Interview L.Q. JONES As Told To The Phantom   Actor/auteur L.Q. (A Boy and His Dog) Jones, interviewed in VS #49, offers additional cogent comments herein, ranging from his thoughts on Stanley Kubrick to Sam Peckinpah's sagebrush classic Ride the High Country. PHANTOM A Boy and His Dog moves at kind of a cheery pace. JONES That's my pace. The picture only runs, I think, 90 minutes and 12 seconds. Because to me we were making pictures too long; if you can't say what you've got to say in 80 or 90 minutes, maybe you're in the wrong business. PHANTOM That's what bothered about a similar film in a way, A Clockwork Orange. I know everybody loves it but I thought it was a little overblown. JONES Well, I adore what Kubrick did, but Clockwork bothered me-of course, he does that in a lot of his films, and he could get away with it. If you look at Clockwork, he first tells you what's going to happen and then he shows you exactly what he just told you. But it does get tedious to me. See, I even got bored with 2001. PHANTOM Me too. JONES I went to sleep, I think, two or three times during the color show when they're going between planets. And yet you look at his stuff and you can't fault it. But, by the same token, look at 2001, look at Clockwork Orange, look at Barry Lyndon. And then go back to probably one of the finest films ever made, Paths of Glory. Paths of Glory is what, 78 minutes? The Killing. The Killing is maybe 90 minutes? Has anyone ever made a better picture than The Killing? Probably not. Paths of Glory. If you question it,  look at Paths of Glory and then look at Breaker Morant. Remember Breaker? Breaker is a hell of a picture, same exact story, except one is about the Boers and one is about the French. But notice, Breaker must be, what, 120 minutes? And in Paths of Glory he gets it done in 78, 80 minutes? I think if I'd made a picture like Paths of Glory, I'd just pack up my bags and never make another picture. I mean, you can't get any better. And you certainly gonna make it worse. And he proved that to me when he went to 2001, when he went to Clockwork, and when he went to Barry Lyndon. PHANTOM Yeah, he seemed to have lost the brevity idea. JONES Well, he started reading his own clippings. It's either Paths of Glory or The Little Foxes, if you ask me if I'd ever seen a perfect picture, that would certainly spring to mind. In Paths and The Little Foxes, I don't believe there is a missed cut, I don't believe there is one frame that doesn't need to be there nor do you notice that it's one frame short anywhere. As a matter of fact, I was in my agent's office 'cause I hadn't worked for about two days and I was wondering, what the heck, am I out of the business? We were sittin' there, the phone rings-it was Stanley Kubrick. And he was calling to see if I would work in Dr. Strangelove. I said, "I'll walk barefoot across the country." PHANTOM Was that gonna be the Slim Pickens role? JONES That was what Slim did. Then I went off to do another picture, because they said it was gonna be like, oh, six or eight months before we go to work. And they had to move things around, so they moved it forward. I'm now stuck doing another picture. And so we had to pass and Slim did it. I was really ticked, 'cause Slim and I had been friends for a thousand years. But I wanted to do that. PHANTOM What a great part. JONES But I looked at it-Slim was so marvelous, nobody could've done what he did in Dr. Strangelove. So although missed the picture, I'm glad I did and Slim got to do it. He was so good. But I wanted to work for Kubrick and that was the last chance I had. Oh well, that's show biz, I guess. PHANTOM Any thoughts on Ride the High Country? JONES I think Ride the High Country is the best Saturday afternoon, eat popcorn, hold a girl's hand western ever made. Sam did such a marvelous job with it. PHANTOM But you know I saw that as a kid and I thought it was pretty edgy, having Randolph Scott as an old guy and Joel McCrea getting killed. And that gritty, muddy mining camp and those kind of in-bred brothers. JONES Wait a minute, wait a minute, you're talking about my family here! PHANTOM I thought it was pretty edgy. JONES Well, for its time it was. They put it out with a little gem called Boys Night Out, which was not one of the world's great pictures. It was pretty different from the western. I've been in the business now for 49 years and for the first time somebody in distribution says, "Wait a minute." And he started checkin' into it and sure enough he found out it was doing marvelous business. But what happened it was running with this other picture and nobody would come to that movie. But when Ride the High Country was on, the place filled up. And as soon as it was over, then they all left. They really got smart, they pulled it from the double bill, held on to it for about three or four months, and then put it out as a single. And then it won an award for Best Picture of the Year, in Europe. PHANTOM And you also had Charles McGraw. JONES I worked with Charlie, of course, when we were under contract to Warners. This was the first time I ever got to direct him. I don't think Charlie had ever done a preacher before. He was a tough man. What was that thing he did on a train? PHANTOM Narrow Margin. JONES Thank you. She [Marie Windsor] and Charlie were just magnificent. I'm not sure he ever came up to that again but he did some marvelous things. PHANTOM Returning to A Boy and His Dog, I'd have to say it's one of the best films I've seen this year. So many films today seem so slack. JONES Well, we don't make motion pictures anymore, we make money. You know that tits and violence are gonna work. So that's what you show. I very consciously, with A Boy and His Dog, did not do it. A Boy and His Dog is the best pornographic opportunity that's ever been had in a motion picture. I mean, look at it. We could do anything we wanted; it's called for. But I didn't want my picture to be that way, so I went the other way. We worm into your brain and we keep those little explosions that keep going off. You're thinking it's a lot more vulgar than it is. You look for nudity and it's not there. But the picture suggests that it's there and you work off of that. I love it! PHANTOM I haven't seen it recently, but Brotherhood of Satan I liked a lot too. JONES With Brotherhood, we had more fun than you could shake a stick at. I like horror but not shock, and there's a difference. So what hasn't been just beaten to death and at that point in time witchcraft had not been really used that much. We started about the same time as Rosemary's Baby did. Now that had a lot more money than we did, and a lot more talent too; they got out before we did but we were right behind them. In that one, it's just witchcraft and it's horror and it's great fun. PHANTOM That became a cult film too, on a smaller scale. The one I haven't seen is The Devil's Bedroom. JONES Unfortunately, that has been lost to posterity. That picture, we shot it with household bulbs to light it, the camera work in it is grotesque. That made many 10 Best lists of that year because it is so bad, you look at it and say this has gotta be a documentary because nobody could make this many mistakes. But you know, some people really like it, it's weird. PHANTOM You used a little clip from that, though, in Boy. JONES Yeah, that was part of the stuff we used in the theater. PHANTOM And the other stuff--was that just an old stag reel? JONES It came from, oddly enough, the guy who was doing our camera work on The Devil's Bedroom, who also made very soft porn. PHANTOM It plays great-it looks like this is what's left of the world that's gone. It's a funny film yet it's got this underlying horror. JONES It's all of that. Which is one of the things that goes into its rhythm. There are lines in that film that the audience just goes bonkers over, you can't hear the film for the next 30 seconds because people are laughing. That's there but you turn it right over and here's brutality. But you don't see it as much as it's suggested. That's why people think it's a really brutal film. I don't think it is. Copyright 2003 PhanMedia, Inc.