Mister Roberts (1955) Writers: Thomas Heggen (novel) Frank S. Nugent (screenplay) Joshua Logan (screenplay, play) Thomas Heggen (play) MORTON: Who's that? Who's that officer? You, boy! Yes, you. Come here. Are you one of my officers? PULVER: Yes sir. MORTON: What's your name again? PULVER: Ensign Pulver, sir. MORTON: Well, I'm glad to see there's someone aboard this vessel knows how to salute. Pulver? How is it I don't see you around much, Pulver? PULVER: I've often wondered the same thing myself, sir. MORTON: What's your job, Pulver? PULVER: Officer in charge of laundry and morale, sir. MORTON: How long have you been aboard, Pulver? PULVER: Fourteen months, sir. MORTON: Fourteen months? Oh, spend most of your time in the laundry, huh? PULVER: Well, yes sir, most of the time. Yes, sir. MORTON: Well, you do a very good job, Pulver. PULVER: Thank you, sir. MORTON: Except for one thing. PULVER: Sir? MORTON: I don't like starch in my pajamas. You'll watch out for that, won't you Pulver? PULVER: Yes, sir. MORTON: Fine. Doing very good work, Pulver. You must come to my cabin sometime and have dinner. (Roberts starts teasing Pulver as soon as the Captain leaves.) PULVER: Cut it out! Cut it out, Doug. Now, knock it off. Oh cut it out! Oh, wait 'till next week, Doug, you just wait. Wait 'till next week he gets his laundry, you wait and see. Doug, I'm gonna get some starch--you know, some of that real thick starch like the use on nurses' unif-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUOjtPiVqs8 We often think of interrogations as something used in torture scenes, police dramas and espionage films, but this scene, a comic moment in the dramatic film Mister Roberts, is just as intense for poor Ensign Pulver. Throughout the film, Ensign Pulver (Jack Lemmon) has pretended bravado against the ship's egotistical Captain Morton (James Cagney), while at the same time desperately avoiding the captain in person. In this scene, Pulver accidentally comes face-to-face with the captain, and gets grilled because the captain doesn't recognize him. Pulver's veneer of bravado is stripped away and Mister Roberts (Henry Fonda) won't let him live it down.

Meet the Robinsons (2007) Writers: SCREENPLAY Jon Bernstein, Michelle Bochner, Don Hall, Nathan Greno, Aurian Redson, Joseph Mateo, Stephen J. Anderson BOOK William Joyce ADDITIONAL STORY MATERIAL Robert L. Baird, Daniel Gerson, Shirley Pierce https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7J2QASqJ3w WILBUR: Lewis, I told you to stay in the garage! LEWIS: I did, but I went up the tube, and I ran into your family, and I... WILBUR: You met my family? (Scene changes to dark room. Wilbur pulls string to light single hanging bulb.) WILBUR: Pop quiz. Who have you met, and what have you learnt? LEWIS: Okay. Bud, Fritz and Joe are brothers. Fritz is married to Petunia, and is she... WILBUR: Cranky? Yes. LEWIS: Tallulah and Laszlo are their children. Joe is married to Billie. Lefty is the butler. Spike and Dimitri are twins, and I don't know who they're related to. WILBUR: Neither do we. Go on. LEWIS: Lucille is married to Bud, and your dad, Cornelius, is their son. What does Cornelius look like? WILBUR: Tom Selleck. LEWIS: Okay, Cornelius is married to Franny, and her brothers are Gaston and Art. WILBUR: You're forgetting something. LEWIS: Forgetting? Oh, right. Wilbur is the son of Franny and Cornelius. WILBUR: And nobody realised you were from the past? LEWIS: Nope. WILBUR: Whew. LEWIS: Thank you. Thank you. Hold your applause. Thank you very much. A delightful spoof of the blacked-out room interrogation scene. The joke the animators pull here is when Lewis asks what Cornelius looks like and Wilbur tells him he looks like Tom Selleck, so the empty picture frame suddenly fills with Selleck's life-like portrait (the only real-life image in the entire film). In actuality, Selleck voices Cornelius.

