My name is Tom Mount.
The producer of Tequila Sunrise.
Tequila was a picture of curious origins.
Robert Towne had written and directed for Warner Bros...
...a picture called Personal Best.
Warners had removed Bob...
...from the post-production process on that picture.
As a result of a lawsuit...
...Warners had agreed...
...to pay Robert a million dollars...
...for a screenplay.
An original, which would be his next...
...and to let him direct that original.
Our paths crossed in Paris...
...where I was producing a Roman Polanski movie called Frantic...
...starring Harrison Ford...
...and Roman's soon-to-be wife, Emmanuelle Seigner.
We needed a rewrite on Frantic...
...and hired Bob...
...and he moved to Paris...
...in early...
...'86.
We did that work together.
He explained the dilemma on Tequila Sunrise.
Bob at that time had about...
...10 or 15 pages of outline for the story...
...and a deadline looming, by which he had to deliver...
...a finished script to Warner Bros.
So while in Paris...
...he went to work in earnest on Tequila...
...and we started shooting Frantic.
Before very long, there was very, very good first draft of Tequila Sunrise.
Bob Towne's a remarkable screenwriter.
From a producer's perspective you run into very few people...
...who are able to write scenes that feel completely real...
...compelling dialogue and character...
...whose first drafts are so close to being shootable.
We submitted Tequila Sunrise to Warner Bros.
They were thrilled with the script...
...and agreed to go forward with Bob directing...
...on the condition that we attached a major star.
As a result of our experience in Paris together on Frantic,
Bob and I approached Harrison Ford.
Harrison read the script and loved it...
...and agreed to star in it.
Things then proceeded to pace.
We began to budget the picture...
...and get ready...
...and as we got...
...closer to a...
...pre-production date...
...Harrison got cold feet.
One morning he called me and said...
..."Tom, I simply can't do this thing.
I'm not sure about this character. I'm not sure about this movie."
And so we were left...
...a couple a months ahead of...
...a start date, without a star and we needed one very, very, badly.
We at that point approached Mel Gibson, who was in Australia.
I talked to Mel on the phone; we sent him the script overnight.
He read it and loved it.
Robert Towne and his wife Luisa and myself, we jumped on a plane...
...and flew to Sydney and had lunch with Mel...
...which was a successful meeting.
And agreed to do the picture together.
At that point...
...we started pulling together the rest of the cast.
Bonnie Timmermann, who was...
...has been my long time casting director...
...suggested a number of actors for the parts.
We were all thrilled with Michelle Pfeiffer.
I had worked with her before...
...in a picture I'd supervised at Universal called Scarface.
Bob was thrilled with...
...her demeanor and look and acting ability.
Kurt Russell's part was originally...
...aimed for Alec Baldwin.
But after reading Alec...
...we began to look around again.
Bob had kind of an inspired notion, which was to...
...take Kurt Russell...
...and introduce him to the Los Angeles Lakers' coach, Pat Riley.
And Kurt and Pat hit if off...
...and Kurt began to construct a character...
...that borrowed a lot of the stylistic trademarks of Pat Riley.
The suits and hair and attention to personal detail.
Kurt hit a gym and lost 20 Ibs. And pulled himself together.
And I think it's one of his best roles.
Of course, as one starts to make a movie, inevitably budget comes into play.
There is a moment...
...when the studio actually realizes that they are about to make the film.
In the case of Tequila Sunrise, we had two such moments.
The first month or so away from production...
...the studio began to get very nervous about the cost of the movie.
Their internal estimates...
...for making the film at Warner Bros. In Burbank...
...were running between 30 and 33 million dollars.
My budgeting work inside our company...
...led us to believe that, if we could separate ourselves from Warner Bros...
...and act as a completely independent film...
...the so-called negative pick-up project...
...we could save a lot of money.
Maybe 8 million dollars. And we agreed to make the picture...
...for between 22 and 23 million...
...on that basis.
Warners liked that number and we worked out...
...a business arrangement which allowed us...
...to separate the film from Warner Bros...
...and produce it independently, even though we shot entirely in Los Angeles.
This had a lot of very salutary consequences later.
The second little dilemma...
...we had in this...
...preparatory process was that...
...one week before rehearsal started...
...a very senior executive at Warners who at this moment will remain nameless...
...called me and said, "You know, we just can't make this picture."
And I said, "Great, fine, why?"
And he said, "Well, you know, the hero of this movie is a drug dealer."
And I said, "Yes." And he said...
..."And then the villain in this movie is a cop."
And I said, "Yes. That's true."
And he said, "Well, worse than that."
I said, "Well, what's worse than that?" He said, "Well, worse than that...
...this girl, the female lead, she sleeps with both guys."
Well...
...we talked for some time and I assured him that...
...in real life it was possible.
That there had been drug dealers who reformed...
...that it was likely that there'd been cops who were...
...corrupt, and that it did occasionally happen that a girl slept with two guys.
While at the same time, while trying to make up her mind.
Once we'd gotten past the moral dilemma...
