简·方达（卫报）

Jane Fonda
Oscar-winning actor and one of Hollywood's most prominent liberals, Jane Fonda, spoke to Lord Puttnam about four decades in the movies, improvisation and working with Katharine Hepburn. Here's a full transcript

* guardian.co.uk,
* Friday June 03 2005

Lord Puttnam: Good evening. I don't know how many of you have read the book [Jane Fonda's My Life So Far]. Or, like me, have heard Jane reading it on the radio this week. I thought it was a completely remarkable book and that it, in a sense, redefines autobiography because it has an honesty and frankness that people in the future are going to find it difficult to match.

I was looking for a way of describing and came across this Nobel prize speech by Solzhenitsyn, and he uses a phrase which to me perfectly summed up the book: "It is useless to assert what one's heart does not believe." It seems to me that, sometimes with great pain, you've gone right through this book asserting exactly what your heart believes, and has learned to believe. And that's why it's a journey, not an autobiography - I felt like I'd been on a journey with you. What I'd like to do, because I've become pretty familiar with a lot of the book, and this being a rather more anoraky audience, is to concentrate on the movie industry aspects. And if I may, concentrate especially on a 10-year period in your career between 1969 and 79, from They Shoot Horses, Don't They? through to the completion of The China Syndrome. Where it seems to me that your choice of material was immaculate, and the way in which your life was bouncing between what was going on and the movies you were making, and how these movies in turn were affecting your life, was, I think, exemplary. One of the reasons why I'd like to do this is because I'm not sure that we're living in an era in cinema where that's necessarily true. And I think it's certainly true that I and the people I was working with in the 70s and 80s were learning an enormous amount by what you were doing and achieving and the way you were living your life real, and the way you were using the metaphor of cinema to make points which badly needed to be made.

One of the key films for me - and I went through Jane's oeuvre in the past week - was, and I didn't expect this when I started, Coming Home. It falls pretty well in the middle of that period, and I think it's a superb movie. If it were made yesterday it couldn't be more relevant. And so tonight I'm using two clips from that, including the one we've just seen [Sally and Luke's first date]. So I'd like to start with They Shoot Horses, and the events that led up to you getting that part, what you learned from that role, and what you feel it did for you in terms of feeding your career from that point onwards.

Jane Fonda: Well, it was a book written by Horace McCoy, sort of the first existential American novel, that was very much loved by the French left. My husband at the time, Roger Vadim, knew the book. When I was offered the role - it was not a very good script, and I said no, and he said, "No, you have to do this", so I did. And I'm glad I did. Because soon after I accepted the role and arrived to do it, the original writer-director was fired and this young Sydney Pollack - who had only done one other feature film prior to that, but had become famous in television in the US - was hired to direct it.

The first really seminal moment was when he came to my rented house and he brought the book with him. He sat down and said, "I want you to read the book and I want you to tell me what you think are the key elements in it that need to be brought out in the film." Doesn't seem like a big thing to you, maybe, but nobody had ever asked me to really participate in the content of a movie that I was in before. This was 1968 - it was a very tumultuous time, a time of a lot of change. The movie I'd made before that was Barbarella. So it's interesting to go, in the year 1968, from Barbarella to They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Phew! And I was also morphing from a noun into a verb. And the movie of They Shoot Horses was kind of the beginning of my being a verb. And the fact that Sydney asked me what I thought was part of that process. It's very important to me - I work with young people now and I learned from that experience with Sydney the importance of asking children's opinions, and really listening to them. At any rate, it was the first time I'd done a movie that was relevant to what was happening in the world. The marathon dances of the Depression were a metaphor for American consumer society that was killing our souls, and I'd never done anything like that before.

LP: For me, just looking at the films that ran up to it, there is a transformation in you, as an actor. Here's a clip from early on in They Shoot Horses.

[Runs clip where Gloria and Robert start dancing and make conversation]

JF: Man, she was a tough...

LP: She was one tough girl. I think that line, "I've been disqualified by experts" is sensational. Pauline Kael, when reviewing the film, said, "Jane Fonda has been a charming, witty, nudie cutie in recent years, and now gets a chance at an archetypal character. Fonda goes all the way with it, in a way that screen actresses rarely do once they become stars. Jane Fonda has a good chance of personifying American tensions and dominating our movies in the 70s." Pretty prescient review - they don't always get it as right as that.

JF: Good old Pauline Kael.

LP: But it did represent an enormous step change. To what extent did that segue quite naturally into Klute?

