"Play Misty for me." "Misty, huh?" "Don't you like me?" "Stop it, you dirty bastard!" "You're a very nice girl." "But who needs nice girls?" "Yeah, get lost, asshole!" "I never said anything about not coming back for seconds." "Don't spoil my fun, darling." "I love to give you things." "I just want to say how sorry I am about everything." "The thing I hate the most in the whole world is a jealous female." "It's that other bitch, isn't it?" "Why didn't you take my call?" "Thank you, David." "You're not helping me, buster blue-eyes!" "Get off my back, Evelyn!" "Bye!" "Will I see you tomorrow?" "Aren't you going to play Misty for me?" "First time I thought about being a director was way after I'd become an actor." "I think it was when I was doing Rawhide and I had had some discussions with the producers at that time to direct an episode or so." "That didn't pan out for one reason or another." "So I did some second-unit stuff and little bits and pieces here and there." "I think Don Siegel was probably my biggest sponsor of the idea of directing films." "I had worked with him on quite a few films and we enjoyed the collaboration very much." "When I went to him in 1970 and told him that I had this little project that I wanted to direct he said, "By all means." "Let me support you on that." ""Let me sign your Directors' Guild of America card," and all that sort of thing." "It was a great period of my life, because it started another segment." "It was a very experimental time for me." "I was going off and doing a Paint Your Wagon, kind of, musical thing up in Oregon and then coming back and doing Beguiled, and then Misty." "Beguiled not being a particularly commercial success to follow it with Misty..." "The logical thing would have been to do an adventure film Dirty Harry or something, but that didn't work out that way." "Jo Heims was a girl that I'd known for many, many years." "She was a legal secretary." "She'd say, "I'm going to be a screenwriter some day."" "I'd say, "Yeah, I'm an actor, and I'm studying acting," what have you." "One day, some years later, she came up with a treatment called Play Misty for Me." "I liked the Alfred Hitchcock, kind of thriller aspect but the main thing I liked about it was, beyond that, the story was very real." "The story was believable, because these kind of commitments or misinterpreting thereof, go on all the time." "Jo Heims had a female friend that was very much a stalker type and she didn't commit homicide, or anything like that but she went around and completely harassed this person that she knew very slightly." "It was a great statement on stalking." "Nobody had ever thought much about that in those days, 1970." "And that's something I hadn't seen in suspense films in general." "So I optioned the treatment from her." "Told her that I'd want to get around to it some day and then later on, I was working on a film in Europe and Jo called me up and she said:" ""If you're not going to make that picture..." ""..." "I've got an opportunity to sell it to Universal..." ""...and they're offering me good dough, and I really need it."" "So, because I was occupied at the time, I said, "I can't hold you back..." ""...from making some good money, so you go ahead and sell it."" "Clint Eastwood, hero for hire." "Blazes his way across a land of lust and injustice." "Later on, I had a three-picture deal with Universal and became very tied in with them, so I went to Lew Wasserman, and I said:" ""You've got this little project," and I said, "I want to do it, and I'll be in it."" "And I said, "I'd also like to direct it."" "And without missing a beat, Lew looked across the desk and said:" ""That's fine." "That's very good."" "So I said, "Boy, that was easy."" "So I got up to leave, and I started walking down the hallway, and my agent Lenny Hirshan, was with me, and I said to him, "Boy, that was easy."" "And all of a sudden I heard behind him:" ""Lenny, can we talk to you a minute?"" "So they called him back, and they said:" ""Yeah, we don't mind clint directing this film." ""We just don't want to pay him."" ""We don't want to pay him his regular three-picture deal." ""We want to pay him less." Lenny came back later and said:" ""What do you think?" And I said, "Fine, I'll do it for nothing." ""They're smart not to pay me." "They should make me show my stuff."" "Lenny said, "Let me go back and get just a percentage..." ""...of the gross profits and we won't ask for anything."" "And I said, "That's fine by me."" "Turned out to be a good choice, but I would have done it for nothing." "I think most people who really want to do something badly will do that." "So I think they were saying:" ""We'll let him go ahead and make this little film..." ""...and then he'll go back and he'll do some big adventure for us..." ""...and it doesn't matter."" "I think they were somewhat placating me at the time." "Clint and I had known each other for many years." "We had lived in the same apartment complex." "When he was first getting started, we had worked in the same lot Universal International, it was called then." "We discussed the business back and forth, and we used to say:" ""Maybe some day we can make our own