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From the beginning, Frankenheimer has never been Mr. Sunshine on the set. Standing 6 ft. 3 in. and weighing in at 185 Ibs., he looms over most of his actors and technicians both physically and emotionally. He kept a toy cannon out of sight on the Manchurian set, and shot it off whenever he wanted a special on-camera flinch from Laurence Harvey. "A director has to be ruthless sometimes to get an effect," admits Frankenheimer. "To get those few seconds of screen time, almost anything goes."
When he is not moving actors and cameras around, Frankenheimer withdraws to his Malibu Beach house like one of his hypersensitive characters. After more than six years of analysis and two unsuccessful marriages—his third wife is Actress Evans Evans—he tends to relax only among close friends. Besides, the stuff of scenarios keeps crossing his life. A year after The Manchurian Candidate was released, John Kennedy was shot; the long-range rifle, the mother-fixated assassin, the public murder in the movie, all had eerie parallels in real life. The scene of the spectacular car crash in Grand Prix was staged by the racer Lorenzo Bandini. A year later he died in a pile-up at the same corner. In Los Angeles this year, Frankenheimer was just finishing a film about his house guest when he learned that the guest—Bobby Kennedy—had been assassinated.
His response, typically, was withdrawal—but isolation to Frankenheimer is like a full business week for most of his colleagues. Although he is currently between filmings, he is editing one movie and having scripts completed on four others. In his spare time, he allows himself some jitters of insecurity. "My fear in life is getting hung up on a style," he says. "I don't want to be as prolific as Godard, but I would like to make an average of H films a year. If I made one film every two years, I'd get too careful. I don't want to function that way; I'm still learning a hell of a lot."