Duel: A Conversation with Director Steven Spielberg Page #2

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There were about seven semis

waiting for me to cast the star of Duel.

I walked up and down the trucks.

It was obvious the truck I chose...

because the Peterbilt I chose

was a little more retro.

It was an older truck.

It had a face.

The windows were the eyes

and has a huge, protruding snout.

The grill and the bumper

are the mouth. It had a face.

The other trucks on the back lot

were the flat-nosed, blunted trucks.

The ones that didn't really form

anything but a large conical cab...

where the window went

straight down to the headlights.

There's no engine sticking out in front.

The engine was probably in the back.

If you tip the cab forward, you can see

the engine behind the driver's seat.

I think that's how those trucks

worked in those days. I'm not sure.

But my eye went right to the one truck,

and I said, "You got the part. "

First of all, I didn't quite know how I

was going to achieve this in 10 days.

They were giving me 10 days

to shoot about 73 minutes of film.

With commercials, it fills out

the hour and a half...

of the ABC Movie of the Week format.

I didn't quite know

how I could do this thing in 10 days.

They assigned me a highly regarded

production manager, Wallace Worsley.

Wallace is kind of

gruff and tough.

He was a pussycat on the inside, but

on the outside was gruff and tough...

who looked at me and often

gave these derisive snorts of...

"Yeah, prove you can make this

into a movie.

Because if you can't, you're history.

We'll bring somebody in who can. "

I really respected that.

He took a hard-line position with me.

Because I said to him,

"I wanna shoot this all on location. "

He said "You cannot shoot a movie

of this scale on location in 10 days.

You need to send somebody else out

to shoot all these plates...

and do it on a soundstage

with process. "

I said, "I don't want to shoot this if

I have to go inside. It'll look fake. "

You look out all the windows of the car.

It won't be a chase.

It'll be a guy sitting on a soundstage

with bad process out the windows...

which is always out of sync

with the way the grips move the car.

The car moves this way, the process

goes that way. It never works.

Wally said, "If you spend the first half

of the first day of shooting...

shooting plates,

so we have those banked...

then if you stay on schedule

for the first three days...

then you could shoot on location,

else you gotta come back to the studio. "

I said, "Okay. "

That was the thing I had to prove,

that I could stay on schedule...

so I didn't have to go back inside

to make a real fake-looking movie.

I did stay on schedule to earn me the

right to shoot the whole film outside.

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