Margot Kidder AS Maude

The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)—“Maude”

MK: I was pretty hopeless in that, so they should have cut me out. I wandered around not knowing what I was doing and feeling pretty lost, and they rightly cut my part down. I don’t think I was in very good emotional shape. I think I was a bit of a mess. I’d done about six movies back-to-back, and was in a state of complete exhaustion. Mostly, I remember the lovely Ed Herrmann befriending me and taking care of me. I was crying a lot. I was a real mess when we made that. But this is all such ancient history, Jesus Lord. Was this before or after The Sting?

AVC: After.

MK: Yeah because Julia and Michael Phillips, who produced The Sting, and [co-producer] Tony Bill were visitors to the famous house on Nicholas Beach, and that’s how we got to know them. So everything was kind of very incestuous.

AVC: It seems like a lot of great art was coming out of all this interbreeding.

MK: It was, because it wasn’t all about making money, and because the studios still had development programs for young people. Because you weren’t talking about the budgets of small nations the way you are now when you make a movie. There was a lot more freedom to fail. And if you have freedom to fail, you have freedom to do unusual and good things. Now there’s just this stuff being churned out, except for the few things people fight for. It’s no accident that all the awards are for smaller movies. When you have $100 million in the budget for a movie, there’s something obscenely wrong with the picture. But we didn’t in those days, so it was fun.



"Nothing is as it seems, nothing is just one thing and nothing is ever just over there"