...we started rehearsal for the picture.
Things moved into a very different gear.
We had because of our independent...
...relationship to Warner Bros...
...constructed out of an old warehouse in Santa Monica three sound stages.
The production designer Richard Sylbert had created...
...a truly gorgeous restaurant set...
...which was the centerpiece of the picture's interiors.
One of the things I wanted to do with this film...
...was to make a picture that was...
...fundamentally film noir, but looked very, very glamorous.
I wanted people to look good.
I wanted them to be sexy.
I wanted them to be...
...people that felt like characters...
...from a Hollywood movie of another time.
Bob Towne was very supportive of that idea and we pursued it with...
...a vengeance in the picture.
We started photography...
...with a German cinematographer...
...who had done a wonderful job on an...
...epic but small submarine movie called Das Boot.
He did about a week's work on the show...
...and we decided it simply didn't look right.
So we went in search of a new cinematographer on the weekend.
One week to production.
This is, you can imagine, a somewhat pressurized operation.
The guy we wanted most was Conrad Hall.
A legendary cinematographer, multiple Academy Award winner...
...and a man whose...
...sense of the elegant...
...and the spare combined unusually in the work.
But we couldn't find Conrad Hall. Conrad Hall is the son of...
...one of the co-authors of Mutiny on the Bounty.
Nordoff Hall wrote the book and so, Cony grew up in Tahiti...
...where he still lived at this time.
Ultimately, we found...
...a cousin of Cony Hall's in Tahiti on the telephone...
...and got the cousin to jump on a dugout canoe and go to Cony's house...
...which had no phone...
...and get him on the next plane to Los Angeles.
Without Conrad Hall...
... Tequila Sunrise would not exist.
He came in and did a spectacular job, not only in photography but in organizing...
...the shoot and in making sure that we all paid attention to detail.
If you look at the scene Mel and Russell in the restaurant...
...in this booth...
...confronting each other for the first time about their personal histories...
...and about their intent...
...you notice that in addition to the...
...traditional two shots and cutaways...
...there will be a little sequence when...
...Michelle Pfeiffer walks into the scene...
...that is designed to keep things as...
...interesting and sexy and vital and rich as possible.
This is, I think, gorgeous work.
And I love the idea of playing the hard drama of...
...a story that is a...
...thriller against...
...the luxury of this kind of scene and this kind of shooting.
It's also true that this scene is a very, very good example of Bob Towne's writing.
You know, one guy insists that the other guy try the fish.
What the hell are these guys talking about?
They're not talking about fish; they're talking about a lifetime of competition.
Look at that shot.
Now we need to understand...
...visually that...
Mel Gibson, having confronted...
...the Jo Ann Vallenari character for the first time in his life...
...is going to be a goner.
And if you watch the scene carefully and if you watch the way...
...Mel plays it...
...the shooting and the choices...
...we see that the lifelong competition between these two characters...
...is about to take a new...
...turn.
Michelle of course...
...patterned...
...a lot of her character after Bob Towne's wife, Luisa.
Because in fact...
...Luisa had...
...been married to the very...
...very successful owner of...
...a luxurious Italian restaurant in Los Angeles.
Bob had met her in this restaurant...
...and courted her as...
...a patron and ultimately won her.
Michelle...
...observed...
...I think, Luisa's unique combination of...
...cordial and engaging...
...and distant...
...and brought a lot of that specificity to the part.
By this scene, we were...
...trying to knock off the major interiors in the picture.
The daily work of the film, in terms of moving it forward was done by...
...the executive producer, Tom Shaw.
He's a unique personality in the movie business.
He was a line producer for Richard Brooks...
...on most of Mr. Brooks' wonderful movies...
...from In Cold Blood to The Professionals...
...and also...
...was the line producer and first assistant director...
...for John Huston for many, many years.
So Mr. Shaw provided a kind of unusual...
...glue in holding the picture together, pushing things forward...
...and making the film move along everyday.
In this scene, you see...
...a much younger J.T. Walsh...
...getting his...
...comeuppance...
...from his boss.
I'm particularly fond of the kind of underplayed humor...
...in Tequila Sunrise. There's a lot of it.
It's somewhat sardonic, it's always cruel...
...it's frequently articulate.
Maybe this doesn't happen everyday in the movies anymore.
The next problem we faced in the making of Tequila had to do frankly with...
...maintaining schedule.
A lot of actors in the movie. A lot of sets.
A tremendous amount of night work outdoors, boats...
...and by the water.
It was not a physically easy shoot.
Bob Towne who, for whom this was a second film...
...didn't understand exactly what the demands would be.
And it was a very tough...
...tough, physical endeavor for him.
The punitive new career...
...for the ex-drug dealer, Mel Gibson...
...is the hydro-hose business, which is the business...
...of pen point hose irrigation systems.
It's kind of a...
...perfect idea for the great South Bay Curve in Southern California.
A place where you can make a living...
...by selling...
...something that's directly related to citrus...
...and farming in desert conditions.
