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BUSTER KEATON: I
ought to do something about the new release print of The General that
was shown in London. When the film was to be revived in Europe we
brought over as many old prints as we could find, in order to pick out
the best reels to find the ones that hadn't faded, or been chewed up
by the machine. We gave them to the outfit in Munich who were handling
the film, and they made a duped negative. They did a beautiful job of
it. The first thing they wanted to do, as an experiment, was to
translate all the English titles into German so that they could
release the film in Germany. It did a beautiful business there, so
immediately they made some more prints with French titles for release
in France. Now they must have lost the original list of English
titles, so they put them back again into English from their own German
translation.
I happened to see a
print of this new English version in Rome last week-the same version
you had in London-and the titles are misleading. For instance, when
I'm trying to enlist and I'm asked 'What is your occupation?' I say
'bartender'. Well, that type of man gets drafted into the army
immediately. in the new version the title reads 'barkeep' -that means
you own the place. And it doesn't sound as funny anyway in English: it
might in German, I don't know. Then they put 'sir' on to the ends of
sentences because I'm talking to an officer, but there's no 'sirring'
at all in our titles. Some of the explanatory titles were changed or
dropped as well. Do you remember, for instance, the scene where we all
got off the train and while we were away the engine was stolen? We
actually stopped off there for lunch: the conductor comes into the car
and says 'This is Marietta: one hour for lunch.' But they left that
title off, and without it you'd think the train had emptied out
because it was the end of the run. In which case there's no reason to
steal the engine then: they could have waited until everyone had gone
and the place was deserted.
J.G.: Apart from the
comedy values, the most impressive thing about all the features you
made during the Twenties is their distinctive visual style. They all
have a kind of look which one associates with a Keaton film. How did
you work with your various co-directors to achieve this ? Who actually
did what ?
Number one, I was
practically my own producer on all those silent pictures. I used a
co-director on some of them, but the majority I did alone. And I cut
them all myself: I cut all my own pictures.
J.G.: What exactly
would the co-director do ?
Co-direct with me,
that's all. He would be out there looking through the camera, and I'd
ask him what he thought. He would maybe say 'That scene looks a little
slow'; and then I'd do it again and speed it up. As a rule, when I'm
working alone, the cameraman, the prop man, the electrician, these are
my eyes out there. I'd ask, 'Did that work the way I wanted it to?'
and they'd say yes or no. They knew what they were talking about.
J.G.: You would
choose the actual camera set-ups yourself ?
Always, when it was
important for the scene I was going to do. If I had an incidental
scene - someone runs in, say, and says 'here, you've got to go and do
this' - the background wasn't important. Then I generally just told
the cameraman that I had these two characters in the scene, two
full-length figures, and asked him to pick a good-looking background.
He would go by the sun. He'd say, 'I like that back crosslight coming
in through the trees. There are clouds over there right now, so if we
hurry up we can still get them before they disappear.' So I would say
'Swell 'and go and direct the scene in front of the cameraman's
set-up. We took pains to get good-looking scenery whenever we possibly
could, no matter what we were shooting.
J.G.: What about the
visual idea of the films? Take, for instance, a picture like Our
Hospitality, which has a beautiful period feeling.
We were very
conscious of our stories. We learned in a hurry that we couldn't make
a feature-length picture the way we had done the two-reelers; we
couldn't use impossible gags, like the kind of things that happen to
cartoon characters. We had to eliminate all these things because we
had to tell a logical story that an audience would accept. So story
construction became a very strong point with us.
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