JF: I had just finished making it when I was offered the role of Bree Daniel in Klute. It seemed like a really good idea. A year went by between my agreeing to do it and when I actually did it, and during that year I was travelling around the United States, trying to understand the country because I'd been living in France since I married Roger Vadim. I'd been out of the country for eight years. How long should this answer be? I could talk a lot about this film.

LP: Well, it's a pretty important film.

JF: I'll tell you a funny part of it. So the production manager had arranged for me to spend time with prostitutes and madams prior to shooting. So I did that, I went to New York. I didn't look like I was supposed to because I'd been Barbarella and now I had this short, brown shag that became famous in Klute. Nobody knew who I was. I could tell some pretty good stories about what they told me and what I saw - man, it was wild. And the whole time, I would be going to these after-hours clubs, and no pimp would pick me up. Not even a wink. They didn't know who I was, so what that said to me was that I was wrong for the part, I just didn't have what it took. So I begged Alan Pakula to fire me, I said, "I can't do it, Alan" and gave him a list of actors, starting with Faye Dunaway - I said, "She should do it." And he just laughed and I did it.

Somewhere in there, I just ... and it was the first movie I did where I experienced this: there was like a marriage, a melding of souls between this character and me, this woman that I didn't think I could play because I didn't think I was call girl material. It didn't matter. I didn't know until I was writing the book why. I knew women like her, very talented - she could have been a very good actor. But she'd been abused when she was a child, so she wanted to be in control. And she didn't want intimacy, and hooking was a great way to get money for acting classes and she would always be in control - because hookers are in control, except when they're killed. I studied the effects of child abuse on girls. Originally, a male psychiatrist had been hired, and I said, "Alan, it can't be a male, she would never open up to a man." So he put a woman in the role. And all those scenes were improvised, because by then I had inhabited her, and I knew why she hooked, why she wanted johns, I knew it in my skin. And of course I realise there was a lot of me there, but I didn't know it at the time.

LP: There's a very early scene in that: the lineup for the modelling job that you go for, of 12-14 girls. And the coldness, the sense of absolutely unjustifiable rejection, sets up the film brilliantly. You can't understand it, why would anyone put themselves up for that kind of rejection and not be badly damaged by it. Brilliant start. The clip I've chosen, ironically, is one of the scenes where Jane is talking to the psychiatrist, and I didn't know that it was ... Did you agree with Alan going in that you would ad lib those scenes?

JF: Uh-huh.

LP: Perfect. We chose well.

[Runs clip: Bree talks to psychiatrist about why she's a call girl]

JF: There was a turning point for me in that movie. It was toward the end of the movie, when I find myself with a john, and he puts on a tape recorder. On the tape is the voice of my friend, a junkie who's disappeared and we don't know where she is. And in the course of listening I realise that the man is the one who killed her and he's going to kill me. Prior to that scene, I had asked Alan to arrange for me to go into the New York City morgue. And the police showed me file after file after file of women, hundreds of them, who'd been beaten to death, by johns, by husbands, by boyfriends. I knew about violence against women but I hadn't realised ... It had flesh and bones to it now, it had faces. And that scene, where I'm listening to the tape and realising that this man is going to kill me, I had decided not to prepare. I have a hard time acting fear. So I was just going to listen, because I'm a good listener. And what happened to me was I felt so sad, for all of us, for women, who are so vulnerable to the misplaced anger of men, so vulnerable that it seemed so inevitable that we were all beaten and bloodied and killed and it was going to happen to me, and I began to cry. I was crying for women, and tears were coming out of my nose; it was a very affecting scene that had an effect on people. I didn't think it would at the time. But when the scene was over, I knew something new about myself as an actor. I knew that my newfound activism and feminism was going to improve my acting, because I was now seeing things not just in very narrow, individual, kind of Freudian terms, but seeing them in a much broader, societal way that was going to deepen and enrich my talent. And that was the moment that it happened. It was a very important time for me right then.

LP: I think the core of my thesis for this evening is the degree to which the interests you were developing, and the life you were beginning to lead, were beginning to seriously impact material which you chose to involve yourself with, and indeed the films that got made that just absolutely would not have been made had you not thrown yourself into them, Coming Home being one. It's this synthesis that interests me a lot. Can you develop that at all?

