The Hitcher: 'How Do These Movies Get Made?' (2003) - full transcript
It was my first professional movie.
I was very entertained by the
idea of being able to
go into video stores and find it on the shelf.
It's funny because when you go to Blockbuster
you'll find it in the horror section.
To my great surprise, to this day, inexplicably,
it was listed in the comedy section.
I guess it's a thriller with a bit of a horror twist to it.
-The story has the logic of a nightmare.
-Well, it's a thriller
-To me it's not really a horror film.
-I'm not a big fan of horror.
-It's definitely a psychological thriller.
-First of all, it's a very...
-strange, horrible fairy tale.
-Incredible action in this movie.
Drive and hunt and scare.
-You could possibly put it into the action section.
-It's a mind fuck.
I've never exactly felt comfortable
with quote part with it being a harmony.
It's a weird movie, i mean,
it's still a movie about a killer.
Certainly somewhere between that and thriller.
Some sort of suspense thriller,
horror in there somewhere.
I don't think there's any moment
where you wouldn't think
that this could happen out there.
If you've never seen this film,
you can't look a this film
and know what's going to happen.
THE HITCHER
"HOW DO THESE MOVIES GET MADE?"
The inspiration for The Hitcher
was the Dora song Riders in the Storm
which is about a Hitchhiking killer.
And I always loved the song and thought that
it was a great opening for a film.
So I started with the screenplay of The Hitcher.
I started with the opening 1012 odd page
scene between Jim Halsey and John Ryder.
And basically went from there.
I got a copy of the California
Production Manual, first of all
while I was living in Texas.
And went down the list of all the producers
And I sent what's called a query letter.
Basically, I sent a half page description of the story,
and I kind of dared people to read it.
I got a 40% response,
and I actually got to Ed Feldman by accident.
I'd sent the letter, actually,
to a producer named Phil Feldman
who produced The Wild Bunch, And I said,
I thought , this is probably a good
idea to take a look at the picture.
And it got to Ed's company by accident.
My associate at the time, David Bombeck,
thought it was a very good idea for a movie,
and he said "could he develop it?"
And so we developed a movie over the phone.
We never met Eric Read,
until we had the final draft of the picture.
We used to do. He would be
on payphones in Texas
and we would talk over the project with them.
Between the time i was a still photographer
and the time i became a director,
I was a camera, i was a DP
for some number of year.
Not something i really wanted
to do for a living
but i felt this was a logical
progression from still photography,
and a position in which i could really learn
much more clearly how movies are made
and get closer to the action, so to speak.
And Robert had done a short film
called "China Lake",
which had a very it was about a rogue cop
and it was shot in widescreen
and had the same
sense of hard edged realism
and violent psychology.
And China lake was in the same
spirit and genre
as The Hitcher,
and he had been a stills cameraman.
I don't know, we were just overwhelmed
by his work on China Lake.
My agent at the time called,
and i stille remember this word,
he said to me,
i have a project i'm going to send you,
and you're not going to believe,
he said,
how much fun you're going
to have making this movie.
My agent sent over the script of this
thing called The Hitcher
and as i was reading it,
i was thinking, why did i ever make the
right short film to get this job?
Because, in effect, already made the movie.
John Seal had done witness for me.
Just to meet John Seal
you want to keep working with him forever?
He's really such unique individual.
And Ed said "you should listen".
You should check out this guy, John Seal.
Of course, i never heard of him.
Nobody in America had heard
of him at that time.
I wasn't too impressed with the script.
I did feel that there are an awful
lot of people killed in the first 36 minutes,
and a lot of it, as written,
was slow motion death.
And i wasn't really honestly prepared for that.
So i had a long talk to Robert Harmon,
on the phone, and profit that and said
look, i'm a little worried that there's
so many people
just getting slaughtered in slow motion.
And he said "no, let me tell you how
i'd like to see the film made".
And i think 23 minutes later i signed up.
And i hired him, i'd never met him.
I met him the first time he came to L.A
to begin work on the movie,
and it proved to be a very happy collaboration.
There was a brief period, i recall, in which
we were discussing Terrence Stamp.
Somebody was very interested in, and
it didn't work out. Terrence
was very clear that
he felt that it would take him in a place
he didn't want to go at that moment.
That's how he put it.
And he's been very kind in the year since,
i run into him every now and then.
And he has always expressed a regret
that he'd made the decision because
he seems apparently he's a fan of the movie.
Sam Elliott came through an interview.
We interviewed him one Sunday
morning at somebody's office
in the San Fernando Valley.
He was so scary that i was afraid
to go out in my car
and even drive by anyone, but it
i thought he was going to do the film
and then he backed out at
the 11th hour and we got Rutka.
We were fortunate to get an
actor of Rutka's caliber.
Yes, Rutker was,
i thought, an unattainable possibility.
I believe what pushed
him over the edge
was that the screened my short.
He wanted to see what i had
done as a director.
I saw a short film that he had financed himself
because he was tired of being
a set photographer,
or a Playboy photographer.
He was for two years, and
he wanted to photograph movies.
And it was a wonderful movie.
I saw that film along with the script,
and i just felt
look that, i got to do this movie.
John Rider is, on one hand,
a very tough, resourceful,
murderous character,
but on another hand, no longer
wants to live or continue.
But he wants to
stick around long enough
to pass on to this one kid
this one person who he finds
has a course of life,
how to be, in his terms, strong
enough to survive.
In the original script, it was described
as skeletal, with apologies to him.
I remember that Eric Red used to
talk about Keith Richards as the model.
He was also described in the
script that i recall reading first,
as having no natural voice,
but he had sort of an electronic voice box.
I think in general, their portrayal,
physically and emotionally
of the writer character in the original
script was a little bit more monstrous.
He was certainly a human being,
but he was,
i think, without goodness,
without any quality of...
anything human.
He was just a force of
horror and awfulness.
There's so many elements to it
that we think about,
because Rutgers character shows up
at the right time, at the right place,
is he magic?
-Is he supernatural?
-John Ryder?
That's a rental company.
This guy's name is not John Ryder,
forget it.
And to me, he doesn't exist.
He's just a piece, he's just a ghost
that comes out of the desert sand
and starts haunting people.
He's shooting down helicopters with pistols,
he's slicing people up left and right
and they can't catch him,
he can sneak into a jailhouse
and kill all the cops,
and unlock my cell without me knowing.
There are valid criticism of
the movie in terms of
how could he pop up here,
and how could he pop up there,
and how could he know where he was?
And all those questions, which are,
from one point of view, valid questions,
but from my point of view
and i believe from Eric, Ed Feldman's
and all the other
filmmakers involved in the movie,
the questions is not appropriate.
It might say, if you don't get it,
don't get it.
But the movie is not supposed to
work on this super real level.
I think it's a normal story of
a serial killer.
Except the cleverness of the
script made it more
he made, made the man more than just
a character on television,
where you see villains today, he made...
i think it's one of the most horrorific
characters in the history of films.
And i think that's why the picture
enjoyed the success it did.
To me, the first thing that is scary
about a character is intelligence.
If the guy is intelligent, and now we know,
they are around, but that's scary.
So, you know, you can't fool
them too easily.
You have to be smart to fool them.
It lifts up the whole story.
It lifts up the bad guy.
It lifts up the the hero.
The more complicated, the more
complex the bad guy is,
the better the hero is off when
he finally gets it,
my character shows him that
i want to win
that i'm not so fearful that i'll just collapse
and let you stick that knife in
my heart and drain my life.
I want to survive.
And he recognizes that,
and that inspires him
to take me to the next level.
He says "okay, kid,
i'm taking you on a ride".
In terms of the character, i thought,
this is a guy who knows he's very sick,
but he doesn't quite know
where to go to have it fixed or he
doesn't know how to end it.
He has a coward too.
If he would have the guts to
commit suicide,
that will be fine, but he doesn't have that.
So i guess somewhere in his mind
he comes up with and idea that
if he can just find somebody
who gives a little shit.
He can have some fun with,
and then ask him to just take
him out of the way.
Now, i thought Rudka's character
was a very well balanced,
weirdo in the desert and very frightening,
because of that, because he was subdued too.
He just wasn't some screaming maniac.
He was very subdued and evil
about the whole thing.
And i think that build a suspence in the film
that might not have occurred otherwise.
Rider wants to teach the kid,
train the kid, make him,
strengthen him, forge him.
And the kid, like all people who are in
the process of being challenged
by someone has both a terror and
a respect for this guy.
And also, by the end of it,
desire to rid the world of him.
It may be a slightly twisted view of it.
But at the end of the movie i
certainly have always felt
that Tommy has left to wonder whether or not
if i could.
If the hell of Tommy's character
if the Halsey character could
turn back the clock,
and choose to have never met John Ryder.
I'm not so sure that he would choose that,
he would change anything at the end.
There's that moment when Rutger
is laying on the pavement,
and Tommy walks up to him,
and he certainly believes that he's dead.
The fact that he isn't, is
immaterial at that moment.
And he kind of caresses his hair with the gun.
It's a sort of farewell.
He's not walking over to him
with the gun,
and putting five more bullets in them,
or turning the rifle around
and bashing.
It just would be completely wrong.
There's a certain gentleness, is almost...
controversial, though this,
may be almost a thank you,
involved in it.
That's how i've always felt about it.
I was doing a tremendous amount of driving,
around the Califiornia
area looking for locations.
So it was incredibly carefully picked locations.
And they were carefully picked as
far as their design,
where the mountains laid out,
where the sun was,
all these elements that came together.
It was shot down in the areas
around El Centro, California.
On through the Death Valley
into the Vegas area.
So you get that really old style western look.
A lot of the pre production
was trying to suss out
how Robert wanted to handle it
and how to make the desert look
basically a beautiful place,
where this madness was going on.
I don't know how many people
respond to this,
but it was shot in a wide screen form
in True Anamorphic 235, Panavision
and if you see it in that form,
certainly on a screen,
on a big screen, it has a certain scope to it.
And i also think,
so much of the movie is about,
you might say,
figures in a landscape.
And as soon as you begin to have enormous
scope shots with small cars
and small figures,
you start to feel a certain scale to it.
I feel that John's great strength is that,
his work is beautiful, but always natural.
You don't get the feeling for the most part,
of a camera trying to show off.
He films in a very humanistc way.
He doesn't try, but when he
has to shoot in a small area,
he does it in a small area.
And in fact, i like it,
because in some ways
i feel putting a camera in the area
that the actors must be in.
Say, like inside a car or a small jail cell,
or shed or whatever.
If the camera is included with
the actors inside,
somehow i think it's a
better way of making a film,
than when you pull a wall out.
The actor's psych,
knows that it's a fake set.
We know it's a fake set.
And the camera almost proves
that it's a fake set,
because it can shoot from angles that aren't real.
How about that shoot on the Western dolly,
down low on the road after i kick Rutger out?
And it comes zooming up to
him as he stands up
and he just pans up with the man.
He was on a sandbag on a dolly himself,
having two boys push him down the street.
And of course, it's cinematography.
That's good stuff, you know?
It's not television.
It's big and it's wild.
You know, It's open.
The process of working
with a younger director,
i find, can be quite exciting, because
they know no limitations.
Their imagination goes rampant.
And in a way, that's fun.
Because Eric's writing was, like, rampant.
He had this stuff in there.
And then Robert, i think, very wisely,
was pulling it back and doing it by inference.
And i think that young innocence
of new writers and new directors
is very exciting to work with this.
The experience was very intense,
and i was a young actor,
with limited skill and limited tools,
at the age of 18.
That was put into a very life
altering situation.
I mean, as... i'm talking here
in my real life,
not in the movie.
I really had to deal with Rutger,
who is very intense,
and that was possibly the
peak of his Rutgernance,
if that makes any sense.
And he was a very intense,
very intimidating person.
I remembere how excited he was
you know, when he knew that
we were going to do it.
And he said, i've never acted before, really.
And now i'm going to act now.
And he was stoked.
And what i loved specifically about him,
that he was totally into
whatever would happen
between us in the scene.
And i was also working with the
amazing Jennifer Jason Lee.
Who is as equally intense
when it comes to her craft,
because this is an actress
who has many skills,
and many tools in her bag.
And she made the choice to
never break the character,
out of the scene, in the scene.
She was always that character.
So here i was, the third in this triangle
of some people
who showed up every day to kick some ass.
And i felt, for the first time
pressure.
What real pressure was to deliver.
There's this moment where i actually
elbow him out of the car,
after he's had the knife and
he catches a tear
off of my cheek and he holds
the knife up to the camera,
and the tear runs down the blade.
This is not written stuff,
this is Rutker.
And i'm like "Dude, don't fucking
stab me in the eye with that knife".
And he's very intense with it.
Picking my tear up.
And letting the tear run down the blade.
And these are the things that
i think people picked up as
homo erotic moments, when
i spit on him in the jail cell
and he licks it up.
Why would he do that?
Is he gay?
Dude? It's just interesting filmmaking.
I was just as creative as i can be, and
i always come up with hundreds
of ideas, and then
it's sort of up to the director to say, okay
that can go, and that you can keep.
And i was fascinated working with him.
I just couldn't...
he'd be driving down the desert,
full speed in the black truck,
and there's a white hanky blowing
out the windows of the truck.
