I was looking forward to working with Nick Ray on a western, but he was a very strange man. He was bisexual, with a drinking problem and a drug problem—a very confused and convoluted personality, even for a director, few of whom were as obviously tormented as Nick. I found Henry Hathaway, for instance, to be all about action; I don’t think he ever gave me a direction that involved the character’s state of mind. Hathaway thought in terms of direct lines of physical movement. But Nick was the complete opposite—he hardly ever gave you a physical direction. It was all about emotions, and that’s what he tried to put into the movie. The problem was that Nick was always anesthetized; he’d stare off into space and then he’d say, “Try this. No. Wait. Don’t.” He liked acolytes; I have this mental snapshot of him wearing cowboy boots, surrounded by actors sitting around him on the ground. I remember thinking that he looked a little too comfortable. He was terribly enamored of Kazan, but he completely lacked Gadge’s focus.
