John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [146]
“He was producing the film, and I’d produced a lot of my films, and he butted into everything, and I’ve done that too, but he beat me at it by a long shot. I mean, he’d push directors around and he’d say,
‘You’re putting the camera there? Jesus, put it here.’ Now this was out in the countryside and whichever way you pointed the camera there was beautiful scenery.
“Our director Burt Kennedy was very talented. But he was gentle.
Wayne was not very gentle all the time, and he was not a very talented director. And he gave Burt a lot of trouble. I tried to get Burt to stand up to him. I thought of how Otto Preminger had treated Tom Tryon [on In Harm’s Way] where the director bullied the actor. Here was an actor bullying the director, although Wayne was never as offensive as Preminger.”
Burt Kennedy denied that Wayne had bullied him when we spoke in 1979. He said, “Duke was producing the film and he felt responsible for everything that ended up on the screen. I’m sure he would have preferred to have directed it as well because he knew what he wanted. But he’d tried directing and that hadn’t turned out well for him. So he chose directors he could trust, which is why he chose Andy McLaglen a lot of times. I only did a few pictures with Duke. The War Wagon was the first. I only did one other, The Train Robbers. I’m not sure if it was me who didn’t want to do too many with him or he didn’t want to do too many with me. Maybe he got his own way with Andy [McLaglen] more than he did me.
But I wouldn’t call him a bully.
“I would say that it seemed to me that Duke and Kirk respected each other but didn’t really like each other. They’d argue about politics, and they had such a great rivalry that it produced sparks on the screen which I used to great effect. When they did the scene 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 274
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where they shot two bad guys—where Kirk says, ‘Mine hit the ground first,’ and Duke says, ‘Mine was taller’—that was their real-life rivalry being taken advantage of. And they both thought it was great to play off each other that way. It made the film work as well as it did.”
When I asked Wayne about working with Kirk Douglas, he said, “In recent years, I’ve worked in partnership with only three actors who I could honestly say I had a chemistry with. One was Dean Martin. One was Mitchum. The third was Kirk. Didn’t matter what he thought of me or what I thought of him. He was wonderful to work with, and he is a great actor. I’ll tell you something; he would try and hog the scene just as much as I might do sometimes. It didn’t happen in the first two films we did, but it did in The War Wagon, and Burt Kennedy said, ‘That’s just the way it should be. You’re making the sparks fly. People are gonna love this.’
“That Kirk! I tell ya, I’ve heard that he says I’m a bit of a bully with directors, but I’ve heard stories from some directors about him.
And I heard that his pal Burt Lancaster is the same. I never worked with Lancaster. Would’ve loved to. Met up with him once or twice, and I said, ‘You, me, and Kirk have got to make a picture together.’
He said, ‘That’d be great. You could push me around and I’ll push Kirk around and let’s see if he can push you around.’ He was kidding, but he had a point. The three of us together in one film would give the director a heart attack.”
Kirk recalled one of Wayne’s tricks to dominate a scene: “I realized that when there were others in a lineup with him, he’d be in the middle, and he’d have two cowboys to his left and two to his right. He’d turn to the left and say something, and he’d turn to the right and say something, and then they’d all move forward.
“I found myself in that kind of lineup in one scene, standing to his right, and as he turned left to say something, I bent down and poured myself a cup of coffee from the fire. He