movies."" "Of course, his career took off very quickly and he asked me, "Why don't we get together?" "Come to work at Malpaso."" "And I'd been there just a few weeks when he brought me this script." "He was shooting Beguiled at the time with Don Siegel." "He said, "See what you think about it."" "So I read it." "I loved it, identified." "And he said, "I'd like to do this next."" "And I said, "You are thinking of directing it, aren't you?"" "And he was kind of a little shy to say yes about it." "But I said, "No, you've got a handle on it."" "He had spent all those seven and a half years on Rawhide not just doing his part and going home." "He had been watching what went on, on the set been learning the trade from behind the camera." "So I thought, "This is your chance."" "Jo Heims was the one who wrote the original story and then she and Dean Riesner cooperated on the screenplay." "Dean Riesner was a writer I'd worked with before with Don." "I'd met him through Don." "We worked on coogan's Bluff and a couple of projects." "He was very good." "He told me the story of Misty and of course I was thrilled." "I was delighted, and he indicated that he'd like me to do it." "But he had his definite ideas about the way he wanted to do it." "He cleaned up some of the set-ups at the beginning." "He had the perspective of the part that I was playing, of Dave keeping his outlook, at the same time, not losing the characters of the girls." "This particular story it seemed very true to me." "It seemed very real." "I liked that quality that it had." "It started off gently, and then it built beautifully, I thought." "Play Misty for me." "I was looking for somebody who could play this role and was attractive but at the same time had sort of a quirky side to them and that's Jessica." "She's certainly a terrific gal, terrific actress." "I had actually just moved to California." "I'd done several movies in New York a lot of television in New York, a lot of theater." "I had been in a film Sidney Lumet directed, wonderful movie, called The Group." "And she played a gal." "And they had a lot of girls wonderful parts in there for women." "She had a smaller part, but it was very, very effective." "He had looked at that film for another actress." "There were eight actresses in that movie." "The Group was comprised of eight women." "He had seen me in the movie." "There was one scene in there where she's been flirting with this ski instructor and he finally gets annoyed." "He slapped her." "And the look on her face, it was just something, and I said:" ""Yeah, that's the person." "That's the person I want."" "And I learned a very good lesson:" "Never to show The Group to anybody because there were too many good actresses in that movie." "But that's how he came to call me." "The studio, of course, wanted a name." "They wanted Lee Remick and various other people they had mentioned." "But when Jessica came in the office, I took one look at her and I said:" ""Do you wanna do this film?" She says, "You bet!" and I said, "Okay."" "And I was most pleasantly surprised when I met him for the first time because he was totally un-moviestar-like." "Anybody who knows him will tell you he's very laid back very quiet, soft-spoken." "I was very impressed with him at the first meeting I had, which was long." "He was drinking carrot juice." "This was before health foods were really popular, you know." "I thought, "Oh, my God!"" "He offered me some, and of course, I politely said, "No, thanks."" "But I liked him immediately." "You can't not like him." "I was looking for somebody who just had that zip." "Something like the old-time actresses used to have." "Any of those actresses that came up in the '40s they had all that kind of edge to them." "In 1970, there wasn't a lot of that." "We were in an era where women's roles were really secondary to the male leads in the film." "Most of them were the girl next door, very little depth to them." "I thought that this is one of the best roles for a woman to be a villain in a film, which wasn't being done at that time." "It was a very interesting time for me, right before I got Misty." "I was doing a soap opera in New York, and I had told them I was leaving." "They wanted me to sign, and I said:" ""No, I've been there three years." "It's enough." "I really wanna go."" "I had come out, as part of my contract on that to do a night-time television show, and it was a day in August." "I was talking to Burt Reynolds." "I said, "I'm looking for a girl..." ""...who's got a certain look, but also has some character."" "And he said, "I just worked with this girl on a television episode..." ""...and she was really good."" "Two weeks later, I got a call from my agent saying:" ""You got a movie!" I said, "Really?" "How?"" "He said, "They just wanna hire you." "It's a movie with clint Eastwood."" "I liked her right away." "She was another one that I made a very quick decision on." "Burt Reynolds showed him the dailies." "He hired me right from that." "I never met him, never read for him, never auditioned, tested, nothing." "I thought she'd be a good contrast to Jessica, a good contrast to what was going on between them as opposed to what was going