Interview with Frank Capra

Abstract

Graduating in 1918 with a degree in chemical engineering from California Institute of Technology, he joined the Army and taught math in San Francisco until the Armistice was signed. Capra followed with a box office smash hit, Lady for a Day, which netted Academy Awards nominations for Best Actress (Mae Robeson), Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Script. No other movie had then ever won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), and Best Screen Play (Robert Riskin). Before entering World War II, Mr. Capra finished Arsenic and Old Lace, released in 1944, starring Cary Grant.

Born in 1897 near Palermo, Sicily, Frank Capra emigrated to America at the age of six. While his father labored in a small vineyard near Sierra Madre, Frank worked his way through school. Graduating in 1918 with a degree in chemical engineering from California Institute of Technology, he joined the Army and taught math in San Francisco until the Armistice was signed. In San Francisco he "backed" into a movie career. Knowing nothing about movies, he talked his way into directing a one-reel picture, Faulta Fisher's Boarding House. In Hollywood he wrote gags, first for Hal Roach, then for Mack Sennett. Sennett assigned Capra to create a character for Harry Langdon. The collaboration was successful, and Langdon hired Capra. The Strong Man and Long Pants followed. The two parted, and in 1928, Capra joined Harry Cohen at Columbia Pictures in a partnership which was to be one of the most profitable in the history of the movie business. After a good start with That Certain Thing, the new Columbia director made eight silente in two years before graduating to sound with three Jack Holt "talkies."

In 1930, he directed his first big hit, Ladies of Leisure, which made a star out of Barbara Stanwyck. Other early successes with Columbia included Dirigible; Platinum Blonde with Loretta Young, Robert Williams, and Jean Harlow; and American Madness, with Walter Houston. In 1932, Frank Capra directed one of his favorites, The Bitter Tea of General Yen with Barbara Stanwyck and Miles Astor. Capra followed with a box office smash hit, Lady for a Day, which netted Academy Awards nominations for Best Actress (Mae Robeson), Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Script. But it was to be the next film for which Capra would receive the first of his four Oscars. The vear was 1934, and the picture, It Happened One Night. No other movie had then ever won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), and Best Screen Play (Robert Riskin). This was the first of many successful collaborations between Riskin and Capra.

Broadway Bill came next. In 1936 he won a second Oscar for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, with Gary Cooper, and one of Capra's favorite actresses, Jean Arthur. In 1937, Capra created Shangrila for Lost Horizon, with Ronald Coleman, Jane Wvatt, and Sam Jaffe. A third Oscar was awarded Mr. Capra in 1938 for You Can't Take it With You, pairing Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur as voung lovers, with Lionel Barry more and Edward Arnold as their fathers. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington brought Jimmy Stewart and Claude Raines face- to-face in a Senate battle. It is a film that affirmed Capra's faith in democracy and the innate dignity of man.

In 1941 Meet John Doe, starring Gary Cooper, proved to be one of the hardest-hitting films of Capra and screen writer Robert Riskin. Before entering World War II, Mr. Capra finished Arsenic and Old Lace, released in 1944, starring Cary Grant. He joined the Army shortly after Pearl Harbor and began the seven films of the Why-WeFight series. Those are considered classics in the documentary field. For them he won another Oscar and received medals from General Marshall.

In late 1945, Capra formed his own production company, Liberty Films. For the new company he made what has come to be his favorite film, It's A Wonderful Life, again with Jimmy Stewart. It ran nip and tuck with William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives for Best Picture of 1946. Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were the stars of Capra's screen version of State of the Union in 1948. After selling Liberty Films to Paramount, Mr. Capra made two films with Bing Crosby for Paramount, Riding High in 1950, and Here Comes the Groom the following year. Between pictures Capra made a series of four hour-long television shows on science for the Bell Telephone Company, before teaming with Frank Sinatra in 1958 for A Hole in the Head.