JF: Well, studios weren't banging on my door to offer me parts. And I was working really hard to try and end the war. I thought, it takes three months to make a feature film and I just couldn't imagine spending three months making a film just for the money. And I thought, well how am I ever going to make movies that speak to my heart and to my values? So I was at an anti-war rally with a guy in a wheelchair named Ron Kovic. Maybe some of you saw Tom Cruise play his story in Born on the Fourth of July. Ron, very fiery, very charismatic, had been real gung-ho; he re-enlisted for three terms in Vietnam, had been shot and was paralysed from the waist down and was in a wheelchair. I was speaking at the same rally, and I heard him say - he was talking to students - he said, "I may have lost my body but I've gained my mind." That, I don't know, that just kind of pierced me, entered me. For weeks, I kept thinking of that contradiction: he had lost his body but he had come to understand that the war was wrong. He had come to shed the traditional warrior ethic to become a full human being. And I said, we could make a movie about that, and that's what evolved into Coming Home.

LP: When Patsy and I watched the film, she said she saw Ron Kovic in a relatively small part in the film. Was he there?

JF: Could have been - we had a lot of vets in wheelchairs. Can I talk about the sex part of it?

LP: If you insist.

JF: Well, I don't know; how much time do we have?

LP: In my experience, we've got enough time to deal with sex.

JF: Somewhere along in there, I thought, because it was becoming clear that this was becoming a love story: a triangle between a woman who was an officer's wife - and he was the kind of real gung-ho, I'm-gonna-go-I'm-gonna-be-a-hero; Bruce Dern played that part - and Jon Voight, who doesn't have the bottom part of his body. A love story. And I thought, maybe this is a way to redefine sexuality, sensuality; away from the traditional genitalia and masculinity and pumping, and make it be about what women know really matter, which is when the man is really sensitive to what we need and listens to our bodies and pays attention to us because they want to please us. And I thought, well this would be a great way to not only expose what's happening to Vietnam vets but to redefine sexuality. The problem was that ... there were a lot of these guys in wheelchairs on the set, extras on the film, and there was this guy who had a really cute girlfriend and there was clearly a lot of sexual energy between them. So I asked them about the sex between them because we had this love scene coming up and I didn't know how you do it with somebody who's paralysed. So she said, "You never know when he's going to get an erection. It can be anytime, and sometimes it lasts four hours." Phew! I was totally fascinated by it but I was also kind of disappointed because I was hoping that it wasn't possible because then it would be a movie where there was no penetration. The problem was that the director, the fabulous Hal Ashby, also heard the story about the four hours. And so the movie became the battle of penetration. He wanted to have the penetration and I didn't. Can I just finish off?

LP: I wish you would. Put it in another way, I'd never be forgiven if you didn't.

JF: We knew it had to be a really sexy and groundbreaking kind of scene. And I didn't want to have to do it myself so we got a body double to shoot the long shots. And I didn't want to make Jon Voight selfconscious, so I wasn't there when they shot with the body double. I came to the rushes the next day, and there was definitely penetration - she was moving on top of him, it was pretty clear what was going on. I said, "Hal, you can't use that! I thought we agreed." And then I thought, aha, when it comes to shooting my close-ups, I won't move, so he won't be able to cut it in. And so the day of the love scene - it's always interesting to shoot love scenes: they're skin on skin, and they hang sheets. I don't know if you did this in your films, but I'm kind of modest, so they hung sheets around, and there's only the camera operator and the director who are sort of there with long lens cameras. We spent the day rolling around in bed, and trying to say, "It's OK, it's only acting", right? And so towards the end of the day, I'm on top of Jon, and I hear Jon saying to me, [stage whispering] "Jane, Hal's yelling at you." And I was so into the scene that I hadn't heard. But suddenly, I listened and from the distance, I hear Hal Ashby saying, "Ride him, goddammit!" I refused, I wouldn't do it, and he stormed off the set. Right now, you can't really tell - some people think it's penetration, some people don't - but for the day, it was really a hot scene, wasn't it?

LP: My only experience of this was - and this might end up selling a lot of videos of a film that no one's ever seen - I produced a really execrable film in the mid-70s called Lisztomania, and I hope that no one here's seen it. It had Roger Daltrey and a very, very nice girl called Fiona Lewis in an early scene. And all they had to do was lie in bed underneath a silk sheet. And Ken Russell, who's not the easiest person to produce, was directing everything else that was going on around them. But they lay there for hours. And it was just before lunch, and Ken suddenly got it into his head, "I wonder if we can do it without the sheet"; and he whipped the sheet back and there was silence.

JF: They were getting it on!

LP: Well, I didn't know we were going to go there. So, Coming Home. Here's another clip I'd like to show which I think is sensational. I think this is really exquisite acting. You mentioned that a lot of this also was improvised. So another improvised scene from Coming Home, but which I think is fabulous.

