Original subtitles

I thought To Live and Die in L .A. was, in all, about a counterfeit world.

Counterfeit emotions.

Counterfeit money.

counterfeit superstructure of the Secret Service.

Everyone in the film has a kind of counterfeit motive.

So it seemed to me that the whole film was about counterfeit relations.

We have never seen L .A., or hadn't at the time, depicted as we see it in this

film. This is the L .A. that Billy had come to know.

Those streets of East L .A. and the freeways and just that whole world.

Billy's so suited for this movie because Billy's very in touch with the darkness

that is in all of it.

He's very in touch with the gritty, darker side.

He's very good at finding access to those worlds.

There's a weight and an authority about him.

When he goes into those worlds, people open up to him. They don't think he's a

tourist, because they know.

Deli's happy and he's serious about what he's doing.

When I read Gerald Petrovich's novel, To Live and Die in LA, I first thought

it's very authentic.

What attracted me to it, though, was the...

absolutely surrealistic nature of the job of a Secret Service man outside of

Washington. Right there, fella!

The Secret Service is under the Treasury.

All bad bills and false checks and counterfeit credit cards comes under

does the protection of the President.

That's what attracted me to this. It was a kaleidoscope of various types of

crime from the importance of the country at stake to a fifty dollar bad check

i have found that the

nature of cops and criminals is very similar they understand each other's

as though they're brethren and even the good cops are guys who are walking a

very fine line most of the time u .s secret service i'm arresting this guy

counterfeiting It was a lot of fun to have a badge and a gun and be this

character who, because he's got a badge and a gun, he's not only above the law,

he's above life and death in his head.

It really was an amazing, intoxicating experience for me. I

mean, I got along with Billy Great.

I found him to be brilliant, fast, funny.

It was a real joy to do this stuff.

I learned a tremendous amount from Billy, not just about acting or

but about how to operate in this bizarre business and how to survive it.

Willem had done maybe a couple of movies. He had a couple of movies on his

Peterson and I had done virtually nothing.

And he was fantastic with patience and just...

therefore, in a really positive way and in a really creative way.

And because he is in touch with that whole world, the good, the bad, and the

ugly of that world, he was a tremendous source of information for us. It was

really a run -and -gun, shoot -from -the -hip, fast -break sort of offense that

we were playing in that movie that Billy guided us through.

We started off with a $6 million budget, and everyone took pretty low salaries.

It was kind of a common knowledge that this was not a big exorcist -type

I wanted to make an independent film, let's put it that way, and I wanted to

it with guys who knew how to work quickly.

Like Robbie Mueller, who was the director of photography, who had worked

Wim Wenders, the German director.

Most of our crew was kind of non -union because Robbie Mueller chose his own

crew and he wasn't in the union.

But it wasn't really to save money. It was just that that's a crew that Billy

wanted because it was a hit and run.

It wasn't a soundstage movie. We shot everything practical on the streets or

whatever buildings that he wanted to shoot in.

The fact that Billy shoots quickly and the fact that he will often use the

take really helped because there was a feeling often of flying by the seat of

your pants, which was a good thing. It gave it an immediacy, I think, that

the film.

Cut.

Good. Cut.

First of all, let me say, I don't like rehearsing at all.

But I would set up a situation where they thought I was rehearsing, and then

say, all right, that's it, cut, let's move on. And they'd say, what?

They thought it was rehearsal.

It was a take.

He was always rolling on rehearsals or whatever, you know, just in case he got

stuff he wanted to use.

Later, Alvarez.

Next time you can make a jump with me. I remember doing a rehearsal shot where

we walk out of the bar.

We weren't even thinking about it. We didn't think we were even having to do

Next thing I know...

The scene was over.

He used the whole shot.

He knew what he wanted, he knew what he got in the shot, he knew how he was

going to use it later, so he didn't have to come in and do all this, you know,

well, we better get this, we better get this, we better get this.

He just said, that's it, we got it, we're out of here.

I believe in spontaneity.

That's what I want to see in a performance.

And I have found in my experience that the best... takes i get are the ones i

didn't tinker with at all we talked about it the actors were properly cast

knew what they were doing they went out and did it federal agents excuse me ma

'am i'd like to see the bills that man just handed you please

u

.s secret service

The airport sequence, we shot on the Bradley at the International Airport.

Billy Peterson wanted to get through the crowd, so the best way for him to do it

is to jump on the tram things that run both ways.

And that's what you're not supposed to do.

Billy comes over to me and he goes, you know, the airport officials are here.

They've told us that you can't do that. In fact, they're going to throw us out

of here if we try to do that.

I said, Billy, that thing is great.

We've got to do that. It's great.

He goes...

Yeah, I agree.

So, I'm going to say we're rehearsing, but I'm going to have Robbie and the

other guys roll footage on this.

