Original subtitles

Camera B rolling.

And action.

OK.

Uh, why don't we just dive in and have a look at uh... Steve,

what do you think of the circumstances that might have

led up to the disease itself?

How do you perceive that?

Two ways.

One is asbestos poisoning in my lungs, which is very rare.

Two is, I think, there were times

when I was under pressure.

I had a battle in my business with somebody

for about five years, so I think I really wanted

to let go under pressure.

It all began when a super star

who loved auto racing decided to do a picture about his sport.

That was most seminal moment in his life.

What was happening when we were shooting this movie should

happen to no man.

I just wanted to get it down on film, what

I thought it was all about.

Ladies and gentlemen, the male world

film favorite, Steve McQueen.

Thank you.

If you had your life to do over again,

would you do it the same way?

Damn right.

Every bit of it, because I think film

is a very important medium.

When he was the number one superstar in the world,

he was, like, I think, 38 years old.

People went nuts wherever he went.

He was American Royalty.

Groovy.

Thanks.

I started on a farm, in the state of Missouri,

and I lived there in my youth, and I got

out of there as quick as I can.

His background gave him

a courageous element that stood him in very, very good stead

at that time.

I don't know very much about art or music,

except things that I like.

Basically, I come from the gutter,

and I'm not a compromiser.

He didn't give a shit, you know?

If there was a fight to be had, he would not turn his back,

and it doesn't matter who it was.

I bet you're a perfectionist.

Well, I try to do a good job.

You know, I try.

"The Thomas Crown Affair" and "Bullet" were my two

pictures with Steve McQueen.

I convinced him that every time he went on the set,

no matter what the director said,

he should recite the mantra.

I decide what is right and what is wrong,

and I don't have to explain it to anybody.

I like women, but I'm a little afraid of them.

I'm not going to make a commitment,

because if you make a commitment to a woman, they can hurt you.

I won't pick a fight, but if you pick a fight with me

or back me into a corner, I will fucking kill you.

He used to recite that to himself

when he went on the set, regardless

of what the directions were.

And he played that character, I thought, just brilliantly.

Which do you enjoy more, acting or producing?

Well, I'm sort of hung.

I like producing, as long as I'm acting,

because I think the ultimate is to have creative control.

He loved the part in the "Thomas Crown Affair,"

playing Tommy Crown.

Big business guy, no one knows anything more than him.

He aspired to that character.

He wanted to feel like he was a bit of a mogul.

Now, the movies are changed.

It's not a game anymore.

It's big bucks, heavy bucks.

And those people play for keeps out there.

He got this into his head, that he would build us an empire.

After "Thomas Crown," he said, I'm going to build us

an empire, baby doll.

If I have my name on there,

they can no longer pawn me off as just

a candy ass movie star who they've got to be easy with.

This puts me out front as an executive.

So therefore, they have to deal with me.

The juice.

He got the juice man, he got the power.

It was a very smart, intelligent, sophisticated move

for him to form a production company

called Solar, and exercised his clout in the way he did.

And the first person that he told,

his agents that he wanted to reach out to be his partner

was my father.

I'm standing here with Bob Relyea, the executive producer

of Solar Productions.

We had been through "The Magnificent Seven."

We'd been through "The Great Escape."

The company was a very well organized,

real production company.

The relationship that Steve and I had in our families

was extremely close.

You actually throw a temper?

Can you?

Injustice bothers me a lot sometimes,

and I get angry about things, and so forth.

And I suppose I fly off the handle sometimes.

Steve trusted Bob.

If there was a problem, he'd just grab him by the shoulder,

and he'd take him off to the side.

As much as you want this, Steve, this passion doesn't mean shit.

And Steve got it.

It was a real coup to get him to come to Cinema Center Films,

and to be involved with his company.

That, in itself, was a major accomplishment.

It wasn't just "I'm the biggest star in the world."

It was I'm going to decide what films I make.

I'm going to decide who the directors are,

and I'm going to make that racing picture

that I always wanted to make, and it's

going to define my career.

I race motorcars, because I enjoy it.

I like the competitive element.

I like beating the other guy.

I do enjoy the feeling of power.

It was his thing.

It was his passion.

And if you find your passion in life, you know you got it made.

I remember the first time I raced, I was very frightened.

It scared me.

I didn't like the idea of being frightened,

and I wanted to overcome it.

That was one element.

The other element, and it is a very pure thing.

It's one of the few things in life you can't fix.

When you're out there by yourself,

you're very much by yourself.

The risk taking, the need for adrenaline, the what

do I have to lose attitude that he seemed to project,

it just matched McQueen's soul, his personality,

and his essence.

Racing drivers are a different breed.

When you're in the car behind the wheel,

you tune everything off.

There's one thing that you are focused on,

and that is to perform, to win.

And he had that.

For 20 years, an almost

forgotten airport has echoed to the fury of cars and speed.

Sebring was as close as you get to the brother of Le Mans.

If you're ever going to get a taste

of what it's like to be in an endurance race, this is it.

Just a week before, he had broken his foot

in the motorcycle race.

And I said, you better not do this.

He said, no.

He said, I can do it, I can do it.

What about shifting and clutching?

Must be pretty difficult.

Well, it's a little difficult. I can't use a foot rest.

And we've put some sandpaper on the bottom,

taped it on, so I keep it on the clutch pedal, adjust it.

We went for it.

It was like a Hollywood script.

A surprise to most of the 57,000 who looked on

was the McQueen Revson Porsche 908.

The two have done a Masterful job.