[Runs clip: Sally and Luke on the beach on the eve of her husband's return]

JF: You know, what's so striking is that nowadays movies don't let scenes play out like that. You don't find movies any more that sort of take the time to let it happen. It's so great for an actor to be able to do that.

LP: It's absolutely true - Jane and I first met at the pre-Oscar party the year that she won for that performance, and you were very, very gracious to a very nervous Alan Parker and I. But when you think of that year, the films nominated for best film were Coming Home, The Deer Hunter which won, An Unmarried Woman and Midnight Express. It's hard to imagine that level of seriousness happening today. And I guess one of the things that's driving me throughout this is how can we get back to that, how can we get back to films that will allow that to happen on the screen. I'd like to talk to you about Vietnam for a moment because you are so eloquent about it in the book; the passages on Vietnam are wonderful. I wonder if you could both read that very short paragraph and talk a little about that.

JF: Oh yes, I'm in Hanoi, out in the country. I had visited a city that had been bombed, and we were on our way back. We were maybe an hour outside Hanoi, and bombing was taking place. I was told that I had to get out of the car and run because the bombers were coming. So I did, with my translator, and we ran. All along the side of this road at regular intervals were these manholes for individual people that had thick straw lids that you pull over to protect you from the bombs and the shrapnel. So I was running and suddenly a young Vietnamese girl comes up behind me and pulls me down into one of these holes. She was a schoolgirl, she had her books wrapped up in a belt. She dropped them and pushed me down into this hole and then she got into the hole with me and pulled the top on. And then shortly thereafter you could hear the planes overhead and you could feel the bombs thudding, thudding, thudding. It was very small and we were sandwiched in together - I could feel her breath, and her eyelashes, on my cheek. I swear to God, I thought, this can't be real. I can't be in a manhole in Vietnam with a Vietnamese girl who's just saved my life. It's not possible. When the bombing raid was over, she pushed the top over and crawled back out, and I came out, and this is where I'll begin to read now: "I began to cry, saying over and over to the girl, 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.' She stops me and starts speaking to me in Vietnamese. Not angry, very calm. Huoc - he's the translator - translates. 'She says you shouldn't cry for us. We know why we're fighting. The sadness should be for your country, your soldiers. They don't know why they are fighting us.' I stare at her and she looks right back, right into my eye. Certain."

LP: Last autumn, I worked with Unicef and Patsy and I were in Hanoi for the first time. And I walked into a hotel and bumped into a group of people I'd known at Warner Bros, guys my age. And I said, "Have any of you been here before?" And they all said, "The last time we were in this country, we wouldn't have been as welcome." And they'd all been GIs, and what struck them, as I'm sure has struck you many, many times since, was how ludicrous the entire Vietnamese adventure was. Here they were in a very nice hotel in a rapidly becoming prosperous city. And none of them could work out, for one moment, what that war had been about. Domino theory, none of it made any sense at all.

JF: Yeah, the so-called Enemy One, and we're big export-import traders with Vietnam; it's one of the key destinations. A tragedy that never had to happen. I hope I'm going to be able to see Robert McNamara - he's going to be in Hay-on-Wye. I really admire the fact that he admitted that it was wrong.

LP: I don't know if many of you have seen Fog of War - if you haven't seen it, it's well worth seeing, the McNamara documentary. Remarkable document, actually.

JF: I saw it back to back with The Trials of Henry Kissinger. Huh. Talk about two different kinds of human being. I mean, McNamara was one of the architects of the Vietnam war; how hard, what courage it took for him to finally say, "We were wrong." Boy. You don't find Kissinger doing that.

LP: The penultimate clip that I've chosen doesn't have Jane in it, but I think has enormous resonance and is touched on in the book and you even use it as a sort of chapter heading. It's from The Grapes of Wrath. For those at home watching the webcast, I do apologise but you won't see it. Instead of which you may well see a photograph of Rupert Murdoch, who decided that we shouldn't be allowed to webcast this particular set of images. So sorry about that. It's three minutes and 35 seconds long, so if you're at home, go and make a cup of tea and we'll be right back with you.

[Runs clip: Tom Joad's "I'll be there" speech]

LP: That's one of my favourite scenes from any movie, but I think that that's a series of thoughts that run right the way through this book, from cover to cover. You're constantly, in a way, circling exactly that group of thoughts.