And that's just Rutger holding
hanky out as he's driving.
And the director is not
going to say "ehi, bro,
put the hanky out the window.
The sports of this picture, to me,
and the way the character sort of dances around
with the characters in the movie
and with the audience as well,
is that, he has to put them on the wrong leg
in order to surprise him again.
And that was my goal, basically.
The thing is, he doesn't sit down
and explain to everybody,
okay, director, this is what i'm doing.
Producers, this is what i'm doing. I mean...
he just goes and we're all going,
"what's he got the white hanky
out the window for?"
I don't know. Do you want to ask him?
Not really. What's for lunch?
And you watch it, and there's a reason for it.
And it pays off at the end.
There's a wonderful scene
where Riders just shot two
police officers in the car,
when he's trying to turn himself in,
and the kid grabs a gun and it's it,
he's going to commit suicide.
There's no reason to live.
The nightmare is going to end,
and he puts the gun under his jaw.
When the director yelled action,
it was like something took over.
There was this and it's one of a
really beautiful moment,
where i fell out of the car and
i raised my fingers,
and i started going bang, bang,
and kind of losing it.,
and i started to rub this dirt in my face,
and i looked up to the sky,
kind of pleading to God,
just in time, which normally would
have ruined the movie,
for a big cloud to move away,
and hit me right in the face.
And that's when my character just stood up,
shook it off,
and said, i'm going to fucking meet this guy,
i'm going to take this guy on.
And it all happen in the moment.
The director was clever enough to appreciate
the work that took place, as oppose to
we had a lighting change.
We got to do that one more time.
My DP, John Seals, who is
an Academy Award winning DP,
probably my favorite and most
talented DP i've ever worked with,
said, in his Australian accent,
mate, look at that there.
Let's just give another shot of that cloud.
Go and bar it here, we cut it in.
It's a brilliant moment, mate.
And that's what they did.
And it's funny how fans pick up on that stuff.
Because they've seen the movie
again and again and again,
and they start seeing that stuff.
There's so much to be intimidated by,
that most of the audiance are always
sort of in the same mode as he is.
Once you're past that, you can start
seeing other things,
which is great fun.
We desperately tried to find angles,
and ways of shooting the stunts,
that would be...
that would maximize the stunt effect.
It was a stunt movie and i went for it.
I'd had an idea which seemed, at
the time like a good one.
Everybody has to remember,
this was before the days
of computer animation of any kind.
There weren't even that many
computers behind the scene.
Much less involved in actually making the movie.
It was a sequence of the movie where
the three cars line up side by side,
the end of the chase scene.
Two colleagues cars are
flanking Tommy Howell,
and Jennifer's car, which is in the middle.
They're about to shoot him from either
side out of their two police cars,
and the Tommy Hall character
gets the idea to jam on the brakes.
And since they're all moving down the
road together at 65 miles an hour or so,
when he puts on those brakes,
he would therefore immediately back
away and the two cops would,
in fact, shoot each other,
which is what happened.
So i had this bit of coverage
that occured to me,
that we would take a camera car,
an insert car,
sometimes called, and crane off the side
of that car with a camera.
Off a little crane arm.
So our camera car is driving behind
one of the two cop cars,
and we are craned out,
and flying along the roadway,
about that far off the ground,
six inches or so off the ground.
So the road is whizzing by the camera.
The idea that was when Tommy
Howell's car hits its brakes,
of course, it would immediately
come right back at the camera.
But since we're on a crane arm,
theorically, as that happened,
we could go and move the
camera right over,
and let that car go right under the lens.
We would continue traveling
at 60 miles an hour,
as two cop cars begin to roll.
Completely insane idea.
We did the stunt and it
all went off very well,
until see Thomas How's car went backwards.
The camera went in the air,
shot underneath.
The other two cars started
to go into their turn,
and should have made safe.
But the outer one went into a long slide,
and crossed over and came into
the insert vehicle lane.
And, of course, it was shedding speed
a lot faster than the insert vehicle.
And the insert vehicle driver, who was
a fantastic driver,
he realized that he had men
on top of the vehicle.
He had a camera on the front of
the vehicle, as well on a low platform.
So he had a men on the front of his vehicle,
who was now looking like
he was going to be squashed
between the police car and the insert vehicle.
So in a split second, he made a decision
to put the right hand wheel down,
And swerve the insert vehicle to the right.
And it just ended up sliding sideways,
trying not to hit the police car
with the guys on the roof.
And we shuddered to a halt.
The one thing i never want on in
a picture is anyone to get hurt.
No movie is worth anyone getting hurt.
It doesn't matter how well we
planned things back then,
there was always an opening for
accidents to happen.
And luckily, the professionalism
of that man's driving
was such that we just got out
of that quite happily,
but we're pretty careful again after that.
Rutger was amazing, man.
I remember one scene at the
patrol gas station
that he had to drive out of
the shed of the garage,
out of the door,
smashed the door,
and then he had to go up and
around and come back,
and knock over all the petrol pumps.
And the stunt coordinator tried it
with the door open,
and he drove out, roared up the top,
turned the wheel, couldn't make it,
slammed it in reverse, went back,
filled, came down and knocked over the pumps.
And Ruth had just stood there
looking at it and he said,
"let me do it, we'll roll film."
so all the cameras were set up
and we rolled film,
and he crashed out of that garage,
he went up and did a full power turn,
without stopping and backing and filling,
and rolled down and knocked the pumps over.
And i think the poor stuntmen sat there
with their mouths open,
because he did something that really
even a good stuntman
was having trouble doing.
He just did it like that.
There was a love scene in the motel room,
but i remember when we
were going to film that scene.
Jennifer, i believe,
wasn't feeling, that was a truthful moment.
She felt like that was one of those
Hollywood moments,
that like, okay, here's where
the guy in the movie sleeps
with the girl in the movie.
Oh, wait a minute.
Everybody's dead and we're
running for our lives. Hello.
That scene has changed a bit,
it didn't seem to feel right that
Nash and Halsey would have sex,
there was something...
it's not a consummated relationship
between the two of them.
And she's gonna get torn apart bewteen two tracks.
and it was it,
was better to keep the tension
that it might happen,
but not consummate it.
They already like each other there.
They're surviving.
There's already a bond.
It's a survival bond,
and that's heavy than anything.
I feel that a film scorer's job is to help tell the story.
In a sense, you should almost
be able to turn the dialogue off,
and have the music tell the story.
There's a film called "Mrs. Soffel",
that mark did the score for.
Again, it must have been one of
his very first scores.
I thought it was fantastic.
I really liked the movie too,
but i walked out of the movie and i
was so amazed by the music.