What was incredible about that race is suddenly,

they were winning.

With this combination,

Sebring could have a storybook finish.

Approaching the 11th hour, the Porsche closes the gap

on the faltering Ferrari.

The McQueen pits were overjoyed, thinking

the Ferrari was in trouble.

And out of the darkness, one car would emerge the victor.

It took Mario Andretti two cars

to beat us and only pass us on the last laps of the race.

The 12 hours of Sebring was over,

and Ferrari had won.

McQueen Revson was second.

We were mobbed at the end of the race.

Steve gets up on the car and gives the peace signal.

And it was like Moses parted the waters

or God appeared in the sky.

Silence.

That was my biggest thrill, for me,

because I guess being an actor, people don't really

expect you to do it as well, and I

was a big man of my house with my kids for awhile, anyway.

That was a major, major happy time in his life.

I remember when he came home.

Yeah.

He was in a good mood for about a month after that.

After the Sebing Race, he wasn't

looked at just like, oh, he's the actor,

superstar, Steve McQueen.

He was admired by the other drivers

as a real, professional racer.

The interweaving of film and racing was now perfect.

It was a natural.

His next step was the 24 Hours of Le Mans and to race there.

This was going to be a lasting memory

of Steve McQueen, this film.

Steve wanted to really do the movie of all time, the movie

for all generations, the movie that captures the smells,

the noise, the feeling of car racing like no other film

ever had.

It was a really big deal.

- Hi, guys. - Bonjour.

How you doing?

Merci.

Wow.

It's been what, 40 years?

Ha!

Before Solar was even started,

McQueen decided he was going to make

the ultimate racing picture.

There was a project called "The Day of the Champion"

that never got made.

It was shut down.

John Frankenheimer got there first, with "Grand Prix."

Oh my god, get out.

Get out of here, you.

Give this guy hell, this driver.

Get the Ferrari out of here.

Change the lens on that, and let's go.

I've got to remember which is which.

James Garner was involved in "Grand Prix."

I've been driving it backwards.

And that left a very bitter taste in Steve's mouth.

Jim, where exactly do you use your brakes?

All right.

All right, good.

Another actor, and here he was, taking the subject matter,

and running with it.

Steve's apartment was above James Garner's apartment

in the same neighborhood.

And Steve would urinate out the window at night

on the flower boxes of James Garner below.

And as he performed this act, he went, you pissed on my film.

And now, I piss on you.

What is that? Paint?

No, no.

Close your eyes.

It's all right. Cut it out.

It's not funny.

I can see him sitting in the theater,

watching that and saying, oh, shit.

It's just another movie.

His sense of racing was so personal.

If there was going to be one definitive movie about

that sport, he wanted to do it.

This is a treatment for "Le Mans" and general comments

dated October 2nd, 1969.

Ha.

"Grand Prix," a prime example of a director

playing with himself in public.

We have to reach high in a picture like "La Mans,"

or there is no purpose in making it.

Well, how perfect is this?

OK.

Battle stations.

We all remember the scene in "Apocalypse Now," where

up the river, Kurtz has built a piece of America

in the middle of hostile jungle.

That is what Steve McQueen decided

to lower in to rural Le Mans, and that was SoLA Village.

We want to photograph the entire race,

and then we want to recreate it.

And we want to use the same drivers.

Suddenly, out of the blue, we're asked to work

on a movie with Steve McQueen.

It was like, whoa. Wow.

Why not?

And then on top of that, you knew

you were going to earn $200 a day, which was a lot of money.

Excellent.

Absolutely excellent.

We were given a Porsche 911 each to trundle around in,

and it was good news.

Well, it's quite a pleasant surprise to be invited.

I knew Steve quite well, and it was very nice of Steve,

letting me go racing at the weekends,

and letting his pilot and airplane to come back in time

for filming on Monday morning.

David Piper.

We used to call him the pirate.

I think of the pipe hanging out of his mouth.

He was a grand, old guy.

Mr. Sturges, you've directed Steve McQueen in several films,

including "The Great Escape."

And now, you're here in "Le Mans."

John Sturges is directing this film.

We've done three films together now,

and I tell you, we've had nothing but fun,

simply because we've had the time,

and we get excited about doing really good work.

John was an incredible director.

It was Steve working with John on "Great Escape"

and "Magnificent Seven" which made the myth, and the man,

and Steve McQueen who he was.

The hero of the film is racing in this scene.

That's what it's about.

We have the star.

We had the drivers.

We had an incredible array of technical support.

We had everything, except the script.

He said that the script isn't entirely finished.

We're waiting for the end of the race to finish the script,

to finalize the script?

Well, we do want to adjust our story to the way things

happen that we actually photograph.

That's correct.

It's common in Hollywood to start without a script.

It's not the right way.

It's not the economic way.

But it's common, and anybody who says it's not

hasn't been there.

They had done it once before, Sturges,

McQueen, and my father.

They had done it on "The Great Escape,"

and it turned out well.

And after "Bullitt," my father said the studio would have

written him a blank check just to produce the phone book,

if he wanted to.

We have the best people in the business with us.

Bob Relyea, he's our executive producer.

John Sturges, he's our director.

He probably is the biggest director in America,

and he's probably one of the best in the world.

So with all those things going for us,

plus Steve McQueen and Le Mans, I

think we've got a picture that's going

to make an awful lot of money and make a lot of people happy.

This is the story of racing, man.

This is the guts.

Glass is all right.

All right.

OK.

You got motor racing, and you got Steve McQueen.

