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Warren Beatty breaks his long silence about ''Reds'' | 132755__jack_l
HE KNEW JACK Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill
Reds: Paramount/Kobal Collection

I went to Harvard in 1969 and started reading about Reed, particularly Insurgent Mexico, which was more fun than Ten Days That Shook the World. He was...impetuous is the word that always comes to mind. But I didn't get mobilized — for me, it's like watching a snail mobilize — until the Russians said they were going to make a movie about John Reed. It had to be an American movie, made with an understanding of the pertinence of the Russian Revolution to the development of socialism in the rest of the world. The romance in Trotskyism, as opposed to what became the horrors of Stalinism.

You joke about your slowness, but wasn't there also a degree of calculation in waiting? You knew that you'd have to expend a good deal of personal capital making the movie, and you started amassing that in the 1970s with Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait.
You're probably giving me a little too much credit, but there might have been some actual thinking there. What was it Orson used to say, ''no wine before its time''? [Laughs] I needed very much to make Shampoo, because I wanted to make a movie about the pathetic nature of the compulsive Don Juan. It was funny, but it was also political. Heaven Can Wait was a movie that I thought would be fun to make with Muhammad Ali, but he didn't want to quit fighting, so I thought, I'll change the character from a boxer to a football player and play it myself. That was a big hit, and enabled me to make Reds rather than a sure-thing commercial picture.

Tell me how you came up with the idea for the Witnesses [more than two dozen ancient real-life contemporaries of John Reed's, ranging from Henry Miller to Rebecca West to George Jessel, whose on-camera recollections help structure the movie].
The Witnesses preceded everything. I really wanted Walter Lippmann, who was considered by the 1960s the wise man of journalism. I thought using him would save the movie from being perceived as some left-wing diatribe. For that very reason, he didn't want to be drawn into it. But I found that the more research I did, the more interested I got. The older people get, the less censorship they exercise. They don't care what you think. They care what they think, and don't waste a lot of angst in saying it. I couldn't resist putting them in the movie — and then I had to make the characters live up to those people.

One of the many functions they serve in the movie is to remind you that memory is unreliable — that history is contradictory.
Yes. As Henry Ford said, ''History is more or less bunk,'' and these people disagreed about everything! My 14-year-old has become quite captivated by the movie, and she said to me, ''I really like it because it takes everything with a grain of salt.''

I love the fact that you were acting as an interviewer in the 1970s, right during the time —
Yes, when everyone was doing it to me! I would try to get them, exposition-wise, to use the word abortion or Communist or to say something about the war. But in general, I got what I wanted.

Did you ever consider shooting in Russia?


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