Cpara's most recent feature is A Pocketful of Miracles, made in 1961 with Glenn Ford, Peter Falk, and Bette Davis. In 1964, he directed a documentary film on space travel for the New York World's Fair. And in 1971 he wrote his autobiography The Name Above the Title. During the last few years Mr. Capra has lectured and held film seminars in over 50 American and Canadian schools, sharing his film experience with thousands of students and faculty members. The following interview between Mr. Capra and three interested students was taped on March 24, 1976 on the campus of North Carolina State University.

Q: Could you tell us about the silent era in films? What was it like directing in the silent era?

CAPRA" Well, the principal difference between the silents and, let's say, sound, was that we didn't use scripts. We had a thing called a scenario- at least some of the very expensive films did have a scenario of some sort- very thin. Just with titles as to the kind of story. But Mack Sennett in the comedy department never wrote anything; nothing was written in Mack Sennett's studio. He didn't like books; and if you brought in a book, he'd throw you out. "No gags in books," he'd say. He had been a water boy to an Irish section hand, and this Irish foreman became his idol. He wished he could be just like him: strong and positive. There were never books around there, and he just thought that visual humor couldn't be found in books; and he was right. There were no word jokes; there were visual jokes. They were visual things; and these you had to think up without any paper. And we just discussed the sequences and what would come next in a two-reel comedy. The plot was quite simple, and what we'd try to do was to get comedy routines to fill in the plot. The gag men were separated and cut into two gag-men teams. And they would work on that. Now you would tell the routines that you thought up to Mr. Sennett. If he liked them, and of course he was a great audience, if he liked something you could hear him laugh for two blocks; he'd just open his mouth and guffaw. I guess his great strength was what he liked and what he laughed at was pretty surely what the audience would laugh at. So he was sort of an audience barometer. If he liked the routine he'd work on it too, but he was not an inventive man himself. He'd try to tell a joke and even forget the punch line; he was not funny in himself. But he was a great audience. And if he liked your routine, you were allowed to go and tell the director the routine; and if the director liked it, he'd shoot it; if he didn't like it, he wouldn't shoot it.

Q. Wasn't there an occasion where you thought of an idea, and he didn't like it? What happened then?

CAPRA- Yes, there was 3R occasion. There were occasions when he didn't like the idea. I had an occasion once about a wheel with Ben Turpin, the guy with the crossed eyes. He was making love to a girl. He had taken her out in the moonlight in his buggy, and he tried to get amorous, and she didn't want any part of it. Everytime he'd get amorous, the wheel would almost slip off because his rival had unscrewed the wheel from the axle, so this wheel would almost go off. But when she pushed him back, she'd be saved for the wheel would move back over, too. But finally, of course, the wheel came off, and he fell down. Well, that's a running gag. You can use it and get a routine out of it. And he said, "No, that isn't funny." Well, I thought it was very funny; and so I told it to an actor who was working on the Ben Turpin show, and he thought it was funny; and I said, "Why don't you tell it to the director?" So he went around and told the director. The director loved it, and he shot it. Then Mr. Sennett went into the projection room to see the rushes, and here was this gag.

Q: Why didn't Mack Sennett like it?

CAPRA- He didn't tnmk it was funny. That was his right. He always said, "Whose name is over the gate?" Your's Mr. Sennett." He raised heck about that gag, and he said, "All right, we'll leave it in. I want to teach you a lesson. But I'm taking you to the preview. I'm going to prove to you that it's not funny." Well, we did go to the thing, and it was very funny. And boy, I came out to raves and everything else. I came out rubbing my hands, and he says, "You're fired."

Q: What did you do then ?

CAPRA: Being fired by Sennett was not all that serious because if you came back and walked in front of the gate and looked penitent, with your old clothes on, and he saw you walking in front of that gate when he came in his big car and when he went out in his big car (you had to be there all the time), he'd see you doing penance in front of that gate with his name on it. Well, in about three days he'd let you in. You'd get your job, and that was Sennett.