What have you got?

You've got everything.

"Le Mans" was going to be our number

one picture for the year.

It was a sure thing for Hollywood.

This could not miss.

It's the oldest, most famous race in the world.

As you arrive to Le Mans and come up beside the cathedral,

suddenly, the adrenaline will start to get in your stomach.

That was when I realized I was at Le Mans.

I knew we were driving into the unknown.

You're going to be driving at speeds that a racing

car's never been before.

It was terrifying.

Go.

It was a very fast flowing circuit.

Very dangerous, but all circuits were dangerous.

When I started racing, no one was worried about safety.

I mean, almost every race I went to,

someone was killed... Sometimes, two or three people.

Life was cheap.

Those cars weren't very safe.

They were like sharp knives, if you had an accident.

They cut you to pieces.

A car catches on fire, and that's the end of it.

We have trouble!

We have trouble.

Out at Nissan Dodge.

See the smoke billowing.

There is a problem.

You don't have time to make two decisions.

You have time only to make one, and it must be right.

You are sitting in a motor car that maybe has 600 horsepower

and 30 gallons of gasoline.

So you know that if you crash in this vehicle,

an impact is going to be disastrous.

There's nothing very glamorous about racing,

except when you're winning.

You get to the end of the race.

You're leading the race.

You're almost in tears on the last couple of laps, just

hoping you can get across the line.

Here they come, toward the checkered flag.

Ford wins the 1969 24 hours of Le Mans.

And you don't get a situation like that in life very often,

you know.

You like speed, don't you?

Hm?

You like speed, don't you?

Oh, it's nice.

It's cold.

The original idea was for Steve to drive

Le Mans the actual 24 hours.

The real question here is this is Steve McQueen,

and we are wondering whether or not Steve

McQueen will run in the race.

If I weren't so rotten inside for money,

I would probably tell them to go screw.

But I need the money to make the film.

And I will not race at Le Mans.

It was too big a risk.

And if something were to happen to him in the actual race,

that would put the film on hold and probably never get done.

That's how much it meant to him.

He gave up his shot at competing at Le

Mans for the sake of the film.

Well, the insurance company won't let Steve drive

in the race, as he told you.

We're going to be covering the race itself very extensively,

with cameras everywhere.

And we expect to work approximately three months

afterwards, staging the picture.

Solar Productions ready the camera

car for the race.

My real contribution was driving the camera

car during the actual race.

It was the car that Steve and Peter Revson had finished

second at Sebring, and then they converted

it to carry three cameras, one in front, two at the back.

When the camera car was being fixed up Le Mans,

Steve was all around that.

And you could see written all over his his face,

I want to be sitting where you are sitting

and to take this race on.

Most important was the start.

They wanted to get the start from in the car.

Going through the pit area, with the full grand stand of

don't know how many thousand people in it... this

was genuine stuff.

We were told to film especially the leaders.

So you'd photograph them coming up behind you,

and then switch with the front one

on to catch them overtaking you, and pulling away.

Unless they'd had all the footage that they got,

they could've never made the film.

They were brilliant.

The camera car was bringing need

to the screen what a driver would

see... cars passing at speed, car dicing, all part of the vision.

Here it is, after all this time.

And it started again,

and I meant every word, and I liked what I said,

and I liked what I heard.

And I started to think.

I could think about starting again.

We were laughing again over memories, and wine,

and the years in-between didn't seem a long time.

When I smiled, he knew why.

In a while, it was starting again.

We had so many similarities.

And I started to think.

We were raised by mothers who really were not particularly

ready to be mothers.

Our fathers left us.

We built our career together.

We had children together, and we were

married for a very long time.

You're walking along the street,

or you're at a party.

Or else you're alone and then you suddenly dig...

My mom... I don't know how old she is now.

She won't tell me.

But she still does her act.

There's no controlling the unrolling

of my faith, my friend.

Who knows what's Written in the magic book?

Well, my parents met in the '50s.

She was a star on Broadway.

And she's good at what she does, and she enjoys it.

She loves it.

I sure did like that.

She was about the sexiest girl I ever saw in my life.

I guess it was ever a thing of falling in love with a girl

at first sight, I guess that was it, because boy, I sure had

to chase her for a long time.

It was just our destiny to be together.

I walked out of Carnegie Hall, and he came right to me.

And he said, hi.

You're pretty.

And I was stunned.

And I said, well, you're pretty too.

I remember there was a long drive.

Yeah.

This was my home for three months, man.

The people my dad or Solar rented it from,

they lived on that floor, there.

And they had a nutty daughter, if I remember.

We pulled in here, and she was chasing a chicken around.

And she had a fucking ax in her hand.

And she grabbed it and cut its fucking

head off, right in front of us.

It was the first time I ever saw a chicken running

around with no head right here.

I'd come from Brentwood.

I didn't want to go to Le Mans.

However, because Chad had been doing badly in school,

I said, OK.

If you improve your grades, we'll go.

And he did, so I had to go.

I used to wait right out here to see dad's Porsche coming up.

The fact that you're here

with the likes of Hertz and...

Would you like some gum'?

Thank you.

When the flower children came along, everything changed.

Everything changed.

He was almost 40.

There was suddenly free sex, and free love, and free

this, and free everything.

He said to me one day.

He said, I have to work so hard for love in this house.

He said, I can get it for free out there.

His conquest of women behind his wife's

back probably averaged about a dozen women a week.

It was a little less than two a day.

They wanted to say, I had sex with Steve McQueen.