JF: Yes, it's true. I believe it's true, and I know that my father lives on in that same way. I know one of Martin Luther King Jr's daughters, Yolanda King. And while I was writing this book, she called me about something one day, and I had been thinking a lot about my father, and I asked her, "Yolanda, did your father ever take you on his lap when you were a little girl and talk to you about values and how to live life?" And she said, "No, he never did." I said, "Yeah, my dad never did either, but you have his sermons, and I have my dad's films. This is how he speaks to me. Not everyone can verbalise, right? I feel so blessed that I had a father that chose these kinds of roles - Young Mr Lincoln, Grapes of Wrath, Ox-Bow Incident. There was a dialectic between him and those characters that spoke to me.

LP: Would you read that - it's the last thing I'll ask you to read, I promise.

JF: This is ... my dad died, and I'm talking about being in his home with his widow and my family. "We'd sit together and watch his eulogies on television. All week they went on, and it hit me that this wasn't just my loss, the family's loss. It was a national loss. Dad was a public figure, a hero who didn't just belong to us. Dad lived out these quintessential American values. He represented things that we all wanted to be, and that the country wanted to be. He often said that he was attracted to certain kinds of roles - the working poor, powerless people and the men who helped them get some power for themselves - because somehow their characters might rub off on him, and he would become a better person. But now I saw that there had been a dialectic. He did have many of those qualities."

LP: The interesting thing for us in the UK, certainly for anyone who's my age, is that he didn't just have it for Americans, he represented something that's very, very fundamental and very, very important, and he's left a gap. It means that if you're like, in your 60s, you're scratching constantly for a notion of what's good that isn't around you. And I certainly feel this terrible vacuum that's been created between the ideals that your father was able to beautifully expound, and the pretty tatty, tawdry world that most of us are forced to deal with.

JF: I see it all the time, it's just not represented in our leaders, but it's in the people. I feel particularly optimistic now because I've been travelling for five weeks now to promote my book, through the so-called red states. I tell you what, there's a lot of blue in those red states, and a lot of red in the blue, which means that we're all basically purple. Anyway, 800-900 people would come to the book signings, and I'm very optimistic. They represent the values my father stood for.

LP: What you've proved to me is that I spend too much time around politicians.

JF: That'll do it, that's a killer. Oh!

LP: I stand corrected.

JF: But I hate to create cynicism about politicians, too. We just need to invade. Regular people need to run for office and keep their balls and ovaries intact.

LP: Some of us are trying. Before moving out to questions from the audience, I wanted to tell you one thing: I was really nervous about doing this evening.

JF: You're kidding.

LP: I was, and it's probably become evident already that I am no Terry Wogan or even Barry Norman. But I remembered something: in the late 80s, Patsy and I were at a very, very glamorous evening in Hollywood to celebrate a very, very important Hollywood star, and you were the emcee for the evening. It was fantastically, beautifully produced. Then the band struck up, and you walked on to introduce the evening. And you said, "We're all here this evening - this was a big, televised event - to celebrate the life and the career of Barbra Streisand." And there was silence, because you remembered in the same moment that we remembered, that we were there to celebrate the life and career of Barbara Stanwyck. And I was knocked sideways when you said, "Oh, shit", walked off and you walked back on again to rapturous applause and got it exactly right. And I thought, if I can't survive being on stage with someone who can do that, then I'm some kind of schmuck. So it gave me a lot of confidence. OK, who'd like to start asking the real questions? Stuart, you had your hand up.

JF: You know everybody's name?

LP: I told you, this is a small country and an even smaller industry. Nick then.

Question 1: You faced a lot of criticism in the US - how did you survive when you came back from Hanoi?

JF: Oh, well. Because when you know in your heart why you did something, and you feel and you know that in spite of all the controversy that it was right, doesn't matter. I'll give you a very superficial example: this movie that's playing now with me, Monster-in-Law, with Jennifer Lopez. The critics! I mean, it's like, "What was Jane Fonda thinking?", "What is the matter with her?" But I know why I did it: I did it to have fun, I did it to see if I could have fun again and I did. And audiences love it, so screw the critics. It doesn't matter because I'm real clear about why I did it. And I was real clear about why I went to Hanoi, and I made a mistake and I've apologised for it, but it wasn't going to Hanoi that was the mistake.

Question 2: Given the increasing commercialism, competition for advertising, money, etc, do you think it's still possible to be an actor with a conscience, for somebody to choose work as carefully and with as much consideration as you have?

