INT: So you were working with Caleb [Caleb Deschanel] on that [THE BLACK STALLION]. And so how did you begin working with a Cinematographer? What was that relationship like with yourself having so much expertise in that, how did you divide that work? 

CB: We were all sort of, we were all sort of into the same thing. He was also an Éclair freak, and he lived right across the street from me in Venice. And we were very close friends, you know, aside from the movies. [INT: So camera positions and things like that, who determined that? Or did you--] We usually, you know, came upon some agreement. We both had fairly similar concepts in terms of how to do things. So Caleb was, we were almost always on the same page.

INT: So the next, I mean there were so many challenges in that film [THE BLACK STALLION], but let's just talk about Reno [Kelly Reno] when you working with him, and how also you determined on how, in terms of how you work with child Actors, what was your process with him? I mean, did you... Just as an example, when you wanted to elicit an emotion from them, did you work in regard to the experience that the child was going through? Or if that didn't work, did you have to reach for another experience for that child from something outside the film? 

CB: My method was neither. I mean what I tried to do and sometime with mixed results, was to encourage all the Actors to find the groove, to find the person, to find the thing inside themselves. The important thing is they had to own it. They had to own it and to express it. Not everybody can do that. So if you miscast somebody who can't do that, it's not going to happen in my view. I've been lucky in that, for example, Mickey Rooney, I mean he flowered under that. I mean, probably 15 minutes of that film is Mickey winging it. There's a lot of that movie that was never in the script. An awful lot of the dialogue was never there. An awful lot of the stuff that happened wasn't, it was just stuff that Mickey came up with because he found this guy. He found this guy, and Mickey was a great Actor. [INT: He was.] One of the most underutilized Actors, you know, he was in a lot of movies, but he was almost always the same guy. He could've been one of the greatest heavies ever put on film. I think he only did it once or twice. [INT: Yeah. And what about Reno?] Reno was just a, he was just, you know, kind of a crazy little guy. And he just, he could do that, he could find himself. And I didn't have to say hardly anything to him. [INT: Had he worked in film before?] No.

INT: And where did you find him [Kelly Reno]? 

CB: We tested well over a thousand kids [for THE BLACK STALLION]. We advertised in horse magazines, "You want to be in this movie? Come to this." And we traveled all over the United States. He came in in Denver I think, he was from Pueblo. His father was a real cowboy, Bud Reno, and lived out in the wilderness, out in the steps there. And he was just, you know, I mean he just, he came in, and you know… I just kind of trust my own gut in terms of, "Well, does this kid have it?" You know? And I had a hard time because out of a thousand kids, we found a lot of good kids. Really, there were some terrific kids. And we'd boil it down to five, and then Mickey [Mickey Rooney] came in and did scenes with those five and they were all good. The hardest choice was actually coming up with Kelly. But everybody thought he was so cute, and you know, he had other things going for him, so he was the right choice. [INT: And so, but you had the license to go across the country and look for this kid? I mean there weren't a lot of films that you could do that.] No, no, no, because Francis [Francis Ford Coppola] was calling the shots. The money people had no idea what we were doing.

INT: So one of the things that you and Francis [Francis Ford Coppola] shot is trust the process? 

CB: Yes, absolutely. Process is it as far as I'm concerned. And that's the problem we're in today. [INT: Right. And so there were a whole coterie of you. I mean Caleb [Caleb Deschanel] and...] Yeah, yeah, there's a dozen of us or more, in one way or another. Yeah. [INT: So I just think it's important to make this connection if you want to do it. The fact that Francis was going through this horrendous process on APOCALYPSE [APOCALYPSE NOW] allowed him to appreciate process as it applied to THE BLACK STALLION returns.] Well I don't know that it, if that enabled him. I think he had that attitude early on. He had that attitude early on. He knew that, you know, he just had to go out there and you know, face the demons. And some people could deal with the demons and some people couldn't. And if you can deal with the demons than, you know, you've got to operate on what's there in front of you, right then. You know, and not what somebody's dreaming about or somebody has in a plan.

INT: When in that film did you begin to smell that it could be what it ended up being? I mean... [CB: THE BLACK STALLION?] Yeah. 

CB: I had no idea. When I came back from Italy I had no idea what I had. I had no idea. [INT: Do you remember how much footage you shot on that?] Oh yeah, god. I can't tell you, it was a horrendous amount. First cut of the movie was like six hours. And it took us forever; it took us over a year to edit the film. Because I shot everything that moved. And probably 65, 70 percent of the film is that stuff; it's not what was in the script. [INT: That was--] It's not what anybody talked about beforehand. It's none of that. It's stuff that just happened. [INT: So it was not... the movie that we all see today was not the story you started out with?] Well, it's the story in a very, in a broad way. You know, the kid is on the boat, he's there. I don't think his dad is there. I don't think dad was even there in that version. And they're on the island, he gets rescued, he meets the old trainer, and they do the big horse race and that's the story. That much of it is the same. But not much that happens otherwise. [INT: Of the stuff in between is, yeah.] Yeah.