He loved cars, liquor, women, and he was interesting,

and cool, and dangerous.

See, they liked the danger in him.

Whatever Steve's activities might

have been when he had a break in the afternoon, so to speak.

His trailer was never empty.

I had came from the Royal Dramatic School in Stockholm,

and I was there for the job.

Only if you'd like it better.

He had something hidden.

Maybe that also made him attractive on the screen.

And as a woman, that's something that I want to get to know.

I don't know who cast her.

Think Steve had an eye for her.

She appealed to him.

She was an attractive lady.

My respect for him was not as big as his for me.

We shared this thing about the accident.

I had worked for Steve about two years,

almost, before we did "Le Mans."

I was involved more with the car racing

and other personal matters.

I had dinner together with Steve,

and the count and the countess from whom he rented this castle

in which he was living.

He would drive me home.

It was like 12:00, 1 o'clock in the morning.

And Steve comes into my room and says, come on.

We've got to go.

Where are we going? Why don't we go tomorrow?

I'm tired.

I haven't slept.

He told me to screw myself and said,

what are you worried about?

You're only 21.

You'll sleep when you die.

I never knew her name.

I never got introduced.

And it wasn't just any night.

It was my first night arriving in France.

I sat down next to him in the front seat.

Steve was not driving a Porsche.

He was driving a Peugeot, or something like that.

He was driving like a maniac, and it started to rain.

And I keep telling him to slow down,

and he keeps telling me to shut up.

Suddenly, there was a curve.

He drove at the side, and we rolled over the field.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch... I remember them smashing their heads

into the windshield.

I went flying.

I remember looking at my arm, holding on, as we're crashing

down, and it just broke.

I could see it snap.

I was just out.

Tss... And I remember reaching up,

and opening the door, and pushing the door open, and cut.

Steve thought that I was dead, because I was lying there.

The water, the light rain, woke him up.

And he said, what the fuck happened?

Holy shit.

What have I done?

Oh my god, she's dead!

Is she dead?

And of course, my arm's like this.

It's just hanging.

And she comes to.

She seemed OK, not too bad.

He didn't have a scratch.

They didn't call an ambulance, because they didn't want this

to get official, of course.

We saw a little farmhouse.

Steve says, there's a car there.

Let's go hot wire it.

And all of a sudden, we hear the dogs barking.

And this French guys comes out in pajamas,

and he's got a shot gun, and old, big gun in his hand.

And he's screaming in French something...

POW!

My makeup, early in the morning, she didn't know.

She asked me why I had bruises, but they were not too big.

And I said, ah, well, you know.

The production team, so to say, must have known about it.

Well, I know that there was an accident,

but I don't want to go there.

I don't want to go there.

I took the Wrap for it.

They said that I was the one who caused the problem,

but the fact that Steve was with the girl was never revealed.

You just have to protect Steve, and it's no big deal.

Nobody got killed.

Don't worry about it.

It's part of our jobs.

What would have happened if it'd been on the headlines

just before we started shooting the movie saying, Steve

McQueen, the great driver, he had an accident

with a young actress.

Could you imagine?

He was so afraid.

I could see how scared he was that I would

ruin him and his production.

He said to me, I'd appreciate it if you don't talk about this.

So I said...

No, I Won't.

The cars pass through the sleepy French towns

and countryside.

Strange, slow parade of muttering monsters.

Rolling.

McQueen were trying to achieve something that hadn't

been done in mainstream films about a sport

that he had a true passion for.

Cars under way.

He really wanted to break through

and do a film that was as authentic

as you could possibly get.

He wanted to put the person in the theater, put

them in the seat of a race car.

He wanted them to feel what he felt as a driver himself.

That was always his intent.

Wes, I think this is the first time this sort of a production

has been undertaken.

Yes, it is.

This is the first time anything like this has been filmed.

The things with this car and the mounts on it,

and the cameras on it that have never

been used bef0re... They're entirely new

mounts, entirely new concept of the way to shoot a racing film.

So far, everything is going so beautifully,

it's almost unbelievable.

They were able to achieve camera mounts

on automobiles that never before had ever thought of being used.

To be able to get the feeling of speed on film, helping us

crash which we call the film barrier.

When Steve talked about breaking the film barrier,

he was using language that Hollywood didn't use.

Nobody ever thought of doing it that way.

What he was trying to do was give

the total visual experience.

I'll tell you, Steve was ahead of his time with his vision.

As far as reality film's concerned,

that's where it's at.

That's where it should be.

He wanted it shot at race speeds.

If you're going 20, 40 in the race,

we're doing 240 in every shot we do.

Every driver that was on that picture,

I mean, they were risking their lives every single day

they were there.

These scenes that they shot were choreographed.

You had to do a ballet out on the track

and do what the director had asked you to do.

The making of film was, in many ways,

a lot more dangerous than the race.

And Steve did also not have much of a sense of danger.

So everything was pushed to the extreme.

Now, we're going 220 miles an hour.

Now, we're dicing.

Now, we're setting up a shot.

Not what might happen consciously

to a driver in his mind.

At a certain spot, we're asking drivers to do this.

It's death.

Dereck Bell is the first driver

to experience a narrow escape.

Get out the way there.

Get the men out of the way.

Steve and I were doing a shot.

Suddenly, the car sort of just exploded.

It sort of Went up in flames in my face.

And it appeared that he

took to unfasten the seat belt and climbing out of the door.

It's when I got burned.

Oh, I just got very burnt around here.

It could have been a lot worse.

