The Neon Bible - Flashback: The Wild Bunch
Ninety thousand bullets. Fifty teenage concubines. One runaway train. When Sam Peckinpah set out to make the most violent film ever, they said he was mad. He was.
Walon Green (co-writer): It’s late 1966 and I’m working as a documentary filmmaker when I get a call from Roy N Sickner - a stunt man and old drinking buddy of Lee Marvin. Roy had written a treatment that had been given the thumbs-up by Marvin. He wanted me to turn it into a screenplay. It wasn’t the most demanding project I’d been offered, but since it sounded fun and gave me a chance to work in the movies,
I said ‘yes’.
LQ Jones (actor, TC): There wasn’t really that much in the original version of the script. What there was, though, was the germ of an idea - and sometimes with Sam, that was all he needed.
Sam Peckinpah (director, co-writer): The outlaws of the West have always fascinated me. I suppose I’m something of an outlaw myself.
Walon Green: When Sam rewrote, he didn’t alter a line here and there - he really rewrote. With The Wild Bunch, he didn’t meddle with the structure of the piece so much as with the dialogue; by the time he’d finished, practically all of my lines had been changed. He tinkered with a few scenes, too. The sequence where the Bunch cross the river with the stolen guns: in my version, the river’s crossed on a raft, which Sam swapped for a bridge. When I heard that, I said, “Christ, are you going to blow up another bridge?” Sam replied, “It’s not just blowing up another bridge. It’s about how you blow up the bridge.” And he was right. It was terrific. I suppose I should have been pissed off. That sort of rewriting, however, is the kind a writer appreciates.
Cliff Coleman (assistant director): Sam was determined to make The Wild Bunch in Mexico. After what happened on Major Dundee, no one thought the studio would give him persmision. But Ken Hyman was so in love with the film and Sam was so persuasive, it wasn’t long before we were heading south of the border.
LQ Jones; It was an intense shoot. From day one, it was an intense shoot.
Cliff Coleman: Sam was a perfectionist. He was concerned with minute details. He brought a lifetime of experience to the picture and made damn sure things were the way he knew they should be. Put another way, by the time Sam had finished preparing a set, it even smelled right.
Sam Peckinpah: A director has to deal with a whole world absolutely teeming with mediocrities.
Gordon Dawson (costume designer/wardrobe): We were preparing to shoot the opening gun battle when San said, “There’s something wrong with Strother Martin [playing bounty hunter Coffer]. I want to make him a 1913 Hells Angel. There’s something missing. What can you do?” So I ran back to the wardrobe trailer. I thought, “What the fuck am I going to do?” I had a bunch or nurses’ habits. I ripped the crucifix off the habit, I took a pair of pliers, ripped the Christ off, threw it out, wrapped a fucking .38 cartridge around the cross and hit it with a blowtorch. I ran back to the set, put it on Strother, and Sam said, “That’s it!”
Howard Kazanjian (second assistant director): Sam was a big believer in read-throughs. He’d get the cast to plough through the screenplay time after time. One of the special effects men interrupted us during a script reading and we went outside. Up against the corral fences, they had a cut-out of a human with clothes on and they were showing us the squibs that would simulate gunshot wounds. I’d never seen squibs before. They went off, blowing holes in the clothing. And Sam said, “That’s not what I want! That’s snot what I want.” He got a gun and he said, “This is what I want!” And he went BANG! BANG BANG! BANG! with real guns and real bullets and said, “That’s the effect I want!” From there they began testing with bigger squibs loaded with blood and pieces of meat.
Cliff Coleman: If there was one man who could give Sam lessons in debauchery it was Emilio Fernandez. Emilio was a true original, a real one-off. I don’t know whether this was before or after he’d shot a producer, but there was an awesome aura about the man. He had brought his entire harem with him - some 50 teenage girls who lived with him at his hacienda outside Mexico City. Yes, Emilio was perfect for the part of the insane scumbag Mapache. And yet without him, we would never have had that brilliant ants-and-scorpions sequence which set the tone for the whole picture. That was Emilio’s idea. He used to play that game as a child.
Sam Peckinpah: I was talking with Emilio about the script when suddenly he said, “You know, the Bunch- when they go into the town - are like when I was a child and we would take a scorpion and drop it on an anthill.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “The ants would attack the scorpion…” And I said, “Get me the phone!” I dialled the producer in California, and I said to him, “I wants ants and I want scorpions - and I don’t care how you get them down here!”
