Behind the Scenes: Deliverance (Boorman, 1972) with Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds

Well, my father was first and foremost a poet, and he had made his reputation in the world of letters as a poet before he ever wrote his first novel, Deliverance. He had been a poetry consultant at the Library of Congress. He'd won the National Book Award. He had lots of books, lots of honors attached to that poetry. But he'd been thinking about writing Deliverance for several years, and he finally did it. It launched him to a whole different level of fame, and he was attracting a whole lot I got involved because when the novel by James Dickey, before it came out, it was in galleys, and there was a young guy working at Warner Brothers who was his former student. And he had read it in galleys and suggested it to Warners and to me. And as soon as I read the book, I responded to the themes, perhaps in a slightly different way to James Dickey. I think Dickey belonged to that particularly southern theme of the sort of survivalist, you know, the man in the American outback tradition being able to survive in the woods. But for me, the idea that this river, this beautiful river was going to be dammed and destroyed was a fantastic kind of symbol about a man's attempt to conquer nature. These four men were urban men, so they wanted to reestablish their connection. They're all based on my father. But there are people who he always related to the individual characters in the book. Certainly, Louis Medlock is drawn from one of my father's closest friends who's still alive, still lives in Atlanta, and who was fascinated by the idea of survival. Ed is pretty much based on my father and his experiences. Ed is in the advertising business basically, so is my father. In the book, there are several scenes that are very much out of our family life and his experience with my mother. And the characters of Bobby and Drew both, to a certain extent, draw on a man who was another person very close to my father. And these three of them were the team or the group of friends that would typically go up into the mountains and go canoeing together. He had written a screenplay. And then he and I then worked together on that over a period of time. And he was a brilliant correspondent. He was a wonderful letter writer. And he would write me his notes about the script, and I'd respond. And so that's how we functioned, really. So I went to John Kelly and Ted Ashley, who were running Warners. And they said, go off and make it with unknowns. So I went around America looking at all the regional theater. And I indeed found Ronnie Cox and Ned Beatty. And neither of them had been in a film or done television or anything. It was my first film. Not only my first film, my first time in front of the camera. And I was actually the first of the four actors that John Borman found. He came to New York looking for good unknown actors, and God knows I was unknown. Luckily, I had already read the novel, so I was a bit ahead of the game in that respect. I'm working in this repertory type theater in Washington, D.C. They were casting in Los Angeles and New York. And the word that got out is they were looking for fairly young actors, mostly around the age of 30, from the South, who had a lot of theater training. And the joke was, the answer was, well, there's three of them. Which one would you like to see first? Because there weren't a lot of actors doing classics and such that were jumping up from the southern part of the United States during that period. And so I laughed when we went to New York to see whether anything would come of it. And that's the first time I met Mr. Borman. And I came back and met with John. He liked me. So once they started making the final decisions, they kept telling me and Ned that, you know, that we were in, but they were waiting for the other two guys. And I had an enormous problem trying to persuade him. When I first read the film, I was a little bit concerned about it. I didn't know whether I wanted to do it. I hit that isonomy scene, and it pushed me back a little bit. I didn't know what it was all about. You know, it was a little bit more like a horror film than the films that I was as interested in doing. And then I came to the scene where he climbs the cliff. And there was just the response to the waterfall and the moon. And all the complications of that, going up to he knows not where with a weapon, possibly kill a man who's trying to kill him, and all the nightmare of it that he's seen, I said, I can do that. I can see my face doing that. And still, I didn't know. At one point, talking endlessly on the phone, I said, John, look, I'm going to give you 30 seconds. And you either say yes or no. And then I'm going to put the phone down. I'm timing it now, yes or no. All you've got to say is you're going to do it or you're not going to do it. And it's John saying, but John, it's completely arbitrary. Why 30 seconds? You know, at least make it two minutes. I said, no, no, it's 30 seconds. It was a crazy conversation anyway. Yes or no, John? I can't decide like that. It's ridiculous. I put the phone down. 10 minutes later, he phoned back. He said, I'll do it. I like John from the minute I met him. And I still am impressed with his charisma. He's smart. He's a great filmmaker. The other character, I like the idea of Burt Reynolds. And the studio, they weren't too happy about that either, really, because he'd been in three TV series, which all failed. Yes, and bad television and bad movies. So it was a big change. But we got him, and