on between his relationship with Jessica's role of Evelyn." "And I finished the soap opera on a Friday, came here wardrobed on Saturday and Sunday and went up to Carmel and started shooting Monday morning." "And I'd never met Clint until the night before." "We met in the bar just to say hello." "You always try to hire the best people." "If they're well known, then it works fine." "If they're not, you hire 'em anyway because they're the best for that particular part." "I'm Sergeant Mccallum." "John Larch, a very good actor who I knew and had played golf with." "This is Sweet Al Monte saying, "Hang in there..." ""...because everything is going to be everything!"" "Jim McEachin was a guy who I thought had a lot of character who would be an interesting co-disc jockey." "Mr. Garver, Madge Brenner." "The other people that came along were just all the very best for that particular part." "Let's try to show a little class, shall we?" "Mr. Garver's residence." "Directing and acting wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be on Misty." "I had seen it done before many times." "There are many precedents for it:" "Everybody from Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier and all the people who had tried it, some of them quite successfully." "After a while, I got so you could throw the switch a little bit." "Don kept on me all the time about, "Don't slough yourself." ""The big temptation is going to be to spend all the time..." ""...with the other actors and then slough your own performance."" "So I had to be careful, and I always remembered those words." "That's the one thing you have to be mindful of." "And as I've done it now over the years, it's been 30 years since I still, once in a while, remind myself, "Take your time." ""Don't want to move on to the next thing..." ""...because you've got everybody else covered."" "I was a bit nervous about him directing because this was the first thing he had directed and actors directing isn't always the best idea." "They generally have not a great reputation as far as doing movies, and things like that." "He was intimidating, but I knew from the first day of shooting that he was a director who knew exactly what he wanted exactly how to get it." "He had everything totally planned and made me feel very comfortable, because no matter what we were doing he'd look at me, too, and he'd say, "Did you like that?" "Is that okay?"" "I'd say, "Yeah, okay."" "I never thought once about the fact that he would be both starring in the movie and directing it." "It never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with it." "Actually, it was a nice match because he doesn't like to do too many takes and I don't, either." "So usually we only did one or two, maybe three takes on a shot." "We had the same feeling about not over-rehearsing." "It was a good match, I think." "We wanted to be away from the studio because there's a certain spirit in the crew when you're on location." "It's like an army in the field, no matter where you go." "But especially Carmel, which was so photogenic and really lent itself to the story beautifully." "And Clint knew it, which was a great advantage because we didn't have to scout." "He'd say, "I can shoot this here."" "It seemed to me that it would be a smaller location." "It would be much more of a disc jockey being a big fish in a small pond rather than LA, where there's hundreds of stations and many disc jockeys and so forth." "So I knew a guy here who worked for a local station, who was sort of like this guy." "He was very, very popular, and he was kind of a well known celebrity just being a well known disc jockey in the area." "It could have worked in any small town." "I could have made it in any small town in America." "But it seemed, because I knew this one, I picked this one." "And it also allowed me the chance to work at home." "David, my man!" "His home in the film belonged to Malcolm, I can't think of Malcolm's last name who lived in that house where clint's character lived and who ran a little art store where they made sculptures in which we shot, where Donna Mills was working." "And he knew the house on the cliff, the restaurants." "They all knew him, even though he wasn't mayor yet for many years." "He was like the unofficial mayor of the town." "Everybody cooperated." "We had great cooperation." "It was a small picture." "It didn't cost very much." "I think the direct costs on the film were $700,000 or $725,000 or something less any overhead." "That was, even in those days, still considered very modest." "In those days, it was very unusual to have every shot in a movie especially an under-$1-million-budget movie be on the location." "He was adamant that it be done this way." "Nothing fake:" "No makeup, no process shots no studio shots." "I think it shows." "It's very European in that way." "I didn't want it to look like a television show even though nowadays, if I was shooting it for television I'd shoot it the same way." "It was done all on natural sets." "There were no sets built for it." "Very limited art direction." "Most everything was just done by everybody on the crew pitching in." "This is Dave Garver with a little