INT: So yeah, so let's just talk about the difficulty of some of the shooting that you had to do [on THE BLACK STALLION]. I mean, you know, like the stuff on the boat. One of the things that I saw over and over again in your films is, you know, everything is mise-en-scène, your camera is basically always rock solid, for the most part. And almost right through to your last film. And that's obviously intentional. And your rhythms are between the big wide shots--[CB: And all the details.] Yeah, close-up, and this film had a lot of insert detail. [CB: Yeah, yeah.] So you want to just talk about that philosophically in terms as a filmmaker, how you approach the shooting? 

CB: Yeah, I mean, and this comes from the old days, crawling around in the woods with my Exakta, my old still camera, you know? The important thing is is the world that you create in the mind of the beholder, the person who's watching the movie. So once you have one wide shot of where this is happening, once you know what the geography is that you're in, then, you know, it's going to be that much more powerful if you can go in and fill out all the details. Or you can capture, you know, the movements and the moods that are inside of that. And so for me once you had the big picture, then you wanted to go in and find all the telling details that you could find. In terms of the shipwreck, a few setup shots and then it's all details. [INT: The fire?] Yeah.

INT: How did you do the fire [referring to the fire sequence in THE BLACK STALLION]? 

CB: Oh what we had to do, we built a boat in Cleopatra's Pond at Cinecitta in Rome. And it was a total cockamamie deal, I mean we built the boat to I think half-scale, so it was big. Like made out of Masonite, you know? And the propeller I remember had a deal where a guy gets on a bicycle and he pedals the bicycle and makes the wheel go round. And anyway, the whole thing was on rails, and they had this pond that was maybe I guess about the size of my irrigation pond out here is, is about maybe 300 feet long. And so this whole boat would roll on these rails, it could be pulled through it. And then to make the whole thing it was surrounded by like 10 aircraft engines with big propellers on them, like B-29 motors, you know, to make the wind. And then we had a whole bunch of guys with fire hoses to make the rain. And then we had these guys with big bulldozers, with big giant blades on them that would run into the water, you know, like this, to make the waves in the pool, right? All this cockamamie stuff, it's just hard to imagine what an unbelievable chaos it really was when the whole thing was going. Well in order to sort of time the whole thing, the Art Director designed it so there was this pole and it had these lights on it, so that when it came time for the rain guys to come on with the rain, the red light came on, and then when the orange light came on, it was time for the wave guys, and so on and so forth, until the whole thing is finally running and then we were ready to do the shot. And the guy, the smoke guy, he had a smoke generator off of a World War II destroyer, and it was a pretty massive smoke deal. And so one night we were out there shooting and probably the first night we were shooting, and so we started the fire the whole thing up, and you know, the horses are running around. I got a 100 people running around on the deck of the boat. We got the rain guys coming on, and then we got, you know… until we get the whole thing all fired up. And oh yeah, there's some, there's a railroad car full of water that comes down and hits this stop and all the water comes out of this railroad car and comes over the top of the boat. So it was this whole gigantic contraption. But when the smoke guy came on, he got out of hand. And everything just disappeared. Nobody could see anything. Nobody could see the lights. Nobody could see all these people are running around, the horse is running around, the waves are going, the fire guys are all... the whole deal is going. I'm yelling at the top of my lungs, nobody can hear anything. B-29 engines are all roaring away. I couldn't do anything, you know, so Caleb [Caleb Deschanel] and I just went over and we just sat down and kind of looked at each other, wait until, you know, either the smoke finally cleared or everybody figured that we had the shot or something. And you know, after about 10 minutes everything gradually came down. And that we did every night. We did that every night for like two or three weeks.

INT: So I was going to ask you, how long it took you to shoot that. So that alone took two or three weeks, just that sequence [referring to the fire sequence in THE BLACK STALLION]. 

CB: That sequence took at least that. It was a month of nights. But we also shot, at the same time we shot the poker game and all that stuff too, so. [INT: Yeah, what I remember of that is how much you didn't see. There was a lot of, just as the horse is escaping there's some wonderful cutting in there, so that your mind fills in the missing pieces.] Exactly. But that's my notion, that's what I'm trying to explain by all this. Is that once you establish something in the brain, then you can people that whole thing out, then you can fill that out, make it much stronger if you see all the little pieces right there, you know, rather than it all done in a master or something like that, to me... [INT: So was the whole boat thing done on the stage?] That was all done on a stage. Well, not... some of it we actually shot on a real boat too. We shot on the ferry going to Sardinia, the beginning part where you see the boat. He's running around on the deck and so on and so forth. [INT: So did... I mean, the boy [Kelly Reno] obviously held up well for eight months or six months of shooting?] Oh yeah, he had a good time, I think. Yeah, yeah. [INT: So you said that it took you a year to edit it, and that was just finding the movie that was in there?] Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly correct.