Q. How did he compare with Hal Roach? Did they work along the same lines?

CAPRA: No. Hal Roach was more of a structured person. He was not quite as slap happy as Sennett. He was more structured to the thing. It was more of an assembly-line proposition. At Sennett it was a happy go lucky, free for all thing- anything went.

Q. How long did you wait before you started working with Harry Langdon ?

CAPRA- * was there about a year before I started working with Harry Langdon.

Q. Did he hire you ? I mean did he see your work and say, "Hey, I want that man to direct?"

CAPRA: I Just was a gag man for Harry Langdon for about another year. I just wrote his material. I didn't direct Harry Langdon until he left Sennett and went on to make feature pictures, and I became his director on the film we saw the other day, The Strong Man.

Q: Did Harry Langdon do his own stunt work ?

CAPRA: No, you can't tet the star of your show do stuntwork. If he breaks a leg, then the whole thing goes to pieces. No, you use doubles all the time.

Q. A lot of people didn't make the transition to sound. They didn't survive. How did you survive?

CAPRA" It was Just a Peri0(i OI" transition. You were still in the business of telling a story. That's the business of entertainment, that's really not such a new business. Except that we were dealing in words now as well as in pictures. The transition was not that difficult. Almost anybody who knew anything about films, silent films, survived into sound. It was not a great change for people to make. It was a great change physically for the studios. They had to soundproof the stages, spend a lot of money, build new stages in many cases. They had to get a tremendous amount of new equipment they didn't have before. The recording equipment was very, very expensive. But oddly enough very little production was stopped because of the change. They just kept on making silents and sound, and then gradually changed over to sound without losing stride.

Q: Mr. Capra, what film do you think first fulfilled your aims or purpose as a director?

CAPRA: My purpose as a director was to make money. So I was very happy when the audience liked the very first one I made because that was my aim. At that time we got very little money; at Mack Sennett's I got $35 a week. When I started directing for Harry Langdon, I got $600 a week, which was quite a jump. That was our main thrust- money.

Q. Did you not have your own film company, was it Liberty Films?

CAPRA: That was almost 30 years later.

Q: Whom did you form it with ?

CAPRA: I had been in the army; and when we got out of the army, I formed it with people who had been in the army: William Wy 1er, George Stevens, and a businessman named Sam Briscuit. There were three directors and a businessman.

Q: Did this company have any purpose as such?

CAPRA: Yes, we wanted to make independent films, not make films for a studio, just make them for ourselves.

Q: Did you use any star, or did you ... ?

CAPRA: We used whatever people we could get. We hired for each film. We'd expand for making a film, and contract. and contract; that way we didn't have any great overhead to carry.

Q: You went from gag writer to director. Did you ever think about going any further than director into some other...

CAPRA: There is no higher calling in the world than being a director. What more can you want than to be a filmmaker.

Q: All your life you believed in the motto: "One Man, One Film. "

CAPRA: Yes, I knew nothing about the stage, and I knew nothing about anything else really when I started in this business. I graduated from CaI. Tech. as a chemical engineer, and that was what I was going to be. I couldn't get a job. I sold apples on the street until I got into filmmaking. That's all there was to it. I had an opportunity to get a job with a film company, and that was what started me. The first film I made was a little one-reeler. I did the whole thing because nobody else knew anything about it, and everybody knew less than I did, and I knew nothing. So, you can see how we were the blind leading the blind.. Anyhow, there's when I started with this "One Man, One Film" idea. I could not understand how anybody else could write the material for you and then you'd shoot it; and then you'd give it to an editor, and the editor would put it together the way he wanted it; and then the producer would do it up. I just didn't understand how all of this could happen and yet produce an art form. This was a committee. Everybody would give their own interpretation to that film. And naturally, when a committee dabbles in art, they don't come up with much. You've heard that a camel is ahorse made by a committee. I thought that if this is an art form at all, it's the guy that makes the show. They so-called artist should have control, not the actors, not the wardrobe people, or the song people, or the photography people. I was able to put that idea into execution at Columbia Studios, a very small studio down on Poverty Row where I became the big fish in a very small pond; therefore I could ask for things that I couldn't get any other place. And the first thing I asked for was to have complete control of what I was doing. Since they needed me and the films I made for them made money, that was very fine with them. And they could fire me at any time. That's the way I did inaugurate this "One Man, One Film" idea. I was the first hired director to be able to do that. Of course, if you owned your own company, you do anything you wanted to. But I didn't own my own company. A man like DeMiIIe owned his own company; therefore he could put his name where he wanted to, and he could really control his material. And today it is practically "One Man, One Film" all over the world.