He just called me.
he must have gotten my phone number
from my agent or something,
and said, i've been a fan of yours.
And we had several long phone
conversations long before we met.
And he just expressed his enthusiasm
and describing what he wanted to make.
It all sounded fascinating to me
and he said yes.
And i still don't quite know why,
but we've been friends ever since,
-and worked together many times.
-I fortunately came into this business,
when video was available to
the common man,
and so i could have a video machine at home
and work directly to the picture.
Having a synthesizer keyboard
and a computer,
so i can play something in.
Record it in the computer.
Hit play on the video,
hit play on the computer,
and become an audience
for a moment, and just
see is it working? Is there a connection there?
And then the good news is that
the director can come,
and sit next to me, and we can
have that discussion.
Before we have to get on the
dubbing stage and spend
lots of money to record anything for real.
We can test it out on ourselves,
and we can interact and
we can move it,
we can try it 5 seconds earlier,
we can take the drums out,
we can play the melody backwards,
we can get it the way.
Both he and i know that we're going to want it.
He just enhances the visualization
he just brings you to it.
He becomes one with it as opposed to,
sometimes, i think, score can be a distraction,
for me when i'm watching
a movie, and all of a sudden,
oh, there's a score.
Oh yeah, this is a movie
instead of an experience,
where it all becomes one
and it goes together.
And that's what the score of this
film did for me, which i loved.
I mean, it really...
it really is one with the film
and you don't fell that the score
is a distraction.
It's a beautiful use of sound
there's a scene when Jim Halsey
is locked into the police station,
after he's been arrested and
he goes to sleep,
and he starts having a dream,
and he's dreaming of picking up John Ryder
and when Ryder from his point of view,
leans over and knocks on the
windshield of the car,
It's a sound for several gunshots.
The kid wakes up into the police station,
and the sell doors open, and he
finds that Ryder come in,
and shot all the police officers
or cut their throats.
So, in fact, that...
those gunshots had
intruded on his dream.
That's the sort of subjective stuff.
It's a turn on to me, the sounds,
how you put the sound of a movie together,
because sound goes straight to your heart.
It does not go through a filter of
you've seen this before,
you have never heard
anything before like this,
because it's always original.
I think we previewed the
film in New Jersey.
-It was all very fine.
-There are certain moments, of course,
where they scream,
and then when Nash dies
you can hear people in the audience
saying, "it's not going to happen".
"Oh, my God."
it was so much fun.
They were on the chairs.
And that's the moment you work for it,
to see how it gets there and
how it is received,
and then you know that you did it right.
Some people came over and
thought it was a masterpiece.
Some people wanted to kill me.
I mean, there was a couple of nuns
came over to me in theater and say
"how dare you show this movie?"
and i think it has to do with the realism
of the psychology between
John Roger and Jim Halsen.
It's not a Freddie movie.
It's not a candy man movie.
It's not a guy in a ski mask
with a machete.
-That's some kind of fantasy.
-The LA Times decided
they wanted to do the cover story
of the Sunday LA Times Magazine
about the movie.
And we thought, "wow, that's fantastic."
it'll be the cover of it.
It's called the calendar section of
Los Angeles Times,
and we were all interviewed and
it was all very positive feeling.
It was all very auditory, sort of how
effective it is and all kinds of issues.
And we're all thinking, this is great,
this will be wonderful publicity.
And it'll be fantastic.
So we all are interviewed,
and the day comes for this,
front cover story of the LA Times
calendar to come out.
And i remember opening the paper
and looking at the front page
of the calendar and thinking:
"i must be dreaming", because the
headline of the story,
on the front page was a large shot of
Rutger with his coat blowing in the wind.
It was a still from the movie,
from what we used to call
the Ghost Gas, and this dust storm
and Rutgers Long coat. And it
was a very evocative shot,
but the headline read, "how do
these movies get made?"
by i forgot her name.
And it was basically a story which we all felt
we had been thoroughly tricked
by this journalist,
because there was no hint
in her discussion of the question,
or what the nature or the take of
the story was going to be,
that it was, in effect, not even necessarily
negative about the movie,
but it was a kind of a moralistic quote.
These movies, how do these
movies get made,
that are so horrifying and so frightening?
Years later, in fact, it was
only about a year ago,
when a woman that i met,
heard that i'd photographed the Hitch,
and she said, "that dreadful film".
She said: "how could you have torn
that child apart between those trucks?"
and i thought, she's sounding like
she actually saw it.
And i said, but you didn't see that.
I said, there was just a fantastic little editing
of the accelerator going up
and down the clutch,
coming in and out, Rudka saying,
shoot me, shoot me,
and the gun in his forehead,
and the kid not being able to shoot,
and i said, and then the
revving and the clutch,
and suddenly the wheel turns and your
hear a scream and you go to black.
She said, "not at all true."
i saw that poor child get torn apart.
And i thought to myself,
i know what's happened,
you closed your eyes and you saw it,
in your mind's eye, and when
you opened your eyes,
we were into the next scene.
And for all intents and purposes,
she had seen
Jennifer Jason Lee torn apart.
But you never see it.
When Jennifer Jason Lee is torn apart,
supposedly the good old indian way,
because in the mediaval period
they used to do that.
And the Indians sort
of did some of that, too.
Four horses, and there you go.
Yeah, we're funny creatures.
People always ask me, where's the cut footage
of Jennifer Jason Lee being ripped in half?
That great makeup effect.
And it was never a makeup effect,
and it was never in the script.
That was never seen on screen either.
It was lost screen. It was
done actually by sound.
And of course, the sound does trick there.
The sound of the truck does the trick.
You know, 500 horse power,
not 4, 500 hundred.
The Hitcher is a film that's funny.
It's really a film more about how
don't show it than how you show it.
And people think it's a much
more violent film,
and it got a tremendous reputation
when it came out for being
this incredibly violent picture.
And there's certainly a lot of
violence that happens in it.
But i'm not seeing.
A lot of it's left to your imagination
or it occurs off screen.
it's Blade Runners is 22 years ago,
this is 15 years ago,
but these are to me, they're big moments,
because they give you trust.
Because if you feel that
strong about something,
there's something to be found
and there's...
there's no way or there's no us in fighting it.
I think the people who love movies
regard the Hitcher as a classic of its kind.
And they don't make pictures
really like that anymore.
The Hitcher is just my kind of movie, man.
Good acting, good cinematography,
wicked stunts, and a hell of a story.
what else do you want?
It's now? What? 15 or 16
years later, i still think,
i can't believe this is great.
It's full of trouble and full of problems,
and full of...
all kinds of issue, but
they're within the confines of
a much larger perspective.
Wait a second, we're just making movies here.