verse, a little talk and five hours of music to be very, very nice to each other by." "I never had any idea of presentation except that I had guest disc-jockeyed a few times in my life and I figured he was a jazz disc jockey, so he was probably not mainstream pop with the AM mania, quick-talking, like that, kind of guy." "Jazz disc jockeys are more cool, a little more laid back." "Johnny Adams was the local disc jockey at KRML, the station we used." "He was very quiet-talking, very smooth-talking, very conversational." "KRML, Dave Garver speaking." "Hello?" "Hi, what'll it be?" "Play Misty for me." "Misty, huh?" "We have that right on the play rack." "Play Misty for Me was the original title." "I always thought it was great because Misty was a classic song that had spanned quite a few generations." "It spanned the '60s, '70s, '80s and it's continued on being popular today." "The studio suggested, "How about using a song that Universal owns..." ""..." "like Strangers in the Night?" and I said:" ""What, like, Play Strangers in the Night for Me?"" "I said, "That's been used in a film very recent to that."" "And they said, "At the end of Strangers in the Night..." ""...he says, 'Scooby-Dooby-Doo."'" "And I said, "How about Play Scooby-Dooby-Doo for Me?"" "Right then, I said, "You know, this conversation's coming to an end."" "So we bought the song Misty, which cost $25,000 which was a lot of money then, from Erroll Garner." "I think it was important to keep a classic song that everybody knew and not to sort of whore out and decide that because the studio owned that particular piece was not my idea of something to do." "We wanted to add strings to it, and at that particular time Garner was alive, and so we made the deal to cover him coming back, playing the tune and then adding in strings, and making it a little bit different version than he was playing on the radio, which was a record which only had Erroll Garner, with brushes and bass." "Dee, I'd known a long time." "He hadn't done a lot of movie scores, but he was a band leader in Los Angeles." "I needed somebody that was affordable, because I was on a very limited budget and I wanted somebody who was young and energetic and would bring maybe a newer shot to it rather than using the same people that had been doing these kind of movies over and over." "Hi, Murphy." "Hi, Dave." "No messages for you." "He had worked with Don two or three films before that." "We felt, "Well, this might be a good idea..." ""...in case clint needs a little backup." "We'll start with Don..." ""...who's a director, and with clint, who's going to be a director..." ""...and Don, who's going to be an actor, and Clint, who is an actor."" "There was nothing to worry about." "Clint just immediately took charge." "He thought I was crazy doing it." "He says, "Why aren't you hiring a really good, competent actor?"" "I said, "This'll be a great experience for you, Don." ""You've been on this side of the camera but not on the other side." ""It'll make you more sympathetic to actors' problems..." ""...and also, it gives me an opportunity to have you there."" "I said, "What happens if I fall on my face?" "I've got you..." ""...and everybody'll feel happy about that."" "So he came and did it." "He was so nervous." "He would've been no help if I'd asked him any pointers anyway because he was so intense about trying to get this role so worried about every line." "Finally, I made him throw away pieces of script and improvise a lot of it." "Thanks for the plug." "What are friends for?" "Bartender?" "Coke?" "Coming right up." "I thought she should look terribly average, in an average mode of dress." "In those days it was the mini-skirts with the boots little jacket, a little blouse." "Not fancy at all." "I think my clothing budget was probably $300 for the whole thing which would have been $600 in those days." "No money was spent on clothing, and not on makeup because Clint doesn't like makeup." "He would say, "I don't want that shot-out-of-a-cannon Universal look."" "Because in those days, the makeup was so thick, and fake eyelashes and he really stuck to it." "You know, I tried to sneak on makeup and he'd give me one of those looks so I'd wash it off." "One game?" "Cry Bastion?" "What else?" "Okay, coach." "The bartender was based from the bartender that I knew, named Murphy." "So I thought it'd be fun to play the game that was called Cry Bastion that Murphy used to play." "Cry Bastion was just a fake game." "They'd set up a lot of bottle tops on the bar and they'd yell, "Cry Bastion!" And move the bottle tops and people would watch, and say, "No, no, no!"" "Palfrey's Gambit." "Dirty rat." "And so we just set it up and played it, and I just told Don, I said:" ""The game doesn't make sense." "It's a ploy to get the interest..." ""...of somebody who's sitting down the way." ""So just make it up as you go." So we kind of made it up." "At the beginning, he took his script and he clipped it all, and he had little pieces stuck in various areas so he thought he could go read the lines real quick." "Cry Bastion!" "I said, "Don, you can't do that." "In the first place, your eyesight isn't..." ""You're sitting there, looking, staring