I could've been dead, just as easy as that.

Steve was committed.

He put his but on the line.

Let's put it that way.

Every day, we shot with him in the car.

How can I get this shot'?

That's Steve McQueen.

That's the loner with the dream.

If you have this unlimited film barrier that you want to crash

through, you're going to be worried about if you're

going to die in the process?

In the film, I played a race car driver.

I drove for Ferrari.

And Steve drove for Porsche.

I do some paintings.

You need a place where you are by yourself.

And of course, Steve is here too.

Steve always did it different.

We were talking about reading.

And I said, I don't like reading too much.

I read my scripts, and aw, I don't like it either, he said.

I only read one book in my life, he said,

a book about Alexander the Great.

And I was very impressed by one sentence, he said.

I can't get the world, but I didn't conquer myself.

Get off!

Action.

Who are you?

Especially as an actor, you ask yourself.

Who are you, really?

Sometimes, I had a feeling he was

always searching for something.

My theory had always

been the racing world is no less creative

in expression than film itself.

It's only an oddity, because it's a blood sport.

He wanted to leave his scratch marks

on the history of filmmaking.

I'm a driver.

I'm an actor, and a filmmaker.

He was quasi directing.

He would say, look.

It would be great to get a shot like this.

It caused quite a bit of conflict with John Sturges.

This will be a serious film, and

since the romantic interests will be kept down to a minimum,

this will concentrate on sports car racing and the 24 hours

at Le Mans.

Is that right'?

Well, I'll go with you that we concentrate on the race, yes.

Whether anything else is kept to a minimum or not-

I don't know.

Steve was an executive producer.

He outright Sturges.

This was not the same McQueen that

worked with Sturges on "The Magnificent

Seven" or "The Great Escape."

You've got to believe in what you're doing.

I believe in what I do.

And if I'm shooting my best shot for me,

then I'm doing my best for the audience.

But my obligation's got to be to myself.

To me, he became the character, which I

described to him in the mantra.

He made his own rules.

He knew his own right and wrong.

He didn't have to answer to anybody.

Well, I'll get all these idiots away from you.

If they tell you you're a genius

with sufficient frequency, you start to believe that.

And I think most people out there who get that sort of fame

have a great deal of difficulty handling it.

It was a wild time.

It was a time of great rebelliousness

and attempting to overthrow the gods of Hollywood.

Jay Sebring was a very good friend of ours.

And I liked Sharon Tate.

Sharon was married to Roman Pilanski at the time,

and she was pregnant.

Jay said, why don't you and Neil come over

and have dinner with us?

And Steve said, oh, yeah, sure.

I knew I wasn't coming, and I didn't want to go.

The bodies will have to be made in the examination

by the coroner.

There's no evident cause of death?

Not that we can say at this time.

People kept calling the next day and said, is Steve OK?

An employee came to work at 10050 Cielo

and found several bodies in the house.

And then I find out that there

had been these murders, and they thought Steve was there.

A tentative identification of the persons are as follows.

Sharon Polanski, Jay Sebring.

Steve was supposed to be at the party.

Abigail Folger.

But he ran into a lady or something, and didn't show up.

Voytek Frykowski, and another man who is unknown.

Was there anything scrolled on the front door

of that house in blood?

I can't answer that question.

How you doing, Charlie?

Good.

How are you this morning?

His name was Charles Manson,

and he had a gang of misfits.

Body is badly mutilated.

This, I'd rather not discuss.

I'd never heard of people who massacred the way

they massacred these people.

It's all a play, isn't it?

They found his name on the list of other people

that Manson wanted to murder.

It'd freak him out a lot.

Dear Eddie... Eddie Rubin was our attorney.

As you know, I have been selected by the Manson group

to be marked for death.

In some ways, I find it humorous, and in other ways,

frighteningly tragic.

But I must, I must consider it may be true.

If you could call Palm Springs and have my gun

permit renewed, as it is the only sense of self-protection

for my family and myself.

I'm waiting for an immediate reply.

My best, Steve.

This was 1970, on the set of "Le Mans."

Steve was already what I would

call in a heightened state; extremely paranoid.

Everything was raised.

The levels of craziness, anxiety were heightened.

Everything is zz... up.

He was never the same at any one point.

That marriage was fraying at the seams.

When they appeared on set, they appeared on and on.

They appeared devoted.

But you can also see in Neile's expression, a certain weariness

to the whole situation.

He said, by the way, I'm having friends

visit me from all over Europe.

I said, really?

Who are they?

He said, well, they're mostly women.

And you know, that really got to me,

and I remember sobbing away.

She was wonderful.

She was a smart woman.

I would say to him, you're going to ruin your marriage.

What is wrong with you?

Until one night, I told him, I had gotten even with him.

Steve asked Neile whether she'd ever had an affair.

I said, well, as a matter of fact, I said, yeah, I had.

I was the one person in the world

that he trusted, the one person he thought

he could do anything to.

I would never retaliate.

For him to hear that coming from me

was totally unbelievable to him.

He was really, really, deeply wounded.

It was him, not her.

He's the one that just had this hunger.

And you think, my god, the next day

he's got to get up, and go out, and drive

a 917 at 200 miles an hour.

The whole situation was problematic.

The one thing he wanted to do is what we were doing.

He wanted to be a racing driver.

It's a combination

of trying to use a motor car and yourself as one complete unit.

It's really an umbilical connection between the two,

the man and the machine.

248 miles an hour.

Just imagine losing control and hitting that Armco rail.

Well, racing, it's life.

