Piecework

Huston loved the way Schulz-Keil looked, and drafted him for the part of a bomb-throwing anarchist in Annie. But Lowry’s novel was the German’s primary concern. He’d read it as a boy; now he wanted to see it on the screen. Huston was the ideal director, Finney the perfect Consul. Finney hadn’t read the book before Schulz-Keil’s first approach. “He told me they had an outline for this script, and could he send it to me,” Finney remembers. “I said, ‘Of course.’ “ A friend coincidentally gave him a copy of Under the Volcano; there had been some industry talk about the possibility of the movie being made, and she thought he should read the novel. At the same time, Schulz-Keil sent over his outline.

“It was the thickest document I’d ever seen,” Finney remembers, “so I thought, Well, I might as well read the novel. Like most people, I found the novel very difficult to get into. To plug into somebody else’s stream of consciousness is always hard. But then I thought what an interesting story it was, what an interesting situation it was. The pain of it, the anguish of it kind of struck me. Then periodically I would get new outlines, and then scripts.”

Meanwhile, thirty-two-year-old Michael Fitzgerald had been brought into the production end of the movie. Huston invited him to come to The American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award dinner honoring Huston last year in Los Angeles, where a deal was worked out with Schulz-Keil and Borman. The two Germans had exhausted their bankroll in the process of clearing the rights, and had been turned down by four studios. At the Huston dinner was Alberto Isaac, a director general of the Mexican Cinematographic Institute, who expressed interest in helping with the financing. Fitzgerald sent Tommy Shaw to Mexico to work with Isaac, and three weeks later Fitzgerald arrived to make a deal.

“For twenty years,” Fitzgerald says, “Mexicans have gotten screwed by virtually every outsider that has come in here. I wasn’t prepared to do that. In our picture, they are full participants, from every source of income, all over the world. They recoup in the same position, they have the same proportionate profit participation that everybody has. On top of that, they were given all profits in Mexico itself, as a gift from John.” Fitzgerald sold American rights to Universal Classics, while Twentieth Century-Fox took the rest of the world.

At the same time, casting was proceeding. Finney agreed to do the picture. Huston wanted Jacqueline Bisset for Yvonne; he’d directed her early in her career in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Fitzgerald had been impressed by Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited and showed his work to Huston, who approved him for the part of Hugh. And the work with Gallo continued at Puerto Vallarta.

“All of a sudden,” Fitzgerald says, “we were … I mean this all started at the AFI dinner in March for Chrissakes, and by mid-June we were in feverish preproduction in Mexico.” He remembers Huston’s original interest. “He said, ‘Well, Volcano is there, and it will never get done otherwise; what about taking it over and doing it in the same vein that we did Wise Blood? Which was basically: small, tight, putting every fucking dime on the screen, rather than on bullshit. And that’s what we’ve done.”

Jacqueline Bisset was approached indirectly, through John Foreman, who was Huston’s friend and had produced The Man Who Would Be King. “He told me about the project and asked me would I read it,” Bisset says. “And I thought, Well, it’s an interesting idea, an interesting combination of people.” A first-draft screenplay was sent to her. “My part was not particularly fascinating, but I felt it had to go one way or another: more enigmatic, or much more ‘directioned.’ Both of which seemed fine, if they could move it in one direction or another. John, Wieland, and Guy were all down in Puerto Vallarta working together when I got the second script. So I went to Puerto Vallarta to see them. I read the book in between. In the book Yvonne is not that clear. She’s there very much, if you go through the book looking for her. But I needed to start from some concrete point. There are a lot of abstractions in the book, a lot of symbolism, and things difficult for me to understand: just in terms of story line, from A to B to C, to the end. In the second script, a lot of my queries were answered. I was very touched by the atmosphere of the piece; it haunted me completely; it’s still with me very much. I think it’ll stay with me.”