at something, it looks kind of odd." ""Just say anything."" "Nice game." " Congratulations." " Thank you." "What happened?" "I won." "How?" "When?" "When you said, "Okay."" "I oughta be mad." "There's a big trap when you play someone who's crazy and that's to play them like they're crazy." "I played her as if she were the all-American girl next door." "It was that simple." "I never thought of her as crazy." "It's important that she be a seemingly normal person or else there's no fun in discovering that she's not." "The studio suggested, "Why don't we show her as an escapee..." ""...from a mental institution or something?"" "I said, "If you know she's a mental case, then there's no mystery to the story."" "It would be much more frightening psychologically if you didn't know where she was coming from." "So we didn't start it off that way because I think that would have given the whole thing away." "As a matter of fact, we changed certain things in the original script." "When they met at the bar, and he asked, "What do you want?"" "The original was, "I'll have a vodka stinger" or something and I said, "No, no, no." "We shouldn't have any kind of allusions..." ""...to the fact that she might be going off the deep end or something."" "Care for a drink?" "Okay." " What'll it be?" " Surprise me." "And then, there was another scene, where she comes to the door of his place." "What do you want, Evelyn?" "One coke?" "That was originally, "Can I have a drink?"" "But I didn't want her to be a drinker, a smoker." "I wanted her to be just as pure as the driven snow." "Don't you like me?" "You're a very nice girl." "Everything seemed kind of idyllic, until little things start springing up." "Slowly, we get the clues that there's something odd there." "How'd you like to go screw yourself?" "Hey, take it easy." "She gets all kind of wrapped up in being coquettish, very child-like and the other times, she goes into madness and the other times, she's very sexual or sensual." "All those three things are very typical of schizophrenia." "Surprise!" "I had a very simple through-line." "She had to have this man or die." "And everything came off that." "The objectives of every scene, why she did what she did the logic of what she did was to save her life." "Because if she didn't have him, she would die." "Bye!" "See you later!" "I never thought of Misty as a horror movie." "I thought of it as a very intense love story." "That's my character's point of view, but that's how I thought of it." "I think every actor has to like the person that they're playing." "There's gotta be something about even the worst people in the world that is good about them, and you have to find that in the person because you have to play the vulnerability." "You don't have to come over, if you've got something to do." "That's all right." "I'll be over in a little while." "You and I are going to have to have a talk." "Actually, we suggested to do which Fatal Attraction did when they remade the film or came close to remaking it, was to make him a guy who maybe was married or something." "Then I thought, "No, because..." ""...obviously there's a big problem there, because then he's philandering, etc."" "This way, he doesn't really have any commitments." "He's got this girlfriend he'd like to reconcile with but basically, he's a free guy and how does a free guy get manipulated like that?" "That's what makes it interesting." "Let me come over." "If I could just see you, just talk to you." "No, Evelyn." "But I love you, David, I love you." "I really give Clint credit for a lot of things that made me look good in that movie." "I don't care how many ways you say it!" "It's not true!" " What do I have to do to convince you?" " No, it's not true!" "Let me just wash my face." "I remember in the suicide, when she's in the bathroom when I drop down slowly to the floor and you see the wrists are all bloody that's all him, I can't take credit for any of that." "The scene in the bed where she wakes up screaming from a nightmare after she's tried to kill herself..." "Take it easy!" "I had a dream, I was drowning in the ocean." "The way he shot that, and the camera then goes in to him and you see him, and he's trapped." "That's where she's using every tool, including not only the threat of suicide but the attempt of suicide." "And she's got him completely under her thumb now and we pull back and we pull back and the whole idea was that he's just a trapped animal." "He can't do anything." "The big question when I started to make this film because I was associated with action films, especially in the '60s and the studio seemed to think I had some obligation to be a person who was infallible kind of indestructible, maybe." "I said, "That's not this movie."" "This movie is a person who, regardless of his physical strength is totally at the mercy of the manipulations of this particular person." "Isn't this nice?" "Just us here together." "A wonderful thing about Clint as a director was the fact that he would go with you if you improvised a little bit." "Is that your idea of a dish?" "My God, she's a little old for you, isn't she?" "I remember, in the scene where I find him in a