BUTLER/COURTESY OF WEIDER HEALTH & FITNESSAny that you can share?
Yeah. I’ve got Louie saying on film, “All
I want to be is the Hulk,” and this was
several years before he became the Hulk.
Amazing. Now you’ve got four main
protagonists in the film, and each
one was pretty different from the
others. I’d like to get your thoughts
on each. What was your impression
of Mike Katz?
I adored him. He was authentic, and he
always wore his heart on his sleeve, so you
could tell on his face what was going on in
his mind. The most amazing thing I know
about Mike Katz is that he was a high
school teacher. We filmed him at his
high school, and I watched him playing
touch football, and he began on the zero
yard line, and he ran 100 yards [about 92
metres] down the field. There were a lot of
good high school athletes there, and no
one could touch him. I mean he went so
fast, and he was so agile. You’ve got to
remember, this was a guy who played
track, hockey and football. Three sports,
All-American in college [an honour given
annually to the best US college football
players at their respective positions]. You
know, he was a New York Jets lineman,
and I’m pretty sure he could have played
professional hockey or could have thrown
the discus or something like that. I mean,
he’s an astonishing athlete and a great
human being.I’ve had the opportunity to speak
with him and found him to be a
thoughtful and considerate person.
He’s a fine human being.What was it like shooting the scenes
with Lou Ferrigno and his dad?
Well, when you make a film like Pumping
Iron, you’ve got to put a good story
together, and I had a keen insight into
Louie’s relationship with his father.
I knew that he was the perfect body-
builder to set up as the guy who could, or
might, knock off Arnold. And the
contrast was perfect. Louie worked out
in a small, dark gym in Brooklyn that
was actually R&J Health Studio, which
was owned by a man named Julie
Levine. And Gold’s Gym in California
was the exact opposite. Louie would
work out in these tiny little rooms with
one person around him and his father,and Arnold would work out in a gym in
California that had its doors open, was
wide open, right on the beach. And it
was light and airy, and Louie’s was dark.
Louie was dark and brooding. Arnold
was blond and big and beachy and stuff
like that. But both men are sons of
policemen. I found that very interesting,
and I’m sure Arnold subconsciously
registered that. So the film set up this
wonderful contest between these two
men, and of course Louie was 6'5"
[195cm] and he’s a giant, really. But
here’s something interesting not many
people know. Nik Cohn wrote a movie
called Saturday Night Fever. He wrote
the screenplay for it, and the whole
Italian family, John Travolta’s family, is
modelled on Louie and his family.You’re kidding! Actually, I can see
it. Like the scene in which Louie’s
family is sitting around the kitchen
table...
Yes! It’s all John Travolta’s family. With
his sister and brother and the Catholic
Church and everything else. It was
modelled on them in Pumping Iron.That’s too funny! Moving on to
Franco. He seemed like a lot
of fun to be around.
I was always very fond of Franco. It was
my idea to go to Sardinia and film there.
That’s when we were really doing
seat-of-the-pants filmmaking because
three of us went to Sardinia: myself,
Bob Fiore and his girlfriend, who was
Marshall McLuhan’s daughter. I did
sound and lighting, and Bob did lighting
and camera work, and we were able to do
key scenes for the movie in Sardinia with
literally a two-man crew. And it worked.
And we got stopped by the police in the
mountains. It was very exciting stuff
because Franco’s mother and father
were real shepherds, and I’m not even
convinced any other Americans had been
to his village before us. It was way, way
up in the mountains in Sardinia, and it
was so remote, and it was so high up that
there was still ice on the lakes in June.
At one point Franco chopped a hole in
the ice and caught some trout, which he
served us for lunch. On another occasion
Franco’s family put me in the only
available bedroom, which was his sisters’Arnold works with
a professional
dancer to improve
the fluidity of
his posing.66 FLEX | JUNE – JULY 2017