Phil Ankum (property master): The studio had a guy called James Dannadlson import 12,000 red ants and a dozen scorpions for the opening. Like there weren’t enough ants and scorpions in Mexico already. When he wasn’t busy with the invertebrates, James would catch turkey vultures and stick weighted boots on them so that they could be made to look in the directions Peckinpah wanted.
Warren Oates (actor, Lyle Gorch): I’d been on worse shoots. I’d been in Mexico a few years earlier [on Return Of The Seven]; everybody went down with hepatitis. It wasn’t like that on The Wild Bunch. A couple of people got The Revenge, a few fingers were dislocated and there was probably a nasty gash or two - by and large, it was a pretty standard shoot. What was extraordinary was the pressure. You could have boiled beef, it was that severe.
Ernest Borgnine (actor, Dutch Engstrom): There were times when we’d finish shooting and I’d say, “My God!” But I sincerely believed we were achieving something.
Cliff Coleman: I believe that Sam’s greatest achievement on The Wild Bunch was the layered performance he got out of William Holden.
Louis Lombardo (editor): Perhaps the funniest thing about the shoot was that, the more we shot, the more apparent it became that Bill Holden was impersonating Sam. I told him one day after dailies: “You’re doing Sam!” He was running that Wild Bunch just like Sam was running the movie. His gestures, his tone of voice - it was all Sam.
Warren Oates: Sam did his old trick of going to war with the execs. He just loved to piss them off. Like in the scene Angel [Jaime Sanchez] had his throat slashed. The special effects department had rigged up a prop knife and a pump. The fucking blood spurted from here to the fucking street. And Sam printed it! It was just a malfunction of the pumping mechanism, but it scared the shit out of everybody who saw the dailies. The producers were speechless.
Louis Lombardo: Sam could be a wild man. He wanted to take his fists to me when he found out Cliff Coleman had seen the dailies before Sam had. Cliff was put on the bus back to LA.
Joe Canutt (stunt man): I was scheduled to take part in the stunt where the bridge explodes beneath the bounty hunters. When I’m gonna be standing on a bridge that blows up under me, I want to have a good look at how much of a charge they’re using. I looked at the rigging and Sam had enough explosives to blow us clean onto dry land! My mother didn’t have any stupid children, so I told Sam that, if he didn’t cut those charges, they’d have to find someone else to do the stunt. I also told that son of a bitch that I’d never work for him again.
Warren Oates: I took part in the train hijack scene. Sam let me do what I wanted because I really knew my character. Sam wanted this shot where I’m supposed to be enjoying the ride. So like a Mexican engineer, I gave a little ‘toot’. I just pretended it was my train; William Holden was really driving. he floor-boarded it because Sam said it wasn’t going fast enough. Bill took the lever and went all the way to the hilt, and away we went. It was about a mile-and-three-quarter run and we got down there pretty damn quick, and I could see guys diving off the tracks because I’m up there on that flatcar out in front of the damn engine. And suddenly I’m saying to myself, “Uh-oh, something’s wrong!” because the braeks are on and we’re sliding and the sparks are flying. And up ahead is the flatcar parked on the tracks. So I grabbed the railing on the front of the locomotive and stepped up alongside the boiler and just watched it happen. Those flatcars hit like dominoes. It was quite something to behold.
LQ Jones: Sam did lose it on The Wild Bunch. But I’ve seen him much worse, like on the set of Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. There he was drunk all the time and pointed a live gun at me and Harry Dean Stanton. But on The Wild Bunch, Sam was so in love with the material and so determined to do a good job, he only lost it when he thought things weren’t going according to plan.
Howard Kazanjian: For the big battle that closes the film, Sam wired the courtyard with 10,000 squibs. He had a big switchboard for detonating them. Each charge had to be timed to go off with the actions of the extras. It was painful to get it done right, and Sam was insistent about what he wanted - and rightly so.
Gordon Dawson: I remember when were done with the climactic battle, Sam said, “Alright, Dawson, change the blood.” And I said, “What?” He says, “It’s all red blood. Make it black.” Because blood blackens as it dries. We had blood running down the walls and on all the bodies. I had to go through and change every ounce to black blood.
Phil Ankum: More ammunition was used in that final battle than in the entire Mexican revolution - 90,000 rounds. Only difference was, we were using blanks.
Gordon Dawson: I only had 350 Mexican soldier uniforms and we blew up 6,000 of them. I had a uniform-repair factory going behind the blood hits. They’d come in bloody, ragged, torn, they’d be taped up, painted over, stuck in front of a heater lamp to dry, a guy would go over the patch with dirty gloves to make it look like aged cloth, then they’d get blown up again.
