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George Cukor: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers)

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George Cukor is another Hollywood director with a reputation for claiming the status of craftsman, not artist, for himself, but he's far more forthcoming than Ford in the George Cukor Interviews book, edited by Robert Emmet Long. If Ford's pose was curmudgeonly and ultimately bitter, Cukor's is witty, self-deprecating, and pragmatic. Told of Cahiers du Cinema's analyses of his films, he says "I'm very amused reading these very nice articles about my work." Asked about his firing from Gone with the Wind, he replies, "I have never wasted time regretting setbacks of this kind; I am too much a fatalist, or perhaps just too conceited for that. I have always felt that if I couldn't make one picture I would just make another." Cukor proves himself an incisive judge of other people's work. He sardonically laments Lawrence of Arabia's narrative slackness: "I didn't know what their point was. It was lost in all those surging masses." Generally he's as respectful of actors in his comments as he is in his films, though he bristled at being called a "woman's director." "That one stuck with me regardless of my other attributes. And I, supine fool that I was, said `Yes, yes, I am.' Now that I'm older, I say `What the hell do you mean?'" Asked what drives him, he replies, "the irrepressible urge to tell people what to do." Included in both the Ford and Cukor volumes are a chronology, a filmography, an index, and a photo gallery.