As you probably know, Robert Towne is a native of Los Angeles.
A guy who, in Chinatown...
...and Shampoo and in a number of his best films, has really and brilliantly...
...captured the tone and texture of Southern California.
In this case...
...virtually everything in Tequila Sunrise speaks...
...to the transitory nature of life in the South Bay Curve from Santa Monica...
...to Huntington Beach.
It also speaks to carelessness of life and the carelessness of characters...
...when you see Mel's...
...ex-wife complain that her Mercedes burned up...
...because somebody forgot to put oil in it...
...you see...
...kind of a hilarious metaphor for the disposable...
...and materialistic nature of life in this part of the world.
The fun in this scene with Kurt Russell and J.T. Walsh...
...is that Kurt...
...went out of his way to throw coffee on this guy...
...and insult and beat him up...
...so that he would force him to come to him and apologize...
...and that indeed has happened.
Now the J.T. Walsh character, who knows he has been humiliated in the context...
...of his work...
...has figured out enough background information...
...to turn the heat up.
Also...
...the dialogue in this scene begins to establish...
...high moral ground for Mel Gibson, which is a difficult thing to do...
...about a guy who's been dealing drugs all his life.
But it's, I think, very important to the story that we get a sense...
...that even though he was a drug dealer...
...the Gibson character...
...had a different kind...
...of personal moral code. And that code had overwhelmed his professional work.
And as Mel says later in the movie:
"When you are a successful drug dealer, it's very hard to quit.
Nobody wants you to quit. Not your accountants...
...not your lawyers, not your girlfriend."
So it's fun over the course of the movie to play out...
...the complicated and very compromised...
...moral playing field that the cops operate on...
...against the fairly singular and straightforward...
...moral playing field that the drug dealers operate on.
The nature of the film of course...
...like most movies, is that one tries to conquer...
...from a production point of view...
...the hardest parts of the film first...
...meaning...
...the big night exteriors and save the so-called easy work.
The interiors...
...and shots like this...
...beach perspective...
...for a little later.
Of course...
...Bob Towne...
...a wonderful screenwriter, tends to write screenplays that are much too long.
No exception here.
The screenplay... we started shooting...
...the film with a script that was 135 pages.
In this scene in particular...
...Mel Gibson speaking to Carlos, the drug dealer, about his son...
...was the beginning...
...of an entire sequence which is no longer in the film, but which we shot.
A sequence in which Mel had to go to San Francisco...
...to rescue the son of his friend Carlos...
...from a drug deal gone wrong.
It simply...
...was irrelevant and became too long.
It's one of several sequences that were cut from the film...
...by the time it was released.
We gave Jo Ann Vallenari, the female lead...
...an Alfa sedan to drive...
...partially because she's Italian and partially because...
...Bob wanted to tip his hat very gently to Mike Nicholson in The Graduate.
In this scene...
...we begin to hear the dispassionate, rational, and somewhat...
...angry dynamic that characterizes the female character.
Now the respect Kurt Russell has for this character...
...increases dramatically, but of course...
...her willingness to trust...
...this guy or the cops is also diminishing...
...in equal proportion.
Setting up, shall we say...
...a complicated...
...relationship.
The sets in this film...
...are kind of intentionally full of contrast.
The restaurant's a very rich...
...embracing emotional environment.
All of the officers are intentionally...
...pedestrian, ordinary.
Richard Sylbert, of course...
...has an illustrious history as a production designer...
...from Day of the Locust...
...to Chinatown.
Richard's work is always, enormously...
...useful in a storytelling sense.
Very rarely do you get art directors who are going to be able...
...to come up with set design and an approach to a film...
...that helps you...
...support the narrative.
In the case of Richard Sylbert...
...he is as important a storyteller as the cameraman...
...or the director or the screenwriter.
This is the kind of scene where...
...David Grusin's music...
...is extraordinarily useful.
Now the picture takes a tonal shift that...
...is kind of critical to the whole construct of Tequila Sunrise.
Just when we have lulled everyone into thinking that everything's normal...
...we gently...
...describe abnormality...
...and put the Gibson character...
...in a kind of ill-at-ease context.
Arliss Howard, of course...
...does a wonderful job of playing his extremely unreliable cousin.
The two girls who play the...
...Sin Sisters downstairs with Arliss Howard are appropriately named...
...Dawn and Lala.
Names I think you can only get in Southern California.
One of...
...the motifs in Tequila Sunrise that was the most fun for us from a pure...
...acting point of view is that every single person in this film...
...has a contrary opinion...
...relative to everyone else's point of view about what's happening.
There is no one who simply nods nicely and goes along in Tequila Sunrise.
Everybody is potentially...
...a source of trouble and everybody's got a mouth.
As a film maker...
...for Bob Towne and myself and for the rest of us involved in this picture...
...you know, it is so rare that we get an opportunity to work with...
...material in which people actually talk.
Where the language is rich, where the things they say have to be listened to.
Where things...
...are emotionally revealing.
The problems with the drug dealers...
...you can't...
...pay with anything but cash...
