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Gideon Bachmann: This brings up one of the basic questions about films that adapt literary works: in a book there are many things that you cant see or hear, but which in reading you translate directly into your own, interior images and feelings. Emotions that are created in you neither through dialogue nor action. How do you get these into film? The monologues from Moby Dick, for example?
John Huston: Well, first of all, I try to beware of literal transfers to film of what a writer has created initially for a different form. Instead I try to penetrate first to the basic idea of the book or the play, and then work with those ideas in cinematic terms. For example, to see what Melville wanted to say in the dialogues, what emotions lie wanted to convey. I always thought Moby Dick was a great blasphemy. Here was a man who shook his fist at God. The thematic line in Moby Dick seemed to me, always—to have been: who’s to judge when the judge himself is dragged before the bar? Who’s to condemn, but he, Ahab! This was, to me, the point at which I tried to aim the whole picture, because I think that’s what Melville was essentially concerned with, and this is, at the same time, the point that makes Moby Dick so extremely timely in our age. And if I may be allowed the side-observation: I don’t think any of the critics who wrote about the film ever mentioned this.
I suppose you are speaking about the problem of taking personal responsibility in an age cohere the group has largely attempted to make decisions for the individual. This is an interpretation of Melville; or perhaps 1 should say ONE interpretation of Melville and so in the attempt to understand the basic idea of a work (in order to translate those ideas into film) you are really doing more than that: you add your own interpretation, you don’t just put into images what the original author wanted to say.
I don’t think we can avoid interpretation. Even just pointing a camera at a certain reality means an interpretation of that reality. By the same token, I don’t seek to interpret, to put my own stamp on the material. I try to be as faithful to the original material as I can. This applies equally to Melville as it applies to the Bible, for example. In fact, it’s the fascination that I feel for the original that makes me want to make it into a film.
Gideon Bachmann in conversation with John Huston
Joseph E. Persico: Movies are notorious for losing the essence of literary masterpieces. How did you approach Moby Dick?
John Huston: One could not hope merely to transfer the novel to the screen. Melville’s book has that wonderful, random, disparate quality. Authors of the last century could indulge themselves more, the way Melville did with those chapters on the flensing of whales. He allows himself to slip under the influence of Shakespeare, too, and goes into the dramatic form. So, calling the picture Moby Dick is, in a sense, only a means of identification. The essential, however, is Melville’s philosophic argument. Ahab speaks for Melville, and through him he is raging at the deity. This point, by the way, was never commented on by any critic who saw the picture, not even those who championed it. They failed to recognize that the work was a blasphemy. The message of Moby Dick was hate. The whale is the mask of a malignant deity who torments mankind. Ahab pits himself against this evil power. Melville doesn’t choose to call the power Satan, but God. I thought the picture was quite good when it was released. But it went against the critics’ preconceptions. And what they wrote influenced the way the picture was received by audiences. They seemed to expect Ahab as a raging madman, the way Charles Laughton played him in an earlier version. I rejected that. Then there were those who thought of Moby Dick as an adventure story. No kid of ten is going to read Moby Dick. It takes the hard application of an adult mind to appreciate Melville. It is anything but an adventure story.
Joseph E. Persico in conversation with John Huston