It's not he end of the world.
So i'm quite happy about it all.
I was very entertained by the
idea of being able to
go into video stores and find it on the shelf.
It's funny because when you go to Blockbuster
you'll find it in the horror section.
To my great surprise, to this day, inexplicably,
it was listed in the comedy section.
I guess it's a thriller with a bit of a horror twist to it.
-The story has the logic of a nightmare.
-Well, it's a thriller
-To me it's not really a horror film.
-I'm not a big fan of horror.
-It's definitely a psychological thriller.
-First of all, it's a very...
-strange, horrible fairy tale.
-Incredible action in this movie.
Drive and hunt and scare.
-You could possibly put it into the action section.
-It's a mind fuck.
I've never exactly felt comfortable
with quote part with it being a harmony.
It's a weird movie, i mean,
it's still a movie about a killer.
Certainly somewhere between that and thriller.
Some sort of suspense thriller,
horror in there somewhere.
I don't think there's any moment
where you wouldn't think
that this could happen out there.
If you've never seen this film,
you can't look a this film
and know what's going to happen.
THE HITCHER
"HOW DO THESE MOVIES GET MADE?"
The inspiration for The Hitcher
was the Dora song Riders in the Storm
which is about a Hitchhiking killer.
And I always loved the song and thought that
it was a great opening for a film.
So I started with the screenplay of The Hitcher.
I started with the opening 1012 odd page
scene between Jim Halsey and John Ryder.
And basically went from there.
I got a copy of the California
Production Manual, first of all
while I was living in Texas.
And went down the list of all the producers
And I sent what's called a query letter.
Basically, I sent a half page description of the story,
and I kind of dared people to read it.
I got a 40% response,
and I actually got to Ed Feldman by accident.
I'd sent the letter, actually,
to a producer named Phil Feldman
who produced The Wild Bunch, And I said,
I thought , this is probably a good
idea to take a look at the picture.
And it got to Ed's company by accident.
My associate at the time, David Bombeck,
thought it was a very good idea for a movie,
and he said "could he develop it?"
And so we developed a movie over the phone.
We never met Eric Read,
until we had the final draft of the picture.
We used to do. He would be
on payphones in Texas
and we would talk over the project with them.
Between the time i was a still photographer
and the time i became a director,
I was a camera, i was a DP
for some number of year.
Not something i really wanted
to do for a living
but i felt this was a logical
progression from still photography,
and a position in which i could really learn
much more clearly how movies are made
and get closer to the action, so to speak.
And Robert had done a short film
called "China Lake",
which had a very it was about a rogue cop
and it was shot in widescreen
and had the same
sense of hard edged realism
and violent psychology.
And China lake was in the same
spirit and genre
as The Hitcher,
and he had been a stills cameraman.
I don't know, we were just overwhelmed
by his work on China Lake.
My agent at the time called,
and i stille remember this word,
he said to me,
i have a project i'm going to send you,
and you're not going to believe,
he said,
how much fun you're going
to have making this movie.
My agent sent over the script of this
thing called The Hitcher
and as i was reading it,
i was thinking, why did i ever make the
right short film to get this job?
Because, in effect, already made the movie.
John Seal had done witness for me.
Just to meet John Seal
you want to keep working with him forever?
He's really such unique individual.
And Ed said "you should listen".
You should check out this guy, John Seal.
Of course, i never heard of him.
Nobody in America had heard
of him at that time.
I wasn't too impressed with the script.
I did feel that there are an awful
lot of people killed in the first 36 minutes,
and a lot of it, as written,
was slow motion death.
And i wasn't really honestly prepared for that.
So i had a long talk to Robert Harmon,
on the phone, and profit that and said
look, i'm a little worried that there's
so many people
just getting slaughtered in slow motion.
And he said "no, let me tell you how
i'd like to see the film made".
And i think 23 minutes later i signed up.
And i hired him, i'd never met him.
I met him the first time he came to L.A
to begin work on the movie,
and it proved to be a very happy collaboration.
There was a brief period, i recall, in which
we were discussing Terrence Stamp.
Somebody was very interested in, and
it didn't work out. Terrence
was very clear that
he felt that it would take him in a place
he didn't want to go at that moment.
That's how he put it.
And he's been very kind in the year since,
i run into him every now and then.
And he has always expressed a regret
that he'd made the decision because
he seems apparently he's a fan of the movie.
Sam Elliott came through an interview.
We interviewed him one Sunday
morning at somebody's office
in the San Fernando Valley.
He was so scary that i was afraid
to go out in my car
and even drive by anyone, but it
i thought he was going to do the film
and then he backed out at
the 11th hour and we got Rutka.
We were fortunate to get an
actor of Rutka's caliber.
Yes, Rutker was,
i thought, an unattainable possibility.
I believe what pushed
him over the edge
was that the screened my short.
He wanted to see what i had
done as a director.
I saw a short film that he had financed himself
because he was tired of being
a set photographer,
or a Playboy photographer.
He was for two years, and
he wanted to photograph movies.
And it was a wonderful movie.
I saw that film along with the script,
and i just felt
look that, i got to do this movie.
John Rider is, on one hand,
a very tough, resourceful,
murderous character,
but on another hand, no longer
wants to live or continue.
But he wants to
stick around long enough
to pass on to this one kid
this one person who he finds
has a course of life,
how to be, in his terms, strong
enough to survive.
In the original script, it was described
as skeletal, with apologies to him.
I remember that Eric Red used to
talk about Keith Richards as the model.
He was also described in the
script that i recall reading first,
as having no natural voice,
but he had sort of an electronic voice box.
I think in general, their portrayal,
physically and emotionally
of the writer character in the original
script was a little bit more monstrous.
He was certainly a human being,
but he was,
i think, without goodness,
without any quality of...
anything human.
He was just a force of
horror and awfulness.
There's so many elements to it
that we think about,
because Rutgers character shows up
at the right time, at the right place,
is he magic?
-Is he supernatural?
-John Ryder?
That's a rental company.
This guy's name is not John Ryder,
forget it.
And to me, he doesn't exist.
He's just a piece, he's just a ghost
that comes out of the desert sand
and starts haunting people.
He's shooting down helicopters with pistols,
he's slicing people up left and right
and they can't catch him,
he can sneak into a jailhouse
and kill all the cops,
and unlock my cell without me knowing.
There are valid criticism of
the movie in terms of
how could he pop up here,
and how could he pop up there,
and how could he know where he was?
And all those questions, which are,
from one point of view, valid questions,
but from my point of view
and i believe from Eric, Ed Feldman's
and all the other
filmmakers involved in the movie,
the questions is not appropriate.
It might say, if you don't get it,
don't get it.
But the movie is not supposed to
work on this super real level.