JF: I appreciate where that question is coming from. It's really much, much harder. Although David and I were talking ... there are a lot of fine films coming out of America, all kinds of good films. But for an actor to want to develop their own projects today, I think, is a lot easier. The huge change is that nowadays, if you don't have the audience the first weekend, you're through. And what that means is that young actors and fragile, unusual films don't have the time to garner their fans, their support, the audience. There's no time. It's very hard. You know, On Golden Pond, at the time, we couldn't get it financed in the United States. Sir Lew Grade put up the money for it - we had to come here to get money, for a movie that made $300m, because it was seen as not commercial enough. We could never make a movie like Coming Home now in America. Although, my son's just made a movie that I think cost $15,000. It's called Milwaukee, Minnesota, and he plays a retarded, ice-fishing champion, and it's gotten some really good reviews. But major Hollywood films, no, you couldn't do it. Is Mario Van Peebles in the audience?

Mario Van Peebles: Yeah.

JF: Hey! I was hoping you'd be here. Hi! Good to see you. Yes, he worked with my son. Do you have a question?

MVP: I was interested, you know, in Baadasssss, working with your son, and then growing up with my dad and then having my son in it ...

JF: Melvin Van Peebles, his dad.

MVP: How did you handle, as a parent, how much you got involved, or try to guide him career-wise or anything?

JF: I didn't do anything unless he asked. And he tends to ask. He gives me the script and he asks me to kind of work with him. When he was making his first big film, Bandits, I went to the set and I would give him notes, and when he came to the set of Monster-in-Law, he gave me notes. But I don't do it unless he asks.

MVP: Well, my dad does it whether I ask or not. He still gives me notes.

JF: Well, he also can still breakdance, as you've told me. How old is he?

MVP: He is 72 years young, and he can outrun me.

JF: Holy cow! No kidding. I'm only 67 and I'm getting a hip replacement. I could never breakdance.

MVP: But you look good.

JF: Is your dad here?

MVP: No, I sent him home.

Question 3: I would just like to say that there were five films that weren't mentioned there. I have different roles in my life, so I would just like to say, as a husband, thank you for Barefoot in the Park; as a father and a son, I want to say thank you for On Golden Pond; as a friend, I want to thank you for Julia; as a teacher, I want to say thank you for Stanley & Iris; and in my most important role, that of getting closer to God, I want to thank you for Agnes of God. Thank you very much.

JF: I appreciate that, thank you.

LP: We're going to end, actually, with On Golden Pond. Interestingly enough, I was telling Jane earlier, she's won seven nominations for Oscars and seven for Baftas, but interestingly, different wins. You won Baftas for Julia and The China Syndrome. We paid attention to you very early because we nominated you for Cat Ballou and Barefoot in the Park. The Americans only got you a lot later. Make of that what you will.

Question 4: During your career recess, which movies did you see where you thought, "That part has my name on it"?

JF: None. You know something, I didn't miss it a whit. Not a whit. I love movies, I see all movies, and I would go and see a great woman's performance and I'd go, "Wow! What a choice. I wonder if I had had that part, would I have made that good a choice?" I never thought, "I wish I'd been in that movie", ever. I was done, I never wanted to go back. What about a woman? Is there any woman who has a question?

Question 5: For me, the film in the late 60s that really changed everything was Easy Rider, and I noted that you mention it in your book. That was, I feel, the first film where actors took control and I wonder - obviously, your brother was in it - but what impact did that type of film have on you?

JF: What impact did Easy Rider have on me? I quote your playwright, David Hare: he thinks the best place to be radical is at the centre. I'm kinda of that school of thought - movies that I produced were more centrist, stylistically very normal, even though the ideas were more controversial. When I saw Easy Rider, I thought, "Oh my God, no one's going to see this movie. How can you make a movie about people who drop acid in a graveyard and smuggle kilos of cocaine in their bikes. This is just too much." Wrong. I was married to Roger Vadim then and he knew right away that this was going to change things. And of course it did. Peter was always out there, and I'd be making stupid little white bread movies like Any Wednesday, and I'd come home from work and Peter would come over after having filmed Wild Angels. And I'd say, "What did you shoot today, Peter?" and he'd say, "Well, we raped somebody in a church and we sang Everly Brothers songs together." And I thought, "Oh man, I am so out of it." I was way behind.

LP: We've got some web questions that have come in from people watching. Someone called Anonymous asks, if you could be 20 again today, what work direction would you take with the knowledge that you have.