And if it just so happens that you forget and jump up there anyway, well,

know, what can we say?

Then, of course, they were all down on us. They were screaming and yelling.

Billy's like, well, he did it. I didn't, you know, I didn't tell him to do it. I

told him not to do it. Why did you do that?

And again, that's what was great about working with Billy, because it was all

about getting what you had to get.

Okay, bring them all back to one.

Good.

For me, since I was, you know, I had this double thing of being an artist and

criminal, he really wanted to get me painting.

I think that was important because it rooted that character's whole

It was almost more important to investigate him as an artist than as a

And this whole idea of making the money to support the art, to destroy the art,

it's a pretty interesting do.

That was one of my favorite sequences in the movie, though.

The whole setup of Willem as a counterfeiter.

He blows on the metal sheet. So fantastic, that sequence. I thought that

sequence was magnificent.

Because, you know, it looks so incredibly authentic.

And that is where you've got to go, bravo, Billy Friedkin, man, for getting

touch with the people who could get you that close to the real thing.

I love that sequence.

It's so beautiful.

And you realize how easy it is, and on the other hand, how it is an art.

The whole counterfeiting montage in the movie is so precise because we got some

guys that knew how to do that. We didn't ask questions, but I think they even

did time for doing it.

Billy wanted it as realistic as possible.

And how you make money from the very beginning to the end of it.

We got a hold of a...

I guess you can call him a consultant.

And the consultant did all the real intricate work, putting the ink in and

the little touches. And then Willem came in and did that also.

He made over a million dollars worth of money, and there was only three things

wrong with this money.

Obviously the paper and two small little other things.

It was never meant to be passed, and it never meant to be done anything but

burned. You didn't really want to burn a whole bunch of real $20 bills, but you

couldn't have it printed only on one side, because as you threw it in, you'd

the back was white.

So we actually printed on both sides, which I think that's where you cross the

line. Not bad at all.

Not bad.

We were out in the desert, printing money.

And there was a real tension when we heard some helicopters go overhead.

Because I think the laws on counterfeiting are so tight that if

someone really wanted to bust us, they're right on the spot. We would have

been in real trouble.

After we shot the scenes, I burned almost a million dollars so I wouldn't

out. But you know how on a set sometimes...

Somebody got a hold of a few bucks, and that's how things go down.

Somebody on the set took the bills home and had a teenage son, and he and a

friend took the bills and went off to a grocery store and tried to buy some

Twinkies or something, and they offered the guy behind the counter a one -sided

20.

Within five minutes, the store...

manager had the treasury department there.

And they grabbed these kids, where'd you get this money?

I got it from my dad.

Where'd he get it?

Boom, up pops the name of our property master, Barry Bedig, who was in charge

the counterfeit money.

The Secret Service got kind of upset.

So about 10 .30 at night, they came at my house banging on the door.

and said they wanted to see me downtown.

Well, that one time went into six times.

I came back to the set one day, and I said, Billy, gee, this is the sixth time

I've been down to the Federal Building. He says, listen, next time you go down

there, tell them to either book you or let you go. And I said, what do you

book me?

That's just Billy. I mean, he doesn't bend to certain authority.

That was an authority figure that he wasn't about to give in to.

And there are people, like Masters, who spend their life making counterfeit

money, and then they go to jail, and they get out.

That's something Panko and I have been working on in our off days here in

Malibu.

It's just the front side, you know, but as soon as we get this figured out, then

we'll work on the back side.

Okay, you're both under arrest.

And whoever the studio president is through.

I'm taking it with me. I'm taking it back to the office.

Sorry, I got more.

One of the tremendous aspects about Billy Friedkin is how collaborative he

a director, how he brings everybody in, the actors, and says, okay, we're in

this together.

Let's tell it together.

He called Billy Peterson and myself to go down to Ruthie's house in San Pedro.

So we were going to actually have rehearsal. So I was very excited. I

my God, this is a film where I'm actually getting a rehearsal, not just a

read -through.

We went down to San Pedro. Bill came with us. We drove down there. And we get

into the house, which was like perfect. It was just the most perfect set. And to

get to live in your set, to get to actually experience that, really helped

character develop so well.

So then...

Bill Friedkin said to Billy and myself, he says, well, I'm going to lunch. I'll

see you guys in a couple hours.

You work on it.

And he left.

And it was just so wonderful.

It's like we looked at each other and said, okay, let's get to work.

Can I ask you something?

Sure.

What would you do if I stopped giving you information?

The films that... move me the most are the ones where the performances seem

timeless, where it looks like the camera was just peeking in, just happened to

be there while this stuff was taking place.

And so I told the actors to make it as real as possible.

Make it real.

