Sam Peckinpah 1972 Playboy Interview

PECKINPAH: All right, let’s get it on. I promise to do my little number. But I’m not going to talk about violence.

PLAYBOY: Then we might as well not begin.

PECKINPAH: That’s fine with me.

PLAYBOY: Why don’t you want to talk about violence?

PECKINPAH: Because that’s what everybody is trying to nail me on. They think I invented it. They think that’s what I’m all about. They think I get my rocks off when the people in my pictures get their heads blown off.I’m pretty goddamn sick of it.

PLAYBOY: When you say “they,” do you mean the critics?

PECKINPAH: Who else? You’ve got a beauty there at Playboy, a real windsucker. That review your man wrote of Straw Dogs was literary linguini. I didn’t know Hefner was hiring New York Review groupies,cats who don’t know how to write or how to look at a motion picture.

PLAYBOY: As a matter of fact, our reviewer rather enjoyed the film. But many critics thought Straw Dogs was a work of art, and most of your other movies have been well reviewed. Perhaps it’s just that nobody is lukewarm about your work. They hate you or love you.

PECKINPAH: Either way, they almost always misunderstand me. To some, Straw Dogs was a work of integrity but not of major intelligence. To others it was a work of enormous subtlety and substantial intelligence but failed on moral grounds. Goddamn it, Straw Dogs is based on a book called The Siege of Trencher’s Farm. It’s a lousy book with one good action-adventure sequence in it — the siege itself. You get hired to take this bad book and make a picture out of it. You get handed a scriptwriter, David Goodman,and an actor, Dustin Hoffman, and you’re told to make a picture. You’re given a story to do and you do it the best way you know how, that’s all. So what’s all this shit about integrity and about the picture not being the work of a major intelligence?

PLAYBOY: Pauline Kael has called you a passionate and sensual artist in conflict with himself, and she wrote in her review of Straw Dogs that it’s the film you’ve been working your way toward all along. But that’s not exactly a compliment: She’s horrified by your apparent endorsement of the violence in the film and she claims you’ve enshrined the territorial imperative and are out to spread the Neanderthal word.

PECKINPAH: More, more, I love it!

PLAYBOY: She also calls it “the first American film that is a fascist work of art.”

PECKINPAH: Explain, please.

PLAYBOY: She says the movie acts out the old male fantasy that women respect only brutes and that there is no such thing as rape, that women are all just little beasts begging to be subjugated.

PECKINPAH: Amy, the girl played by Susan George in the picture, is a young, uninformed, bitchy, hot-bodied little girl with a lot going for her, but who hasn’t grown up yet. That’s the part. It wasn’t an attempt to make a statement about women in general, for Christ’s sake.

PLAYBOY: But what about the rape scene? Amy is clearly enjoying the experience, isn’t she? Aren’t you saying, as Kael implies, that that’s what women are for — to be used and enjoyed?

PECKINPAH: Well, Pauline, I trust that’s part of it. But I’m not putting down all women in that scene. Amy is enjoying the experience, yes. At first. Doesn’t Kael know anything about sex? Dominating and being dominated; the fantasy, too, of being taken by force is certainly one way people make love. There’s no end to the fantasies of lovemaking, and this is one of them. Sure, Amy’s enjoying it. At least with the first hombre who takes her. The second one is a bit more than she bargained for, but that’s one of the prices she pays for playing her little game. There’s always a price to pay, doctor.

PLAYBOY: Kael compares you to Norman Mailer and says you’re both in the same machismo bag, but the difference is that Mailer worries about it. For you, she thinks it’s the be-all and end-all.

PECKINPAH: I like Kael; she’s a feisty little gal and I enjoy drinking with her — which I’ve done on occasion— but here she’s cracking walnuts in her ass. Look, what if they’d given me War and Peace to do instead of Trencher’s Farm? I’m reasonably sure I’d have made a different picture.

PLAYBOY: But you picked The Siege of Trencher’s Farm yourself, didn’t you?

PECKINPAH: I didn’t pick anything. I’ve never picked any of my films. Except one, The Ballad of Cable Hogue. That’s the only movie I ever picked to do.

PLAYBOY: Tell us how it works, then. You’re offered a lot of projects——

PECKINPAH: I’m looking for a job. I’m a whore. I go where I’m kicked. But I’m a very good whore.

PLAYBOY: Whatever material you’re given to work on, you then proceed to make it your own picture. There’s certainly no mistaking the Peckinpah touch.

PECKINPAH: The Peckinpah touch! Jesus! Read the goddamn book. You’ll die gagging in your own vomit.

PLAYBOY: When you say you’re a whore, isn’t that a half-truth at best? If you weren’t as good as you are, no one would pay any attention to you; there are plenty of whores around.

PECKINPAH: