Behind the Scenes: To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan, 1962) with Gregory Peck and John Megna

One reason people respond to this novel so greatly is that you do feel it's so well informed by reality and by emotional experiences and a memory of a time that is gone and yet we all want to hold on to, you know. It makes us—it isn't that it's a perfect world, it's an imperfect world, but it's a varied world and it's a world that we recognize. Most of us have some distant feeling about childhood and that period of our life that as we get older we give it certain kind of talismans and meanings that we went through so quickly and we didn't even know that they had meaning, you know. And all of a sudden as you get older and you begin to think back you think, then somehow this coalesced in something rather important that you didn't even know was happening. And I think that's what memory can do for a talented writer. It reforms it into another kind of experience. Hopefully it's so caught a very specific world and in such a wonderful way. She put you in that town on those streets with those people. She caught the sights and the smells and the whole attitude of that small southern town. It was the Old South and the Old South was good. It had a few bad things but it was basically good. Everybody loved each other and everybody was courteous and helped each other. If somebody's house burned, you know, it didn't get to be noon before people started carrying clothes and food and everything else. And they could be black or white. During that time I was a Boy Scout and that was the biggest thing for us. And we had a Scoutmaster who was the undertaker. And I thought he was an old man. He must have been 50 then maybe. And we went on camps together and he would sing while we would go along and he called us all bully and just a great man. Gave us every Saturday of his life. My family's lived right around here all along. We've never been anywhere else. In fact, the only ones that ever moved out of this house was my three sisters that married. And they just moved out with their suitcases. Nobody else has ever moved out of the house. So we have a lot of memories in this place that for us nobody else would appreciate them. But we enjoy them. It was right before the period of what seemed like anarchy to us. And it was before the Vietnam War. It was almost like the end of a vision of America before the tumult and the chaos and time of rage started. It came at a critical time in the fight for racial justice and civil rights legislation that would put an end to some of the worst of the bigotry and the restrictions and the repression in the South. There are people that are vanguard who fight at the front so that the possibilities of all of us who are back there are enlarged. And what Harper Lee explores in many ways, it's what's back there. And why what is back there is so very special that it really energizes you and causes you to want to expand the front, move the boundaries so everyone can live to the fullest. Even though it's an absolutely pure novel, it's in no way begging to be made a movie as some books are. At that time when I read it, the book was already a great success. It had not been bought by anybody for movies. It had been rejected for movies by all the companies that had seen it when it was in galleys. A lot of the studios didn't go bidding on it because they said, well, what's it going to be about? Here's this middle-aged lawyer with two kids. There's no romance. There's no violence except off screen. There's no action. What is there? Where's the story? He sent the book to Greg and he said yes immediately, instant. I read through the book and I can hardly wait until the next morning to call him and say, if you want me, I'm your boy. I felt a close identification with the characters, with the story, with the social problem, with the father and children. I somehow felt it was something that I had to do. There's a reason why he was right for Atticus Finch because they share a lot of the same qualities. I think the next step was to find out who could write it. And it didn't take much debating about who should do it because I knew Horton and Horton knew that world and actually Horton resisted it for a time. He loved the book and he was concerned about adapting a work he admired so much. Alan brought Harper over to where I was living then in Nyack and I don't know how she felt, but it was love at first sight on my part. And I just somehow felt that we were members of the same family. He trusted us that the book would not be emasculated in some way or changed, that we would honor the book and be true to the book. Of course, it was Pakula I worked with during the script process and he was passionately devoted to this novel, passionately. Horton at that time lived up in Nyack in this wonderful old Victorian house right above the Hudson River. And there we were in this idyllic Victorian house looking at the kids playing down in the yard below, just as the kids of Mockingbird played. The southern man's house and then we would go down and have dinner, southern dinner with all the collard greens and all that stuff I'd never had before, Mockingbird type food. When I was given the novel, there were two things that helped me a great deal. And one is, Alan said, I think it would be interesting to rethink the structure of the novel, to try to bring everything into the focus of a year. Then a reviewer called Scout in the Wilderness showed the roots of Scout towards Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and it just opened a whole thing for me. I don't know, it's one of those things that's very helpful to a writer. Harper was delighted with the screenplay