I think it's a normal story of
a serial killer.
Except the cleverness of the
script made it more
he made, made the man more than just
a character on television,
where you see villains today, he made...
i think it's one of the most horrorific
characters in the history of films.
And i think that's why the picture
enjoyed the success it did.
To me, the first thing that is scary
about a character is intelligence.
If the guy is intelligent, and now we know,
they are around, but that's scary.
So, you know, you can't fool
them too easily.
You have to be smart to fool them.
It lifts up the whole story.
It lifts up the bad guy.
It lifts up the the hero.
The more complicated, the more
complex the bad guy is,
the better the hero is off when
he finally gets it,
my character shows him that
i want to win
that i'm not so fearful that i'll just collapse
and let you stick that knife in
my heart and drain my life.
I want to survive.
And he recognizes that,
and that inspires him
to take me to the next level.
He says "okay, kid,
i'm taking you on a ride".
In terms of the character, i thought,
this is a guy who knows he's very sick,
but he doesn't quite know
where to go to have it fixed or he
doesn't know how to end it.
He has a coward too.
If he would have the guts to
commit suicide,
that will be fine, but he doesn't have that.
So i guess somewhere in his mind
he comes up with and idea that
if he can just find somebody
who gives a little shit.
He can have some fun with,
and then ask him to just take
him out of the way.
Now, i thought Rudka's character
was a very well balanced,
weirdo in the desert and very frightening,
because of that, because he was subdued too.
He just wasn't some screaming maniac.
He was very subdued and evil
about the whole thing.
And i think that build a suspence in the film
that might not have occurred otherwise.
Rider wants to teach the kid,
train the kid, make him,
strengthen him, forge him.
And the kid, like all people who are in
the process of being challenged
by someone has both a terror and
a respect for this guy.
And also, by the end of it,
desire to rid the world of him.
It may be a slightly twisted view of it.
But at the end of the movie i
certainly have always felt
that Tommy has left to wonder whether or not
if i could.
If the hell of Tommy's character
if the Halsey character could
turn back the clock,
and choose to have never met John Ryder.
I'm not so sure that he would choose that,
he would change anything at the end.
There's that moment when Rutger
is laying on the pavement,
and Tommy walks up to him,
and he certainly believes that he's dead.
The fact that he isn't, is
immaterial at that moment.
And he kind of caresses his hair with the gun.
It's a sort of farewell.
He's not walking over to him
with the gun,
and putting five more bullets in them,
or turning the rifle around
and bashing.
It just would be completely wrong.
There's a certain gentleness, is almost...
controversial, though this,
may be almost a thank you,
involved in it.
That's how i've always felt about it.
I was doing a tremendous amount of driving,
around the Califiornia
area looking for locations.
So it was incredibly carefully picked locations.
And they were carefully picked as
far as their design,
where the mountains laid out,
where the sun was,
all these elements that came together.
It was shot down in the areas
around El Centro, California.
On through the Death Valley
into the Vegas area.
So you get that really old style western look.
A lot of the pre production
was trying to suss out
how Robert wanted to handle it
and how to make the desert look
basically a beautiful place,
where this madness was going on.
I don't know how many people
respond to this,
but it was shot in a wide screen form
in True Anamorphic 235, Panavision
and if you see it in that form,
certainly on a screen,
on a big screen, it has a certain scope to it.
And i also think,
so much of the movie is about,
you might say,
figures in a landscape.
And as soon as you begin to have enormous
scope shots with small cars
and small figures,
you start to feel a certain scale to it.
I feel that John's great strength is that,
his work is beautiful, but always natural.
You don't get the feeling for the most part,
of a camera trying to show off.
He films in a very humanistc way.
He doesn't try, but when he
has to shoot in a small area,
he does it in a small area.
And in fact, i like it,
because in some ways
i feel putting a camera in the area
that the actors must be in.
Say, like inside a car or a small jail cell,
or shed or whatever.
If the camera is included with
the actors inside,
somehow i think it's a
better way of making a film,
than when you pull a wall out.
The actor's psych,
knows that it's a fake set.
We know it's a fake set.
And the camera almost proves
that it's a fake set,
because it can shoot from angles that aren't real.
How about that shoot on the Western dolly,
down low on the road after i kick Rutger out?
And it comes zooming up to
him as he stands up
and he just pans up with the man.
He was on a sandbag on a dolly himself,
having two boys push him down the street.
And of course, it's cinematography.
That's good stuff, you know?
It's not television.
It's big and it's wild.
You know, It's open.
The process of working
with a younger director,
i find, can be quite exciting, because
they know no limitations.
Their imagination goes rampant.
And in a way, that's fun.
Because Eric's writing was, like, rampant.
He had this stuff in there.
And then Robert, i think, very wisely,
was pulling it back and doing it by inference.
And i think that young innocence
of new writers and new directors
is very exciting to work with this.
The experience was very intense,
and i was a young actor,
with limited skill and limited tools,
at the age of 18.
That was put into a very life
altering situation.
I mean, as... i'm talking here
in my real life,
not in the movie.
I really had to deal with Rutger,
who is very intense,
and that was possibly the
peak of his Rutgernance,
if that makes any sense.
And he was a very intense,
very intimidating person.
I remembere how excited he was
you know, when he knew that
we were going to do it.
And he said, i've never acted before, really.
And now i'm going to act now.
And he was stoked.
And what i loved specifically about him,
that he was totally into
whatever would happen
between us in the scene.
And i was also working with the
amazing Jennifer Jason Lee.
Who is as equally intense
when it comes to her craft,
because this is an actress
who has many skills,
and many tools in her bag.
And she made the choice to
never break the character,
out of the scene, in the scene.
She was always that character.
So here i was, the third in this triangle
of some people
who showed up every day to kick some ass.
And i felt, for the first time
pressure.
What real pressure was to deliver.
There's this moment where i actually
elbow him out of the car,
after he's had the knife and
he catches a tear
off of my cheek and he holds
the knife up to the camera,
and the tear runs down the blade.
This is not written stuff,
this is Rutker.
And i'm like "Dude, don't fucking
stab me in the eye with that knife".
And he's very intense with it.
Picking my tear up.
And letting the tear run down the blade.
And these are the things that
i think people picked up as
homo erotic moments, when
i spit on him in the jail cell
and he licks it up.
Why would he do that?
Is he gay?
Dude? It's just interesting filmmaking.
I was just as creative as i can be, and
i always come up with hundreds
of ideas, and then
it's sort of up to the director to say, okay
that can go, and that you can keep.
And i was fascinated working with him.
I just couldn't...
he'd be driving down the desert,
full speed in the black truck,
and there's a white hanky blowing
out the windows of the truck.
