“The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name”

“How can you put yourself in any kind of historical perspective while you're living your life?” I wanted Monte Hellman to talk about where he thought he fitted into the American cinema of the early 1970s – not the Spielberg-De Palma-Coppola-Lucas New Hollywood but the Dennis Hopper-Bob Rafelson version, the one that got rolled over, the one of which Hellman was, in my eyes, the undisputed king. ButI was approaching Hellman as a bygone figure from the past while he saw himself as very much alive, a working director. His string of failures, career disturbances, disappointments and bad distribution deals formed a Stroheim-like image of Hellman in my head that he himself could not afford to recognise. I had a self-congratulatory image of myself as a knight restoring the king to his throne, but that was a young man's folly. ¹