"In the not-too-distant future, there will be no wars." "There will be no poverty." "But there'll be rollerball." "I think it started something, cos people still talk to me about Rollerball." "It had its own sort of aura." "It was violent for its time." "It was a spectacle and an action movie." "When I see it now, I feel like a prophet." "Ladies and gentlemen, our corporate anthem." "I think it's more timely today than it was then." "It was foreseeing the future." "Corporate society takes care ofeverything." "My God, are we closer to that now!" "It's the little guy with a conscience against the big powers that be." "That's what it is." "I love this game, Moonpie!" "I love it." "I was living in London." "I had just finished directing Fiddler on the Roofand Jesus Christ Superstar." "Two musicals." "I'm not an action director." "Didn't wanna do anything about space." "I really didn't have very much interest in the future - only in so far as I could project behaviour." "Norman's always looking for... to help the other guy." "Fiddler was the pogrom of the Jews and the diaspora that was happening then." "This one was a typical Norman subject." "Here was a man who was gonna be his own man, even though he was being told not to be." "So Rollerball was within that vein which Norman has always adopted." "He's even adopting it today with Hurricane and other movies." "I think the whole political aspect of Rollerball is a combination of history repeating itself, like Circus Maximus in Rome." "The whole idea of violence for the entertainment of the masses." "In previous societies," "Roman society in the Collosseum and in the Circus Maximus, there were death sports." "They've been toned down." "They've become the NFL." "They've become other less violent sports, but they're still there." "I felt that maybe our society was drifting in that direction." "Sport was really building into a much more powerful form of entertainment." "There was a lot of violence, there was a lot of Evel Knievel stuff on television." "Stunts in which stuntmen got burned and hurt - and all this for the ratings." "Sports themselves were changing and becoming very dark and very violent." "A lot of fights were breakin' out at ball games." "There was a kind of general nastiness." "I picked up this aspect, of course, in writing Rollerball." "I'm Canadian and therefore hockey - ice hockey - is pretty big with us." "The moment there's blood on the ice in a hockey game, the entire audience stands up - Iike they're being fed." "Because blood on white ice ignites people." "And the violence in hockey became focused on by the television cameras." "I was also reading at that time a lot about corporate society." "I was thinking about how nations are going to eventually fade away and corporate society is going to be here." "GE, the year that I wrote Rollerball, had a profit, gross profit, greater than the liquid assets of all the Scandinavian countries." "Political systems, like communism, socialism, democracy itself, might start to fail." "The multinational, multi-global corporations would take over control of our lives." "When we invest our faith in corporations, of course, we trade our freedom for comfort, because we don't vote on the people who command the boards of directors of companies." "If one company owned all that you saw on television and all that you read in the newspaper, if it was controlled by one corporation, surely that corporation could control your whole thought process, in a way." "All of that came together in this surrealistic story, which I called Roller Ball Murder." "I wrote it in April of '73." "It was very quickly bought by Esquire." "I was just fascinated with this story and his take." "It just grabbed me." "I said "This is a movie." "We can just make a movie out of this."" "I optioned the film rights to the short story." "I got a phone call from William Harrison." ""This is Bill Harrison." "I hear you bought my short story The Roller Ball Murders. "" ""I was wonderin' if I could write the screenplay with you."" "I said "Have you ever written one?" He said "No, sir."" "Although I was a fledgling screenwriter," "I knew what a scene is all about, I knew how to do a character." "So there were things he didn't have to teach me, and things in fact he did." "So we sat down and started to work and collaborated on the screenplay for about six weeks, I guess." "It's a "bread and circuses" thing with the corporations in the movie and the story." "They've set up rollerball as a way to discourage individual achievement and to put down heroes, but ironically a hero comes out of this." "We pinned the whole film of Rollerball around one man." "Jonathan, in a televised society where people were tied together by television... he was so popular." "And of course that's exactly the opposite of what the forces want." "Jonathan, he became like Michael Jordan." "He almost became larger than the sport itself." "There's one guy that can do it and nobody else." "In that controlled society, he winds up having a huge amount of personality to the people that viewed him." "The corporation got scared." "Can't you do what you're told?" "Jonathan E's got this conscience." "He doesn't like what's goin' on with him, the control they have over him." "He became a survivor." "He had to outwit, outmanoeuvre, everything that was against