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70 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTOS: PHOTOFEST; (OPPOSITE LEFT) EVERETT That Ritchie was a media advisor to John Tunney during his 1970 race for the Senate, and his screenwriter Jeremy Larner wrote speeches for Eugene McCarthy, provided a kind of safety net of cred- ibility to all of this filmmaking on the fly. "Redford loved to work in a kind of accidental style of filmmaking, which I like, too," Ritchie told Kagan. "I would set up a scene, but I would not tell him everything that was going to take place in the scene. I would not tell him if a phone was going to ring, and I would just say, 'If a phone rings, you can answer it or not answer it—it's your choice—or you can be frustrated by it.'" Redford, who describes the late director as "smart, very tough- minded, willing to take risks," was open to letting Ritchie place him in uncertain situations. "We'd go to a factory, and I'd be advertising myself as Bill McKay," Redford says of the would-be senator he played. "When the whistle blew, they just wanted to get home … People went right past me, ignor- ing me, and we used that in the film to show that my character was really having a struggle getting traction … It was humiliating sometimes." Occasionally, Schatzberg, too, would plant surprises for his actors, as in the opening scene of Scarecrow (1973), in which Al Pacino and Gene Hackman play drifters who form an uneasy alliance. "There was a car that was supposed to come through that wouldn't stop for them, but then I told my assistant, 'I want another one to come by,'" Schatzberg says. "They didn't expect the second one, and they see it coming, and Al starts walking toward the car and Hackman looks at Al and he starts walking toward the car and they both start walking, [then] they start running a little bit [and] start screaming at one an- other. None of that is scripted, but it gave them something to react to." Some actors would object to being taken by surprise in this way; others are liberated by it. "Some of the movies today are made to the beat of a drum and there's no time for improvising or experimenting," says Pacino. "With Jerry, he was inventing as we went along, just because some- times the locations provided ideas and stimulated the imagination." PREPARING FOR THE UNPREDICTABLE If Grosbard was open to so-called happy accidents, he was much more controlled about it. "Ulu was sort of a perfectionist, and it re- ally took him a great deal of time to really feel prepared," says actress Rose Gregorio, whom Grosbard married in 1965. "A film for Ulu al- ways was at least a year's project, even if they had the money." Once a film was underway, Grosbard was equally meticulous. He especially valued rehearsing with actors. "It also was good for him because, by the time they had rehearsed it a little, he got ideas for staging," Gregorio says. "In rehearsal, the actors can do things spon- taneously that come out of the work they've done, which determines the blocking." In the John A. Gallagher book Film Directors on Directing, Grosbard says he sought to run a "relaxed set," similar to that of Elia Kazan, with whom he worked as an uncredited assistant director on Splendor in the Grass. "The key is to relax yourself so you can listen, hear, and respond," Grosbard told Gallagher. "You're on the spot, yet you have to find a way to be open to what's going on." Says De Niro: "He wasn't a guy who was high-strung or any of that sort of stuff, and had a good sense of humor… He just was a very easy guy who understood people working out whatever their way of cre- ating something or being in character. He was always supportive of that." Schatzberg, whose initial claim to fame was as a photographer for such leading magazines Esquire and Vogue, would often enlist his cinematographer to heighten the believability of his performances. The DP Adam Holender, who collaborated with Schatzberg on four films starting with Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), and the direc- tor screened Gillo Pontecorvo's documentary-like historical drama The Battle of Algiers in preparing to make The Panic in Needle Park. "What was wonderful about The Battle of Algiers is you really believed all that happened in front of the camera wasn't staged, but that the camera just happened to be there and it was really life," said Holender in Vincent LoBrutto's book Principal Photography. As a result, Holender shot some exterior scenes on lenses as long as 600mm or 800mm. Pacino remembers the challenges of staying in character with the