For ten years he had managed to keep off cigarettes. Jake Gittes brought them back.
“You believe in aliens?” he asked Jesse Vint.
Vint, cast as the grove’s crippled farmer, searched Jack’s face for irony. There wasn’t any. This was just Jack. “Do you believe in aliens?”
“They’re here. They’re here today. Right now. Taking us over. One by one.”
“You putting me on?”
Vint remembered that great scene in Easy Rider: Jack, with Hopper and Fonda around the fire, improvising a stoned monologue about extraterrestrial life. He was clearly high in that scene, a tour de force of subconscious release. Was he high now? Or did he really believe this stuff?
Never one to miss a debate, Polanski had drawn close to Nicholson’s lecture, listening intently. Stanley Cortez, director of photography, was slow to set up the shot, leaving cast and crew ample time—too much time, in fact—to talk about aliens.
“We only have this location for three days,” Sylbert reminded Evans, who didn’t need reminding.
“We’ll get it.”
Evans was disinclined to Cortez from the first; he had pushed for Gordon Willis for director of photography. He wanted the broodingly romantic look Willis brought to The Godfather, but Polanski, having so enjoyed his work with William Fraker, DP on Rosemary’s Baby, resisted. Evans feared reteaming them. Two kids in a sandbox, they had pushed Rosemary behind schedule, and Evans wouldn’t let Chinatown, the first Robert Evans Production, run the same risk. Yablans and the rest of Paramount were watching the production carefully, waiting (or in Yablans’s case, hoping) for Icarus to fall, and any perceived indulgence of time or budget—Evans was trying to keep the latter to three million—would be characterized as his fault. Cortez, then, was a compromise; Polanski could get behind the cinematographer of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons; and to Evans, the faded glamour, the sumptuous camerawork of Ambersons, portended well for Chinatown. At sixty-five, Cortez was, after all, familiar with the period he remembered well, and even if he wasn’t as comfortable with the new Panavision technology as a younger cinematographer might be, at least he would bring a degree of stylistic reportage to Chinatown. But how long would they wait for it?
Cortez was laying boards on the dirt to smooth, theoretically, the camera movements. But the dirt wasn’t a flat surface.
“He’s putting down a dance floor?” Koch asked. “He should be using rails.”
Assistant producer and production manager Doc Erickson had his suspicions. Cortez, he knew, was a figure of considerable influence at the American Society of Cinematographers and “had his name on a number of films,” but he “had not done that many pictures” as director of photography. Whatever Cortez’s facility with black-and-white, Erickson could see, watching Cortez set up the shot, that he had comparatively little experience with color.
Another director might have exploited his downtime to reconceive the shot or storyboard upcoming setups, but Polanski, who stopped storyboarding after film school, had already completed his preparation. He knew, basically, where he wanted the camera. But there was no point, Polanski reasoned, in attempting to plan for every contingency; committing to a shot in advance would be as senseless as reverse engineering, “like ordering a first class suit by a leading tailor in Paris, then trying to find a person that will fit it,” he said. “I do it the other way around.” Adjustments to the proverbial suit would come from watching the actors discover the fit, “letting them rehearse and seeing that instinctively they find the right places, the right attitudes, the right readings and the right body language.… Only then do I start thinking of filming it, deciding when and how I’m going to place the camera.” In the interim Polanski would hold off the actors. Why warm them up only to let them cool down? He’d wait—for Cortez to give him the go-ahead—and in the meantime reexamine certain technical details.
“Get your clubfoot from wardrobe,” he told Jesse Vint. “I want to see your walk.”
A crutch under one arm, Vint hobbled along.
“No, no. You’re too athletic,” Polanski called back. “Here’s the thing. When a person is born with a clubfoot, what happens during the growth is the skeleton becomes deformed and they will compensate.”
Vint’s character would appear only briefly in the film; amid the chaos of the scene, an altercation between Gittes and the farmers, the particulars of his handicap would likely be lost in the melee, but to Polanski there were no minutiae.
Polanski took the crutch, and Vint watched astonished as Polanski’s frame adapted, just as he had described, to the clubfoot. He walked to and fro, Vint thought, making the anatomical readjustments of someone born with the deformity.
“Why the hell aren’t you doing this part?” Vint asked.
“I’m already doing a part,” he replied inscrutably, returning the crutch.
When the time finally did come to shoot the scene, Polanski instructed Vint to give it everything he had.
“Hit Jack on the head with the crutch,” he said. “Hit him hard and don’t hold back.”
“Hear that, Jack?” Vint turned to Nicholson. “Roman said it. Not me.”
“Don’t worry about it, Vint. Do what the boss tells ya.” Ready for the take, Nicholson put out his smoke. “Let’s go.”
It was so hot, unseasonably hot for October. They would have the location for three days. Both too much time and too little.
“Quiet!” Howard Koch shouted, calling the set to order. “We’re ready to go.” Then: “We’re rolling.”
Polanski held stone-still next to the camera lens—any closer to the actors and Koch would have to forcibly pull him out of the scene.
“Speed.”
Perfect silence down the orchard, the eucalyptus in the foothills, the mountains at the farthest reaches of the landscape, and for three still seconds the Tierra Rejada valley sounded a million years younger.
“And…” Polanski murmured. His focus was absolute; he was a rifleman staring down his kill.
A hot breeze, the sound of secrets whispering the oranges.
“Action!”
Vint raised the crutch and whacked Nicholson over the head, knocking him down. Vint flung onto him, and they tussled in the dust. The violence was real, but Jack kept acting; more, fastening onto the rage, feeding on it. “He cannot stop,” Polanski observed. “He goes into a kind of fit…”
Polanski, involuntarily acting alongside them, his expressions changing, his shoulders twitching in step with Vint’s lopsided shuffle, absorbed the drama like a scene written in Braille, until his body touched a falsehood and recoiled. “Cut!” He was Polanski again. “Cut.”
He crossed to Vint. “You think that’s a hit? That’s not a hit.”
“You hear what he said, Jack?”
Jack heaved himself up from the dirt. “Go ahead, pal. You can’t hurt me.”
Polanski jumped back to the camera, and they went at it again. Vint thwacked Nicholson dead to the ground.
“Cut!”
That was it.
“Good!” Polanski said. “Now Jack.”
They would go in now for Jack’s closeup, a shot of him knocked out in the dirt.