Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [75]
To pass the time between scenes, Steve raced his 150 mph Grand Prix motorcycle (which Fox had brought over for him) all over the Taiwanese countryside. The roadside officials were told never to stop him, no matter what speed he reached.
Back home, the McQueen publicity machine was hard at work keeping Steve’s name in the American consciousness while he settled in for the long shoot. “I’ve got apples, bananas and nuts on the table,” he told one interviewer. “I’ve got a great ‘old lady’ in Neile and two terrific children. It’s pretty damn good, all of it!”
No one, including Steve, could foresee that the shoot, originally set for nine weeks, would stretch into seven months. It quickly became a nightmare for Steve, his wife, and the kids, all of whom came to intensely dislike living in Taiwan. As Neile later recalled, “Taiwan was the pits. There is no other way to describe it. It was dirty and malodorous and because the country was technically at war with Red China, it was also, for all intents and purposes, a virtual military base … the war in Vietnam had been escalating rapidly and Taiwan was being used by our troops for ‘R and R.’ ”
Because of the location conditions, Robert Wise later described the film as “[t]he most difficult picture I ever made.” The weather was unstable; it could be 86 degrees one day and 30 degrees the next. And it rained almost every day they were there. Nobody had figured on the rainy season being a factor, but it forced Wise to continually change exteriors to interiors, shoots that were originally scheduled for Hollywood, now done to fill time during the weather-wasted days.
Living in an undeclared war zone that was the focal point for two wars (Vietnam, and Chiang’s ongoing dispute with the mainland), bad food, poor housing, and severely limited social opportunities all contributed to the harder-than-usual shoot. Most of the other male actors and crew had taken to living on the ship, where conditions were actually better than they were in Taiwan, and the construct quickly became something of a social scene, rumored to be the main hangout for American soldiers either going into or coming out of Vietnam. Steve was said to have slept over on several occasions to help him get into character.
Troubles of another sort began when Steve insisted he be able to sit in on the dailies, the footage shot the previous day and screened to make sure it was usable, and to help with the actors’ continuity—clothes, hair, and so on. It is not all that common for actors to ask to watch dailies, as most don’t want to sit through them, but Steve told Wise that he should be allowed to see his scenes every morning. Wise agreed but soon came to regret it when midway through Steve told Wise he didn’t like the way he was being directed. Wise asked what he meant, and Steve said he didn’t like his readings of lines and the way he was being lit. Wise tried to brush it off, but Steve wouldn’t let him. Every day he complained to Wise that Holman would not say the things he was being forced to say in the script, that he (Steve or Holman) was not that verbal, that he didn’t need to be the film’s vehicle for so much of its exposition.
To keep peace, Wise allowed Steve to improvise some of his lines, and even agreed to Steve’s suggestion that they shoot each scene he was in two ways, meaning Wise’s way and Steve’s way, despite the huge extra expense it created. Wise was able to comfort himself knowing, at least in part, that Steve was spending his own money.
He did not let up on his complaints about the script, and eventually, in an attempt to appease him, Wise let Anderson go, something the screenwriter was not at all upset about; he had had more than enough of Steve and his improvisations. (Although another writer was brought in, Anderson and McKenna are the officially credited screenwriters.)
Then Steve complained