Q: Could you choose your own technical people then?

CAPRA- Right, you have to choose as much as you can. I mean, you just can't choose at will. People who are working some other place won't stop there to come to work for you.

Q. How did you begin working with Robert Riskin? Was that by accident?

CAPRA: No, Robert Riskin came out when Columbia hired a lot of young playwrights. He came with the bunch. There were about six or seven. He came out with that bunch. And we worked together on our first film, which -was Platinum Blonde; and we became very good friends, and we started vibrating to the same tuning fork, and then we worked together on about twelve films.

Q: Also Dimitri Tiompkin did a lot of your musical scores.

CAPRA: Yes, Tiompkin scored a lot of films. He was a Russian. He emigrated to Paris, and began to speak French with a Russian accent, and knew German with a Russian accent. He began to speak English with a Russian accent, and finally he began to speak Russian with no accent or with an odd accent. So he's a man who can't speak any language anymore without an accent. But he's a wonderful musician. I gave him the first opportunity he had to score a film which was Lost Horizon, and that was the most expensive thing Columbia had ever made, and to give it to an outside man who had never had any experience in scoring a film was really something that the studio thought was absolutely crazy. But I wanted something new and different, and I thought that this man could give that Russian-Asian quality to the music that I thought the picture ought to have.

Q: When did you decide to put music behind them ?

CAPRA: " Music is another tool which you are able to use in telling a story, as you use sound, as you use color. These are all tools. Your principal tools, of course, are the actors. The others are all accessories to your story telling. So you use them as you think the story should be colored by music, or by sound, or by color, or by photography, to advance the mood or the style of the scene that you're shooting.

Q. Could you tell us what happened at the Academy Award dinner for Lady for a Day ?

CAPRA: Well, I thought I'd made films that merited at least the attention of the Academy, of course everybody thinks that. But I thought it very strongly. American Madness, Platinum Blonde, Dirigible, films like that have been mentioned at least. But since we were a very small studio, we didn't have many votes, probably not more than two votes in the whole studio. When Lady for a Day came along, it was a very big hit in theaters, with the public 'as well as with the press and the critics. And it also was a big hit with the Academy voters because it was nominated for four categories: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Writing, Best Directing. It was a tremendous thing for me. I looked up the records and no film had ever won four major Oscars, and I thought here's a chance to make a sweep, this is probably the best picture for the whole year; and anybody who votes for anything else is out of his mind. So I was really sure that we'd get at least four awards. I became impossible to live with. We moved in from the beach; I rented a big house in Beverly Hills to be seen around; I gave parties; I went to restaurants and stood around so they'd see me; and I got a tuxedo made by a tailor, expecting surely to be seen; and I rehearsed speeches, I wrote lots of acceptance speeches; and I practiced them before a mirror so my voice would break in just the right place. My wife was in her ninth month of pregnancy, and she just locked the door and thought I'd lost my mind. And I had! So I went to the Academy Dinner at the Biltmore, and Will Rogers was the master of ceremonies. He was giving out the awards. The first celebrity I ever knew was Will Rogers. I thought this was a good omen. I had invited about ten friends. The first was the writing award, and I thought Bob Riskin 's going to win this, and I'm going to win the next one. It was not Lady for a Day; it was tor Little Women. Victor Herman and Sarah Mason were called up to the stand, and I thought Oh, my goodness. Well, I said, okay, 111 settle for three. The next one was mine, and Will Rogers began talking. It was dark, and I had this crumbled up little speech in my hand, and I unrolled it and tried to look at it, and I couldn't, and he said: "The envelope," and he looked at it and he said, "It couldn't happen to a nicer kid than this, and I've known him for such a long time, and he came from nothing" ; and every word spelled me, of course, and finally he said, "come up and get it, Frank." Well, everybody at my table leaped in the air, and it was a long walk to the dance floor. I went around people's tables say, "Excuse me, excuse me," etc. And I got to the dance floor, and the spot-light was going around, and I was saying, "Here I am! Over here!" And finally the spot light goes over and stops and picks up another guy on the other side of the dance floor, and it's Frank Lloyd, the director of Cavalcade. I was actually aghast and astonished standing there in the dark, and Will Rogers embraces him and everything else, and finally somebody said "Down in front!" right behind me, and I moved. And that long walk back with everybody yelling "down in front" was the most miserable thing I've ever had happen to me. And I was so mad at the Academy I said that if they ever, ever, ever give me one, I won't accept it. Well, the next film was It Happened One Night . . .