restaurant..." "She couldn't get laid in a lumber camp!" "...and I scream at her, and he throws me into a taxicab." "She's nothing!" "Nothing!" "We couldn't even loop." "We had to do looping on a lot of scenes." "We couldn't loop the scene where I'm in the taxi screaming:" ""I only did it because I love you!" etc., because it was so crazy." " Please, I did it because I love you!" " Where to?" "Don't you understand?" "When it came to looping, I said, "I don't think I can do that."" "Because I couldn't follow, nobody could follow it." "He said, "Okay, then we won't."" "That kind of going with the artistic choice rather than the technical." "I'm not very happy with you." "Oh, God!" "I always saw her as somebody who screamed." "I mean, I've never killed anybody, so I don't know what it must be like." "I should think it's a huge release, which includes screaming." "We certainly looped a lot of screams into that movie." "And I learned how to handle a knife." "There's a way Clint taught me." "You have to hold it like this and then twist it so it catches the light." "It looks so scary and eerie that way." "When we did the scene of hacking up the maid he wanted blood." "And this darling make-up artist that I loved, Jack Freeman brought little Visine bottles of blood." "And Clint said: "No, you don't understand." "I want buckets!"" "And sure enough, Jack went and got more blood in pails." "Splashed them all over the walls." "He went all the way!" "Please, somebody!" "Oh, God, help me!" "What she really needs is psychiatric help." "Really?" "I need a couple more days to try and figure out where I'm at." "I wanted to do a nice idyllic scene where he was reconciling with the girlfriend Donna Mills' character." "I heard the Roberta Flack song on the radio coming to work one day and I said:" ""Yeah, this tells the story." ""If I could buy that..." I had a little problem buying it but we finally got it." "He brought me into his trailer, and he said: "I want you to hear a song." ""I want to do a montage sequence to this song, I just heard it on the radio..." ""...and I bought it."" "He played it for me and I went, "Wow."" "I mean, it's the most beautiful song I've ever heard." "He said, "I want to do this beautiful sequence." ""There's going to be some nudity in it." "Can you handle that?"" "I said, "Oh, God." ""What's my mother going to say?"" "I was nervous about it." "He said, "I'll tell you what." ""I'll let you see it after it's cut and everything." ""If there's anything in it that you find offensive or don't like, I'll take it out."" "I said, "Okay."" "I was nervous shooting it." "More than anything, I was cold." "So that's how it came about." "He found the song he conceived the montage to it and then it went into the movie." "It was like an organic thing that he needed to put in there that he really felt strongly about." "He worked very hard on that montage." "And I thought it was one of the most beautiful pieces of film I'd ever seen." "At the time, strangely enough, a lot of people didn't like it." "They felt that it was intrusive." "Not that they didn't like the sequence." "They felt that it kind of came in the middle of the movie." "Then the movie went on again." "I think Clint really knew what he was doing by putting it there to kind of ease the tension, and then start it again." "At the jazz festival that day, we shot 30,000 feet of film." "We had cameramen all over." "We said, "Grab anything you can."" "That wasn't a crowd of extras, you know, all set up and stuff." "We just went in with a bare crew, sound and camera, no lights, nothing and shot it." "And that, again, is a precursor to the way things are shot because at that time, nothing was shot that way." "Now they shoot television things that way, but they didn't then." "I thought it was really inventive and really good." "It took a huge amount of editing." "Carl Pingitore, the editor, had his work cut out for him culling that down, and making it into a workable montage." "But this was strictly clint's idea and his creation." "The big problem I had was how to hide from the audience who are much smarter than most people give them credit for the fact that Evelyn is going to move in with the Donna Mills character." "How do I hide that?" "If we go ahead and have a scene where Donna Mills starts talking about the roommate." "Then right away, people would get the sense of something." "I kind of buried it in the jazz festival." "I've got to pick up my roommate, Annabel." "Madalyn's your roommate." "I found my man and I'm moving out." " And Annabel's moving in." " Right." "I didn't want to hammer it home so everybody goes, "Here comes the roommate."" "So it does come as a surprise." "At least for most of us, I think it did." "That was the cannonball Adderley group now at the Monterey Jazz Festival..." "Camera moves are fine but sometimes stillness can be very effective." "I could have come around, I suppose slid around and pivoted on the blinking phone in the foreground and everybody'd go, "The blinking phone," and what have you." "This way, it's just there." "Keep it very quiet and calm, and later on you can move around as things get more radical." "Hello?" "Play Misty for