him." "There were no countries as such." "Only corporate societies." "All it has ever asked ofanyone ever, is not to interfere with management decisions." "So it's not a very democratic situation." "There was obviously a hierarchy." "The executives, the servants of the executives, and the outsiders who are not in that world." "The women, for example, are all sort of courtesans of the corporate state." "Everybody seemed pretty happy." "Everybody seemed content." "They popped a lot of pills." "At that time, we were just recovering from the swinging '60s." "This was Bill's reaction to that, I suppose." "Do you like poetry?" "You know, I was the majority, I suppose, that said "Hey, don't change anything." "Everything's fine right now."" ""My God!" "We don't wanna change anything."" "And you must keep everything calm." "Everybody must be kept calm." "Don't want revolutions." "Revolutions are started by people full of passion." "I love the idea of knowledge being controlled." "There must be a mistake." "These books are classified." "They have been transcribed and summarised." "That's power." "I remember going to New York and meeting with united Artists with this idea." "And it was so bizarre!" "I think it was its own genre at the time, because I don't think anything had been made like it at that time." "I think united Artists was fascinated." "When they kept asking about the game," "I kept describing helmets like football helmets, the gloves with studs, so that they could hit the opponent." "They were excited by the theatricality of it, but I don't know whether they were really sold on... that I knew what I was doing!" "We were stunned that uA had agreed to make the film." "That's when I think I was most terrified." "Casting, for example." "We talked about Jimmy Caan because he'd just been in Brian's Song." "He played a football quarterback." "There was something about his personification of that sports figure that to me was very believable." "Also Jimmy at that time was a top rodeo rider." "He was going around the country bulldogging steers, jumping on the back of his horse." "I thought if I could get that macho thing that he had goin' to this Jonathan, who was going to start to ask questions..." "He became fascinated right away." "They got the old samurai spirit." "He took a lot of stuff for that Jonathan character from when he played football." "Like when they were playin' the national anthem." "I think he saw Butkus or somebody do it, getting intense before a game." "Doin' this on his leg and stuff, and he brought it to that character." "Oh, I told him he was really gonna get beat up." "But he loved that idea." "He was ready to jump in." "I think he was excited also because I was reaching out for some very fine actors." "Jonathan E." "That's the name." "John Houseman, who controls the sport." "And Sir Ralph Richardson, who was going to play the world's librarian." "Zero, he's the world's file cabinet." "His scenes were all with Jimmy." "So James was really looking forward to working with these celebrated actors too." "I was just kinda sitting, trying to figure out, could we make this into a film?" "What was rollerball?" "No one could play the game, because we had no stadium built." "The track was all-important." "Could roller skates hold?" "How fast can you go?" "This was something totally experimental." "One of the most creative forces behind the making of the film was a production designer called John Box." "Here is a man who did Lawrence ofArabia." "He did all kinds of wonderful films." "And I threw him this challenge." "And so we decided we needed an amphitheatre." "Like Rome." "We needed a coliseum." "A circular track with the audience around it." "We had to wait for John Box to solve all of the problems technically before we could build it." "Then a big undertaking was to find someplace to build this thing, because we needed a huge indoor area." "The only place we could find was in Germany, in the basketball stadium that was left over from the Olympics." "We went over there, we got the foremost track-builder in the world, which happened to be a German, and we set out to build this huge track." "It was a pretty scary undertaking at the time." "Once that was done, then we could bring Max Kleven, and the motorcycles, and the skaters, and put them on this track and start to figure out... the rules." "In the original story, the rules of the game were very amorphous and ill-defined." "He hadn't written it from a "how the game was gonna play"." "It was kinda written like it didn't make much sense." "They had guys on foot." "Do you remember they had guys with rifles in there that started shooting?" "I said "That won't work."" "We were lucky in so far as we spent the first..." "I don't know how long. 1 2 or 16 weeks, we did nothing but shoot the games." "It was only as we progressed that we started making rules." "In the beginning we just shot roller skates and bikes and goals and bloody heads." "We put it together, but then realised that we'd gotta make this make sense." "It's very difficult to invent a game." "You've got to pick up that ball." "You can't just stuff it into the goal, you've got to make a few circuits." "So I think it was the roulette wheel and the idea of a pinball machine that gave us the idea that the ball could be fired." "And it could be pretty lethal." "And