John Huston was born on August 5, 1906, in Nevada, Missouri, a town that his grandfather won in a poker game, according to family legend. He was the son of Walter Huston, who, after fifteen years as a vaudeville headliner, became one of America’s finest dramatic actors, best known for playing the old farmer in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms and for the title role in Dodsworth. He was forty-six before he made his first film and again achieved instant critical and popular success. Until his death, Walter Huston appeared in all his son’s films.

John Huston’s mother was Rhea Gore Huston, a talented newspaperwoman, horse fancier, and inveterate traveler. The parents separated when John was three and later divorced. The boy grew up following his mother around the country to a succession of reporting jobs spelled by visits to his father on the vaudeville circuit.

As a young man he was a ranking lightweight boxer in California, winning twenty-two of twenty-five bouts, briefly attached to the Mexican cavalry, a street artist in Paris, and a reporter on the old New York Graphic. He began his motion-picture career as a screenwriter on such films as The Killers and Sergeant York.

He has directed thirty-eight movies, among them: The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The Red Badge of Courage, The African Queen, Moulin Rouge, Moby Dick, The Misfits, The Night of the Iguana, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Man Who Would Be King. Huston also occasionally acts in films and appeared in The Cardinal, The Bible, Chinatown, The Wind and The Lion, and Myra Breckinridge.

He won the Academy Award for best direction for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948; The Screen Directors Guild Award for The Asphalt Jungle in 1950; and the New York Film Critics Award for Moby Dick in 1956. Along the way he has also been a big-game hunter, a high-stakes gambler, a long-time resident of Ireland and of Mexico, where he now lives, and he has been married five times.

The interview began on the Burbank Studios set of Annie, Huston’s first musical. He is slouched in the director’s chair, a gangling, seemingly fleshless man with a grizzled beard and deep creases radiating from his eyes like spokes. With his slat-thin arms and folded legs, he suggests a collapsible yardstick. He is dressed with almost deliberate anonymity, loafers, nondescript dark blue slacks, and one of the last white, messageless T-shirts in America. He is seventy-five now and moves with a slow, stiff grace. Between takes, he sips lemonade from a huge Styrofoam cup. And he talks.

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