Q: Where you won everything?

CAPRA: I was there.

Q: And you accepted?

CAPRA: I accepted.

Q. While you were at Columbia, Joseph Walker was the director of photography for most of your films. Could you tell us about this collaboration. How did his style affect your style in motion picture?

CAPRA* Well, he had no particular style. What he was interested in was trying to figure out what you wanted. But he was innovative. He wouldn't be stopped by anything; you couldn't really stop him. If you had something difficult you wanted to get, some kind of a mood, he'd do it. He knew how to get it. We did a lot of experimenting together with the use of lenses and with the use of masks and with the use of gauze, and things like that.

Q. Although you feel that the camera in its relation to the movie should be as unobstrusive as possible, how do you feel about unique camera angles and expressionistic lighting in respect to creating or in helping to emphasize a mood? Would you think it's all right as long as it's used in that . . .

CAPRA: If its trying to emphasize a mood, yes. But if you see the machinery, the story's going out the window. It is not a machinery-to-the-people medium. It's a people-to-people medium. The actors are telling the story. You can only involve the audience in the lives of the actors and characters that the actors are playing. You can't involve them in machinery. They don't give a darn about a sunset, or a fast moving camera, or a hand -held camera, or anything like that. These are ego-massaging, little, egocentric things that directors indulge in, and we indulge in for ourselves and for each other. But audiences are bored with that.

Q: Maybe I've just seen old prints, but I'm wondering do you use a soft focus effect to create a romantic or nostalgic mood. I noticed in It Happened One Night in some of the shots of Claudette Colbert it seemed that she was in soft focus to suggest her romantic interest in Clark Gable.

CAPRA: Well, it's not just to suggest her interest in Clark Gable. You want her to look very nice at that moment, and that's done with long focus lenses where the focus will become very narrow; and if you focus on the person's eyes and nose, everything back of their head gets soft because it goes out of focus. So you get a feeling of a kind of a softness about the whole scene which transmits itself into the mood of the girl if she's in a soft mood. We did a lot of that kind of stuff- a lot of work with four inch lenses, even six inch lenses.

Q. How about deep focus? Do you use that in American Madness to dehumanize a mob, or did you use it in other aspects?

CAPRA: We used that mostly to widen the focus so that more people would be in focus, and that's when you use a wide angle lens, and you get great depth of focus with that. And you get a very short depth of focus with the larger lenses, the three and four inch and the six inch lenses. So we'd use, let's say a 35mm or a 25mm lens on the wide shots where everybody would be in focus even those close and those in the back.

Q. Normally it seems that when I'm watching your pictures that the camera is usually objective, letting you see the whole thing; but then occasionally it will switch like in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and become subjective; in other words the camera will actually become one of your characters, and let the audience see what that person sees. Can you elaborate on that?