Well, there was a lot of edgy things about that movie. And again, it's a

question of trust, you know, and I think Billy had all of our trust at all

times. So that when he said, you know, look, we're going to do this, we're

to do that, we're going to do this, there was no argument against it. The

argument you would come up with is I feel uncomfortable, and that's the actor

getting in the way.

Billy Peterson and I trusted each other to make that choice, and we trusted

Bill.

When you feel trusted as an actor, you know you can fly.

It gives you absolutely magnificent wings because you know you can try

and you're not going to be made fun of.

Billy's got a nose, you know.

And if something changes and he thinks it's going to an interesting place,

ride it out. I've seen him chase down instincts, you know, and have it take

to real interesting places.

He creates ingredients and then wants something to happen.

He sets up every shot. It's not like it's arbitrary shots.

It's like he lines it up, sets it up with the DP, whether it's a dolly shot

whether it's a crane shot or whether it's a close -up or a medium or wide.

His eye is right there to set it up.

And then you continue looking.

He never changes setups and moves around or hunting for a setup.

God, I don't know where to put the camera. He knows exactly where he's

put the camera and exactly what he wants.

which is beneficial to everybody on the crew.

I get all the taste, brother.

Yo, yo, yo, yo.

Hello, Jeff.

What are you doing in my crib?

You sent two assholes to do Cody and they blew it.

Action, Ernest.

The scene where we go to the house and I kind of surprise them, that was some

serious fighting in there.

That was a really incredible ass -kicking going on there.

He wanted it nasty.

He wanted to take the lamps and take the cords and use what was there, not to

make these guys look like they were professional fighters, but they had an

instinct or two about how to kill somebody.

We're going to have to follow him down, but I want to be tight on his face and

see him crumble into it.

Okay? Robert, just clear the front for a second, please.

Willem can relax.

Our goal was to, you know, jump on it and not be inhibited by it at all.

Otherwise, it wouldn't have been the same movie.

I remember at one time Billy saying, look, I don't want marks. I don't want

to hit marks. I want them to do what they do and you capture it. Come on out

there. This is not a mark. There are no marks.

Now!

John! Beautiful.

Okay, clean him up.

Woo!

Nice.

You know, there was a lot of times where he just left the cameras going on us to

see what would happen, and we just never stopped until somebody said stop.

You know, if we didn't hear stop, we just kept making our own movie.

Over the chain.

There's a scene where I come out of the car, we got the guy, and they had one of

these Halliburton...

where the money's supposed to be, but they thought the scene was going to end

before we got to the place where I was going to beat the thing up against the

abutment.

Well, nobody said cut, so I just kept pounding the thing. I figured I had the

one that was locked. It was never going to break.

I just let Peterson keep going, and lo and behold, he smashed the briefcase so

hard that the lock broke.

and you saw that there was nothing in the briefcase except a phone book.

That's very funny.

Nobody said stop, so we just went right on. You know, we grabbed the guy, kicked

him, threw him in the dirt, dragged the belt off of him. And I think you see it

in the movie, there's a life to it that is real, because it was real.

Get your pants off.

What do you mean, get your fucking pants off? Get the fuck out of here!

It just played out, and it's a fantastic moment.

It kept them in the reality.

You had to be ready to go as far as you could go with it. You all right?

I'm crazy.

You hoped they'd stop it before somebody got hurt.

Get out of here. Come on. Come on.

The pace scene was one of our last things to shoot.

We were definitely going to go over budget and over schedule, and it took us

weeks to shoot the one scene.

We were going to continue to shoot until he got what he wanted.

We had done all the principal photography, and then all of a sudden we

really stripped -down unit.

We had no trucks coming with us, no wardrobe, no makeup. It was 40 stunt

Friedkin and Panko and me. We were going all over L .A., blocking off streets

and just spinning out.

You don't need a lot of people to shoot a chase, because when you're shooting a

chase, it's one shot at a time, maybe with multiple cameras from different

angles, but one shot at a time.

And these are all the stunt drivers that we're going to be having working on the

show. What are their names?

Richard Ellis, Bobby Bass, David Ellis, Dick Zyker. And my name's Buddy Joe

Hooker, yeah.

He says, you know, if we can come up with a chase that's better than the

connection, then it'll be in the movie. If we do something that isn't, it won't

be in the movie. And I believed him.

I like to do a lot of diagramming myself.

Big chase sequences and stuff. The way I see them best and the way that I can

explain them to people best is diagramming them.

Overviews of who goes where and what's happening and camera positions.

And if he's crossing, then I want you to cross. So when we're coming with the

camera, we see this kind of thing.

The chase requires a lot of cutting to be made to work.

Actions and reactions, points of view.

It's like knitting.

It's painstaking.

It's knit one and purl two.

First, there was all this stuff leading up to the freeway.

We did a lot of it ourselves.

I was able to do a lot of the driving stuff, you know, and I wanted to do all

it. You know, I got to the point where it was much more fun to be doing the

stunts than it was to be doing any of the acting stuff, you know.

