A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan) In the following extract from an interview with Cahiers du Cinema in 1966, the great Greek-American director Elia Kazan discusses his transition from theatre to film, and how this influenced his conception of character and artistic realism. Related Articles MMR Podcast #601 - Undivide Us direct… Unmasking the Secret: The Thrilling A… best projectors for home

CAHIERS: Shall we begin with the actors? It seems that, little by little, you have guided them from exteriorization toward a certain interiorization.

ELIA KAZAN: I believe that that is true. In the films that I was making twenty years ago, I had, I chose, more flamboyant actors. They were the engines of the film, and the film was the vehicle of their expression; it was always a question of expressing, of exteriorizing what there was ‘in’ them, and the free course that I left to this flamboyance made me tend sometimes almost toward opera. But, little by little, I lost interest in this expression as such, and in fact I almost turned against it. I began, too, to restrain my actors, in proportion as I saw things in a truer, calmer fashion.

At the same time, I became more and more interested in what happened to them, to the actors, human beings, characters—in the way in which they reflected or reinforced something, be it unconsciously, in the way in which they let something grow in them, come out from them. Now, ten or fifteen years afterward, I see the gap that separates me from the first manner, when my actors were moved by the most violent feeling of life, which they rendered directly and unconsciously. Now I no longer ‘feel’ people through an acting technique. Life is not like that. People ordinarily do not know or realize the why and the how of their beings, whence they originate and whither they lead them. In any case, very few people know exactly what they want, and there are fewer still who can go straight to what they want. That is why I direct my youngsters in a more supple, more complex way. I abandon myself more to imprecision, to the nebulous, and I accept more readily the ways of contradiction. I believe that that is the only way to approach the truth.

A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan)

CAHIERS: Your films themselves are made more and more on the complexity and contradictions of life.

ELIA KAZAN: At the start, my films were always written by scenarists, sometimes theatre men [Tennessee Williams, William Inge]. Even then I worked on them myself, but little by little I collaborated more and finally I began to write my stories myself. I was present at the birth of the film, instead of being, as before, the conductor of cadences and solos. In A Streetcar Named Desire, there are entire scenes that I would do differently today. I would have them happn much more calmly, unconsciously, and that would take much more time as well. I still think that dramaturgy is essential in theatre, but one must rethink the thing completely when one approaches the screen. That too is why, as I grew older, I felt more and more acutely the difference between theatre and film. and, little by little, I lost interest in the theatre.

CAHIERS: But the fact is that you originally acquired much from the theatre. Perhaps something of it still remains today in your films?

ELIA KAZAN: I agree absolutely. I took something from the theatre and that something is still there. But, regarding that, let me be more specific about some points. The essence of the Stanislavsky method, and the fundamental interest that it had for us, in the way in which we learned it as students and used it later, dwelt in the action. That is to say, when someone felt, experienced something, our feeling—and our theory—was that this emotion would never become ‘of’ the theatre, unless it were expressed as a need, a hunger. And it is of this need, of this hunger, that such-and-such a precise action sprang incarnated as expression of this hunger. The play became a series of progressions, each of which consisted of the fact that a person did a certain thing that responded to a certain want. We stressed the word ‘want’. and we did our best to emerge on the word ‘do’. In short: To do. To want. To do.

Wild River (Directed by Elia Kazan)

We sought to attain the infinitive: To conquer, to love ... infinitives emerging on ‘To want’ and ‘To do.’ The result was that our performances in the theatre, especially in the form in which I expressed myself at the start, were extremely violent, violent and amusing. But today, when I observe life, I see it takes much less direct paths, circuitous paths, subtle and subterranean. Moreover, when the actor is aware of his aim—because the director has pointed it out to him or he has analyzed it himself—he cannot but distance himself from life to the extent to which, in life, people are uncertain ultimately as to what they want. They oscillate, wander, drift, in relation to their aim—or they change their aim. In short, they want this, then that, but... but that is life, and it is there that the poetry of life dwells, in these contradictions, these sudden deflections, these aspirations that spring up and disconcert. In short, while I once had a unilinear approach to life, I now interest myself more and more in the complexity of things.

– Interview with Elia Kazan. By Michel Delahaye 1966. From Cahiers du Cinema in English. March 1967.