...and they can't pay in front of anyone in cash...
...because people think you're a drug dealer.
So Mel Gibson's, having a very hard time...
...changing his life...
...and his...
...reputation.
This restaurant set created by Richard Sylbert...
...was so detailed and so lush that during the course of...
...making the picture, we had several...
...Los Angeles area restaurants come to us and make bids...
...for the set after we wrapped.
Ultimately we did sell big pieces of the set and the plants for the set to...
...a restaurant company that recreated it...
...in a new restaurant on Hollywood Blvd.
So always...
...Bob Towne is...
...salting this picture with...
...references to the great Sot Baker, Redondo Union High.
A sense of history, of growing up together.
A sense of evolution, life at the beach.
It, I think, helps enormously to evoke...
...the sort of...
...texture of this...
...of the culture that surrounds this picture.
These people and this dilemma couldn't happen anywhere else in America.
It's very specific in the same way that...
... Coal Miner's Daughter describes...
...Loretta Lynn's life in Butcher Hollow with great specificity.
This kind of film...
...really gets at the...
...defensive, the game playing...
...the superficial...
...and the deeper needs and desires...
...of the people who inhabit this world.
You may notice that Mel Gibson...
...is pouring Herradura tequila...
...throughout this entire film...
...thanks to...
...a generous contribution from Seagrams...
...the distributor of Herradura tequila in the United States.
It's one of the few movies in which...
...we could actually do product placement without...
...looking like product placement.
A kind of busman's holiday for Jo Ann Vallenari.
While Dale McKussic, the Mel Gibson character...
...eats his heart out...
...in the distance.
While the party is...
...set up...
...for McKussic's son...
...and Jo Ann Vallenari thinks she's falling in love with the cop.
The cop is of course...
...playing both sides of the fence...
...gathering information.
And this party sequence is a hilarious, I think...
...send up of...
...a cop surveillance...
...and all of their...
...technological excess.
Certainly it's not what the police thought they were going to find...
...in this house on this afternoon.
These exteriors were shot in Manhattan Beach, California...
...on a series of hillsides and yards...
...for houses that...
...were immediately adjacent to the strand and to the ocean.
Ann Magnuson plays...
...Mel Gibson's ex-wife and I think quite wonderfully.
Ann is a very gifted actress...
...and part of the secret...
...was to surround Mel in this...
Surround Mel in this situation...
...with actors...
...who really were...
...overcast in a certain sense. Much better actors than their small parts...
...would let you know.
Jason Randal who plays the magician in that scene, is really a magician...
...in Southern California. Works frequently at Magic Castle in Hollywood.
These house interiors...
...McKussic's house of course, are constructed on a stage...
...at the makeshift stage in Santa Monica.
And this kind of creation is enormously helpful to us in the production process.
We can locate the restaurant and the house interior...
...a piece of the house exterior including the hot tub and a part of the yard...
...and the various bits and pieces of the office for the police department...
...all in the same sound stage, all within a few feet of each other.
So as we work we are...
...in a position to move efficiently and get from one piece to the other.
In this scene, of course...
...Michelle Pfeiffer begins to understand for the first time...
...the depth of the betrayal that's going on here.
She's already begun to fall...
...for the Kurt Russell character, Frescia.
Now she's beginning to have to reconsider...
...her judgment...
...about his honesty and about the situation she's in.
Moral ambiguity is of the essence in this movie.
Probably as it is in life.
Once more we have...
...a moment when the cops in their...
...extreme eagerness to capture the dreaded drug dealer McKussic...
...have screwed things up...
...and managed...
...to spend a lot of money and use a lot of people...
...and figure out nothing.
The fun thing about this next shot is the reveal of the snitch.
We begin to see who inside Mel Gibson's world...
...is betraying him.
And there we are.
Mel's cousin, the guy he...
...lives with and has hanging around the house at all times...
...he is indeed his betrayer.
This sequence is one of my favorites in the movie. It's a scene that we shot...
...purely at the last minute. It wasn't scheduled to be shot...
...in a swing set...
...nor was it scheduled to be shot at sunset.
But we had wrapped the day's work in Manhattan Beach, we were driving back...
...to our homes in Los Angeles in a convoy...
...through Venice, California...
...and we saw a swing set on a beach...
...and it was almost sunset.
We literally, no permit, no nothing...
...stopped all the equipment, grabbed the DP...
...a handful of crew...
...no lights, ran out...
...stuck the sticks in the sand, popped a camera on it...
...and as the sun begins to set...
...with three different cameras simultaneously running...
...we shot this sequence.
Which I think...
...is one of the most emotionally important in the movie.
And if we hadn't had the happy accident of finding the swing set...
...on a beach in Venice...
...near Sunset.
If you know Southern California, you can see that that sun is setting...
...on the far north end of...
...the Santa Monica Bay, setting over the mountains of Malibu.
We end up with a very evocative scene...
...mostly by chance.
It is terrifying how many good things happen in movies...
...and bad things, by chance.
The plot thickens, sort of the understatement here.