Anything that happens before or after is just waiting.

That's a good sentence for Steve.

Sometimes, I had the feeling it is like this.

It meant a lot to him, almost everything.

And we had a scene where we get out of the car

after two hours of driving.

Of course, you sweat.

And the makeup man came, and put some water

in my face, and hair.

And he wanted to do this to Steve.

And Steve said, no, no, no, no, no.

He stepped in his car.

He drove a couple of rounds, got out of the car.

He was sweating naturally.

And he said, Siggy, look at this.

It's swollen here, the vein.

So that is the perfect thing.

The makeup man can't do this.

It has to be real.

And Steve wanted it like this.

As an actor, if you get in the position

to be able to have control, or as a filmmaker,

you must carry your project.

Carry it all the way through, to the end.

That means you can't give up.

You can't let a thing go.

And nobody will make a decision for you,

and nobody's smarter than you are.

There was really no script.

We were winging it.

In the meantime, until we got somewhat of a script,

we were shooting just footage.

Hollywood is a formula they like,

and they like to stick to it.

They wanted to have more of a love story.

My dad wanted cars and realism.

You had a mental picture of a documentary, something that

was paired down to give you the total experience of what

was going on.

People like myself felt Le Mans

would make a great background for a dramatic story.

That debate caused writers to come,

and go, and take a shot at the script that would make sense.

They were called dueling caravans,

because they were lined up next to each other.

Who could get the latest new script on Steve's desk first?

He was trying to write the great American novel when he

was trying to write the script.

And because the first sentence written was in the greatest

sentence ever written, he couldn't

get himself to that point, putting it down on paper.

Everybody that went to the box office back then

said, oh, he's going to win it.

He's going to win it.

So let's throw a little wrench in this.

I'm going to give him something different.

OK, Steve.

You walk into this caravan.

You see this girl you haven't seen in a long time.

And she looks up at you and says, hello.

What would you say, hello?

And he said, not necessarily.

That was the lowest point for me.

I thought, we're never going to get a script.

If I had written the script, I know it would have worked.

It would have worked.

I was his boy.

I was his writer.

His favorite expression is the son of a bitch knows me.

I don't know how, but he knows me.

The meeting took place in Steve's home.

He insisted that the character had to be a loser,

and I didn't want to write a loser.

You have to remember, I was also a star.

I thought I had a Write to insist on my position.

He just wanted to lose in that movie, and I don't know why.

Steve wanted to have something more than just

Steve McQueen doing Steve McQueen on film.

You're talking about something he

wanted to do that was more important than acting.

You shouldn't argue with a superstar,

even if you helped make him a superstar.

I was the highest paid screenwriter in town

when I went to that meeting.

And after that meeting, the phone never rang again.

His love of cars were so infectious

that is screwed me up for life.

Since day one when I got here, I'm like, dad,

can you just give me a ride in one of the race cars?

That's all I wanted.

Must've been two months went by, and my dad

turned the car around.

He opened his right door, the side door,

and went like that, turned around,

and he sat me on his lap.

And I just put my hands inside of his hands.

For a second, he pulled his hands out the wheel,

and I was steering the 917.

And that was pretty bitching.

Yeah, baby!

Ha, ha!

Chad didn't tell us that he hit a wall in Daytona.

He's got 16 screws on his neck, and he's got a rod

on either side of his spine.

I broke everything in my body.

And the reason I'm wearing shades

is my right eye is still towed in.

I was in a coma for three and a half weeks.

Did I say that?

Would I change anything?

No.

I wouldn't.

Pretty neat, huh?

There is nothing better, nothing better.

I mean, motorsports is the strongest drug in the world.

We attempted to show in the film,

rather than to explain it, just to show why a man races.

The feelings that he gets from it.

It's a great sense of freedom.

It's a high of one sort or another.

To drive a car in perfect condition to the limit

was the most gratifying thing you ever did.

It's almost like a ballet, with the car

going in through the corners.

And it's a thing of beauty.

It is a work of art.

I went 330 kilometers per hour.

The faster I went, the more relaxed I was.

But when it's finished, you have the time to think,

and then you're glad that nothing happened more.

It overtakes drivers, without them knowing it.

The freedom of an eagle floating in the sky

was something that racing brought to him.

Whatever that other stuff was that came from his upbringing,

he could set that aside.

Death is so close.

It's right on my shoulder.

And yet, there's a peace here.

And he actually found such joy in that, that he

wanted to give that to people.

I've always wanted to shoot a motor racing picture,

because it's always been something close to my heart.

I sometimes thought, well, maybe I shouldn't do it.

When something is close to you, you

have a tendency to become too much a perfectionist with it.

And I don't think there's any race driver that can

really tell you why he races.

But I think he could probably show you.

He was not Hercules.

He was Icarus.

Steve wanted to fly so high, and he didn't quite

understand the point where the wax starts to leave your wings.

Through the set, through the set.

And cars are rolling.

I was rolling.

They had to pay the drivers.

They had to pay the camera men.

They had to pay the sound men.

They had to pay the people that fed them at lunch.

And the people in the cinema center were checking in.

How are things going over there?

Well, not so good.

We ain't got no story.

We were approximately $1.5 million over budget.

And the studio was expecting a Steve McQueen movie to bail

us out, and we didn't have it.

We were going to make the most expensive

documentary in the world, if somebody didn't talk.

Everybody was looking for the same thing,

with one exception... With one exception,

and that would be Steve McQueen.

The truth is we had gone into a rather lengthy debate

over the basis of the film.

