The film was made in 1973. It was a golden time for people to experiment without risking, for example, AIDS. Today one has to be so much more careful and I don't think a character like that could exist now.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'm not so sure that younger people today really appreciate the enormous bravery that went into the creation and production of that film, or how important a film at the time it really was.
These things have a life of there own and never existed when I was growing up certainly worrying when one would get made. It's kind of amazing how that one movie kept living through all these years.
John Schlesinger had one of his friends designing it and he had never done a film before. Ten days before it started, they didn't have any costumes. I was rung up and joined up.
A lot of these types of films - the vigilante or revenge drama - were so popular in the '70s because there was a feeling in the culture of loss of control.
I remember reading the script for 'Dangerous Liaisons' and thinking that I could quite happily spend the rest of my life watching this film; the story and the writing were so wonderful.
I was surprised that the TV series was popular itself, but after that it went on to become more popular over the years and thus it seemed eventually that they would turn it into a movie.
I don't think a movie today that captured all the things that we did in the seventies could come close, because it's like asking to recreate the seventies and the audience sensibilities and that's impossible.
I imagine it was much different in the 1970s. That was the Renaissance for black actors, albeit in blaxploitation movies. There was a much greater preponderance of work then than there is now.
It was being young and sensitive and an actor. There was a lot of pressure, everything was a hurdle.
What I felt at that time - we're talking about '61 - was that I couldn't remember seeing a film that reflected the age we were living in.