If you're driving a car that fast, it's happening.

Poor Panko.

The blood would just drain out of his face every morning when he would find

what I was going to be doing with him in the back seat.

It was not lost on me that the car chase the last five weeks were shot at the

end of the movie.

I mean, if something happens to one of us, they still got a movie.

We've seen all the movies.

Most of them, you just go, hey, that doesn't happen.

But to do real stuff and still make it work, that's a challenge.

The whole thing with the train, just being a part of that whole thing was

amazing just to see how it all got put together.

He'll go around the train and we'll lose him in that angle. You know, catch the

train, pass it.

Then he won't go through the fence until we move the cameras over here and down

there.

I just figured out the MacGuffin.

Once you hit the riverbed and you're out of this thing and you think you're out,

all of a sudden two guys come barreling straight at you.

And they start coming at you.

Then you turn and you're out of that and some guys start firing out the window.

So everywhere you go, it'll be like a nightmare.

They just come at you. And that's what forces you on the wrong way freeway.

I thought, what have I not seen? Well, I haven't seen a car on a freeway

traveling against traffic.

If we can pull this off, this is going to be very hairy.

We're going this way. The deal is, the entrance we went onto was an actual

entrance ramp where they just put a do not enter sign up, and we go.

They have all the stunt drivers coming off the entrance.

Now, what Friedkin did to make it even more confusing was everybody else was

going the wrong way.

If you look at that movie, it's like England. The oncoming traffic is

in the wrong lane, all of it.

So it's really confusing.

Billy likes some radical stuff, and he'll call for the heaviest stuff you

give him, but he wants it to be safe.

We had designed this swivel car that was hydraulic that you could pull behind

the camera car.

so when they're going through traffic we could place the actors believably in

that and make the audience think that they were there and at a given point

hit a button and the car goes back like this and it's them there's no faking it

or no screens and all that stuff it's

choreographed but there's a tremendous margin for error And, you know, you hit

somebody going 25, and they're going 25, and you hit them head -on. It's like

going 50 miles an hour into a wall. I mean, that's a hit.

I made the mistake of telling him, hey, you know, when they're on the freeway,

why don't we jackknife this truck?

And he goes, great, great, put it in, let's do it.

And then I'm going, how in the world do we do it?

Up to that time, I don't think there had ever been anything like that. A truck

jackknifing and squashing cars and the whole thing.

When they locked up the tractor and the trailer brakes, we had a cable going

from the back of the truck to this big four -wheel drive.

We had cars all stuck in between them, too, so we could lock it up and just

the trailer right around and squish them as much as we wanted, and bingo.

About a year after the movie opened, I was at a coffee shop, and I'm sitting

next to a guy who's an undercover cop, and he says, you're John Pankow. And I

go, yeah. He goes, oh, man.

I can't believe I'm hanging with you. He goes, I'm an undercover cop and my PD.

And he goes, I have to tell you. It was so unbelievably true to life, your

complete state of panic.

He said, I have been in it. I have been shot at. I have been in chases. That is

exactly what you feel. It is just blind panic.

I had no idea where I was going to go with the script

while we were filming.

Here's this guy, this Secret Service agent, who's defying death every time he

goes out.

and who throws caution to the wind.

And it seemed to me that inherently this agent was setting himself

up to die.

I thought, you know, how am I going to end this thing and not do some,

you know, phony tacked -on ending?

Freeze it up, pal!

Originally, the screenplay was written that Vukovic would die in that locker

room scene.

And Billy said, what do you think if we kill Billy Peterson instead of Johnny

Pankow? I said, wow, that would be killing your star, wouldn't it?

He said, yeah, but it would sure be a twist.

And I said, well, I think maybe you should try to shoot it both ways.

He said, ah, I'll shoot it one way. We'll kill him.

Having chance go down in this movie is... I remember thinking that's just

great idea because it just doesn't happen. It just never happens.

You never see the protagonist go down.

You can't do this to me!

With probably less than ten minutes left, the star of the film gets killed.

I thought, well, the audience certainly isn't prepared for this, but then when

it happens, they will get it.

The idea that if you live by the sword, you're going to die by the sword.

You know, this was a guy who was never going to live long anyway.

You know, if it hadn't been in the locker room that night, it would have

a highway or some parachute jump. You know, he was not long for the world,

chance, any more than Masters was.

The agent and the counterfeiter, these are guys driving toward suicide.

And so you live by fire, you die by fire.

And you always have to be open to the unexpected.

The real chance is dead and his young partner becomes him.

He isn't really him, but he has now assimilated all of the characteristics,

attitude, and even the dress of his mentor.

You're working for me now.

And so, in a final counterfeit moment,

Vukovic becomes Chance.

Let's listen.