they finally agreed. And now being a southerner, raised in Georgia and Florida, I knew Dickie's work. And I got this call, would I fly to LA and meet with Vorman? And I said, of course. And I came out and went to the back lot of Warner Brothers. And we started immediately talking and laughing. And he said, can you do a southern accent? And I said, I've spent 20 years trying to get rid of it. But I, yes, I can. And then he said, would you mind improvising? And I thought he meant with him. And I said, no, I'd love to improvise. And he opened the door, and Voight came out through the secret door. John Voight, who I immediately liked, because John is guyless and just a wonderful guy. I think Bert saw this as what he knew it would be, which was going to propel him into the public eye. And when he came on the set, he knew that. He knew what this picture could do, and he knew how to play that role. So he was looking at me to see if I was going to interfere with that. So he looked at me like, are you my friend? Are you my enemy? I would sit in his chair. I would sit in his chair a lot. I just wanted to see what he'd say, because it was so sweet. And three or four weeks went by, and he didn't say anything. So finally, I said, don't you want to know why I'm sitting in your chair? And he said, I was wondering. And I said, well, I can't sit in my chair, because I'd covered up my name. And he went, oh, I mean, that's how guileless he is. I mean, I could pull 1,000 practical jokes, which I did all the time. We knew each other from the beginning, and we laughed a lot from the beginning. So there was always that ingredient. And John has a great sense of humor, a terrific sense of humor. So he was the proper master for us to be dealing with at that time. We were rehearsing in this sort of country club in Clayton, Georgia, because the actors had to train on canoe and archery and get fit. And we had to, you know, it was a lot of work to get them into a state where they'd be able to safely make this picture. And we had two weeks of rehearsal where we all just sort of were together. And we got together every day, all day. But we would sit for hours, and we'd talk about our relationship, but then we'd talk about did our parents know each other? And how did we get to be friends? And we, I mean, we wrote a novel. John did, anyway. And I tried to help. And so Jim came up and sat in the bar, and he had this booming voice and this powerful presence. And he was very intimidating. And Dickie always called us by our character names. And he went, Lewis, I'm talking to you, boy. Come over here. And the girl said, I think Mr. Dickie wants you. And I said, he ain't talking to me. My name ain't Lewis. My name is Burton. Tomorrow morning, he got up. And I could feel him coming. And I was sitting in a barstool. Now, a barstool was pretty tall, but he was so big that he stood up over me and his hands down like this on the bar, and his head was still here. And he went, Lewis, I'm talking to you, boy. I asked you to come over there. I want to talk to you. I said, Mr. Dickie, I'm not Lewis. I'm Burton now. Tomorrow morning at 6 o'clock, I'll be Lewis. But now, get out of my goddamn face. And there was a quiet little moment there where I thought possibly he will kill me or cut me or stab me or whatever. And he went, that's exactly what Lewis would have said. And then he went back over and drove them crazy for the rest of the evening. Never bothered him again. I was trying to include him in this thing, so I invited him to rehearsals, but he would sit there and then he'd make these kind of noises of alarm when he'd hear, you know, the lines being spoken. He'd be going, ah, ah, ah. And it was impossible to work. Well, I don't think Jim Dickie had ever seen actors working out before. You know, he's a poet. He never called me Ronnie. He only called me Drew. So he'd come in in the afternoon, we were there working, and he would say, hey, Drew, Drew, come over here. Do that scene for these guys. He also told each one of us, separate from the other one, it really happened. I beg your pardon? It really happened. He told me privately and made me swear was that he said, everything in that book happened to me. And I was absolutely stunned to hear this. And I then said to John Boyd one night, you know, it really happened. Dickie told me. And Boyd said, yeah, he told me, too. I said, he did? And then we found out he told Ned and he told Ronnie. Well, my father loved to make up stories and he loved to play with people's minds and he thought this was a way of getting these guys revved up. My father saw Deliverance as his movie. He was very possessive. I think lots of writers feel that way and he certainly felt that way. And my father had a really powerful personality. And initially, he wanted to be on the set and he wanted to be engaged and involved with the actors. And he wanted, essentially, to be a parallel director of the movie. And eventually, in fact, quite quickly, the actors got uncomfortable with it because they were dealing with John who understood actors very well and then they were trying to deal with my father who was trying to project his persona into each of the characters. So finally, I said to him, well, look, Jim, you're going to have to leave because we've got to get on with this and make the film and we've got to rehearse and you've just got to leave it in my hands. So he wasn't too happy about that but he had no choice. So he did say, well, I want to say goodbye to the boys. So I said, okay. And I'll never forget, he went to the door when we