and it all seemed to flow. It seemed to be a kind of natural. I feel that the time they called me and said they had a book for me to read was one of the luckiest days of my life, really. The hard thing, of course, was casting the children. I said, let's find kids who were kids. And obviously we wanted to hunt in the south, really look for kids in the south. So we started a search. There was a young woman at the time, a young woman, Bodie Boatwright. She's from the south. We put her in charge of the search. And I don't know how many kids she's, but she went all through the south. There's a director here, was a director here in town, who directed Town and Gown Theater here, James Hatcher. He called my mother and said, you need to take Philip to this audition. So she asked me if I wanted to go to the audition. And I said, no. And she said, well, you get out of school for half a day. And I said, OK. He is also the person who called Mary's mother. I had never done any acting. So my girlfriend and I had both gone down to interview for this thing. We got up on the stage and they said, well, do you have something prepared or whatever? No, you know. So we just got up. And oh, I vaguely remember something about chopping some wood or something and doing, I don't know what. That's kind of silly, something that we just made up at the moment. And then about a month later, or maybe less, two weeks later, we got a call to go to New York for a screen test, which was a big deal. They both came from Birmingham and Alabama. And they both had the quality that I was looking for. They were bright. They were alive. They seemed to have active imaginations. And so both children come from four blocks from each other. And we didn't know each other, of course. I was 13. She was nine. We wouldn't have known each other. They looked as if they could be brother and sister. That the facial contours and coloring and all of it just seemed to work. We went down to Monroeville, thinking that we might make the picture there. And that's how I was able to meet her father, who was a real-life model for Atticus Finch. And he was amused. First of all, he was amused that his tomboy daughter grew up to be a Pulitzer Prize winner. And then he was even more amused by the Hollywood types who barged into his hometown. The town had changed radically after World War II. A lot of the old buildings came down. There was a lot of corrugated iron-up and modern looks to buildings and big plate glass doors. It just didn't have the feel of the small town. Harper Lee visited the set and was stunned in that it looked so much like a southern town, like her town. To be able to produce that look and that feel on a back lot at Universal Pictures in Hollywood, I have to credit the production designer on it with so much of that look and that feel, and that's Henry Bumstead. Somehow he discovered that there was a small town out in the San Fernando Valley that was about to be destroyed. And those houses all had the look of the southern homes. And he took and placed and built them, carved out a street, and there we were in Maker. It was a very particular film. There's never been another film even remotely like it, in my opinion. It had to have an individual language. We were seeing an adult world and really serious adult happenings through the eyes of children. One approaches it in terms of what would address itself to children. What would children play on a piano, given a chance? What do children do when they go to the piano? Well, I'll tell you a story about the first day of filming. The first scene was a scene where Atticus was coming home from the courtroom or his law office, and the kids were expecting him. And customarily, the boy took his briefcase and they walked on down the street, talking over the events of the day. And during the shot, which was covered by a camera on a dolly track, I just glanced at Harper. She was walking along behind the moving camera, and I saw something shining on her cheek. We finished the scene. Mulligan said, marvelous. First scene, first day, first take. It's a print. It's going to be in the movie. So we were feeling pretty good about that. And I walked over to Harper and I said, are you crying? How do you feel? She said, oh, Gregory, you've got a little potbelly, just like my daddy. Of course, I said, that's great acting. But it was the highest praise. She was very close to her father. The best scene in the movie for Mary and for Greg is a scene in bed when she asks about the watch. And she was just magic in that scene. She yawned, she rubbed her nose, the way she looked at the watch, the whole relationship with her mother. There was something very special happening between the two of them. To get the kids in that totally unselfconscious frame of mind took very delicate handling. I tried to set up a mood on the set that allowed the kids to be kids, that they could climb on the equipment, and as long as they didn't get in the way of the work, allowed them to explore it, particularly early on. It was very much like them playing around their own backyard, only playing pretend. It was all just so easy. As I think back on it, I get lost in memories of just thinking how easy it was. The novel begins with a sort of idyllic setting, tree houses, swings, children running, running loose, playing freely without any fear of crime or other sorts of things. And it seems that this is a kind of Eden, small town Eden, where there's this kind of surface tranquility. They want to see what is hidden. The three children become attracted to a kind of eerie, dark side of life that they have first encountered in literature and in movies. Dill is based on Truman Capote, and that Truman was a neighbor who would