if that could be fielded with a glove and then put in a goal..." "We had to have a goal." "Norman added a lot himself to the game." "He put the hook on the back of the motorcycles, which carried the skaters." "I thought "What an ingenious idea." "They can get more speed up this way."" "They had to grab on to that motorcycle." "It was actually a spring off a bike and the loop was attached to the spring, so when guys came in and grabbed it, it had some give to it." "We knew that the skill of driving and handling the motorcycle... we needed the top motorcycle stuntmen we could find, and most of them were in Los Angeles." "Not very experienced in motorcycles at all, but I rode 'em!" "I don't think he took anybody who was really one of those motorcycle racers, because all you had to do was just learn to keep it up on the track, pull the guys, just use your head with it, you know." "And now it was time to get the team together." "It had to be a combination of stunt guys:" "guys that could skate, guys that could ride motorcycles." "We all started practising." "I was on a picture in New Mexico." "It was a Western." "We would go down at night to this roller rink and we'd rent some skates and we just started skating." "The music and everything..." "It was really easy." "Everybody was havin' a good time, just skating." "Nobody knew anything about skating." "I thought he was kiddin'." "They were holdin' him up and he was goin' like this." "I thought it was a joke." "It was real." "He couldn't skate!" "There was a European roller-hockey group." "So we tapped into that group." "And then I brought some more English guys over." "They were hockey guys." "Then there was a thing called roller derby." "Roller-derby guys." "Those guys were really good." "That was their life, skating." "So they had skates that were different, and we were lookin' at what they had." "Mostly, we had to take stuntmen and train them." "You guys had never done that sorta stuff." "That's somethin' all these guys had to learn." "They were fabulous!" "We'd rehearsed here for about a month on flat roller rinks." "One guy, even before we got outta here, fell and broke his hip." "Remember that?" "Somebody broke their leg." "These were all big athletes." "These were all linebacker types." "They all had a great rapport with each other, the stunt players." "They took those stunts very seriously, and had to." "They were very dangerous." "You boys wanna play for Houston, you'll have to learn it." "Jimmy is one of the great mimic actors." "He bullshits himself that he is the best in the world, whatever he's doin'." "You know, Jimmy tap-dances, he plays the piano." "But he's a mimic." "He sees something' and it's uncanny how fast he gets good at it." "The first thing he had to do was learn how to really skate well at high speeds." "He wanted to do a lot of stunts himself, so he prepared for weeks, I think." "It didn't take him long and he got good." "We all got on the airplane to go to Germany." "He took us straight to the track from the airport in Munich." "When we walked in, everybody went "Oh, my God!" The track was straight up." "These guys took one look..." "Big bravado here!" " He took one look at it and he said "Oh..."" " We can't do this!" "I crawled to the top on my hands and knees." "I got a hold of the rail like that, looked down and let go." "So he said "We better have a couple of weeks to learn this."" "They said "Max, this can't be done."" "I said "Well, it can be done, but you guys gotta skate a little better."" "Within two weeks, we were playin' the game and we were ready to start shooting." "When you had the Japanese guys doing that when they were skating, it just evolved from guys horsin' around in-between setups." "Moonpie..." "Off the rail comes Moonpie and takes out..." "Bein' up on the top of the rail, come swooping' down, grab the back of a bike and drop-kick the guy." "But it was for real." "We shot some second unit before Norman got there." "When Norman showed up... by that time we really had the game goin' well." "But there was just so much footage to be shot." "This is before Steadicams were invented." "Dougie Slocombe invented this kind of car that was kind of built and it could travel at 35, 40 miles an hour." "Probably we had about three or four cameras at a time." "We also had camera mounts in the centre of the track." "We'd have a camera operator on skates who was pulled along in front of people." "Olympic cameramen, who had covered the Olympics... how they could follow focus at 30 and 40 miles an hour, I have no idea." "But they did." "It needs at least one Houston player hitting a guy here." "He sees the scene." "He knows that it's gonna be cut." "He gets caught up." "He gets very emotional about what he's doing." "He really, really cares." "I was terrified." "I was terrified about killing someone." "Maiming someone." "I kept cautioning everybody to slow down, slow down." "But they just started to go faster and faster." "Sometimes they got goin' too fast." "And because of the bank of the track and the flat skates, you reach a certain speed and just drift off the track." "You're unaware of it until suddenly there's a ball of bodies hitting' the wall." "The guys on the motorcycles got mad because, when you were on skates, you could crash one of those guys on a motorcycle any time you wanted." "It's