were rehearsing in this house and he went to the door and he said, I understand that my presence will be more expeditious by my absence. And then he turned on his heel and he left. And Bert said to me, does that mean he's going or he's staying? It was a great moment because Dickie was so intimidating and I had to ask him to leave. I said, you know, I want you to go and I want you to come back and play the sheriff. And he said, if I go, I ain't coming back. Get yourself another boy. Anyway, he couldn't resist and he came back and we shot the scene. It was fascinating in a sense that the actors who had been so intimidated by him, now at the end of the film, they came back face to face with him. Of course, on their own ground because they were actors and he wasn't. So they were in a much more superior position. Well, he was a good actor actually. Very good actor. You know, he did a lot of the readings of his own poetry and he was very popular because he had a great sense of drama. As a director, you have to deal with actors individually in terms of what their needs are. And here you had three different approaches. You had the theatrical approach of Ned Beatty and Ronnie Cox. You had your Hollywood film star like Burt Reynolds and Voight who's a method actor. And so there was a very nice dynamic there. I have to say that I think that the casting was, as it always is, a great part of the success of that film. And the good thing about us all is that we all rolled up our sleeves and we wanted to do the job and we all contributed whatever we had to it. I think one of the most memorable scenes in Deliverance has to be the opening sequence where these four guys pull into this gas station way the hell and gone back in the mountains and they encounter this boy who seems to be mentally disturbed or deficient in some way but who has a banjo. Rosper Pannenberg is my assistant on the picture. I sent him off to try and find Summer and he came back with this kid. Billy Joe Redden was this incredible young man. He was 15 years old. He was in the second grade at that time. It's what Jim Dickey used to call the land of people with nine fingers because everybody had lost a finger doing something. Either they'd had it chopped off or they were born without it or something. When John Borman was casting, he always had me come in because how we related to each other was very important to him. We all knew immediately this was the kid that we wanted. And I said, oh it's fantastic. And Rosper said, well there's only one problem. He can't play the banjo. But they found a way to do it with another boy who was a great banjo player and could do his fingering here. So all he had to do was do this. So he put his arm here and the other boy held the banjo's neck and that's how we did that scene. And every time they'd stop the playback he would turn to the kid and he'd say, we sure can't play that thing, can't we? We sure can't play that thing. It was magical. Then you remember the old guy came out who had that hat and started to dance. Nobody told him to dance. Julian Banjo's is a traditional piece. It must have just arisen out of banjo playing up there in the Appalachians. It's a kind of battle. A feud between these two. In a sense it's between the mountain men and the urban men. And it has a quality to it of somehow expressing the whole film. After we finished Billy's stuff, John Borman came to me and he said, Ronnie, you should be proud because we owe Billy's performance to you. I don't know that that's true but I am proud and it means a lot to me that he said that. Of course the first time he worked was when we were at the gas station and they did the song together. Then he came back later and appeared on a bridge that we crossed on Earth. One of my favorite shots in the whole film is the first day when they first start out in the canoes and then Billy's up on that bridge and sort of with that banjo going like a pendulum of a clock and sort of Drew trying to recreate that moment. The shot in the canoe looking up at the boy with the banjo swinging it back and forth is as good a shot as you'll ever see in any picture. It's almost a 360. He had this incredible effect on the audience but I always feel like it had something to do with whatever that magic was that happened because he met Ronnie Cox. Nature makes Deliverance a widescreen film first. The sense of the river, the sense of the woods but also the way Borman and Vilmos Sigmund framed the scenes. John Borman was preparing Deliverance and he was looking for a cinematographer in those days. He didn't know yet who he was to hire and he saw the dailies for MacCabe and Mrs. Miller and I know the studio hated the dailies because they were so desaturated and soft but Borman said, wow, this is something very interesting you know. I want to talk to this guy. And I met Vilmos and we spent some time together and when he told me the story of how he came out of Hungary, he was a film student in Budapest in 56 at the time when the Russians came in and I thought someone who had been fired on by the Russians that survived was the man and he was tough and wiry and the guy I needed because this was going to be tough. You know, shooting this picture on this raging river and in very, very difficult circumstances where you couldn't have the kind of backup that a cameraman would normally expect to have and I wanted someone who also could operate as well as light. When I was looking for locations before Vilmos came into the picture I was looking for locations and trying to find this river and the river obviously