me." "You also don't want to give away what's going on." "I guess I could have done it from behind somebody's hand or something walking across a room and gone in to his face." "Right away, you know something's going to happen." "I didn't want that, I just wanted him sleeping." "The idea is, you don't know if he's dreaming and then he looks up and bam, she's there." "I hope we're lucky enough to grab her next time she tries it." "Tries what?" "To kill you." "You and I ought to stay away from each other for a couple of days." "She's already following you, isn't she?" "I don't want you to worry." "I can handle myself." "Annabel, how's that stuff coming?" "Hope you like cinnamon in yours." "Working with Jessica Walter was wonderful." "She's a wonderful actress." "I met her probably the second or third day of shooting." "Actually, we became very good friends and I lived in her guest house when I came down to Los Angeles because I didn't have a place to live." "She offered me her guest house to live in." "The eyes are wrong." "David's are more how shall I say colder." "She's a very precise actress." "Very strong, so that you never felt wishy-washy with her." "You always knew exactly what was going to be done, how it was going to be done." "God, you're dumb." "The funny thing is, off screen, we were running around together and seeing all of the sights and things like that." "And on screen, she was cutting off my hair and trying to kill me." " Tobie." " We're waiting for you, David." "The painting was done by a local artist, a guy named Don Heitkotter." "I think he's up in San Jose now, but he was here at the time." "He just volunteered to do it." "He said, "Will you give me a credit on the screen?"" "I said: "Fine." "The only trouble is this is a movie..." ""...so I need three or four copies..." ""...of this one she tears up."" "I was just trying to keep the intensity of him coming in there and meanwhile, she's killing him, in a visual way, with the painting." "So I made a lot of different angles of her cutting." "And I did a lot of equally different angles of my character driving down the highway." "So I had a lot of variety, so I don't come back to the same shot, back and forth." "It's different each time, so it's somewhat disorienting but, in a way, it keeps the audience on their toes." "What's happened to the other girl, nobody knows yet." "We haven't cut to that." "We just see her at the painting." "Maybe she's killed her, too." "Maybe not." "We don't know." "So we keep that in the offing." "Careful." "What I had to do to poor Donna, cutting her hair and menacing her." "Careful." "The poor girl." "Does he run his fingers through your hair?" "I was wearing a wig because I didn't want them to cut my hair." "Have to get you all nice for David." "But it was still scary because they were huge scissors and she was very close to my face." "I hope he likes what he sees when he walks in here." "I didn't realize, when we were shooting it, how scary it was going to be..." "Because that's what he's taking to hell with him." "...until I saw the movie." "He's a master at setting up that kind of suspense." "I think that was the most exhausting sequence in the movie." "Many, many days on that." "But of course, when you're acting and you're enjoying what you're doing, you could go on forever." "Clint is always prepared." "He always knows what's going to happen." "It was very carefully blocked, and it was carefully plotted out." "It was tiring but it's an exhilarating kind of tiring." "I like not seeing things specifically and the night offers you a way to do that." "You get little excerpts of things and you can also use sound effects." "Things like that puts everybody ill at ease." "I was kind of winging a lot of things." "I had a definite plan in mind but by the same token, I'm not averse to altering that plan or embellishing that plan as I'm filming." "And because I move rather quickly, I get my motor going and I also get the motor going of all the members of the crew and everybody starts giving you good input and good things happen." "You've heard about people in institutions where you get a person that's crazy has sometimes a tremendous amount of strength." "Here's this crazy person who's got a kitchen knife." "She's already committed homicide." "She's already gone way over the top so it's going to be a desperation move." "I wasn't playing a violent character like some of the other movies." "This guy's a disc jockey." "He's never been in a situation like this." "So he's kind of desperate about his girlfriend and about himself." "There was quite a bit of discussion about clint hitting a woman and knocking her through the window." "As Clint said, "By that time..." ""...anybody is going to want to knock her through the window."" "In the original story the detective is stabbed, but not killed by Evelyn so at the ending of the story, he conveniently shoots Evelyn." "And that's the end of it." "Well, I wanted a little bigger thing, so we rented a house that's on a cliff down on the highlands here, south of Carmel someplace where it could all go over the top." "I thought the cliff and her and the sea and the playing of Misty would be quite