Samuel Fuller: Interviews

Conversations With Filmmakers Series

by Gerald Peary

In the early twentieth century, the art world was captivated by the imaginative, totally original paintings of Henri Rousseau, who, seemingly without formal art training, produced works that astonished not only the public but great artists such as Pablo Picasso. Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) is known as the "Rousseau of the cinema," a mostly "B" genre Hollywood moviemaker deeply admired by "A" filmmakers as diverse as Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and John Cassavetes, all of them dazzled by Fuller's wildly idiosyncratic primitivist style.

A high-school dropout who became a New York City tabloid crime reporter in his teens, Fuller went to Hollywood and made movies post-World War II that were totally in line with his exploitative newspaper work: bold, blunt, pulpy, excitable. The images were as shocking, impolite, and in-your-face as a Weegee photograph of a gangster bleeding on a sidewalk. Fuller, who made twenty-three features between 1949 and 1989, is the very definition of a "cult" director, appreciated by those with a certain bent of subterranean taste, a penchant for what critic Manny Farber famously labeled as "termite art."

Here are some of the crazy, lurid, comic-book titles of his movies: Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, Verboten!, Pickup on South Street. Fuller isn't for everybody. His fans have to appreciate low-budget genre films, including westerns and war movies, and make room for some hard-knuckle, ugly bursts of violence. They also have to make allowance for lots of broad, crass acting, and scripts (all Fuller-written) that can be stiff, sometimes campy, often laboriously didactic. Fuller is for those who love cinema--images that jump, shout, dance. As he put it in his famous cigar-chomping cameo, acting in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965): "Film is like a battleground . . . love, hate, violence, death. In a single word: emotion."

After directing, Sam Fuller's greatest skill was conversation. He could talk, talk, talk, from his amazing experiences fighting in World War II to the time his brother-in-law dated Marilyn Monroe, and vivid stories about his moviemaking. Samuel Fuller: Interviews, edited by Gerald Peary, is not only informative about the filmmaker's career but sheer fun, following the wild, totally uninhibited stream of Fuller's chatter. He was an incredible storyteller, and, no matter the interview, he had stories galore for all sorts of readers, not just academics and film historians.

Genres: Collections, Film

168 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 30, 2012

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of interviews that American director Samuel Fuller did with various publications – mainly rather obscure film journals – between 1949 and 1988. The bulk of the interviews date from 1970–1982.

As viewers of documentary materials know, Samuel Fuller was quite a character in real life, a cigar-chomping, tough-talking New Yorker and grizzled World War II veteran, and that persona comes through in every interview, too. The word “goddamn” is used seemingly thousands of times. At the same time, I was surprised to learn that Fuller was an extremely well-read person and fan of classic literature that I wouldn’t have expected based on his tough image (e.g. Proust). Readers of this collection will also get a general idea of Fuller’s own literary output, pulp novels that have now been eclipsed by his film output. It was also amusing to learn that Fuller never learned French in spite of making Paris his home for many years, which does explain how atrocious his accent is in his cameo appearance in Aki Kaurismäki’s Le vie de bohème.

When it comes to Fuller’s films, the interviews often delve into details of scriptwriting or production, and Fuller continually points to his concerns as a filmmaker, that special mix of low budget and pure emotion that makes for the distinctive Fuller style. Consequently, for cinephiles this book may be worth a look.

The downside of this collection, however, is that the interviews can be a bit repetitive – either the interview turns the conversation to the same scenes in the same films, or Fuller tells the same anecdotes time and again. (He also goes off on some old-man-reminiscing tangents at points where one would prefer him to stay focused on the films.) Any substantial discussion of his work ends with The Big Red One in 1980. The last interviews here chronologically are extremely short – answers to brief questionnaires, for example – and so they don’t give much detail on his late films like White Dog.

[A.C. Light · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obnoxious intro, but once little bro sits his ass down and lets grown man shit commence… Hoo boy that GOAT will hunt.