was vital to the story and being rather young and foolish, I chose this river which was virtually impossible to get into but because it was so hard to reach it looked pristine and wild, which is what I needed. For the river scenes we were going four wheel drive vehicles to get us into the river at a certain point and then we'd go with the two canoes the four actors, Vilmos Sigmund the cameraman myself and Art Brooker who was a grip. Sometimes with the sound and often not. Sometimes we shot dialogue without sound. We dubbed it on afterwards because of the sound of the river and we spent the whole day going down. We bought a lunch in a sealed plastic bag and we went down the river, shot the scenes and we were picked up at a point down below and that's how we did it. Of the four of us the only one who had ever been in a canoe before was Ned Beatty who was playing the biggest klutz in the canoe yeah I had fished in one and I spent some time in one I was the only one who had actually ever been in the woods before. One funny thing is that when we were doing the canoe I wanted to have the wooden canoe because I felt it was more homey more cozy like Ed. I said look John, you know you're the star, you should pick first praying that he would take the pretty one and he did. This green wooden canoe was the worst canoe to get down this rapids with because it just every rock we hit it just you could hear the thing breaking underneath us whereas the other canoe could go right over rocks and everything. So I made a terrible blunder but I made an artistic choice Bert recently sent me the gift of a canoe that was like my canoe and he has Voight's Choice on the canoe he sent it to me recently Half of whitewater canoeing is picking the correct line If you choose the correct line a set of rapids can be a piece of cake. If you choose the wrong line it can be disaster You know we trained them and their abilities were varying shall I say. Bert didn't want to be told how to do it he just barreled in there and did it and did it pretty much ok through sheer willpower and strength John Voight learnt it very carefully and all the techniques and it was kind of ok the same with Roddy Cox but when Ned was with John Voight who was a bit tentative about it and he would get into a rage because he'd be in the front there and if John Voight screwed up at the back he was the one who was going to be pitched into the river. Borman said to me I want you to read this book and it was called Zen and the Art of Archery one called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Racing which I had read and one of the things is that the arrow releases you. You don't release it you pull it back and it goes when it's time to go and it goes where it's going to go which is right in the bullseye. And as we were training down the river I was training with a guy named Freddy Bear who had the bear bow which was named after him who had killed every animal in the world with a boner including a rhinoceros. First night they spend together. You know there's a sense there are hints that there's something out there, something threatening they all have a few drinks and there's a line where John Voight says whatever happens in Atlanta nobody can find us here and he's saying it in a kind of relief the sense that they have got away but of course we later on that we realise that they are cut off totally and can't be rescued and found. Now we come to this scene this campfire scene and each one of us had our ideas like I had my idea about this scene I was going to be a little drunk and Ned had his idea and Bert was really going to carry the scene to a certain degree and John the way he put the camera there was one scene where the camera was stationary and we thought we hear something Bert leaves and we're there he goes around the back and then comes back through and it's all one shot it was an incredible shot very brave it could have taken you out of the movie had it not worked it was like introducing an element of fear that something is not right because that's the first time basically when they think that maybe people are following them and by the same token when Voight goes out early in the morning and tries to shoot a deer and gets this deer fever which is that your hand starts to shake in the point of kill you can't keep still and we see that so later on in the film when in order to survive he has to try and kill this mountain man and we see him get the shakes again we know that he missed the deer and he's probably going to miss the man all those tensions were set up there and also the slight irritations between them that were coming out you know the Ned Beatty character was getting irritated by being teased by the Bert Reynolds character so these little tensions were going up there all these seeds were sown for what was to happen later there's probably no scene that people remember in Deliverance that's even remotely as powerful in their recollection as the squeal like a pig scene where Bobby is raped by one of the mountain men and in the filming of Deliverance everybody knew that scene was coming and because it was filmed sequentially there was a lot of tension building up to that scene the rape scene was to me in some ways the heart of the film because it was the rape of the river by the urban men and the rape of them by nature's revenge if you like consider the mountain men as being sort of malignant spirit of the forest it was difficult of course but for me the problem was the location where to shoot it and I looked and looked and looked and eventually I found this