DepressedBergman@DannyDrinksWine
Burt Lancaster on why Frank Perry was the wrong choice to direct "The Swimmer" (1968) & the directors he felt would have handled it better:
"'The Swimmer' (1968) is certainly one of my favorites. It's a John Cheever story and there was the very difficult problem of translating a literary work to the screen. Cheever speaks in the short story of how a man is walking through a lane and he smells a fire, it's an autumn fire; he describes it as the smell of autumn in the air. Well, that kind of thing in writing is lovely, especially in Cheever's phrases, but when you try to get this quality onto film, it requires some kind of approach.
I'll say that I don't think Frank Perry was able to do this, and I don't know that any other director would have been. But you certainly need someone like a Fellini or a Truffaut, or someone with that kind of imagination to let the camera also tell your story. Film has its own particular life—regardless of what's actually going on in a film.
And it needed some kind of strange, weird approach to capture the audience and make them realize that, in a way, they were not looking at anything real. In talking about the script we would say, "I don't know why two men in white coats don't come take this guy away." It should have been obvious that this man was going through something that was not quite real; it was all part of his imagination. But it was played in a realistic sense—so when you come to the end of that film, instead of being sympathetic and heartbroken for the man, you were surprised and shocked."
("Take 22: Moviemakers on Moviemaking" Judith Crist, 1984)