come and visit in the summer to visit an aunt. He would be shipped off by his parents to spend the summer in Maycomb, in that town. I did quite a bit of work on the character of the boy next door, because the minute Harper told me that it was Truman, as a little boy, my mind just went wild, you know? And I don't think it was all really... I don't know what Truman was like, a little boy, and I'm sure it really wasn't like that, but it gave me a lot of imaginative impulses. Boo Radley is used very deftly, in my opinion, by this wonderful author to realign the community in a more classical way. I mean, initially, what we have, Boo the Radley House, that neither blacks nor whites want to walk by, that this great mystery of this demonized view of the family at first is one that's shared by the community. And that's what a community is, isn't it? A group of people who feel the same way about something. Boo Radley is two things to these children. One thing is he's scary. But the funny thing about children is children love to be scared. It's just kind of part of the adventure of life. Edgar Allan Poe said that we're attracted to terror because we long to know some reality above this surface of appearances that we're doomed to labor in. We long to know some kind of transcendent verity, some glimpse of truth. Ruth White got into makeup every day, and it would take her four hours to look like this old lady. And I just hated to lose it. And it was beautifully played, beautifully directed by Bob. The kids were wonderful. And in the cutting of the film, it stopped the film. Again, the difference between books and film. My experience growing up in a town like this, it's very true. We were half amused and half celebrating the eccentric. We were kind of in awe of them, that they had the nerve to be eccentric. There's a great oral tradition in the South, and we have institutions that really feed the oral tradition. And we see them in the book, the church, and the courthouse. The value of the oral tradition is its democracy. It doesn't give to an intellectual elite the exclusive right to shape communal memory and the collective memory. It makes into a commonwealth the story of our shared lives. It's something that we share in common, and it's like a collection plate into which we can all put something. Our stories, our myths, and the ease with which we are able to, in some way, cross boundaries. My goodness, you know, half the time we spent talking, and now there's television and all those things that disrupt. And God knows what's going to happen in the future when all these channels start intruding into our lives. You're never going to get that, let's all sit around at the dinner table every night and let's talk about how you did in school today. Kids aren't interested in doing that anymore. And we've given them permission not to be interested in that anymore. Our culture has given them that permission. I mean, how many smart-mouthed kids you see on TV? All of them. There aren't many children nowadays who have a father or a mother, depending upon if it's a single house from a father or a mother, that they can look to and say, this person is totally honest, totally loving and caring and loves me without question, that isn't distracted by the flurry of today's world. The household of Atticus is very eccentric. He seems to mute these class divisions and age divisions by allowing them to call him by his first name. Atticus is raising them by giving them some freedom and some opportunity to explore in a realm of ordered liberty. They have a kind of liberty, but he invests them with keen values and the values that he invests them with are good information and they see him living the values. So they're able to run wild, run free. They think they are, but there's this kind of moral electronic gate that they are really bounded by Atticus's own high-mindedness. They're on an invisible leash and go no farther. They don't stray from the moral strictures of Atticus's own conduct. The mother figure here, the one who operates as the children's mother, is a black woman. We had a Calpurnia. We had two, as a matter of fact. We had Beatty and Frankie who helped raise our family and for Beatty to take me anywhere, we had to take the bus because she didn't drive. Now the fact that Beatty had to go to the back of the bus and I couldn't go back there. I had to stay in the section just before and would have to ask people to move so I could sit close to her. I had a real gut feeling that's not right. That's wrong. Why should she have to sit back there? The mad dog in the street seems to be a foreboding of evil. Something bad is going to follow this and also it prefigures Atticus's confrontation of the madness in his own community, exemplified by Bob Ewell. He's kind of the mad dog that Atticus then has to confront later on. It was a time of segregation and that was all we knew. We had a lot of blacks that came to our store to pay their bills on Saturday. They were scared to come in because the Klan was standing on each corner of the square up there, the courthouse. We always had a Christmas parade and we invited every band in the county of which two were black. The Klan called me and said, we're not going to have that black band. Of course, not calling them black. And I said, why not? He said, we're just not going to have it. And I said, well, we plan to have them. So we went ahead with the plans but the Klan then threatened the band director, the principal of this black school, said there'll be bloodshed if you go through this. And my daughter, she said, Daddy, what are we going to do? I said, well, we're not going to have a parade. And I told her that in a town where there was hate, Santa Claus