Kenneth Hyman (Warner head of production): I approved Sam’s budgetary overages because I saw the rushes. I thought they were extraordinary. So if he wanted a few more rifles and a machine gun, God bless him.
Ernest Borgnine: Sam was an obsessive son of a bitch, that’s a given. But you look at how great that film was, and at how bad movies are today and you think that maybe Hollywood would be a better place if there were a few more obsessive sons of bitches directing pictures.
Gordon Dawson: What happened on The Wild Bunch almost never happens: everyone was there, on his toes, job and homework done, eight possibilities in each hand and his mind searching for eight more, on a dead run for 80 days. Everyone gave full-bore commitment.
LQ Jones: Shooting finished in June 1968. The last day was spent on a sound stage at Chrurubusco Studies in Mexico City, shooting close-ups. Sam shot the footage he wanted and burst into tears! I’ve only seen Sam cry twice. Really cry. The other time, it was just the drink talking. But that day in Mexico City, he wailed like a baby. Why? because he had given the picture everything and now it was over. If you give as much to a movie as Sam gave to The Wild Bunch, tears are the only relief, the only thing that make any sense.
Sam Peckinpah: On a shoot, you’re just mining the ord. I don’t start making the jewellery till we hit the cutting room.
Louis Lombardo: The rough cut of The Wild Bunch ran three hours and 45 minutes.
It played really well at that length.
Sam Pekcinpah: The preview screening reaction cards were incredible. Thirty per cet said it was amazing, the greatest film they’d ever seen. The other 70 per cent said it was revolting, the most disgusting film they’d ever seen. Either way, the picture got people pretty steamed.
Kenneth Hyman: When the lights came up, there was no applause. Only shocked silence.
William Holden (actor, Pike Bishop): Are people surprised that violence really exists in the world? Just turn on your TV set any night. The viewer sees war, cities burning. He sees plenty of violence.
Sam Peckinpah: I cut out several points of violence. So instead of having 35 people walk out, we only had 10. It’s a good average - I don’t mind 10. But then the Motion Picture Association of America wanted some cuts made - I lost some good lines I wanted to keep in. One is where Tector [Ben Johnson] is in the wine vat with a Mexican lady and he’s pulling out her breast and he turns to his brother and says, “Lookit here, Lyle - a nipple as long as your thumb!” The line wasn’t in the script, it just came out - a natural thing. But they took issue on that.
LQ Jones: Sam was editing The Ballad Of Cable Hogue in Hawaii when Ted Ashley [Ken Hyman’s replacement as Warners head of production] told [producer] Phil Feldman to take out another 10 minutes. I’ve never seen him that angry. He was glowing with rage.
Sandy Robertson (journalist/archivist): Ashley cut The Wild Bunch because American distributors complained the film was too long. The material Ashley removed from the American cut involved several crucial flashbacks, some juicy fireside dialogue and a big battle. In Britain, we were luckier. When The Wild Bunch first played over here in the 70mm roadshow version, we saw almost the precise version Peckinpah wanted us to see. That version also regularlly aired on TV in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
LQ Jones: Everyone talks about what a good technical director Sam is, but few people recognise how great a director of actors he was. On Wild Bunch, he coaxed extraordinary work out of people. Edmond O’Brien [eldest Bunch member Sykes] was thought a blind-drunk has-been by most critics. Then they started talking about how brilliant he was in The Wild Bunch and writing that he still had the magic that made him so memorable in DOA. And Ernest Borgnine, who’d got a reputation - undeserved - of being a ham since winning his Oscar: in Sam’s hands, he became a legend all over again. As for us young guys - Warren, Ben Johnson, Strother Martin, me - we built career on having been in The Wild Bunch. If you want evidence of The Wild Bunch’s classic status, just look at the excitement that greeted the 1995 release of the restored cut.
Sandy Robertson: The problem with the ‘directors cut’ of The Wild Bunch is the same as with the director’s cut of Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. It isn’t a director’s cut at all. The ‘new footage’ is only new to American audiences. For all the fanfare, the print is still incomplete. Besides the ‘nipple line, music is missing. Peckinpah also went
on record as saying he wanted the end to be accompanied by the sound of buzzing flies. Until this material is restored, The Wild Bunch as Sam Peckinpah envisaged
it doesn’t exist.
Sam Peckinpah: The Wild Bunch is not a pretty picture. It’s the story of violent people in violent times. Violence to the people in the picture is not just a means to an ed - it’s the end itself.