JF: Oh gosh almighty, what would I do? I would read my book. I would definitely finish college, and I would definitely study the kind of things which it never occurred to me to study in the brief time I was there - sociology, psychology, child development, and so forth. And then I'd probably have become an actor. And I probably would have done exactly what I did. It's just that I would have chosen better, husband-wise and movie-wise.

LP: There's a version here of an earlier question but maybe we'll press you a little on this. It's from Karen West who asks, "Are there any performances in movies made in the past 15 years that you particularly admired and perhaps you'd have liked to play those roles yourself under different circumstances?" I'd just like to extend that: are there any performances in movies that you admired and wished you had, and that you believe you could have added value?

JF: No. I never see myself in...

LP: Or what about ... I had the experience, when seeing Raging Bull the first time in 79, of really thinking that maybe I should just jack the whole thing in, because it was so much better than anything I'd ever done and, frankly, the way it was made, I couldn't imagine getting to that. And it took me a while, I think it was a few months after that that I arrived at a different feeling, which was, to hell with it, there are great movies to be made. Did you have a film like that?

JF: No, but I was in a play with Geraldine Page, a Eugene O'Neill play called Strange Interlude. It was an eight-hour play, I think, with two intermissions where you went out for dinner and came back. Monumental play, and first day of rehearsals, Geraldine Page came in and she not only knew the whole script - she'd memorised it - she inhabited it already. That was the time I said, "I'm packing it in, forget it, I am never going to do a play again." In movies, Sophie's Choice, I guess. I did Meryl Streep's first movie with her, and it was Julia. I'll never forget it. I'd never heard of her because she'd never done a movie. We had a scene where Lillian Hellman walks into Sardi's after the triumphant opening of Little Foxes. And there's a character called Anne Marie, with black hair and everything. I wasn't even paying any attention to this actress; I just did my stuff. The next day, I went to rushes, and the camera - Doug Slocombe, brilliant cinematographer - they bring me into Sardi's and they pan across several people, one of whom is this black-haired character called Anne Marie. Then I walk off and they stay on this Anne Marie, and with a slight gesture to her mouth, and a cloud across her eye, an entire character and all her thoughts about Lillian Hellman became apparent, and I went, "Holy shit!" Me and my partner were casting for Coming Home, and I went right to the phone and woke him up, I said, "Bruce [Gilbert], it's really a weird name, Meryl Streep. I'm telling you, this is the first actress since Geraldine Page. This is something phenomenal." I feel so honoured that I experienced that with her.

LP: That Pauline Kael moment.

JF: Yeah, that's right.

Question 6: Could you talk a little bit about your working relationship with directors?

JF: One of the wonderful things about being an actor is that every director is different. For example, Fred Zinnemann, Julia, never would shoot twice, it was one take. He would cast brilliantly and he knew where to set the camera, you could tell volumes just by where he put the camera. Hal Ashby started out as an editor, and he would shoot 30 or 40 takes of Coming Home and print all of them. And he would never tell us to do anything different; he would just do it over and over and over and over and over. Then he'd go into the quiet of his editing room - I don't think he really liked people - he would chisel like Michelangelo. He'd take a moment here, and a pause there, and a gesture there, and he'd create, sometimes things that we never intended. So, so different. Sydney Pollack was an actor, so he knows how to get down there, deep into the psyche. Same with Alan Pakula. Alan had a particular chemistry with women and really liked to disappear into their psyche and draw out things you never knew you had. I use the analogy of sports, because I play a lot of different kinds of characters - well, I've already mentioned how I didn't think I could do Klute, and I once played a very wizened, tough rancher, and I didn't think I could do it.

But, for example, think of anger as a muscle. The way you express anger isn't the way that I do, or you. If you have a good director, you will find that he's getting you to use an entirely different muscle that you never even knew you had - it's real hard and sore, then after a while it becomes normal. And you discover all these new muscles when you enter a new character - that's what a director does for you. And it's just blessed to be in that situation, because we all, in fact, carry so many people inside us; the only difference is that actors get paid for it, and we sort of spruce it up a bit. So with fine directors, you can allow these people to come out, and bring new people in. It's primarily a profession of empathy, and so directors who allow you to tap into your empathy... that's why actors are usually progressive. A few exceptions, but mostly actors are progressive because we are accustomed to all the nuances of human life, whereas dictators just try to flatten it all out. So we usually try to stand up to dictators like, well, we won't mention names.

