Your re-emergence has reignited some of these festering hostilities.
How are you dealing with that?
I get letters on a regular basis from Vietnam veterans, so moving,
saying that they forgive me. That they’ve understood I did what I had
to do. They did what they had to do and that we’re kind of meeting in
the middle now after 30 years. It makes me happy because it shows that
there’s healing taking place.
There are also a lot of veterans who have not yet been able to heal and for whom I’m the lightning rod. I understand why there’s rage about Vietnam, as well there should be. We were lied to, we were deceived by a series of administrations. It was a war that never had to happen and it’s very hard to take your rage out against your own government and I became a lightning rod and I have to own that. I hope in time, with time, that people can…those guys can heal. It wasn’t my war. I didn’t send them there. I didn’t lie. I just tried to end it.
How difficult was the process of writing your autobiography?
Not difficult once I made the decision to do it. I thought, “Oh gosh,
but it’s going to be so hard to write about this or that.” And yet as I
began to write, when I’d come to those what I thought would be
difficult passages, it was, I don’t know, it’s like there was an angel
sitting on my shoulder and it just came. It was easy to write. It was
easy to write about my marriages and my husbands without blaming or
without being gossipy. You’ve got to own your life. You’ve got to own
and take responsibility for it…statute of limitations on being angry
and blaming your parents and all that kind of thing.
What does writing do for you creatively?
Writing your life is unique as an experience and I wrote
in layers. I would start with what I had the most, “Then I did this,
then I did that, then I did this…” Then you come back a little bit
later and say, “This is what I really did.” Then you come back a little
bit later to say, “This is how I felt.” Then you come back and say,
“This is why I did it.” And I find, at least for me, that I
always had to say, “What was I feeling?” because you can take away
anything, but you can’t take away how someone was feeling and what that
did to them. And I thought if the book is going to resonate with other
people that’s where I have to go, and that’s a very transformative
thing.
Now the other interesting thing is when I’d hit a problem I would go out and garden. Having my hands in the dirt and growing things is very therapeutic for me. Or I’d chop down trees. I have a ranch in New Mexico and I’m trying to clear trails for it so I can ride.
Is there a movie you’ve seen that changed your life?
Well, many of my father’s films had a huge impact on me growing up.
“Grapes of Wrath,” “Young Abe Lincoln,” “12 Angry Men,” “Oxbow Incident.” I
mean they really formed a lot of my character and I think represented a
lot of his character as well. Other than that, no. Books have caused
epiphanies in my life, but I can’t think of any films.
How has the industry changed since you were working more steadily?
I’ll tell you one big difference that I hate. 15 years ago and more you could make a movie and so it didn’t do great the first weekend? It would have a couple of weeks to get some life and get some legs and word of mouth, and young actors would start to get noticed. It would have time. Nowadays if you don’t make it that first weekend you’re toast. That’s so scary and it doesn’t give young
actors a chance to build a following. The other thing is,
technologically, when I stopped making movies 15 years ago there
weren’t even cell phones. There were no digital cameras,
there were no video villages, you know, none of this... We had junkets like this, but this is like a well-oiled machine. Everything is a lot slicker.
And what would “Barbarella” have looked like in CGI?
What’s CGI? When I look at that movie now, which I do with great enjoyment, really, the charm of “Barbarella” was the jerryrigged quality of it. We didn’t have any of that stuff. The angels flying… I write a whole scene about that
in the book. Nobody had ever flown without wires. That was what was fun
about it.