And that's just Rutger holding
hanky out as he's driving.
And the director is not
going to say "ehi, bro,
put the hanky out the window.
The sports of this picture, to me,
and the way the character sort of dances around
with the characters in the movie
and with the audience as well,
is that, he has to put them on the wrong leg
in order to surprise him again.
And that was my goal, basically.
The thing is, he doesn't sit down
and explain to everybody,
okay, director, this is what i'm doing.
Producers, this is what i'm doing. I mean...
he just goes and we're all going,
"what's he got the white hanky
out the window for?"
I don't know. Do you want to ask him?
Not really. What's for lunch?
And you watch it, and there's a reason for it.
And it pays off at the end.
There's a wonderful scene
where Riders just shot two
police officers in the car,
when he's trying to turn himself in,
and the kid grabs a gun and it's it,
he's going to commit suicide.
There's no reason to live.
The nightmare is going to end,
and he puts the gun under his jaw.
When the director yelled action,
it was like something took over.
There was this and it's one of a
really beautiful moment,
where i fell out of the car and
i raised my fingers,
and i started going bang, bang,
and kind of losing it.,
and i started to rub this dirt in my face,
and i looked up to the sky,
kind of pleading to God,
just in time, which normally would
have ruined the movie,
for a big cloud to move away,
and hit me right in the face.
And that's when my character just stood up,
shook it off,
and said, i'm going to fucking meet this guy,
i'm going to take this guy on.
And it all happen in the moment.
The director was clever enough to appreciate
the work that took place, as oppose to
we had a lighting change.
We got to do that one more time.
My DP, John Seals, who is
an Academy Award winning DP,
probably my favorite and most
talented DP i've ever worked with,
said, in his Australian accent,
mate, look at that there.
Let's just give another shot of that cloud.
Go and bar it here, we cut it in.
It's a brilliant moment, mate.
And that's what they did.
And it's funny how fans pick up on that stuff.
Because they've seen the movie
again and again and again,
and they start seeing that stuff.
There's so much to be intimidated by,
that most of the audiance are always
sort of in the same mode as he is.
Once you're past that, you can start
seeing other things,
which is great fun.
We desperately tried to find angles,
and ways of shooting the stunts,
that would be...
that would maximize the stunt effect.
It was a stunt movie and i went for it.
I'd had an idea which seemed, at
the time like a good one.
Everybody has to remember,
this was before the days
of computer animation of any kind.
There weren't even that many
computers behind the scene.
Much less involved in actually making the movie.
It was a sequence of the movie where
the three cars line up side by side,
the end of the chase scene.
Two colleagues cars are
flanking Tommy Howell,
and Jennifer's car, which is in the middle.
They're about to shoot him from either
side out of their two police cars,
and the Tommy Hall character
gets the idea to jam on the brakes.
And since they're all moving down the
road together at 65 miles an hour or so,
when he puts on those brakes,
he would therefore immediately back
away and the two cops would,
in fact, shoot each other,
which is what happened.
So i had this bit of coverage
that occured to me,
that we would take a camera car,
an insert car,
sometimes called, and crane off the side
of that car with a camera.
Off a little crane arm.
So our camera car is driving behind
one of the two cop cars,
and we are craned out,
and flying along the roadway,
about that far off the ground,
six inches or so off the ground.
So the road is whizzing by the camera.
The idea that was when Tommy
Howell's car hits its brakes,
of course, it would immediately
come right back at the camera.
But since we're on a crane arm,
theorically, as that happened,
we could go and move the
camera right over,
and let that car go right under the lens.
We would continue traveling
at 60 miles an hour,
as two cop cars begin to roll.
Completely insane idea.
We did the stunt and it
all went off very well,
until see Thomas How's car went backwards.
The camera went in the air,
shot underneath.
The other two cars started
to go into their turn,
and should have made safe.
But the outer one went into a long slide,
and crossed over and came into
the insert vehicle lane.
And, of course, it was shedding speed
a lot faster than the insert vehicle.
And the insert vehicle driver, who was
a fantastic driver,
he realized that he had men
on top of the vehicle.
He had a camera on the front of
the vehicle, as well on a low platform.
So he had a men on the front of his vehicle,
who was now looking like
he was going to be squashed
between the police car and the insert vehicle.
So in a split second, he made a decision
to put the right hand wheel down,
And swerve the insert vehicle to the right.
And it just ended up sliding sideways,
trying not to hit the police car
with the guys on the roof.
And we shuddered to a halt.
The one thing i never want on in
a picture is anyone to get hurt.
No movie is worth anyone getting hurt.
It doesn't matter how well we
planned things back then,
there was always an opening for
accidents to happen.
And luckily, the professionalism
of that man's driving
was such that we just got out
of that quite happily,
but we're pretty careful again after that.
Rutger was amazing, man.
I remember one scene at the
patrol gas station
that he had to drive out of
the shed of the garage,
out of the door,
smashed the door,
and then he had to go up and
around and come back,
and knock over all the petrol pumps.
And the stunt coordinator tried it
with the door open,
and he drove out, roared up the top,
turned the wheel, couldn't make it,
slammed it in reverse, went back,
filled, came down and knocked over the pumps.
And Ruth had just stood there
looking at it and he said,
"let me do it, we'll roll film."
so all the cameras were set up
and we rolled film,
and he crashed out of that garage,
he went up and did a full power turn,
without stopping and backing and filling,
and rolled down and knocked the pumps over.
And i think the poor stuntmen sat there
with their mouths open,
because he did something that really
even a good stuntman
was having trouble doing.
He just did it like that.
There was a love scene in the motel room,
but i remember when we
were going to film that scene.
Jennifer, i believe,
wasn't feeling, that was a truthful moment.
She felt like that was one of those
Hollywood moments,
that like, okay, here's where
the guy in the movie sleeps
with the girl in the movie.
Oh, wait a minute.
Everybody's dead and we're
running for our lives. Hello.
That scene has changed a bit,
it didn't seem to feel right that
Nash and Halsey would have sex,
there was something...
it's not a consummated relationship
between the two of them.
And she's gonna get torn apart bewteen two tracks.
and it was it,
was better to keep the tension
that it might happen,
but not consummate it.
They already like each other there.
They're surviving.
There's already a bond.
It's a survival bond,
and that's heavy than anything.
I feel that a film scorer's job is to help tell the story.
In a sense, you should almost
be able to turn the dialogue off,
and have the music tell the story.
There's a film called "Mrs. Soffel",
that mark did the score for.
Again, it must have been one of
his very first scores.
I thought it was fantastic.
I really liked the movie too,
but i walked out of the movie and i
was so amazed by the music.
