Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films

Timed to follow the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' controversial decision to present the 1999 lifetime achievement Oscar to famed film director Elia Kazan, this selection of interviews has little bearing on contemporary Hollywood. In fact, the book is a time capsule, comprising only Young's sessions with Kazan in 1971 and 1972, a time when Young was beginning his own filmmaking career. As Kazan had a longstanding agreement with Knopf that he would not do a competing book until his memoir, Elia Kazan: A Life, was published in 1988, Young's transcripts gathered dust over the years. In Young's q&a format, Kazan discusses all but one of the 19 films he directed, moving chronologically from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) to the seldom-seen The Visitors (1971), a non-union, low-budget ""anti-war picture"" that employed his own house for a set. Discussions here range over all aspects of scripting, music, cinematography, methodology and directing: ""I try to base things in realism and take off from there,"" he says. The book does offer some perspective on Kazan's HUAC testimony, which the director says made him an ""unsavory figure"" (""The hardest time I ever had was just prior to On the Waterfront which every studio in California turned down""). He drew memorable performances from Brando, James Dean, Andy Griffith and others using everything from the Stanislavsky system to the ""Jack Daniels school of acting."" Kazan's work in the theater is ignored, but film buffs will find these interviews a valuable resource, since Young asked all the right questions, unleashing an avalanche of revelatory insights from a director who, his political choices notwithstanding, remains an American original. 60 b&w photos. (June)