The Graduate | movie | 1967 | Official Featurette
Benjamin, a recent college graduate very worried about his future, finds himself in a love triangle with an older woman | dG1fWlAzQmN0ZTJtam8
Transcript
00:00 We go on the set, and I did it with Katherine Ross,
00:03 a quite beautiful girl.
00:06 Did you just wash your clothes?
00:08 Yes. Sit down, please.
00:10 Where did you wash them?
00:11 And we rehearse, and Mike wants to do this, I learned later,
00:16 in a master shot.
00:18 I couldn't have told you what a master shot was,
00:20 but the camera was there, and we're here,
00:23 and then we get on the bed, and it comes over and around,
00:27 and then it comes over here,
00:28 and he wants to do ten pages all in one take,
00:32 and moving the camera.
00:33 So maybe he's just working out himself,
00:36 or he's trying to see, you know, can this guy,
00:39 who's basically just barely been on the stage,
00:43 can he do movies?
00:45 Can he, you know, work under these conditions?
00:48 It's not a few lines and then cut.
00:51 Would you like to style?
00:53 And both Katherine and I kept screwing up.
00:55 We were both violently nervous.
00:58 I haven't said I was going to marry you yet.
01:01 I know that.
01:04 But I think you will.
01:07 And Buck Henry, obviously, and Mike had worked on it,
01:12 and they, you know, they wanted it word for word.
01:16 And if we left one word out, or,
01:18 they said, "That's not a period, that's three dots."
01:22 I mean, it was strict.
01:25 Fine, but we weren't getting it,
01:29 and I could feel the sweat building up a little bit.
01:34 This was all day with the crew,
01:39 and Mike takes me aside after, God knows,
01:44 the tenth take or whatever,
01:47 and I go to talk to him, and I think,
01:49 "Oh, I hope he's going to tell me, 'Thank you,
01:51 "and I'll just go back to New York.'"
01:53 But he says, "You know, you seem so nervous, Elodie."
01:58 I says, "I am." I said, "I really am.
02:01 "I told you I don't think I'm right,
02:03 "and I don't think I know the lines that well.
02:06 "I couldn't learn them fast enough."
02:08 And I remember he said, "Well, just relax."
02:10 He says, "It's not, the curtain's not going to open.
02:14 "There's no audience.
02:16 "It's not the movie that's going to come out.
02:18 "It's a screen test.
02:20 "We don't even print most of this stuff
02:23 "when we put together the scene.
02:26 "There's no need for any pressure."
02:29 And I looked at him, and I said, "Okay, thank you."
02:33 And he put his hand out to shake my hand,
02:36 and I shook his hand, and his hand was so sweaty,
02:40 it slipped out of mine, because he was that nervous.
02:45 So we finished the screen test,
02:47 and I shook hands with people on the crew,
02:51 and the prop man, who coincidentally wound up
02:55 being the prop man on the film,
02:57 I guess I had a hand in my pocket,
03:00 and I took my hand out of my pocket and said, "Thank you."
03:04 I basically was apologising for being there
03:07 and wasting their time all day.
03:10 And I took my hand out of my pocket to shake his hand,
03:13 and tokens fell out when I took my hand out.
03:17 The tokens then were about that big.
03:20 And there's, I don't know, eight of them on the ground.
03:23 And I start to bend over. He says, "No, that's okay, I'll get them."
03:26 And he gets them, and as he's putting them in my hand,
03:30 he says, "Here, kid, you're going to need these."
03:33 Very nice, very sweet, but that was a message.
03:36 And I said, "Thank you."
03:38 Parenthetically, when I got the part,
03:41 the last day of shooting, the 100th day or whatever,
03:44 this prop man gave me-- and I still have it in my study--
03:48 a frame with about ten tokens in it.