dynamic rather than just having her shot and lying on the floor." "My stunt double, who was a wonderful stunt lady named Julie Johnson that I had actually worked with before." "She took the final punch at the end of the film." "That was a dummy that went all that way." "She went a little way and then the dummy went all the way." "Then when you see Evelyn lying in the water in the Pacific Ocean thirty degrees that was me." "It had a nice irony to it." "This woman's at the bottom of the cliff and he's walking off injured and wounded and the girlfriend's injured and wounded." "And this one is especially for Evelyn." "Everybody's trying to gather up what's left and here's this beautiful theme that comes on which is associated very romantically." "I was petrified going to the first sneak preview." "I don't like going to those anyway." "So we snuck in, in San Jose." "I put on a hat and glasses and disguised myself in a beard or what have you." "I went and sat in the audience." "I sat in behind all these teenage girls." "It was going along well and the first time there was a psychotic moment out of Evelyn these gals jumped out of their teeth." "How would you like to go screw yourself?" "By then, I thought, "I think we're on the road to something here."" "Don was very proud of it and he and John cassavettes came over." "John liked it a lot, too." "He thought it was great." "He said, "There's only one trouble with this movie." ""It doesn't have Hitchcock's name on it."" "I said, "Really?" and he said, "Yeah, if his name was on it..." ""...people would be giving this all kinds of things."" "It opened up, among other places, at the Cinerama Dome Theatre in Hollywood." "They had a four week engagement there." "Each week, it would do a little bigger business than the week before." "But they were obligated by contract for a Christmas movie to come in." "I had gone down to see how the business was doing and the manager said, "I don't want to yank it out of here..." ""...but I have no choice."" "And the next week, the christmas movie came in and business dropped to one-fourth of what it had been with Misty." "He felt very bad and was very down about it." "But Misty was a big hit." "Even though some reviewers liked the film a lot..." "A lot of them dismissed it, because as I'm always fond of saying not too many people were ready to accept me as an actor much less as a director." "I remember thinking, upon seeing Misty, it was pretty good." "It was really a very stirring, interesting, quirky movie." "The truth of the matter is as the years have gone on that movie seems better than it seemed initially." "And it's partly because it's such a unique movie." "I guess were seeing more stalkers in movies in the last decade or two than we did in those days." "But there's never been a movie that quite worked that sexual nexus in the same way as Play Misty." "But that's no reason we shouldn't sleep together tonight if we feel like it." "One thing I learned on the movie is, never to worry about Clint as a director." "Clint is, in my opinion the top director in the business today." "You hire him and you get the best direction, on schedule, on budget and it's highly creative and it's wonderful." "He would ask people whose judgment he trusted:" ""What do you think of this?"" "They would digest it all, but the final decision was always his." "He went by his basic instincts." "When it was over, I remember the last day, I really shed a few tears." "I did." "I remember saying to Clint, he had his pickup truck and he drove me back to the motel." "I had little tears in my eyes, "I'm so sorry it's over."" "Because it really was a labor of love on everybody's part." "It seems as fresh today as it did then as scary today which is really saying something because there have been lots of scary movies." "There's been lots of things done with cameras and this and that and this is pretty basic." "But it's real, inventive and precise story telling that just makes it grow and then gets you." "I think it says that that's what lasts." "That's what keeps people riveted to their seats that kind of storytelling, and clint knows how to do it." "I've never done another movie like this one because I've never had another script that seemed to lay out logically." "I like doing departures, but if I had another script as good as that one that would fit in with me and my present day maturity I would certainly attempt it." "But it was a great time." "I haven't seen the picture in many years." "If I did, I'd probably say:" ""I could do this a little different than that."" "And I'm fond of saying that I'd probably really wreck it because whatever my thoughts were at that time were probably the proper ones." "If I did it now, I'd probably make it slicker, but it might not have the same energy." "Misty was very important in my life and I've directed a lot of films since then." "Maybe I wouldn't have done any if I hadn't taken that opportunity at that time." "We don't have a goddamn thing between us!" "But I love you!" "She's already following you, isn't she?" "Don't leave me!" "Because this maiden lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by you." "Play Misty for me."