would not come. The most difficult sequence was the courtroom stuff, particularly when a movie like Mockingbird is dependent on performance. Bob Mulligan, along with Greg Peck, set the ambience for all of us in terms of the atmosphere in which we worked. It took us two to three weeks to shoot the courtroom scene. When the picture began, Harper's father had passed away and she gave me his watch. And I had noticed when I was in Monroeville that he carried it in an old-fashioned way and he had a way of playing with it. And just holding that watch in his hand. And I stole that mannerism when I used it in the courtroom. In wardrobe at first, they suggested high heels. And I said, no, she wouldn't have any high heels. And if I do have to wear high heels, if I've got to wear high heels, then you have to let me wear them with socks. Oh, no, they said, no one wears high heels with socks. Oh, yes, they do, where I'm from. Then it was really important to me that my hair not be clean because Mayella's hair wouldn't be that clean. There wouldn't be time for doing for yourself. She was taking care of a whole pastel of kids. She was being the mother in more ways than one. I saw these girls on the streets of violence, these very underprivileged girls, these girls from awful, awful backgrounds. I mean, most of them took it for granted they'd be molested by the time they were certainly 12, by a father, an uncle, a brother, or someone down the road. She knows she's lying and she's trapped up here. And that's her only defense. It's one of the reasons I went into this with a bizarre body language. She's a trapped animal. I remember looking right in my face. One of the first things we said after hello was, I know that man. I never got to know him. I stayed out of his way because I was really afraid that I wouldn't be able to take very much of the kind of attitude he projected without getting into some real difficulties. Jim was such a fine actor. He was so into the backwoods redneck. He despised me and I didn't think too much of him. He thought I was some kind of Hollywood leading man that couldn't cut the mustard and really create a character. Brock, he had a nobility about him that was quite remarkable. It certainly reinforced who was good and who was evil. Put Brock Peters and James Anderson side by side. And it ain't very hard to know which is the good guy and which is the bad guy. This was a gentle person, kind man. He was not guilty. And there shouldn't be any aspect of a guilty person that appears there. Bob worked very carefully with me. And I remember being frightened that I might not be able to deliver what it was he was asking for in terms of the depth of emotion and the varieties of colors that he wanted to come out of me. And I don't remember the day that it happened or even the moment. But when I look back, I remember there was a time when finally I saw it. And I literally was able to always go back to that place. And it was like a key and I could unlock it. Atticus is tolerant of all of the people, the poor blacks, the poor whites, the uneducated. And what we see there is this notion of noblice oblige. And a significant point is that Atticus suffers everybody. He's peerless. But everyone is his peer. I get letters from schoolteachers. One boy wrote an answer to the question, what was your favorite scene? He said, oh, I like the scene where Bob Ewell spit in Atticus's face. Well, I got my attention and I read on and I realized that the boy really did get the point. Because Atticus had told his kids, look, I'm going to be doing something unpopular in this town. Maybe he sensed, he knew something was up. So he's going to protect those kids. He doesn't know what the repercussions might be. What does he care? It's instincts to save them. I'll never forget the day I saw Bob Duvall walk on the set in wardrobe, in full costume, with the ragged shirt and the baggy pants and the old worn work shoes. And he had dyed his hair white. And it just stunned me. He was very pale. There was no makeup. And there was boo. When that door goes back, there's a light thing. It's light. Hurts the guy's eyes a little bit. And then just from there, just examine the room from his hermetic position. Fantasizing about Boo Radley. The whole concept of Boo Radley. Fears with which we titillate ourselves with. Boogeyman ends with, hey, boo. That's a lesson in screen acting that he was able to convey so much in a glance of shyness, of awkwardness, of some kind of deep affection for the child, of being exposed to other people when he's a recluse. All those things he conveyed with the most subtle expression. And really, it came from deep inside of Bob. You can't push that stuff along. It's very delicate stuff. You got to be very careful with it. Especially with Horton, the material is very delicate. Like sandpiper prints, you know. It is a childhood we all wanted to have and most of us didn't. We are rooted in the street where we know everybody. We feel free to live our own mystery world, now we're protected by this ideal father. And it's become as much a part of the American myth as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. It's a triumph of Harper. And I think the triumph of the film is it did capture the soul of that book. Characters like Atticus Finch are out of style these days. People who believe in living by the golden rule. People who don't seek the almighty buck. People who are concerned about their community and care about the people in their community. Sometimes I'm not so sure that we are better off as a people, as a society, as a community than we were 50 or 100 years ago. I don't know that we're ending up the century in a blaze of glory. We've got a very, very long way to go.