My father went back to his production office,

and in a fit of rage, threw a lamp against the wall.

He said, this picture's fucking out of control.

And it was at that moment that he

turned and saw Bob Rosen reclining on his couch,

reading a magazine.

Wrong guy was in the room.

Bob called the studio and said, we've got real problems now.

They're falling out among themselves.

I don't remember that happening.

Could it have happened?

Yeah.

But it wasn't like a revelation.

Everybody knew the picture was out of control.

Cinema Center's answer was we'll take the picture over.

Now, we call the shots, and we make the decision.

We don't care which script you make.

Just make one of them.

And you, Steve, will lose your salary,

will not get your points.

You have nothing to do with this picture, except act.

We don't got no picture.

Last night, they took the picture away from us.

It says, I have read the foregoing

and agree to render services only as an actor

in the picture.

And then my dad signed his name, "in blood."

It's brilliant.

It goes in character with my dad.

I love this shit.

There's a great deal of compromise involved

in movies, I suppose, and I get a bit undone when people try

to use me, or there's compromises, or injustice,

and I fly off the handle.

Steve was furious with my father.

At this point, in McQueen's mind,

my father had gone over to the other side of the fence

and betrayed him.

This racing picture was so close to all of us

that when the studio took it over,

Mr McQueen felt that that had put a knife

in the heart of the company.

And Steve and I did not speak again.

You betrayed me.

You stabbed me in the back.

I'll never talk to you again.

Loyalty was a big thing with my dad.

If my dad felt in any way that he had been burnt, that was it.

I don't think my father betrayed Steve.

But I think he fell again, as a business person,

as a professional, that that was going to be the course it

was headed for, no matter what.

Thanks very much, Bob Relyea.

Thank you very much, Mr. Sturges.

Bye.

John came to me.

And he said, I'm going to quit.

And it came about because of the relationship with Steve.

John Sturges was brought in to make

a theatrical motion picture with characters and a story in it.

The more John tried to have it his way,

the less ground Steve would give him.

He said, I'm too fucking old and rich to put up

with this type of shit anymore.

Goodbye.

Now, here we are, half way in the production,

and they don't have a director.

Now, what?

There's a lot of ways

that man can be hurt in business.

They can hurt your head.

They can hurt you financially.

They can gut you.

Or they can cause that thing to pop up in your throat.

A couple of times a day, you start

thinking about it a little bit.

He was nothing but success up to the point of "Le Mans."

Everything that he did turned to gold.

And now, "Le Mans," everything turned to shit.

I've always wanted to know if Steve had

walked off the production at that point, what

would've happened.

Call it ego.

Call it his name.

It's not good press if the world's number one box office

attraction walks off a film, a film that meant so much to him.

There was no quit in my dad.

He had something that he started,

and he wanted to finish it.

We're rolling, guys.

Thank you.

Guys, settle, please.

I come in on a Monday morning.

And Jerry Henshaw comes in, says how

would you like to go to France?

That's how it happened.

They had no story.

They knew that Steve was never going to win the race.

That's about what they knew.

I can see him now with the glasses,

and that funny hat he wore the whole time.

He wasn't this mogul, this great icon of the movie world.

He was a guy called Lee Katzin, who nobody had heard of.

Poor old Lee didn't know the front of a car from the back,

so that wasn't helpful.

McQueen hadn't chosen him, didn't like him,

wasn't impressed by him.

And he was obliged to work with him.

They did a take in the pits.

And Lee said, one more please.

Steve got up.

And he said, listen, asshole.

I'll tell you when we get one more.

Move to your next shot.

And if I like it, I'll show up.

The problems of individual's egos were there.

It wasn't a lot of fun that way, at all.

Come on.

I want to show you something.

Come on.

Walk with me.

I want to get down here, because this is where Dave Piper lost

it, right in this right hander.

We'd been filming in the morning.

Everything went according to plan, no problem.

Went to lunch, came back to the circuit,

and the director wanted the Ferraris to be

leading with a Porsche behind.

They haven't decided what the script was going to be,

and they wanted both options.

I drove just as I had driven in the morning, went

into this right hand corner.

The back end just went.

Word had gotten back to the compound

that there was an accident.

And I got that.

And I was thinking, geez, I hope it's not my dad.

I hear the triad a lot.

And so what's going on?

He says, I want to show you what can happen in motor racing.

Steve, I'm calling you to tell you that we're having accident.

David Piper, he's been taken to hospital.

This was all grass, and I remember a couple cows.

And there was a wheel assembly, sitting out in the middle

of fucking nowhere.

Uh, well, he had a crash.

He was left bolted onto the engine in the seat,

and the rest of the car took off and left him.

You can see there's quite a lot of blood coming out of your leg

in your overalls.

But it's a tremendous relief that you're

still conscious and alive.

David has been injured.

I just spoke to the pilot.

He will come in at night.

It was my doctor.

He said, we're going to have to amputate.

I said, well, take it off four inches below the knee,

and I'll take my chances.

My mom took me, my sister to see Dave.

And I remember the room was dark,

and I remember he had a sheet over him.

And you could clearly see that below his knee was gone.

I lost it there.

I lost that much.

Would your accident have

happened if a proper script had been in place?

Oh, no.

It probably wouldn't have done, yeah.

Definitely wouldn't have done, because they wouldn't have

wanted to do the shot twice.

It shouldn't have happened.

With David Piper, Steve was very, very aware

and very worried about it.

You'd think it was his fault.

It's his film.

The bucks stops at the top.

