Word: pakula
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...eager to get on with adapting his Marathon Man novel for the screen. Yet another writer was brought in for a polish job, though the script remained a problem. A lot of what is on the screen now was finally improvised by the actors and Director Alan Pakula on the set?with Redford calling Washington five or six times a day, according to colleagues, to check these changes for accuracy with "the boys...
...they settled on was Alan Pakula, who had just come off another study in American political paranoia. The Parallax View, but whose work on Klute was what had really impressed both actors. They felt he had done an excellent job in building by visual means menace and tension into a script that had lacked those qualities. "If our project was to succeed, we'd need the same kind of tension," Hoffman remembers thinking. He adds: "Bob liked him because he felt he wouldn't jump on a liberal bandwagon. Redford saw the film as a detective story...
Much as he respected Hoffman ("One of the joys of the movie was working with Dustin; he has one of the most wonderful acting minds I've ever worked with"), he disagreed with him about the advisability of fictionalizing the film. He and Pakula were convinced that documentary-like realism was essential to the picture, that they had to develop what Pakula calls "an immediacy, a sense of being there," that would replace conventional melodrama as a means of sustaining interest. He also felt this attention to workaday detail would protect against the picture's "overwhelming potential for pretentiousness...
This shared obsession is probably responsible for sustaining the relationship between Redford and Pakula through the strains that were to develop after shooting began. Pakula is a painstaking director, capable of talking out a scene for hours before putting it in front of the camera. Then his habit is to insist on endless retakes, covering every nuance his actors develop as they rework a scene, giving himself every imaginable option once he takes the film into the cutting room. Redford is an actor who does not find a character through ratiocination or conversation, but rather by getting as quickly...
Those parts were always at war." It was a war, as it turned out, which he could not win on either front. Pakula could not be forced to speed his pace, perhaps in part because Hoffman liked talk and retakes too, and inevitably the picture fell behind. In the end it was 35 days over schedule and $3.5 million over budget...