place which was laurels which had these acid green leaves so that the light coming through had that nasty kind of greenish hue to it and there were these brown leaves from the laurels on these undulating slopes and these black stems of the laurels and nothing else and once I found that I knew really how to shoot it casting first of all man who played the toothless one he worked on a dude ranch with Burt Reynolds Burt told me about him John said to me I can't find the other guy and I've got lots of southern actors but they won't take their front teeth out I said the actors are funny about that they don't want to pull their front teeth but I worked with a guy and I used to do a stunt show in ghost town North Carolina he had no front teeth the guy's name was cowboy coward now he stutters but he was a hell of an actor and he played Pa Clinton in the shootout and he said do you think you can find him I said I don't know this had been 15 years before maybe more so I called ghost town do you possibly know where cowboy coward is and they said yeah it's right here so he came in and he was amazing the other guy I saw a lot of people for that part and obviously it was very very difficult and he had an extraordinary quality Bill McKinney who was sensational in this part so intimidating, so deranged powerful physically too unusual guy, very good guy who was a tree surgeon from Los Angeles that's one of his jobs an actor, singer and a tree surgeon and they got him, somehow they got him for this part he and Ned Beatty spent a lot of time together because in a certain sense when we were approaching the scene it sort of cut them off from everybody there were these two and they had to do this and they had to find a way of doing it didn't bother me that much it's all worked to me I'm pretty much a contemporary sexual person you know but I didn't read that much sex into it the scene wasn't going to be particularly physical the way it was written but when we came up to start getting ready to actually do it Mr. Borman said I just don't believe it he said I don't believe this guy is going to drop his laundry and then just sort of give in to this he said I want you to run I said fine, I'll run but Bill was great to work with especially in that regard the whole thing about running away and catching interesting thing about it was even when I'm beating him up at the first of it if I throw the knife in the tree and chase him up the hill and pull his underwear and slap him I'm thinking all the time about protecting him too it's interesting thinking back on it those things that come to your mind although there's contempt there but I'm still taking care of him I'm not losing control Ned is a great actor and what Ned was able to do was to make it so convincing that he was being raped that was what made the scene work so well he played it he allowed himself as far as I can see in his own mind and heart to be violated it takes a lot of courage for a man to do that he's one hell of an actor the line itself came about because the need to do it for television a cleaned up version squeal like a pig was one of the things we came up with as being a harmless thing that could be substituted for these F words and it worked so well that I abandoned the F words and used that instead and it was much more effective that whole scene is so frightening and it was done in a way that was tastefully done but it was horrifying at the same time because without doing this scene in a horrifying way you would not believe the rest of the story we've seen that scene in a sense where a husband who's tied up and forced to watch his wife being raped and here it's the man being raped and he can do nothing about it and the Burt Reynolds character, Lewis, of course can when he arrives he's able to fulfill his destiny which is to kill a man well after Bill McKinney is shot this debate goes on about what to do with him and he has to play dead and this is extraordinarily disciplined this man, he mustn't blink, he mustn't breathe and he was able to do this as we shot this long sequence that went on around him death is like no responsibility really I spotted on that tree twice for 6 minutes and 45 seconds without blinking and this guy comes running there with a stopwatch he said, Jesus, you remember you know how long you stayed with your eyes open I said no, he said 645 so we did it again, I did it again but see the atmosphere was right it was a little bit on the moist side, humid and there's no glare and I'm on the tree and I just keep it on the tree Ned's performance was so devastating in that and obviously that scene afterwards is my big scene in the film and preparing for that scene was the easiest thing in the world I mean, I would just get myself out of breath just because we had supposed to have been running up that was easy, you could run in place or do push-ups or do whatever just to get yourself where you're actually heaving a little bit and then right before the scene was done I would just go over and hug Ned I mean, all you gotta do is go look at his face and emotionally, you're there they've reached a kind of primal level here, they've killed someone they're in this place cut off from the world as the Burt Reynolds character says, there's no law and they decide to bury him and not tell anybody and they carry him there's a series of scenes then, which I did where they carry this body on their back so it's redolent of some burial of some ancient chieftain then they have to claw out a grave with their hands and Drew is the moralist who is completely against this idea