eight hours of doin' this." "At the end of the first day there were more asses and thighs with huge, huge strawberries on 'em..." "So immediately, that next day, they sent out for biker leathers." "They had really good protective gear, all the way from the ankles on up." "Football pads, hockey pads, kneepads." "Nobody was really seriously hurt." "Is everybody all right?" "Guys would just get banged up." "Even with a helmet on, you see stars." "If somebody went down on the track, they had guys run out with stretchers." "There was a lot of abrasions and dislocated fingers, stuff like that." "They didn't go to the hospital, but they were hurt." "People have told me "There was people killed on that movie."" "I say "Well, I was there from day one and I hate to tell you that's not the truth."" "Publicity department, they liked to say that there was bodies laying' everywhere." "I played the Manila speedball." " What's this dude's name?" " That's our new speedball from Manila." "They called me out to play this little part." "I'd been in the dressing room." "He drew attention to me and he says..." "Oh, he's a big honker." "Big honker!" "I remember right at the very end of the film there was just myself." "He has the ball right in my face like that and he can kill me or let me live." "And he lets me live." "So by now everybody's pretty well worn out." "They'd been there a long time." "I said "You guys vote whether you want to stay another day or go home."" "When I came back in, they'd gone up to the top of the track and they were all pissing' on the track." "And we knew that was the end of the movie." "The guys wanted to go home!" "It was the first time stuntmen got a credit." "There were so many stunts within the picture that Norman said "We've got to give these men credit for what they've done."" "I'd spent the '60s with... call it the English New Wave, with Tony Richardson and Nick Roeg." "Then Norman Jewison came over and I went a little Hollywood with him." "I would just go through all the film and I'd just snip out anything I thought was remotely useful." "I would then start to put it together and see how I felt about it, and gradually form it into something." "I remember when they came to neg-cut that particular reel," "Technicolor said "Do you know how many cuts are on that reel?"" "I said "No." They said "900 cuts." I said "I'm not surprised."" "We took flak because it was too violent." "It's an anti-violent film." "Get offthe rail!" "And yet it has to use violence to make its point." "People today say "Rollerball." "Oh, Jesus!" "What a violent picture."" "But you hardly ever see any blood in that picture." "It wasn't very violent at all compared to today, or even when Taxi Driver came out." "The fellas came up behind me, grabbed me, pulled my helmet off." "My head, in slow motion, comes down, hits the track and bounces." "You see all my flesh moving, but it was very powerful the way it was edited in." "Norman had said "What are we going to do about the music?"" "Then he said "I think we should use classical music."" "I had an old, old LP of Albert Schweitzer playing the Bach "Toccata and Fugue in D minor"." "Then they brought in André, and André said "It's not bad, Tony!"" "It's almost a European action movie." "It's almost Last Year at Marienbad with game sequences - the haunting quality of some of the scenes." "There was two different responses to Rollerball when it came out." "One was in Europe, the other in America." "The English went crazy for it." "That film played for one year in the same theatre in France." "It was a huge hit in Europe." "I think it is because it wasn't a typically American film." "For the most part, the press in Europe treated it like a thematic film." "They had an intellectual interest in the movie, that never got going in America." "In America, everybody wanted to play the game!" "They wanted to play the game, they wanted the track to be somewhere." "They wanted it to be a reality in sporting life, I think." "It did big business in America for a while, but I think it was more circus and less bread." "A lot of the American critics did not see what a strong political statement it was." "They reviewed it and it says "second unit action director genius, Max Kleven"." "Well, can you imagine goin' on the set the next day?" "I think rollerball's here." "We are changing into a corporate society." "America is an amalgamation of corporate states." "We're in a world in which most of the decisions made for us aren't made because we're voting." "Corporations have merged to the point where oil companies have been reduced to maybe six huge multinational, multi-global corporations." "Communism's not the answer." "But, on the other hand, free-rein capitalism has its pitfalls." "We've already agreed on that." "I get a little scared when one company owns the television station and the radio station and the newspaper." "..futility ofindividual effort." "Have we lost faith in our own system of government?" "Are people really even interested?" "Are they more interested in what they're gonna wear or drive, what they're gonna watch, what they're gonna eat?" "Are we more materialistic?" "Are we less sensitive to violence?" "Do we love violence?" "Do we embrace it?" "Does it excite us?" "Does it entertain us?" "Are we returning to Circus Maximus?" "I don't know."