Ted Kotch­eff: ​‘I was approached to make A Clock­work Orange; Mick Jag­ger want­ed to play Alex’

Toron­to-born direc­tor and pro­duc­er Ted Kotch­eff doesn’t com­ply with any crit­i­cal ideals of auteurism, and his name isn’t famil­iar even to those who have enjoyed his out­put over the last 50 years. Kotch­eff has moved between genre (com­e­dy, action, west­ern, dra­ma, thriller) and medi­um (live and pre-record­ed tele­vi­sion, the­atre and film) with the sort of ease that inevitably leads to asser­tions that he’s a journeyman.

This is glib, some­what dis­mis­sive reduc­tion­ism. Over the years he has direct­ed a live TV broad­cast dur­ing which a lead actor died but the show car­ried on; giv­en notes on anoth­er director’s mas­ter­piece (which were act­ed upon); launched an icon­ic movie char­ac­ter into the pop­u­lar zeit­geist; and pro­duced one of the most suc­cess­ful TV series ever made. Hard­ly anyone’s def­i­n­i­tion of a dili­gent crafts­man bang­ing out pro­fi­cient prod­uct. We caught up with the vet­er­an film­mak­er to find out more about his colour­ful career.

LWLies: Was there some­thing in your work­ing class upbring­ing that con­tributed to you becom­ing a filmmaker?

Kotch­eff: My film school was an abat­toir. I some­times see a film and think, ​‘This guy has no idea how real peo­ple live’. It was a tremen­dous boon for me, work­ing at a Cana­di­an slaugh­ter­house, and at Goodyear Tire & Rub­ber. When I went to work in film, I knew about human beings’ real lives, both work­ing and mid­dle class.

Look­ing back at your 60-year career, how do you per­ceive your own body of work?

I was cer­tain­ly influ­enced by Ital­ian and French film­mak­ers, and the British film­mak­ers I knew from my time in Eng­land, peo­ple like Tony Richard­son and John Schlesinger. My own thing was that I always worked on the scripts I filmed, either alone as I did on my foot­ball movie North Dal­las Forty, or with oth­ers as I did with Sylvester Stal­lone on First Blood and Bob Klane on Week­end at Bernie’s. I’ve always want­ed to make films that said some­thing, that had some mean­ing about the human experience.

You cer­tain­ly haven’t ever been stuck in one genre.

That start­ed when I first start­ed direct­ing live tele­vi­sion. Every three weeks it would be some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent; a com­e­dy, fol­lowed three weeks lat­er by a sto­ry about a young woman being molest­ed, and then after that an action sto­ry. That was of great ben­e­fit to me, as it helped me to find out what it was that I real­ly liked to do, and in fact I loved com­e­dy, I loved dra­ma, and I loved action, so I’ve hap­pi­ly done them all through­out my career.

Speak­ing of live TV, the most incred­i­ble sto­ry you recount in your auto­bi­og­ra­phy is of a live broad­cast of the tele­play ​‘Under­ground’ in 1958.

It was a live four act play. Towards the end the cos­tume design­er rushed up to me and said, ​‘I think Gareth Jones has faint­ed, he fell for­ward into the smudge make-up in my make-up tray.’ Jones was the vil­lain of the piece, there were five or six char­ac­ters who were buried in an under­ground sta­tion as the result of a nuclear war. I told my assis­tant to call mas­ter con­trol and tell them to have a Char­lie Chap­lin short stand­ing by. I rushed out and told the oth­er actors ​‘Something’s hap­pen­ing with Gareth’, and then I was told that he was actu­al­ly dead.

You can imag­ine how we felt at that moment, but I got all the actors togeth­er and re-wrote the script, telling them ​‘Here’s what we’re going to do, you’re going to say that line there, and you’re going to say that one’, and we restaged the remain­der of the play in a few min­utes before we were back on the air. The set was piles of rub­ble in this ruined under­ground sta­tion, so cam­eras came up from behind rub­ble and then went back behind it so anoth­er cam­era could move in and shoot some­thing by the first pile. Don’t ask me how but some­how we got through it, and we made it to the end.

You were also involved in Michelan­ge­lo Antonioni’s Blow-Up?

I had a call from one of the film’s pro­duc­ers, who told me that the film was 20 min­utes too long. He told me Anto­nioni loved my film Life at the Top and thought that I was an ide­al per­son to sug­gest the cuts as he was too close to the film to make the deci­sions him­self. I thought the pro­duc­er was try­ing to pull a sneaky trick and get anoth­er direc­tor to cut the film with­out Antonioni’s knowl­edge, so I said I wouldn’t do it unless Anto­nioni asked me him­self. I was thrilled when half an hour Anto­nioni called and asked me for my suggestions.

I gave him about 18 min­utes worth of cut­ting sug­ges­tions, and sur­pris­ing­ly he used almost all of them. About a year lat­er I had din­ner with Anto­nioni in Rome, and I asked him why he had eight writ­ers list­ed in the Blow-Up cred­its. He explained that he and anoth­er writer would write each of his films ini­tial­ly as a silent film, and he would then bring in indi­vid­ual writ­ers who had spe­cif­ic skill in writ­ing com­ic, roman­tic or action relat­ed dia­logue. He told me, ​‘Ted, we con­sid­er dia­logue to be sound effects. We believe that films are pic­to­r­i­al cre­ations. You must tell the sto­ry in pic­tures.’ That had a big effect on me, I was 29 at the time.

You were approached to adapt ​‘A Clock­work Orange’. How did that come about and why did it not work out?

Pro­duc­er Si Litvi­noff gave me the book and said that he thought it would make a ter­rif­ic film. I worked on a script with Ter­ry South­ern. Mick Jag­ger want­ed to play the part of Alex and the film was financed, we had the whole pack­age, and then the British Board of Film Cen­sors screwed it all up. They said the film would nev­er be shown in Britain because of the depic­tion of youth­ful vio­lence against peo­ple of prop­er­ty, which was a total no no as far as they were con­cerned. We tried to per­suade Para­mount to make the film in Amer­i­ca, but they said, ​‘We can’t give you British mon­ey to make a film in Amer­i­ca that will nev­er be shown here.’ Of course, Stan­ley Kubrick end­ed up mak­ing the film, and he made a classic.

By the time you moved out of TV and in to fea­tures in the ear­ly ​’60s, television’s descent into medi­oc­rity had begun. How do you account for the dra­mat­ic rise in qual­i­ty in the 21^st century?

In my ear­ly days in British TV there were such good writ­ers writ­ing for tele­vi­sion, peo­ple like Alun Owen, who I did sev­en tele­plays with. Then when live dra­ma stopped and they start­ed to do cheap series peo­ple just seemed to decide, wrong­ly, that TV wasn’t an ​‘artis­tic’ tool, and dis­missed it. It wasn’t until 10 years or so ago that peo­ple again realised the great poten­tial of TV for telling dif­fer­ent and dif­fi­cult sto­ries. I was offered SVU so I came back to TV. No one had ever done sto­ries about child molesta­tion and rape, and TV allowed us to delve into this dark area time after time. Fea­ture film­mak­ing doesn’t want to tell these sorts of sto­ries now – tele­vi­sion is the only way to do it.

Ted Kotcheff’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy ​‘Director’s Cut’ is avail­able now.