Written Interview: Buck Henry

A great interview with the talented writer, actor and comic Buck Henry at a 1996 appearance he made at the Museum of the Moving Image for a screening of The Graduate. An excerpt:

SCHWARTZ: I’m just wondering, both you and Mike Nichols had backgrounds in improvisational comedy and in writing for television comedy, and I am wondering what you learned in terms of scene construction, in terms of pacing and timing of scenes, from television and from those improv experiences.

HENRY: I don’t know that we learned anything from television. I don’t think that I’ve ever learned anything from television. Yeah, I had done a lot of work in television. Mike hadn’t really done much except doing stuff with Elaine that he did on TV.

SCHWARTZ: But the improvisational —

HENRY: But improvisational, certainly. I mean there are all sorts of gags and tags to scenes in there that come out of improvisational scenes that — Mike even borrowed a couple of things he and Elaine had done. Anne blowing out the smoke after the kiss was something he and Elaine had done in a sketch years before. It’s interesting to me to see how long some of the scenes take. In some cases a little too long, for me, now. Certainly by today’s standards, where films have to crank up the volume every few minutes to keep the audience satisfied, it’s interesting to see that this film takes its time.

Characters are allowed to sit there and stand there and walk there, so that you can assess their mood and begin to feel the way the character feels — since the theme from the beginning was, what is it like to live under water? What’s the feeling like? What’s the alienated feeling that, if not all of us, a large percentage of us feel when we’re 18, 19, 20 years old and have to talk to adults who live in a different world that we don’t understand and really don’t want to, and that everything comes through a kind of barrier? So, the little guy in the fish tank is sort of a theme for the way the hero and the way ostensibly we feel, that feeling of being isolated from social behavior that’s accepted. And also then it gives the excuse for the peculiar dialogue that’s seventy or eighty percent of the time just a little off what people really say. It’s not deconstructed so much as — I don’t know what the word is. It’s like, it’s almost like it’s translated.

Obviously, I improvise when I’m writing; everybody does. Every writer does. You improvise and hope that you are getting to the punchline at some distant point. Mike Nichols rehearses a lot. And this was very rehearsed. There are only two or three things in the whole film that weren’t written down or pre-set in some way. And they stayed in the film partly because they’re great and partly because Nichols shoots in long masters and doesn’t like to cut it up except where he’s planned to cut it up.

It’s a drag to have to go shoot a whole master again because somebody’s done a little blip that you didn’t figure for. Like Dustin when he says his name when Murray Hamilton can’t quite come up with his name in the scene in the lanai, when he is talking to Ben, and he says, “I just told him.” And Dustin waited about four seconds then, which was just a moment. It was very funny. He thought of it at that moment and it stayed in, probably partly because that was the best take of that master.

For more of the interview, go here.

HT to Shaula Evans for the link.

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