A lot of people complain that Tequila Sunrise has too much going on in it...
...and is too confusing.
My own feeling is that it's always...
...fun to see a movie where you have to actually listen and think...
...to keep up with it.
We're made a number of films that are...
...reliant on dialogue...
...and complex layering of character, whether they are comedies or drama.
For us, it's always more fun than...
...a kind of straight ahead paint-by-numbers sort of film making.
This is a song by Crowded House.
The Grusin score and the contemporary songs...
...were put together and produced by Danny Bramson...
...who is probably the finest film soundtrack producer in our industry.
He's currently head of motion picture music...
...for Warner Bros.
At this time, this song hadn't been released...
...went on to being a big hit single for that band.
The McKussic character's inadvertent switch of envelopes...
...creates a crisis with Jo Ann Vallenari.
Again, the dangers of life in an all cash economy.
There's a very interesting turn in this movie.
Of the things I'm particularly...
...pleased with about the film is Bob's use of...
...Mel's relationship with his son.
At the time this movie was made...
...of course Southern California was a world capital of single parenting...
...and there were lots and lots of guys with kids...
...without wives.
I guess by this moment in history...
...single parenting is a nationwide phenomena.
But I think, it was used...
...cleverly in this picture.
Of course, Bob Towne...
...had for some years raised a daughter...
...by himself...
...so he had some sense of...
...how to approach that issue.
I think we should stop and watch this scene because this scene is actually...
...important and I think perhaps Michelle's best scene in the movie.
And so...
...life among the compromised goes on.
It's particularly fun in this film to watch the shift of emphasis...
...as characters gain awareness...
...and turn on each other, one after the other, after the other...
...sometimes correctly, sometimes mistakenly.
Like an endless the House of Mirrors, emotional House of Mirrors.
We introduce in this scene...
...the Raul Julia character.
And like everything else in Tequila Sunrise, this man is not what he seems.
He is the head of the Mexican Drug Enforcement Task Force...
...come to Los Angeles to look for Carlos...
...legendary drug dealer and ex-partner of McKussic's. But of course...
...he also happens to be Carlos.
So everyone perpetually working across purposes.
Budd Boetticher, legendary film director...
...all sorts...
...of blood and sand bullfight type movies and westerns: Lonesome Kid...
...and many others.
We asked Bud to come up from San Diego out of retirement...
...and play the judge in this movie.
In the back corner, the gentleman that you met at the beginning of the film...
...the drug deal...
...Arliss Howard, who plays...
...Jo Ann Vallenari's lawyer...
...and the lawyer that Mel tried to teach to sell cocaine...
...at the beginning of the film.
Now Jo Ann Vallenari discovers that...
...from her lawyer...
...that a lot of what she's been told by Frescia, the policeman who she's...
...crazy about...
...simply isn't true...
...or was designed to elicit information to help him track and or apprehend...
...McKussic.
Now we find...
...Frescia's firm ground shifting once more.
The essence of this confrontation of course is that...
...Frescia...
...contrary to his better judgment...
...or his intent...
...is actually falling in love.
So the essence of this picture in a funny way is that kind of...
...abiding melodrama...
...that was a staple and a main stay of Hollywood for...
...since the beginning of sound, certainly.
It's a bit of a romance, certainly.
It's a bit of a thriller, certainly.
But really this is...
...drama and melodrama.
I hope...
...sort of its best form for my Hollywood terms.
It's not very different in many ways than...
...good pictures with...
...Alan Ladd, Jr. Or with Fred McMurray or with...
...Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda.
The complexity of the emotional relationships...
...gradually overtake the plot...
...and push it into the background...
...and what the audience really is interested in this:
"Who's going to end up with whom and why?"
As opposed to:
"Will the cops get our hero or not?"
So it's an interesting balance to try to strike.
This particular location in the little boat towing sequence...
...was Dockweiler Beach...
...near the Los Angeles International Airport.
Now we see the beginnings of the setup of...
...the Mexican police cooperative action to bust Carlos, the drug dealer.
The theme of surveillance is lots of fun in this movie...
...because people listen and see things all the time.
What does any of it mean?
Becomes the question.
If the woman takes her clothes out of the car, is she staying at the house?
Heavy shot, maybe just a bit of an overreaction.
Part of the...
...essence of this kind of film is trying to find that balance between...
...continuing action and plot...
...and emotional evolution.
I'm not sure Tequila is entirely successful in doing it, actually.
I like this film very much. In fact, it happens personally to be...
...my favorite film of all the films I've done...
...or worked on and that includes, God knows, lots and lots of good films...
...and some not so good films.
By the way, this shot took us the entire night...
...because the damn cat wouldn't do what he was supposed to do.
That shot you just saw was the one time...
...that the cat stopped and played with Mel on the way into the house.
It was a very expensive cat shot.
One night on this movie, night shooting exterior...
...cost about 140,000 dollars.
My best advice to you is:
No animals!
Now we begin to...
...put the information about who the inside snitch is in the hands of...
...Frescia...
...whose rivalry with McKussic is at its maximum...
...and whose loyalty is...
...still...
...a factor in the plot.
Now we are about to get into...
...a sequence in which Mel...
...and Michelle...
...their characters, make love in a hot tub.
This of course...
...makes life complicated.
On a movie set when you have...
...important stars who are supposed to...
...be nude or seminude and make love.
...life gets...
...very, very complex.
Michelle had read the script.
She understood that this scene was in the script but closer to the day of...
...achieving this...
...stuff...
...she got more and more nervous, understandably.
Finally...
...a couple of days before we were to shoot this scene, I got a call from...
...her attorney, who also happened to be my attorney...
...Barry Hersch.
He said, "You know, Michelle is fundamentally uncomfortable being...
...seminude in this shot...
...and perhaps we shouldn't do it."
I said:
"Well, it was in the script and I think we ought to shoot it."
I went to see Michelle...
...and she was indeed nervous, trying to figure out...
...what she could wear in the shot...
...that would be as close to invisible as possible, but still resembling clothing.
So we called in an expert...
...on clothing for dancers in Las Vegas who came up with some very...
...invisible...
...and micro designed monofilament...
...G- string kind of thing.
After a lot of hemming and hawing and back and forth...
...Michelle finally decided that was something she was comfortable wearing...
...and felt dressed in.
Mel of course had a very different reaction to the issue of nudity.
Mel is a lovely guy...
...and in his heart, fundamentally a surfer from Australia.
So when the question...
...about taking his clothes off came up, he simply said:
"Let's shuck the bathing suit and get on with it."
This wasn't exactly...
...designed to reassure...
...Michelle that...
...he was as concerned as she was.
So we kept them apart until the start of the scene...
...and then of course, you cut the crew on the set to an absolute minimum.
Something like this:
A cameraman, one assistant...
...a handful of others.
But you know...
...it's a movie...
...and actors and actresses understand fundamentally what they...
...are going to be doing.
We also obviously shot this scene in an somewhat abstract way...
...because we weren't trying to...
...create...
...the most explicit scene in the world. We were trying to do something...
...erotic and romantic...
...and something that would establish the notion that...
...when these two characters make love...
...it is different than...
...her liaison with...
...the Kurt Russell character.
So that separation is utterly important.
Kurt, in this slide projector scene...
...sees the worst clue he'd possibly see.
It's the look in her eye when she's looking at Mel.
If you look at Robert Towne's work, you see that most of it...
...operates on at least two levels, sometimes three or four, all the time.
Shampoo, Chinatown...
... The Last Detail.
Pictures where...
...people's behavior, the details of their language...
...their movements...
...and even the gestures...
...all add up to...
...a multi-layered sense of what they want.
The first thing they want, the second thing they want...
...the third thing they want, like all of us.
Now we see...
...Frescia's...
...police partner, J.T. Walsh, making the exchange...
...with Mel Gibson's cousin. Now we know where the rat is.
Raul Julia, we've worked with on several films...
...and one of the things of course that was wonderful about Raul...
...as a human as well as an actor, is that he brings...
...a tremendous kind of excitement, enthusiasm, to the set...
...and his performances are always...
...flamboyant, smart, funny.
Raul loved to drink and he loved to sing.
After a few nights in restaurants in which...
Bob Towne and I heard Raul's amateur but enthusiastic versions of operas...
...we decided to insert...
...some of that drinking and singing into this picture.
Which we'll see later on.
Again those night scenes by the hot tub, which are interiors...
...beautifully lit by Cony Hall.
So my question is:
"Can the Carlos character prevent himself from singing in the rest of this movie?"
I think it's probably an impossible notion.
For the restaurant exterior that you just saw, we used Mateo's...
...a well-known Italian restaurant on Westwood Blvd...
...in Los Angeles.
Mateo's was...
...the long time haunt of people like Sinatra, Dean Martin.
And is still very much of a Hollywood nightspot.
This little shot you've just seen in the parking lot behind the restaurant...
...was done...
...entirely in a corner of the sound stage...
...in a space about 12 feet by 20 feet, with a little smoke...
...and some paint and light.
In the course of making a picture...
...many times we shoot...
...location specific masters...
...and cutaways...
...or big interior pieces and later in editing, we discover that...
...we need...
...pieces that are...
...connective tissue, utterly critical to the movie...
...but we just don't have them.
And that was one of them. We go back in after the fact...
...and pick up little bits and pieces of shots that make the story...
...supportable and understandable.
You see lots of people wandering towards the beach in the dark.
This is because the grunion are running...
...a small shellfish which is, a small fish which is...
...a favorite in Southern California and they run periodically during the year...
...and people come down to the beach and catch them in buckets...
...boil them.
This sequence takes place on...
...the bridge leading into...
...Long Beach, California.
One of the tallest bridges in Southern California.
A bridge from which you can see the...
...cityscape in all directions.
And it appears that Lindroff, the snitch...
...has had his ticket canceled.
This we shot in...