LP: I was at a screening with Fred Zinnemann and he told me that when he cut Julia together, he was quite unhappy with it and fretted a lot. One day he was screening the movie in London, and the first reel arrived late, and so he started the film without it. And that was the movie - the problem with the film was the opening reel, which he actually didn't need. He said to me, "The greatest discipline of film-making that you have to learn, is first lose your darlings." What happens is that you fall in love with a scene or a line, and all of a sudden you've built something that really shouldn't be in the movie at all, just to protect one component.

JF: Yeah, it's true of writing as well, I've discovered.

Question 7: Did you enjoy making Barefoot in the Park with Robert Redford?

JF: It was great fun.

Question 7 add: And did you fall in love with him?

JF: Yes, I did. I made three movies with him and I fell in love with him every time. And I still love him, he's just great. But he doesn't like to do love scenes, that's the problem. I'd look forward to the love scenes and he'd want to get them over with as soon as possible.

Question 8: Compared to acting, how did you find writing as a creative endeavour? Was it very different?

JF: Yeah, because you're totally in control of what you do. There'd be days when I'd wake up before the sun and I'd be headed to the kitchen for coffee and I'd think, maybe I'll go back to my laptop and take a quick look at what I did yesterday. And the next time I became aware, the sun had gone down, and I didn't even brush my teeth. Sometimes, I was so zoned out that I'd literally sit there for 15 hours. Because movies are collective, cooperative endeavours, which I like a lot. But writing is all up to you, it's what's so scary; it's just you and that page. But I really like it a lot.

Question 9: How was it working with Katharine Hepburn, and how was it working with your dad?

JF: OK, Katharine Hepburn: the first words she said to me was, [does Hepburn voice and shake] "I don't like you." And the last thing she said to me, when I called her the day after she won her Oscar to congratulate her was, "You'll never catch me now." In other words, it was prickly. But it was also ... almost my favourite chapter in the book is the chapter called On Golden Pond, because I think I really captured the experience. She did not like me, I don't think, and she was extremely competitive. You have to understand, she was old and I was in my 40s, so I was a bigger box office star than her, and I was producing the movie for my father, and so she actually thought I was going to try to get billing above her and all kinds of things which never even occurred to me.

However, there were times when I ran into trouble because of my father - like there was a scene where we were having an intense, angry exchange about parcheesi and beating people, and they shot my close-up first and there was so much light in my eyes that I couldn't see his eyes, and so I had the cameraman put some light on his face so that I could see him. When the camera turned around and it was now on him, and before we shot, I said, "Is it OK, Dad? Can you see my eyes?" He said, "I don't need to see your eyes. I'm not that kind of actor." And the way actors are, half of me was demolished, like the character, Chelsea. I just felt so hurt and awful. And the other half of me was saying, "Yes! This is so great, this is just like the character." But the bad part took over, and at the end of the day, when everybody was leaving, I was just immobile on the couch, I was so wiped. And suddenly Katharine Hepburn came up and just put her arms around me; nobody knew it but she just did. And she said, "He doesn't even know that he hurt you. You don't take it personally. Spencer used to do that all the time to me. He'd say, 'I don't need you to be here for the love scenes. Go. I'm not that kind of actor.' They don't know that they've hurt you." And it meant the world to me. That kind of thing, she would do.

And then my favourite bit. I had no intention of doing the back flip - I hate going over backwards, especially into cold water. And I had a stunt double all lined up. So right after the "I don't like you", it was "Are you going to do the back flip?" And right as she said that I remembered that dive in Philadelphia Story. And I thought, oh God, I'm going to have to do it. So I said, "Yes, I'm going to do it." And so I spent a month working with a trainer, with pulleys and ropes and mattresses. I can't tell you how hard it was. Finally, I graduated to that raft out there where I finally did it in the movie. I practised and practised and practised, and one day, I finally actually got over - I did a flip, a pretty good flip, better than the one in the movie. I was covered in bruises and I come crawling up on the beach, and out of the bushes comes Kate. She walks over to me and she says, "How do you feel?" And I said, "I feel just great." And she says, "That's all right. You've earned my respect. You've stood up to your fears. If you don't do that, you become soggy." And that stayed with me. Now, whenever I'm afraid of something, I just say, man, I'm not going to get soggy; I'm just going to go into it. She would come in and stir things up. She felt it was the obligation of a star to be fascinating. My father thought it was the obligation of a star to do the work. And it's why I'm happy that I'm his daughter - she was fascinating, but I'm glad I've got his genes. She was prickly.

LP: Everyone I talked to about the book, and I mean everybody, sooner or later raises the issue of that scene with your dad in On Golden Pond, and all the issues that emerged. And I wonder if you wouldn't mind talking us into that and then we'll run the clip.