CAPRA" That's point of view. It really depends. If I'm photographing somebody, and he is looking up here, and I know what he is looking at, then you have to photograph what he is looking at from that point of view just to follow the continuity. You don't disorient the audience. There's nothing that makes an audience more unhappy than to be disoriented. They don't know where you are. If you make a sharp reverse cut for no reason at all, they don't know what happened. So their mood of being with the film and being part of it is broken, you see, that's just bad direction. Whenever you break an audience's mood, you're just asking for trouble. So you use machinery, but it must never be seen. The interest must always be on the actors. That's what the audience is interested in, in the people who are to make these decisions, the actors. But how you get there, that's your business, not theirs. They don't want to know about that.

Q. Leland Pogue in his book The Cinema of Frank Capra says that in your editing style you use a lot of cuts between shots. Is this because of your emphasis on dialogue and the story or do you only use this frequent cutting in scenes where you're trying to build suspense?

CAPRA: Well, you follow the interest. That is the guideline there. Where's the interest? Who does the audience want to see? Whose face do they want to see react· to somebody else coming in the door? What effect is that going to have on them? You follow the interest of what is happening; and if you just use that as the guideline, you'll find that you will do the right kind of cutting. Who do you want to see next? Who do you want to see in that moment? Now these are cuts with closeups. A closeup is an emphasis. You want to get up close so you can see that person's face, the person's eyes. What are her thoughts at this moment? Closeups are for dramatic purposes-not just to speed up or not just for glamor. They must have a purpose. Every cut must have a purpose. One of the principal things about it is to get the smooth flow, the filmic flow, the dynamic of film. You can edit a film so that it flows very smoothly from one cut to another. You don't know where you have a cut; you just don't know. Your interest flows back and forth, back here this way and that way, and it's just wonderful the effect you get when you do it right. The audience doesn't know it or have to know anything else. They remain fascinated by what is going on. That's what you should try to accomplish. There are many ways to put scenes together. Many, many ways. But only one or two are worth a darn.

Q: How many cameras did you use ?

CAPRA: Mostly three.

Q: Three at once?

CAPRA: Yes, bUt there are a lot of problems. You can light one camera; and if you light two cameras, the problem is doubled; and if you light three cameras, your problem goes up geometrically. The problems with three cameras are eight times what they are with one. But it's worth the effort because then you've got that scene photographed from three different angles, and you just intercut those angles at will. You can go from one to another without fear of stopping the pace or the effects of the scene or anything else, because it is one scene being photographed from several angles. And if you have to stop in between and photograph all those angles separately, you're liable not to get the same intensity, the same character of the scene, the same kind of mood of the scene, the same feeling of the scene as when it's photographed all at the same time. And then you pick up closeups from one of the other cameras at the same time that the master scene was being photographed.

Q. What sort of techniques did you use in editing to help bridge a time gap in a story?

CAPRA" All kinds of gimmicks have been used: going from a tree with flowers to a tree with snow on it. A lot of these things you think are necessary, but the audience is so far ahead of you that all these things bore them. So if somebody is going into the elevator on the 8th floor, you can bring him right out of the building on the next cut, and the audience will thank you. They know he went down. It just accelerates telling your story. You just don't have to follow him down, and follow him getting out, and all his long walks. That's unnecessary. They do it in television because they've got to fill up time.

Q. Do you use headlines for bridging a time gap or just going forward ?

CAPRA: Information . In a play that used to be done by the butler and the cook talking in the kitchen. They gave you everything that happened the night before: who was what, who was with whom, who slept with whom. They give you a lot of this exposition part. Exposition is dreary stuff, and it has to be made kind of interesting. That is why you have to use your ingenuity to make exposition interesting. I used newspaper headlines and that kind of thing that would have a kind of flow to it. Other people do it other kinds of ways. But the whole thing is how do you tell exposition, what happened. You're in this interval between this sequence and that one, it may be a week or a year. What happened during that time? Tell it short, quick, exciting; make it interesting.