...a shipyard in Long Beach, near the old...
Naval Air piers.
We stayed down in Long Beach for the dock sequence...
...the boat chase...
...and other pieces of the night exteriors...
...using the Navy pier...
...warehouse as makeshift sound stages.
Now we enter a sequence in which...
...the Dale McKussic character...
...has to make a series of very hard decisions...
...which involve...
...in dramatic terms, separating himself from his past, for real.
He has made all the external signs of separation...
...he's no longer a drug dealer.
But he's indebted to Carlos.
And he's indebted to his past as a drug dealer.
And Jo Ann Vallenari...
...who now means everything to him is the...
...access...
...around which...
...his release...
...from his own past will be constructed.
This sequence we shot over two nights...
...on a rented yacht in Long Beach Harbor.
Raul insisted on being genuinely drunk for the scene.
So did Mel.
It's a very interesting sequence...
...from the director's point of view, because...
...working with them was, to say the least, an imprecise science...
...during this part of the film.
And you see in the background everywhere, oil derricks pumping away.
The lifeguard is played by Ken Moore...
...who was in real life a lifeguard and a surfer.
A kind of unofficial Mayor of the beaches of...
...the South Bay.
Shooting movies is always complicated when it comes to practical locations...
...and Manhattan Beach was one of our primary locations.
The location of McKussic's house exterior...
...of the place where the surveillance took place...
...the place where the birthday party for the children occurred.
The Mayor of Manhattan Beach was running for re-election.
I made a deal with him for a permit...
...to shoot in the area.
The minute we moved the trucks and equipment in...
...all the neighbors started complaining like mad...
...and holding out their hands for...
...cash to be quiet...
...or turn their televisions down or go away...
...or let us park cars in their driveways.
And we were happy to pay them.
What we hadn't counted...
...was the then Mayor of Manhattan Beach would turn our production unit...
...into his closet election campaign headquarters.
So rapidly I found that our printshop was turning out posters for the Mayor...
...and many of our production assistants and drivers...
...were stapling posters all over...
...phone poles and buildings, up and down the streets of Manhattan Beach.
By the time the election came around...
...and this guy won, we all felt jubilant.
We felt like we were his campaign staff.
I would've been very, very disappointed given the amount of money we spent...
...and the focused time if we hadn't been able to re-elect this guy.
It would have been...
...a terrible commentary of the inefficiency of a movie company.
Cruising along Long Beach Harbor in the fog...
...this Fittipaldi racing boat...
...is capable of doing over 100 miles an hour on water.
We had two of them for the show...
...cruising along there at about 60.
It's a remarkable boat and a very, very high maintenance item.
It's also true, of course, that once you start shooting in fog...
...you are perpetually trapped in fog...
...and you have to create it when it doesn't show up for you.
That's why this sequence is shot on a sound stage...
...with the boat on gimbals.
A lot of fog in the background...
...trying to solve the engine problems...
...because while there are a few foggy nights...
...it's absolutely unpredictable, the fog moves easily when blown by the wind.
It's really impossible...
...to control the situation.
I entered the movie business...
...like most people I know, backwards.
I started out to be a painter...
...went to graduate school at CalArts in California...
...an arts conservatory.
In search of an ability to pay the rent...
...went to work for Roger Coreman...
...the legendary producer of...
...many of your favorite biker...
...and monster movies.
Working for Roger...
...was always an education and an adventure.
In an eight month period, we made ten motion pictures...
...which meant that no film...
...was shot for more than...
...ten or twelve days at a time.
Those films probably averaged to 50 or 60 thousand dollars each...
...in cost.
The great advantage of working for Roger was that...
...on Monday you were loading cable in a pick-up truck...
...and on Tuesday you were a second AD. On Wednesday you were a speaking extra.
On Thursday you were rewriting a scene of the script...
...and on Friday you took his wife shopping.
It was always a well-rounded education.
From Roger...
...I got a job at Universal...
...purely by accident. One of the low level executives there...
...had seen...
...a film, a 16 mm black and white film I had made at CalArts...
...and in a local festival in Los Angeles...
...and I was asked...
...to show up in his office...
...to interview for a job.
In that interview, it became clear that this guy was actually going to hire me...
...much to my amazement.
He asked me what I've been making weekly.
I had been terminally unemployed for some months.
I thought, "Well, what's the biggest number...
...the biggest lie I could tell this guy?"
So I said, "Well, I've been making 250 dollars a week."
He said, "Fine, you start Monday. 300 a week."
I thought frankly that I had died and gone to heaven.
Three hundred dollars a week...
...at that moment...
...I think I was 22, 23 years old...
...was a lot of cash.
What Ned did not tell me...
...as I showed up for work on my first day at Universal...
...was that my first job on my first day...
...was to go down to the 8th floor of the tower...
...and find the young man who had had my job as of Friday...
...and fire him.
Ned had neglected to tell his old assistant.
As I delivered this charming news to this hapless guy...
...he explained to me that Ned had had...
...nine assistants...
...in a four year period.