INT: So there were two other elements that became signatures of your other films as well, both music and sound. Especially sound. [CB: Yes.] I don't know of any other Director's work that I remember where sound is a real character all the way through it. And that's something you're thinking about while you're shooting, are you? 'Cause I know it's a post thing. 

CB: Well again, to me it's part of the universe that you're trying to build, you know? That the sound is, you can tell an awful lot with sound. And if you don't have it in picture, you can tell it in sound, you know? You can see just a detail--if you have that world created in the head of the whole environment and all the people who are in that environment and what's going on, you can just show a little detail of it and hear something that will tell you what's going on. [INT: Yeah. A bomb.] Yeah, or whatever. Yeah.

INT: And music, when you're shooting are you thinking about the music? I was thinking about in BLACK STALLION there's that little dance sequence with the horse and the music, so was that something you came up with in post or were you thinking about that when you were shooting it? 

CB: I wasn't thinking about in shooting it. And again it was, that sequence happened because I couldn't shoot it. The fucking horse wouldn't go in the water. Couldn't get the horse in the ocean. So how are we going to shoot this scene? We don't, you know… The boy's going to get the horse in the ocean, get on his back and get out, how are we going to shoot this scene? Well I remembered as a kid at Tahoe, when I'd swim underwater, if you looked up the underside of the water was like a mirror, the surface of the water was like a mirror. It just reflected what was down underneath. You couldn't see what was up there. So we put a cowboy on the back of the horse, and we drove the horse into the water, and you never saw the cowboy who was holding the horse, and making him go into the water. [INT: But you saw the horse?] We saw the horse, only just saw him down below. So that's how that whole sequence happened. There’s no way we were going to get the horse in the water. The horse was impossible. So okay, well let's shoot it this other way. And we had, you know, the Éclair camera was original developed with Cousteau [Jacques Cousteau], you know, so it's partially an underwater camera. So we had this old rig, Caleb [Caleb Deschanel] had never shot underwater. Neither one of us had done anything underwater. We didn't have any--all we had was this little thing you could put it in. And so we shot all that stuff in a couple of hours and… [INT: But if you hadn't had that childhood experience about being underwater, you never would've solved that problem.] Wouldn't have solved the problem. Yeah. That's right.

INT: So when the film [THE BLACK STALLION] was a film and was Francis [Francis Ford Coppola] happy with it before it got released and everything? What was that at that moment of birth, how were you guys feeling about the film you had made? 

CB: I don't know that he was too sure, but he stuck up for me. I mean he had to go to bat in some very difficult situations where, you know, there was heavy artillery against me, which he saved me from. [INT: In regard to the film you mean?] Yeah. [INT: What do you mean?] Just some investments that had been done in the film that... yeah, so he was very helpful that way. [INT: And this was in regard to the release of the film?] This is in regard to the film. Carmine [Carmine Coppola], his father, we tried to do music with another Composer, that didn't work out. We didn't have any budget left. Carmine agreed to try to do the score. He did the score and a lot of the score I think is excellent. But there were a couple of cues that I thought that were... I couldn't agree with. And so those we filled in with, we brought in performers. And this dance you're talking about was one of those. We improvised the music to the picture. And Carmine was ready to throw me to the dogs and you know, there was heavy-duty artillery going on. And Francis stood up for me. Which wasn't easy for him. It was very hard. I mean, Carmine is a terrific, was a terrific Composer. He had really good melodies he put together and everything, but he could be difficult about some things. And that was one of the difficult things in that movie.

INT: And what about the release of the movie [THE BLACK STALLION]? 

CB: It wouldn't have happened if Francis [Francis Ford Coppola] hadn't gone to bat. It would never have seen the light of day. ‘Cause what happened was that the whole United Artists was taken over by a whole new bunch of people. And the new people who came in didn't even know that they had the movie. Didn't even know it was their movie! When they came to the first screening of the film at Francis' place, they thought they were going to see APOCALYPSE [APOCALYPSE NOW]. The guys in the limos all showed up to look at APOCALYPSE and here's this horse and, "Oh Francie, what's this horse doing here? Francie, come on, what is this horse? What do we look at this horse for? Where's the helicopters?" So... [INT: That was the insurance company, right? It was, that owned it at the...] No, this guy, the guy who was running it, I can't remember his name, but he was an accountant, was running the company at that point. And they, after the screening they said, "You know, this is unreleasable. This film is impossible. What is this? An art movie for kids?" And so he convinced them to run it at the New York Film Festival and open it in one theater in New York City, which was a porno house. They took a famous porno movie out of the… to play THE BLACK STALLION for one week. And it did a little business, so they played it another week, and it got more business. And then they finally released it. But then when they finally released it, they got kicked out of all the theaters because it was Christmas. So it went out of the theaters and then they had to re-release it again in the spring. But it was Francis who convinced them to give the film a chance and to spend a few bucks.