Q. I was amazed at some of the technical solutions you came up with, like how to show cold.

CAPRA: Well, I have a passion for credibility, and I tried to make a film believable, and that starts, of course, with getting very good actors for all the small parts; because if you believe the small people, you're more liable to believe the derring-do of the stars. And, of course, such things as snow that looks like snow, and cold that looks like cold are made more credible when we see breath of people that are working in the scene. If you get in the 20°s, your breath shows. If you're supposed to be in the 20°s, and there's no breath, the audience knows something is phony about that scene. And in a word they just don't believe the scene, and then they won't believe the story. But if you make all those things credible, and they believe that you're out in the cold or that you're in the Arctic, then you believe everything.

Q: How did you solve that problem in Lost Horizons?

CAPRA" I took everybody to an ice house. We hired an ice house and made a studio of it, and threw out the swordfish that were piled up in it, and brought in the actors.

Q: Did you go on location when you made your movies?

CAPRA" Location wherever it was possible. It was too costly then. The equipment was not as fine and miniaturized as it is today, and it was rather cumbersome. If you went out to take a closeup of two people away from the studio, you had a retinue of over 15 trucks following you. It was a very expensive thing. Now that is all over with. You can make a picture any place in the world with the equipment that you can put in a station wagon. And many pictures are shot that way. Interior and exterior, all are shot right on location.

Q. In most of your films, you focus on the average man, your John Doe, your little man, the individual who is typical of everyday life. I guess it's the little man versus the big man, and in many of your films you were against politics or political bosses. Would you go into detail and say why?

CAPRA" Well, about the little man. I like people, I think people are just wonderful. I also think that people are all equal in the sense of their dignity, their divinity; there's no such thing as common man or an uncommon man. To me they're all-each one has something unique. Each one is actually unique. Never before has there been anyone like you. Never again will there be anyone like you. One mold, one young lady. So you're a very unique person, so is he, so is he. You are something that never existed before and will never exist again. Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that something pretty exciting? So I look at you as something that plays part of a great whole, an equal part of everything, or else you wouldn't be here. That being the case, I just always liked to get down to people that are supposed to be the mob, and I find very interesting people there. I like people, and I get right into them. I use people a great deal for background. I shoot many scenes in crowds because I think people are more interested in other people than they are in anything else. They love the faces; they don't know who the devil they are, but they like them because they are people. You could put a camera inside of a window, let's say a grocery store or a restaurant or a jewelry store, and just photograph the people from the inside window-shopping. And you watch the various faces that come in and look; they're just fascinating. You are an audience by looking at them in the projection room; you can't take your eyes off them. They are interesting per se to other people. That's why I direct my attention to the people or to the actors that are representing people, and they become credible, and they know who they are and then the audiences care for them. The biggest thing is that I want them to care about these poeple.

Q: Your characters seem to represent certain ideals, like all of mankind should stick together and love and . . .

CAPRA" Well, the advent of the human race has been because of idealists and not because of masochists, or cynics. That's all pretty dry. It gets you nowhere. It's the idealists who walk alone and live alone and swim up the stream.

Q: They're non-conformers?

CAPRA" They're non-conformers. And it's the idealists that are non-conformers. And they're the ones that finally become the folk heroes. I don't know where we're going, but we came up from some kind of a jungle, and we're better off now than we were in the jungles. Some of us have a little more compassion within us and forgiveness within us, and make a kind of an evolution. I don't know where we're evolving to, but the idealists will have a great deal to do with where we're going.

Q. You "discovered" a lot of new talent, like Barbara Stanwyck. What kind of talents did you look for in a prospective actor or actress?

CAPRA: I don't know what I looked for.

Q. Were you just told to go look at Harry Langdon and make something out of him?

CAPRA: Yes! That's right. And we managed to do something with Harry Langdon. But I don't look for anything in people. I look for interest; if they attract me, they're interesting. That's a point in their favor.

