an Abbey we could use. So in the film the king would climb the wall in Hampshire and descend from it in Oxfordshire. It is nice to have a challenge like that.

Cineaste: How do you remember working with Orson Welles?

Zinnemann: It was totally unpredictable, but a lot of fun. He had a great sense of humor. We made Cardinal Wolsey's room very small on purpose, so you felt that there was not any oxygen in it, that he took it all up. The art director, John Box, did a brilliant job. Everything was in red, the Cardinal and the walls, and he sat there, big and fat, looking totally unlike Wolsey, but it really didn't matter. In addition, for research, having the Holbein portraits of all these people was terrific. We did not use all the details because it would have cost too much, and anyway people would have been watching the costumes instead of the actors, which is a great danger in costume pictures.

Cineaste: When you made The Day of the Jackal, how important was the characterization of the Jackal? Was it important, for example, that he be an upper-class Englishman?

Zinnemann: Not all that much. The important thing was to have a man who can become invisible. There was nothing special about him, so he could be one of the crowd. If you had a big star, it would have ruined the whole movie. This was part of a long battle I had with the studio, who wanted a star. There were several stars who wanted to be in it, but then the film would have become a vehicle for the star, and that was not the story. Edward Fox happened to be sort of upper class, but that was not mandatory.

Cineaste: When Robert Shaw, as King Henry VIII, emerges out of the sun in A Man For All Seasons, was that an image you planned?

Zinnemann: It was the idea of Robert Bolt, the writer, who always wanted to get the feeling of him coming out of the sun. There is one thing that maybe should be said about the director. Basically he takes the script and brings it to life. It comes up in arguments about who is the author of a film. David Lean said that the author of the script is the writer, the author of the photography is the cameraman, and the author of the editing is the editor. They are all associate authors, but the principal author is the person who puts it together and makes it come to life. No one else can do that, certainly not the producer. Legislation which suggests that the person who finances a film is the author is ridiculous. Billy Wilder is the author of his films, not Paramount!

There are going to be many battles fought over this, because the financial boys want to be the authors. In America they managed to remove the clause stipulating moral rights of authorship from the Berne Treaty. It is a very important question and, unless it is resolved eventually in favor of the director, you will always have films like 'Terminator 26,' without imagination, and with a colossal amount of money wasted, with half of it not visible on the screen. We were trained to try and see the biggest part of the dollar on the screen. Some of these old Hollywood proverbs were pretty wise. Another was that you meet the same people going down as you met going up. It was a great life, I must say, and it is now totally different. There is a tremendous amount of talent, but there is a very worrying lack of what I have to call soul, because I cannot call it anything else.

Cineaste: Did you have disagreements with Hellman over Julia?

Zinnemann: Lillian Hellman wrote a book called Pentimento, with chapters which supposedly dealt with her life. In a short story called "Julia," she wrote about a woman she knew, and had helped in Germany, which was not true. Lillian Hellman in her mind owned half the Spanish Civil War, while Hemingway owned the other half. She would portray herself in situations that were not true. An extremely talented, brilliant writer, but she was a phony character, I'm sorry to say. My relations with her were very guarded, and ended in pure hatred.

Cineaste: Are you pessimistic or optimistic about the cinema as you have known it this century?

Zinnemann: I would like to be optimistic, because we have brilliant directors and writers and actors, but I tend to be pessimistic. We have enormous powers of persuasion, and we are role models for the rest of the world, but we no longer have a positive attitude towards life. Until that is changed, I think it is not going to be good.

My own credo is borrowed from the words of William Faulkner, who expressed them in his speech when accepting the Nobel Prize in 1951, and which have stuck in my memory ever since: "I believe that the human spirit will prevail forever. It is our privilege to help it endure by lifting people's hearts, by reminding them of Courage and Honor and Hope and Pride and Compassion and Pity and Sacrifice, which have been the glory of their past."