Nobody had ever lasted as much as six months.
This meant that we were destined to work together and I spent...
...the next decade working happily with him.
This pier by the Long Beach Naval Station we constructed especially for...
...the final shot.
Pieces of the pier are already pre-rigged with explosives, fire.
So the final moments of Tequila Sunrise...
The final moments of Tequila Sunrise...
...revolve entirely around...
...people's emotional needs, not the needs of the plot.
We tried to keep the plot alive enough...
...to be able to remember what the hell's going on in this movie.
But not so alive that it dominates...
...the personal vendettas and emotional tension.
Among the other problems we had with Warner Bros...
...was the constant pressure to subtitle...
...the pieces of the film that are in Spanish...
...which is pointless.
Because even if you don't understand...
...them word-for-word, you understand the intent of the scene.
The moral implications of the picture...
...were critical to all of us.
In this final sequence...
...after Carlos...
...is wounded and is dying...
...his continued...
...fidelity to the...
...greatness of drug dealing is very important to us.
The studio thought this was insane...
...and we had an enormous amount of pressure...
...to change the scene or cut the scene or re-shoot the scene.
But ultimately, in previews, audiences...
...loved it that Carlos never wavered from his...
...enthusiastic embrace of crime.
One of the great problems with the studios always...
...is that they want every single character...
...to end up...
...being...
...a soldier for...
...the good, the right, for mom, apple-pie and the American way.
There's very little room for...
...unrepentant behavior or ambiguity.
This film is nothing but ambiguity...
...and lots of unrepentant behavior.
In the background the Star-Spangled Banner...
...playing in the radio sign off.
It kind of underscores...
...the finale of this movie, which is a merger...
...of drugs and money and power...
...and betrayal.
Which seems...
...the appropriate fuel for...
...the lives of these characters.
Now as usual in a Bob Towne movie...
...people discuss with each other...
...the diabolical things they're going to do before they do them.
The perfect Bob Towne ending to which two wounded guys...
...on the edge of death continue their philosophical argument.
You can imagine how much Warner Bros. loved this advice...
...from...
...Carlos:
"The future is grass, buddy."
The J.T. Walsh character having...
...sunken to morass of compromise...
...and foolish decisions and stupid...
...bureaucratic bungling has no choice...
...but to kill everybody in sight, if he's going to look like a hero...
...and he's about to start a little bigger fire than he anticipated.
That is...
...about as complete an expression of...
...continuing friendship as one can find...
...when a cop shoots his partner on behalf of his buddy...
...the criminal. You may notice a lot of...
...dollar bills falling through the air in this shot.
These series of explosions took us two nights in Long Beach.
And this beach...
...and this sunset.
This ending is a new ending. This is an ending that we shot after the fact...
...in an effort to perfect...
...the emotional connection...
...between the characters using...
...the lifeguard station, which you've seen before in the film...
...and this shot which is at a different location.
That's the beach at Zuma Beach...
...California. Sunset.
Tying in the...
...ubiquitous lifeguard truck...
...and the not so subtle conspiracy...
...as among...
...the cops...
...and Frescia. Woody...
...the lifeguard and Harbor patrol officer...
...and McKussic...
...a guy who has only one goal at this point in life...
...and it appears that he's got it.
So what can I say? This is Bob Towne's vision...
...of another day in the South Bay.
The original ending for the movie involved tying up...
...a tremendous number of loose ends in a much more linear dramatic way...
...and was completely unacceptable...
...to audiences in the preview process.
In fact, in previews...
...this movie got shorter by almost 20 minutes, 25 minutes.
The entire subplot having to do with Carlos' son...
...and his failed drug deal in San Francisco, which we shot...
...was all excised from the movie.
Further...
...a number of smaller sequences...
...were pulled out...
...to try to clarify plot.
Many people still say the movie is incomprehensible on a pure plot basis.
Personally, I like that.
That intense...
...melodramatic layering that causes you to have to...
...think and work...
...and struggle to keep up with the film.
The film was edited, by the way, edited by Claire Simpson...
...a wonderful English editor...
...who studied with Dee Dee Allen; perhaps...
...one of our 2 or 3 best...
...editors.
The stunt coordinator for this movie, Bobby Bass...
...is a legendary character who'd done...
...many films and many stunts throughout the business...
...and Bobby...
...continues to stay, to do...
...many of...
...the most important action pictures you'll see.
Of course, not long after this film...
...Raul Julia died, very unfortunately.
Left a big hole...
...in the world of entertainment, where that kind of character is rare.
A character that rich and expansive.
The soundtrack for Tequila Sunrise as it happened, turned out to be...
...a big hit...
...and did very well for Warner Bros.
The picture was a modest hit in the U.S. And a giant hit outside the U.S.
In America, it got...
...good reviews, sometimes great reviews...
...but it got...
...tremendous...
...acclaim in the international market where people seemed frankly...
...not to be at all put off by the dense language...
...and the intensely layered melodramatic nature of the picture.
Subtitled byd th GELULA & CO., INC.