I never saw him afterwards.

No.

Just never happened to see him again.

It was a film that took us four months

to shoot, and was very difficult,

and we had a couple of very bad accidents.

It was the most difficult film I've ever done.

One morning, at Solar Village,

no one else was there but myself and Steve.

And he said, Lee, I see what you're trying to do,

and I'm not going to fight you.

I'm not going to be against you.

I want to work with you.

From that time on, it was wonderful.

We battered out an outline that Steve agreed to.

It took 6, 8, 'l O weeks for this to happen.

And finally, we got basically what we had in the movie,

in terms of dialogue.

When people risk their lives, shouldn't it be

for something very important?

Well, it better be.

He was trying to vindicate the purpose of the film

by making sure it was finished and would be

a testament to the personal bravery of his most respected

pals, the motor racing drivers.

It was late October or November.

And the trees were turning yellow.

It should be within

So they had to paint the leaves.

Ugh, my goodness.

In November, 1970, filming finally

wrapped three months over schedule,

and about $1.5 million over budget.

He was sort of melancholy, I think.

He said, it's done.

The last day of filming, he got out of his car,

and he unbuckled his wrist watch, and walked over to me,

and handed me the watch.

And he said, I want you to have this.

Thank you for keeping me alive all these months.

Le Mans is close to me.

I love motor racing.

It was a film that was very, very close to me,

and we all hope it turns out well.

Camera number three, marker.

Camera number four, marker.

Camera number five, marker.

We now have speed on all the cameras.

I will call action, and then it'll be a count of 10.

If anything happens to me, Allie gets my pickup truck.

Guys, can you hear me all right?

All right.

The fire brigade ready?

All right.

Now, may I have your attention please?

I don't care what anybody else says.

I think he was satisfied as a filmmaker at what

he had done for this picture.

I've never seen the movie.

It's too difficult for me.

Steve lost his wife, lost his marriage, lost the film,

lost everything.

All of that loss, at that point

in time, I think it really speaks to how deeply he cared

about that project, and how it was so tied into his persona,

and his soul, that I think he sensed that if it wasn't going

to happen on that film, it wasn't going

to happen in his lifetime.

Being an actor is a gas.

Being a movie star is a pain in the ass.

And when that happens, you stop your personal growth.

And that's the thing that I suffered from.

When he wanted to give back,

Hollywood wasn't there for him.

He had this vision that came out of his heart.

I don't think any of those other movies came out of his heart.

The world just became a different color

to him, after that film.

"Le Mans" is a turning point in his life.

When he left Le Mans, he turned his back on the sport.

The zest he had for driving fast had gone.

As far as me moving on myself,

I think I'm more into life than cinema.

My conception can only be motorcycles, and speed,

and things like that.

I don't want to do that anymore.

I don't do it no more.

Now, I'm clean.

Well, it's done.

I've got to try something else.

Do I really want to do this anymore?

Do I want to go that fast?

And I think with David Piper's accident,

an awareness of the vulnerability

was in his psyche.

What he cared most about in that picture

were the drivers.

He loved the drivers.

Oh.

Dear Sid, so many times before, in the history of motion

pictures, brave men have lost their lives and limbs,

and people have forgotten about it.

I feel very strongly that we should dedicate

the first premier to David Piper and give all the proceeds

to him and his family.

Would you please pass this on to the higher ups?

And I do think we do this to racing

for what they gave this film.

My best, Steve McQueen.

Oh, how wonderful.

Gosh, that is terrific.

I really lost touch when I was in hospital.

I never heard of anything like this.

How very nice.

Well, Steve's heart was really in the right place, wasn't it?

It's fantastic.

I just wanted to get it down on film for what

I thought it was all about.

And I guess it's going to be up to the audience to decide

whether I was right or wrong.

Oh, it was a lot of cars.

And I was waiting for my scenes.

Most actors do that, first time they see a movie.

I was disappointed.

I could never see how it was going

to be a roaring success at the time,

because there was no script.

But then I saw the film two years ago,

and I went, god, that's brilliant.

It's the most wonderful documentary of one of the most

glorious times of motor racing on the greatest

track in the world.

From an actor's point of view, loves it.

But from his point of view, from a driver's point of view,

lovely.

And from a car's point of view, beautiful.

It gets acclaim, because it's trying to be pure.

It's not a Hollywood concoction.

But What the film doesn't capture

is dramatic storytelling.

Problems, they vanish in all the years.

I think he would have been proud that we did it.

Proud that he did it.

What's happened now is a cult is following this picture.

People who are into cars revere this film.

That's all they want to talk about is "Le Mans."

It has taken on a life of its own.

The thing that Steve did that moved cinema forward

was his absolute insistence on authenticity.

You just have to say, you went for it, guy.

I say, power to him.

They still are not able to capture

what we captured inside those cars with the real drivers

today.

Steve McQueen, he had no fear.

When he went to Mexico to get treatment,

he had a copy of the film shipped to Mexico,

and showed it to the patients in the house.

I think it was his last goodbye to everything.

He was just a nice man who lost his way along the way,

and found it back.

And hopefully, he's up there, having a good time.

Like I used to say, safe travel, honey.

I always get a sense he's watching me,

but close your eyes, and listen to that.

Close your eyes and listen to this again.

So that's what my dad envisioned,

bringing that to life.

But I think today he would say, ah, now,

you guys finally get it.

My big thing is daydreaming.

You know when you daydream, you go to sleep.

In my life, my daydreams came true.

It's just that I run out of gas.