Just wanted to make a few notes on my reading of this before I give it back to the library. It's a really rich book of interviews, though also can be problematic for the reasons one might expect; Hawks is notoriously opaque about any 'meaning' his films might have contained, and he often makes rather derogatory comments about women. He's also quite the storyteller, and quite the peddler of his own myth at this point.
The key insight I got from the book was on how Hawks works with screenwriters. Hawks prided himself on working with great writers, like Hemingway, Faulkner, Hecht, MacArthur, and Furthman. He had to say about plots "There are about thirty plots in all of drama. They've all been done by very good people. If you can think of a new way to tell that plot, you're pretty good. But if you can do characters, you can forget the plot" (33). I think there's a principle of experimentation that helps with this, as seen in Hepburn's characterisation in Bringing Up Baby. He worked in the room on the script. He had an approach to dialogue which Hemingway called 'oblique dialogue' and Hawks 'three cushion' 'because you hit it over here and over here and go over here to et the meaning. You don't state it right out' (32). The example Hawks used was substituting 'Oh, you're just in love" for "Oh, you're just broke out in monkey bites." All of this has to do with a quality of looseness, both in the making of the film and in how it turns out.
One of my other favourite sections is when Hawks talks about John Ford. In particular, he talks about a scene in Red River where he tried to emulate Ford. They were doing a burial scene, and a cloud was coming over. Instead of waiting for it to pass, they went right on and did the scene, and it produced something 'almost as good as [Ford] can do' according to Hawks.
Another sort of fascinating thing for auteurism is the injection of personal style. Hawks mentions that the famous joke in To Have and Have Not where Bacall constantly, erroneously calls Bogart's character 'Steve', and Bogart calls her 'Slim' is taken from his own marriage. He also says of Only Angels Have Wings "I knew every character personally that was in that picture. I knew how they talked" (74).
There's a heap of great stories too. A favourite is of course Hawks' explanation of why he hit Hemingway ("He just said, 'Can you hit?' I broke my whole hand.").
Anyway, there's a whole lot else in the book, but this was just the little I could take down today!
