The French Director Told John Wayne He Couldn’t Act in 1967 — What Happened on Take 23? D

The call sheet on Tommy Briggs’ clipboard had 22 scenes listed that morning. By the time the day was over, only one of them would matter, and it wouldn’t be in any of the cameras. Tommy was 26 years old. This was his first real Hollywood job, assistant director on a picture that nobody had a clean name for yet.

The studio called it a Western. The French director called it a meditation on masculine mortality. The crew called it the job they’d be happy to finish. Stage seven, Burbank, California. July 1967. The lot smelled like cable grease and old paint and the dry heat that settles into California concrete by 10:00 in the morning and doesn’t leave until midnight.

Tommy arrived at 5:30, same as every day. He walked the set alone, checking positions, adjusting things that didn’t need adjusting. That was his job, stay ahead of the problems. That was when Jean-Luc Ferrat walked in. He was smaller than you’d expect from someone who took up that much room. Narrow shoulders, wire-rim glasses, a gray scarf wound around his neck in the middle of July.

Behind him came his assistant, a young woman who carried a leather notebook and never looked up from it. Ferrat moved through the set like a man conducting a private inspection. He touched things without asking. He stopped in front of the main camera, looked through the lens for a long moment, and said nothing.

The crew watched him without looking like they were watching. Ferrat had won two major European awards in the past 3 years. Every profile described him the same way, visionary, precise, uncompromising. He had been hired because the studio wanted prestige attached to the picture. He had accepted because the budget was three times anything he could get in France.

At 7:15, the full company gathered for the morning meeting. Ferrat talked for 20 minutes about the film’s architecture, about duality, about a man who has spent his life performing strength and must now perform something he has no word for. The room listened. Most people wrote things down they wouldn’t be able to explain later.

Then Farrow looked at the far end of the table. “Monsieur Wayne,” he said, “I want to be honest with you from the beginning because honesty is more useful than comfort. You are a monument, one of the great American monuments, but monuments don’t act. They stand there. And what I need for this film is someone who can do something a monument cannot do.

” The room went still. It took about 2 seconds for the stillness to arrive and then it was complete. Tommy was standing near the door with his clipboard. He watched John Wayne at the far end of the table. Wayne was holding a paper coffee cup in both hands. He looked at Farrow for a moment. Then he looked at the window.

Then he looked back at the cup. “What time do we start?” he said. That was all. Tommy wrote the time in his notes. He didn’t write anything else about that moment. He didn’t know yet that there was anything to write. The first week went the way first weeks go. Long hours, small adjustments, the gradual process of a large machine learning to function as one thing.

Farrow directed with a specific and exhausting method. Before every scene, he would explain his theoretical foundation. He referenced philosophers by last name only. He talked about subtext with the intensity of someone describing something urgent and medical. Wayne listened. He never took notes.

He never asked questions. He showed up on time, knew his lines, hit his marks. Farrow said nothing about this, which Tommy noticed was different from saying it was fine. The critical scene was scheduled for the third week. The script described it simply, “The sheriff sits in the empty town square after the arrest.

His deputy is dead. The danger is over. He’s alone.” Less than a page, no speech. The character just sits with what has happened. It was the scene the whole film was built around. Everyone knew this, even the people who hadn’t read the full script from the way Ferraro talked about everything else. The morning they shot it, Tommy arrived at 4:45.

Before we go on, if you’re watching this on TV and you’ve never subscribed to this channel, we’re still under 1,000 subscribers and we’re just getting started. A subscribe from your phone takes 5 seconds and it’s the only way to make sure the next story finds you. The first take ended with Ferraro saying cut before Wayne had fully settled into the chair. “Too much.” he said.

“Already too much.” Wayne stood up, walked back to his mark and waited. Second take. “Cut. I can see you preparing. The audience will see you preparing.” Third take, fourth. Tommy stopped writing individual notes after the sixth. By the 10th take, the coffee table near the monitor had four empty cups on it.

The gaffer had stopped making eye contact with anyone. The script supervisor was staring at her pages without reading them. Ferraro never raised his voice. That was the thing Tommy kept returning to later. He would simply say cut and then explain with complete precision what was wrong. Each explanation was different.

Each was specific. Each was, in its own terms, probably correct. Wayne said nothing after any of them. He walked back to his mark. He waited. He did the scene again. 15th take. 16th. At the 17th, a woman from the production office appeared at the back of the set with a yellow legal pad. She wrote something down and left without speaking to anyone.

18th take, 19th, 20th. The lights had been running for 6 hours. The set smelled like hot metal and the particular staleness of air that has been breathed by too many people for too long. Tommy’s lower back hurt. He hadn’t eaten since 4:00 in the morning. After the 21st take, Farrow stood up from his chair.

He walked to the center of the room. He looked at the camera. He looked at the set. Then he looked at the crew with the expression of a man who has been working a calculation for a long time and has finally arrived at the number. “It’s the actor,” he said. “He doesn’t understand the scene. He cannot understand it.” Nobody moved.

