They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969)

Sydney Pollack (0:34)

This is Sydney Pollack, and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about They Shoot Horses, Don't They? As You Watch It, if you do want to listen to comments about it. It was a special film for me. I made it in 1969 It was my fourth film. And it was a film that had very special challenges. I had sat down and read the book and thought it was an interesting book. I think I was less enthusiastic about it, perhaps, than some of the other people who had attempted to make it before it came to me. I think I was fooled a little bit by the simplicity of the book, by McCoy, the way McCoy had written the book.

Because I know there were people that had a real burning passion to make this as a film. I was intrigued by it, but I didn't look at it and go crazy over it. Several years later, Joe Wazan came, the agent, came and talked to me about it, and said that there was a director going to do it, but that there was a problem, and they thought they were going to let the director go. This was during, real early on. This was before any shooting had started. And in fact, what had happened is that James Poe, who was a writer, who had adapted the book, was going to direct it as his first directing job. And I guess he ran into some difficulty with Jane Fonda and Marty Baum, who was the head of the film company, and Irwin Winkler and Bob Chardoff, who were the producers. They were unhappy with the way it was being prepared and the way the tests were going, and Jane was getting a little bit nervous. And so they were looking around for somebody who could come in and take it over. And I had made a few films before, nothing that was any big success. It was very early in my career, and I had been directing films for about four years.

And they offered it to me, and I agreed to do it, but I didn't care for the script, the original script that Mr. Poe had written.

And I felt that I had to start all over again in a way.

And I was desperate to find a writer who could write fast, because I had something like eight weeks to get ready, between six and eight weeks to get this picture ready, to cast it all and to prepare it. They were deep into construction of the set already. And I hunted around to find a writer, and the writer I found was a guy who had never made a film before. I don't think he's made one since. His name was Robert E. Thompson, Red Thompson, we called him. And I found him from a television series called Have a Gun, We'll Travel. The thing is that the television series was so beautifully written, I thought, but more importantly, it was so sparely written. There was no pretense at all about it. The problem I was having with the postscript was that I felt that it had been a little bit seduced by the symbolism of the picture.

And I thought it got complex in a way that it needed to get and therefore somewhat pretentious in a way. That this metaphor of these people in a closed world going round and round in a circle, it was so strong by itself, that the task was to do it as straightforwardly and simple as possible was what I thought. So I hired Red Thompson, and we gave ourselves a task of doing eight pages a day, which we figured we had to do to get finished. And what would happen is Red would write eight pages while I would be working at studio all day, doing casting and costumes, and getting the crew together, and laying out shots. And then we would meet about six o'clock in the evening and take those eight pages and rework them and cut them down a bit to around six pages, and then I would put them through. And that way we just kept adding and adding to our screenplay until we finally had screenplay just in time to begin shooting, really. What happened when Red and I began to work is we did several things. One of the first things we did, which was a difficult decision, is we decided to never ever open it up.

That the claustrophobia of it was terrifically important, and that doing the entire film within the walls of that ballroom would be a plus. It would make it very, very hard to do, very hard to sustain it, but it would add a strong element to the film in some way. So, we decided to get rid of everything that we felt was superfluous to the marathon itself, and try to make everyone meet at that marathon, as opposed to the book and the original script, which had Robert and Gloria, the two central characters meeting on a park bench outside Paramount Studios and deciding and planning to go to the marathon and do the marathon. So we sort of introduced everybody at once, and that gave us a form that I liked very much. It was a very strong, clear, although limiting form. It produced something marvelous. It forced me directorially to try to find some way to sustain visual interest in one place with one activity over and over and over again. That was a very frightening thing for me at the time, because I kept thinking, my God, this is a nightmare. Not only am I in one set for two hours, but I have people doing the same thing over and over for two hours. And worst of all, they have to get slower and more fatigued as they do it. So that I have this sort of nightmare of having to slow the people down to play the reality of the fatigue as they keep doing the same thing you've been seeing them do for the previous hour and a half. But I think it worked out very well. And I mean, it, it, it, you know, often those, those are the significant things. The limitations placed on you often produce the most interesting work. They force you to be inventive about solutions, and sometimes wonderful things happen because of obstacles, things that you have to overcome. And I think that was the case here.