that they should take the law into their own hands you see him when they're digging the grave first of all he won't take part in it, and then he does and he's doing it feverishly and there's a sense that he's broken by this John Borman came to me and said Ronnie, one of the really important things and it's an important shot is Drew's death he said you can make it either way you want it to but it's really important that you make his death be enigmatic that people not be clear one way or the other but just make sure that it's a mystery 50% of the people I talked to think he bailed out and probably Voight thinks he killed himself because that's what his character would think and mine would think he was killed I decided for my own purposes that Drew didn't get shot he didn't commit suicide he's too strong a Catholic to ever do that but maybe his paddle hit a rock spun him out, he hit his head on a rock he drowned but when they found the body there was no bullet wound, there was no entry there so as far as I'm concerned, he was not shot so when they discover him, his body he's washed up and this arm is right across like this and all we did was rub a little, make a little bruise under the armpit here and it was an image of a man who's broken I'm old now and I can't do it anymore but I said you know John I said I can do a really weird thing with my shoulders and he said so I showed him and he almost fell down he just thought it was the greatest thing he'd ever seen and so there are rages of people about whether that's prosthetic or how they did that and it's just me we shot more than a week in this little lagoon which is in the bottom of the waterfall and we could control the water actually on that waterfall and we got permission from the water authorities that we could actually control the water whenever we needed so it was like being in a Universal Studios in a back lot if they would have built a waterfall that's the way it would have looked like actually basically for the smashing of the canoe they were able to build a rail in so that the canoe was running along this rail and both canoes were on rails so that they were able to collide like that and then the wooden canoe was rigged so it broke apart and so having put all this in place with no water then we would open the sluices let the water come down which covered the rails and you see the two canoes collide and break up and then we had the men having to slide down this terrible slope and it was the one place where we used a double for a buoy Bert wanted to do it himself Bert said I don't want to have to tell people that there was a stuntman, I did my own stuff he sent a dummy over and it looked awful and I said to him I can do that you can do that? I said yeah so he said alright and then we got to the bottom there was the scene there where Bert breaks his leg and he's dragged up well that was just a lamb bone I took the bone and broke it backwards and then tore a hole in the stuff the bone and stuck it out and poured the blood on it and John as only John would do everybody else went oh my because it was like diabolique it was petrifying well when Bert of course breaks his leg then Voight has to become Bert take on the role and find within himself this hunter this primal man and he has to climb this rock face, this cliff and there's a certain point where he's scared and he doesn't know if he can do it and he takes out the picture of his wife and son and it drops and it falls into this abyss and it's like as though at that point he'd lost his family lost everything that he he was and he goes on as this man who has become someone else from being this gentle easy going guy he's now become this killer when they get to a point in the river where they realise that they're back by this rusted wreck of a car which to them means civilisation, they're back and what is civilisation represented by? This old wreck of a car and that's the kind of irony there and then of course the dam is being built and it's already being flooded, the water's already backing up and there's a village that's going to be flooded and the wooden church is being moved out you always think of a church as being something very solid, belonging to one place and then you see it on the move and you get the sense that nothing can be relied upon, so that that church which is moving through a street is like their beliefs, if you like which have now become uprooted and uncertain. For me all those scenes that follow after they escape from the river were the most interesting scenes in the film and most of those scenes, for instance in the hospital, when they go into the little dining room, which is one of I think my favourite scene in the whole film when Ned Beatty's already there in this very typical thing you have in Georgia where everybody sits at one table in a restaurant or in a boarding house and a meal is served, it's like a family thing and Voight comes in and there's this kind of quiet sympathy for him and he weeps and he breaks down because it's so moving to him that people are treating him kindly and I think that that's the truth of people who come back from war that they can't believe that they've returned that things are going to be alright you know, that that love is there for them. I needed an image to express the sense that this was a nightmare that was going to haunt these men, particularly the John Voight character, always. The fear that the body might be found it was a nightmare and it had to be expressed in some way and so this hand rises from the river and Voight wakes up. It's the idea