He just called me.
he must have gotten my phone number
from my agent or something,
and said, i've been a fan of yours.
And we had several long phone
conversations long before we met.
And he just expressed his enthusiasm
and describing what he wanted to make.
It all sounded fascinating to me
and he said yes.
And i still don't quite know why,
but we've been friends ever since,
-and worked together many times.
-I fortunately came into this business,
when video was available to
the common man,
and so i could have a video machine at home
and work directly to the picture.
Having a synthesizer keyboard
and a computer,
so i can play something in.
Record it in the computer.
Hit play on the video,
hit play on the computer,
and become an audience
for a moment, and just
see is it working? Is there a connection there?
And then the good news is that
the director can come,
and sit next to me, and we can
have that discussion.
Before we have to get on the
dubbing stage and spend
lots of money to record anything for real.
We can test it out on ourselves,
and we can interact and
we can move it,
we can try it 5 seconds earlier,
we can take the drums out,
we can play the melody backwards,
we can get it the way.
Both he and i know that we're going to want it.
He just enhances the visualization
he just brings you to it.
He becomes one with it as opposed to,
sometimes, i think, score can be a distraction,
for me when i'm watching
a movie, and all of a sudden,
oh, there's a score.
Oh yeah, this is a movie
instead of an experience,
where it all becomes one
and it goes together.
And that's what the score of this
film did for me, which i loved.
I mean, it really...
it really is one with the film
and you don't fell that the score
is a distraction.
It's a beautiful use of sound
there's a scene when Jim Halsey
is locked into the police station,
after he's been arrested and
he goes to sleep,
and he starts having a dream,
and he's dreaming of picking up John Ryder
and when Ryder from his point of view,
leans over and knocks on the
windshield of the car,
It's a sound for several gunshots.
The kid wakes up into the police station,
and the sell doors open, and he
finds that Ryder come in,
and shot all the police officers
or cut their throats.
So, in fact, that...
those gunshots had
intruded on his dream.
That's the sort of subjective stuff.
It's a turn on to me, the sounds,
how you put the sound of a movie together,
because sound goes straight to your heart.
It does not go through a filter of
you've seen this before,
you have never heard
anything before like this,
because it's always original.
I think we previewed the
film in New Jersey.
-It was all very fine.
-There are certain moments, of course,
where they scream,
and then when Nash dies
you can hear people in the audience
saying, "it's not going to happen".
"Oh, my God."
it was so much fun.
They were on the chairs.
And that's the moment you work for it,
to see how it gets there and
how it is received,
and then you know that you did it right.
Some people came over and
thought it was a masterpiece.
Some people wanted to kill me.
I mean, there was a couple of nuns
came over to me in theater and say
"how dare you show this movie?"
and i think it has to do with the realism
of the psychology between
John Roger and Jim Halsen.
It's not a Freddie movie.
It's not a candy man movie.
It's not a guy in a ski mask
with a machete.
-That's some kind of fantasy.
-The LA Times decided
they wanted to do the cover story
of the Sunday LA Times Magazine
about the movie.
And we thought, "wow, that's fantastic."
it'll be the cover of it.
It's called the calendar section of
Los Angeles Times,
and we were all interviewed and
it was all very positive feeling.
It was all very auditory, sort of how
effective it is and all kinds of issues.
And we're all thinking, this is great,
this will be wonderful publicity.
And it'll be fantastic.
So we all are interviewed,
and the day comes for this,
front cover story of the LA Times
calendar to come out.
And i remember opening the paper
and looking at the front page
of the calendar and thinking:
"i must be dreaming", because the
headline of the story,
on the front page was a large shot of
Rutger with his coat blowing in the wind.
It was a still from the movie,
from what we used to call
the Ghost Gas, and this dust storm
and Rutgers Long coat. And it
was a very evocative shot,
but the headline read, "how do
these movies get made?"
by i forgot her name.
And it was basically a story which we all felt
we had been thoroughly tricked
by this journalist,
because there was no hint
in her discussion of the question,
or what the nature or the take of
the story was going to be,
that it was, in effect, not even necessarily
negative about the movie,
but it was a kind of a moralistic quote.
These movies, how do these
movies get made,
that are so horrifying and so frightening?
Years later, in fact, it was
only about a year ago,
when a woman that i met,
heard that i'd photographed the Hitch,
and she said, "that dreadful film".
She said: "how could you have torn
that child apart between those trucks?"
and i thought, she's sounding like
she actually saw it.
And i said, but you didn't see that.
I said, there was just a fantastic little editing
of the accelerator going up
and down the clutch,
coming in and out, Rudka saying,
shoot me, shoot me,
and the gun in his forehead,
and the kid not being able to shoot,
and i said, and then the
revving and the clutch,
and suddenly the wheel turns and your
hear a scream and you go to black.
She said, "not at all true."
i saw that poor child get torn apart.
And i thought to myself,
i know what's happened,
you closed your eyes and you saw it,
in your mind's eye, and when
you opened your eyes,
we were into the next scene.
And for all intents and purposes,
she had seen
Jennifer Jason Lee torn apart.
But you never see it.
When Jennifer Jason Lee is torn apart,
supposedly the good old indian way,
because in the mediaval period
they used to do that.
And the Indians sort
of did some of that, too.
Four horses, and there you go.
Yeah, we're funny creatures.
People always ask me, where's the cut footage
of Jennifer Jason Lee being ripped in half?
That great makeup effect.
And it was never a makeup effect,
and it was never in the script.
That was never seen on screen either.
It was lost screen. It was
done actually by sound.
And of course, the sound does trick there.
The sound of the truck does the trick.
You know, 500 horse power,
not 4, 500 hundred.
The Hitcher is a film that's funny.
It's really a film more about how
don't show it than how you show it.
And people think it's a much
more violent film,
and it got a tremendous reputation
when it came out for being
this incredibly violent picture.
And there's certainly a lot of
violence that happens in it.
But i'm not seeing.
A lot of it's left to your imagination
or it occurs off screen.
it's Blade Runners is 22 years ago,
this is 15 years ago,
but these are to me, they're big moments,
because they give you trust.
Because if you feel that
strong about something,
there's something to be found
and there's...
there's no way or there's no us in fighting it.
I think the people who love movies
regard the Hitcher as a classic of its kind.
And they don't make pictures
really like that anymore.
The Hitcher is just my kind of movie, man.
Good acting, good cinematography,
wicked stunts, and a hell of a story.
what else do you want?
It's now? What? 15 or 16
years later, i still think,
i can't believe this is great.
It's full of trouble and full of problems,
and full of...
all kinds of issue, but
they're within the confines of
a much larger perspective.
Wait a second, we're just making movies here.
It's not he end of the world.
So i'm quite happy about it all.