Q. I've heard that with Barbara Stanwyck, you would rehearse all the other actors before she came on the set; and when she came on, she just went through it and did it in one take.

CAPRA: She was ver^ difficult to work with because she was unskilled in that she started as a chorus girl and she worked her way to be a kind of ingenue, and she was very, very stage-minded. She had only one performance to give to the audience and that was the performance she gave when she gave it. She'd give the best performance in a rehearsal. And every time she did it again, well, that was new to her, and it would not be as good as the first time she did it, and each succeeding time she did it she would go downhill. Now this was a great problem because you have to rehearse these scenes with other people; you have to see that everybody else knows what they're doing. And then you get an actor that leaves the best performance in the rehearsal. That really creates a problem because then you will not get her best performance on the film. So with her, I realized that she was new and young and fresh and dewy-eyed, and that she would not be able to master this technique that other film actors had mastered : to keep their emotions down in rehearsals and save them for the time when they needed them during the takes. So I just had to invent ways not to rehearse her. And that's where the three camera thing started with me so I'd have more cameras on at one time so really I didn't have to do as many takes with her. We were trying to get all the different kinds of angles, we tried to get all the angles we possibly needed, the important ones in a scene the first time. This created problems in lighting, it created problems with the other actors. They hadn't heard of her; they didn't know-I didn't give a damn whether they'd heard of her or not, I knew she'd be marvelous. Everybody 'd stop just to look at her. She really had power-a lot of young, fresh power. She'd make you believe anything she did. So in that way we had to shoot Barbara Stanwyck on her first film, Ladies of Leisure, and on a couple of other films; but not too long after that, of course, she learned to control herself, because other directors might not go to these lengths just to baby her and protect that first scene she would do.

Q. You liked characters or actors who played themselves, didn't you? Is that what you were looking for? Gary Cooper on the screen as well as off screen has struck me as almost the character he played.

CAPRA" Well, he'll play that character better than he will any other character. And in a sense every actor puts himself into that part. No two actors would play the same role alike because they are different people. Each one is a unique individual. They have no likenesses at all. And they'd play the same part, but not the same. That's why when I'm casting a part I try to get the actor that I think will do that part as I see that part.

Q. What messages should filmmakers be conveying to the audience?

CAPRA" The message is that we should forget messages. You have Western Union for that.

Q: What ideals?

CAPRA" Entertainment. Just entertainment. It's show business, it's theatrical, it's theatrics. What message have you got for the world? At your age? You're still learning. You're still absorbing stimuli from the outside. You still don't know. You've got opinions, but your opinions will change. You'll go back and forth as you make your way through life. You'll realize that your opinions were probably in a sense prejudiced. And you will find that they will change. So what gives you the right to give the world a message? See? You wait for that message. Don't worry about that message. You worry about entertainment. You worry about making things interesting and tell a story in an interesting way. Never mind the message. That message will come out. If you have anything, it will come out. But it will come out when you can give that message with entertainment; and if you're going to make tracts instead of dramas, people are not going to come to see them. They won't pay money to come and hear tracts, religious, political, or any kind of tracts that you have in mind. But the audience is the main thing you must think about, not the critics. That's the reason we make films; that's the theatre. A theatre is not a theatre without an audience.

Q. I was reading some critiques on your major films by Leland Poague in his book. Do you think that he overemphasizes the sexuality in your films?

CAPRA: I'm not too familiar with that part of Pogue's book. You just can't forget sexuality. It is a part of everyday living. It is part of what we live with, and it is part of the great joy of living. I don't think we could eliminate it. I don't think we can downgrade it, nor do I think that we should defile it. And when you see explicit sex scenes on the screen, they are defiling one of the most wondrous things any human being can experience.

Frank Capra's visit to North Carolina State University was made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Film Institute of the Univeristy. During his stay, March 15-24, 1976, he met with film classes, talked with individuals interested in the movies or in film careers, and lectured nightly to students and the general public after screenings of his major works.