that they can never really rest in peace that that nightmare will always be threatening they will never be able to put this experience to rest and I think it's a good note to end the film on. I got this guy who was a very good diver who did the stunt for John Voight to go under the water and put just a rubber glove on. I wanted to show the idea of a hand would be swollen from the water and so he just put this rubber glove on him and he went under and he pulled his hand up. That's how we did it. When I first saw it I thought I don't know about that and then when I saw it with an audience and the audible gasp was sensational. You know I started as an editor myself and so we cut the pictures and went along and three days actually after I'd finished the shooting we had a cut so within a week of finishing shooting the studio was watching the film. Well I first of all had to deal with the whole censorship problem. You know I think often violence on film is I think dishonest when you know bang the shot fired and he falls out of shot and that's it. And so the killing of this man I elongated it. It took him a long time to die and it was something the censors tried to cut and I had long arguments with the censors about that issue. My point was that it was vital that these men these characters should be obliged to see the consequences of their actions and we fought it and the studio backed me up and eventually I took out from the death scene six frames which is one quarter of a second because it was the only cut that I made. We thought that we were doing an interesting movie but you know we were a little bit scared about the rape scene and you know how the people are going to accept it and all that so we we didn't think that it was going to be that successful the way it became. Well then the picture opened and it got quite an adverse reaction to the violence and particularly to the rape scene but the reviews were generally good and it was a huge success. I met someone just a couple of years ago who said to me I saw that film Yours Deliverance when it came out he said I walked out halfway through and I've never been back to the cinema since. So I think a lot of people were put off by it. The first thing I noticed about people's reaction to it was that women seemed to know exactly what it was about and guys would say yeah, yeah, I know, canoes, you know I know about that I did that, yeah. I don't think Borman and I don't think my father were interested in having people walk out of the movie feeling good. They wanted people to walk out of that movie feeling like they had been run through a ringer and you can't forget Deliverance because you can't write it off emotionally or psychologically. Jim Dickey would haunt the cinemas when it was being shown and he would walk along the lines of people saying you're going to get your money's worth today, boy I'm telling you here, this is one great movie. And unfortunately as the years went by and recently all the conflicts that we had originally about the script resurfaced and wanted to remake the film That was during a period in his professional life when he was not as productive and creative as he had been before and I think it was sort of a passing project I think ultimately he was probably happy with the movie as it was Yes, I was nominated as producer and as director and Tom Priestly for the editing and it was a very strong year. It was Godfather Cabaret I think there were probably five films nominated as Best Pictures that year that could have won any time in the last ten years When you make a very successful film of this nature it has a quality of bonding you together with the people who made it, particularly when you've been through something like this was the making of this was rather like being to war, you know So I've remained friends with all those four actors and Vilmish Sigmund and seen them all from time to time over those years Well we've all gone through our different adventures in life and we've changed and certainly gotten older There's still the same characters the same boys that made the film back there are still alive It was really a life changing thing It opened doors that I didn't even know existed before that Bert Reynolds looked at me one day and said you're really good in this I said what? He said you know you're really really good in this I said oh thank you Bert He said no thank you Bert He said you know you're going to do films I said sure But God bless him Bert did an awful lot to help me have that film career So the film was filled with these extraordinary moments of my life that I'll never forget Not only was it my deliverance out of television and certainly some bad moves but into another area that I'd never been in Without John I swear to you this movie would have been half as effective I mean he was 100% over the top you know it's just his energy it's the way he works it's God's gift to John In the 70's the studios depended on directors and gave them an enormous amount of power When I made Deliverance there was no no notes from the studio, we didn't preview it there were no sneak previews, there were no audience cards and things and today this kind of film would be made in a much different way but the 70's were a period of originality and daring and we were free from censorship very largely for the first time and that's something that often is not taken into account, you know there were all sorts of possibilities available to us that hadn't been before If you stuck a gun to my head I couldn't think of another story except some that shouldn't be told