Tommy looked at his clipboard. There was nothing on it that required looking at. Then he heard the sound of a chair. Wayne had stood up. Not fast, not slow. He moved to the monitor the way he moved everywhere, with the economy of a large man who has spent decades not wasting motion. He stood in front of the screen.

He looked at the playback from take 22. Then he rewound it. Watched it again. Rewound it one more time. Farrow started to say something. Wayne turned around. “What is this man afraid to lose?” Farrow stopped. “I’m sorry?” “Not what does he want. Not what does he feel.” Wayne’s voice was exactly the same as when he’d asked what time they were starting 3 weeks ago.

“What is he afraid to lose?” “Right now, in this moment, sitting in that chair. That’s the scene.” Farrow was quiet for a moment. “The scene is about grief, about the weight of “I know what it’s about.” Wayne looked at the chair on the set. “What’s he afraid to lose?” Nobody in the room answered. Maybe because the question didn’t seem to need an answer from any of them.

Maybe because the answer was obvious and they had all simply not looked at it that way. Wayne walked back to the set. Tommy watched Farrow. The director stood very still. Something was moving in his face that Tommy couldn’t fully name. Not defeat, not anger. Something closer to recalibration. Like a man who has arrived at a destination and found it is not what the map described.

Take 23 began. Tommy always had trouble afterward explaining what was different. He had watched Wayne do this scene 22 times. He knew every beat of it. This time he stopped writing notes. He stopped thinking about the shot list. He stood at the back of the set with his clipboard at his side and watched a man sit down in a chair.

That was all that happened. A man sat down in a chair. Farrow didn’t call cut. The camera kept rolling. The operator looked at Farrow. Farrow didn’t move. The operator kept rolling. After a while, Tommy couldn’t have said how long, Farrow walked to his chair and sat down slowly, the way people sit when they are not paying attention to sitting.

He put his hand over his mouth. He looked at the monitor. He didn’t say anything. Tommy wrote one line in his notes that afternoon. He didn’t write it as a professional note. He didn’t know why he wrote it. He just did. He wasn’t performing loss. He was remembering it. That evening Tommy was locking the equipment room when he heard footsteps in the corridor.

Wayne was heading toward the parking lot, jacket over his arm, the same unhurried pace as always. Tommy said, without planning to, “How did you know?” Wayne stopped. He looked at his keys for a moment. “Know what?” “What the scene needed.” Wayne was quiet for a bit. Not long. “I didn’t know,” he said.

“I stopped trying to know. That’s different.” He went out through the side door. Tommy stood in the corridor for a while before he finished locking up. The film came out in the spring of 1968. The reviews were good. Several of them mentioned the scene in the third act specifically. The chair, the empty square, the quiet after everything.

Variety called it the finest thing Wayne had done in a decade. A critic in London used the word stripped. Farrow returned to France. He made two more films in the following four years. In interviews, he talked about American cinema with more care than he used to. In 1974, he wrote a letter to a film student at a Paris Conservatory.

The student had asked about the relationship between theory and instinct in directing. The letter was three pages. The last paragraph was six sentences. It was published without Farrow’s objection in a small journal in 2003. The hardest thing I have learned is that technique is the beginning of the work, not the end of it.

I spent many years believing that if I could describe a scene precisely enough, the scene would happen. What I found on a set in California in 1967 is that description and experience are not the same thing. A man who has actually lost something does not need to be told what loss feels like.

I made the mistake of confusing intelligence about a subject with knowledge of it. The scene on the 23rd take was not directed. It simply occurred. He did not name Wayne in the letter. In October 1978, Farrow gave a long interview to a French film magazine. Near the end, the interviewer asked about the American picture. The only one he’d made in Hollywood.

Was it true there had been difficulties on set? Farrow looked at the interviewer before answering. “I told him he was a monument,” he said. “I was wrong about that. A monument is something that has stopped moving. What I saw on that set had not stopped moving in 30 years. I told him nothing. He reminded me of something I should not have needed reminding of.

” The interviewer asked what that was. Farrow picked up his coffee cup. “That the point of all the theory,” he said, “is to eventually stop needing it.” Tommy Briggs worked in film and television for another 31 years after that summer. He became a director, a good one. He had one rule that everyone who worked with him knew because he stated it at the beginning of every production.

Don’t tell your actors what to feel. Ask them what they’re afraid to lose. People asked where it came from. He usually said he’d picked it up early from someone he’d worked with. If they pressed him, he’d describe the afternoon, the 22 takes, the monitor, the question. Most people assume the lesson came from Pharaoh. It didn’t.

In 2001, Tommy taught a semester at a film program in Los Angeles. On the last day of class, a student asked, “Did John Wayne ever talk about what he did on the take 23?” Tommy thought about that for a moment. He thought about the corridor, the keys, the jacket over the arm, the ordinary way the whole thing had ended.

“He talked about it,” Tommy said, “the same way he talked about everything that mattered to him.” He let the class figure out what that meant. Some of them did. If you enjoyed spending this time here, leave a comment about what John Wayne represented to you. A simple like also helps more than you think.