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Despite my respect and admiration for Huston, for whom I worked on and off over several years, as well as my admiration for Wayne, I never could understand Huston’s reason for casting 186

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Wayne. So I asked him why while I was working for him in London in 1974, and he told me. “I felt that Wayne was the right actor to play Townsend. He had proved he could act in Red River and The Searchers, and I wanted to tap into that talent. I saw Wayne as a giant form among the tiny people who existed in the exotic world of Japan in the 1880s. I thought, Who better to symbolize the big and awkward country that was the United States back then? I was sure Wayne was the right choice. I made a terrible mistake.

“I had no idea that Wayne would have any kind of vanity. But he kept saying, ‘My best profile is on the right,’ so I shot his left profile whenever I could. A film should be a partnership between director and actor. But we were at odds almost from the beginning.”

Having some knowledge of both men and their work, it didn’t surprise me that the combination of Huston and Wayne was a disaster in the making. As Wayne told me, “I just couldn’t connect with Huston, though God knows I tried. The script was being rewritten with new pages each day. He’d promised me he’d get a decent script together, but he never did. We had no goddamn plot.

I’d go up to his room and ask what we were going to be shooting in the morning, and he’d say ‘Duke, just look at that view. Isn’t it magnificent?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, great. But what are we doing tomorrow?’ I could never get a straight answer.

“After just a few days of filming, I realized that I was just a character in Huston’s idea of a narrated tapestry. There seemed to be no real exploration of the character of Townsend. I guess Huston thought it was enough to say that Townsend was like John Wayne, and so he just put me through a series of admittedly beautifully shot scenes, but with no substance. I told him that there were all sorts of things we could do to make the story about people, and not just a series of moving photographs. But he thought his images were more important than his characters.”

Playing Townsend’s interpreter was Sam Jaffe, whom I interviewed by telephone in 1981. He was an incredible ninety-one years old then and still working up until his death in 1984. He said, “It was obvious from the start that Huston and Wayne were not going to work well together. It didn’t help that we never had a completed script when we started the film, and we were having to learn new 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 188

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lines every day. I could see Huston was trying to make a beautiful film, and you couldn’t fault him for the way he shot it. But Wayne had a point too. He couldn’t get inside the head of Townsend, and Huston wasn’t giving him anything to go by. So Wayne just played Wayne in a top hat. There was nothing else he could do. Wayne told me that he relied on people like John Ford and Howard Hawks to push him into giving a performance that was not just another John Wayne role. Huston just didn’t want to do that. Perhaps with another actor, Huston might have been able to get the picture he wanted.

They both cared about the picture, make no mistake. But they thought they were making two different pictures.”

Huston told me a story about a near catastrophe which occurred during filming. His disdain for Wayne showed. “We nearly had a disaster when we were shooting the scene where Townsend sets fire to a village infected with cholera. Then he took the dead bodies and put them on boats and set fire to them. We had a barge which was some forty feet long which was supposed to be full of these bodies.

We set fire to it and launched it. We had a line attached but the line somehow broke and the barge drifted free. We got some fine shots of it, but the problem was that a wind blew up and drove it into some fishing boats anchored in a small cove. The