I don't know if television scripts are acceptable, or whether only movie scripts are preferred. However, this episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation is one of the most intense interrogation episodes of the series and I thought it fit the theme. Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Chain of Command--Part 2" (1992) Writers: Gene Roddenberry (created by), Frank Abatemarco GUL MADRED: That won't help. I have many more. PICARD: Still, it felt good. GUL MADRED: Enjoy your good feelings while you can, there may not be many more of them. I've just received word. There's been a battle. The Enterprise is burning in space. The invasion of Minos Korva has been successful. PICARD: Don't believe it. GUL MADRED: There's no need for any further need of information from you. Our troops were successful in spite of your refusal to help me. You might have saved yourself a great deal of torment by yielding at the beginning. PICARD: I want to see a neutral representative. GUL MADRED: There is no such person. The word will be that you perished with your crew. No one will ever know that you are here with us, as you will be for a long...long time. You do, however, have a choice. You can live out your life in misery, held here, subject to my whims...or you can live in comfort with good food and warm clothing; women as you desire them; allowed to pursue your studies of philosophy and history. I would enjoy debating with you--you have a keen mind. It's up to you. A life of ease and reflection and intellectual challenge--or this. PICARD: What must I do? GUL MADRED: Nothing, really. Tell me how many lights you see. How many? How many lights? This is your last chance. The guards are coming. Don't be a stubborn fool. How many? GUL LAMEC: You told me he would be ready to go. GUL MADRED: We had some unfinished business. GUL LAMEC: Get him cleaned up. A ship is waiting to take him back to the Enterprise. (To Picard) Captain Picard, if you'll go with the guards they'll take care of you. PICARD: (Turning to Gul Madred) There...are...four...lights! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_eSwq1ewsU In this intense climactic scene from the two-part episode, Captain Picard faces his torturer for the last time. During his incarceration, Gul Madred tried to convince Picard that he cannot trust himself or anything he knows in an attempt to break his will. The outward measure of their battle of wills is to count the number of lights along the ceiling. Picard always answers the correct number--four--while Gul Madred tells him there are five and punished Picard when he answers differently. At this moment, Picard finally wavers, ready, perhaps, to succumb and agree to five as a way to escape ongoing torture. When Gul Lamec enters to take him back to the safety of the Enterprise, Picard's final act of rebellion is to shout out the correct number of lights to defiantly show he remains unbroken.

Inglourious Bastards (2009) Writer: Quentin Tarantino Col. Hans Landa: Now if one were to determine what attribute the German people share with a beast, it would be the cunning and the predatory instinct of a hawk. But if one were to determine what attributes the Jews share with a beast, it would be that of the rat. If a rat were to walk in here right now as I'm talking, would you treat it to a saucer of your delicious milk? Perrier LaPadite: Probably not. Col. Hans Landa: I didn't think so. You don't like them. You don't really know why you don't like them. All you know is you find them repulsive. Consequently, a German soldier conducts a search of a house suspected of hiding Jews. Where does the hawk look? He looks in the barn, he looks in the attic, he looks in the cellar, he looks everywhere *he* would hide, but there's so many places it would never occur to a hawk to hide. However, the reason the Führer's brought me off my Alps in Austria and placed me in French cow country today is because it does occur to me. Because I'm aware what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once they abandon dignity. http://youtu.be/QfSjs_6MZOQ http://youtu.be/8uldpQpoZQM It's a long scene, but so full of anxiety and tension. This is exactly what Hitchcock meant when he refered to the tension on a scene based on the knowledge of the viewer. What I love about this interogation is that it is based around story telling, not a demand for information. The way Landa gets the Farmer to give up the Jews he is hiding done so well. Unfortunately, this scene is too long to get all the clips and dialogue. But, you need to take the time to see how it is built and how it sets up so much more of the movie.

Movie - True Romance Youtube - http://youtu.be/S3yon2GyoiM Vincenzo Coccotti: You know who I am, Mr. Worley? Clifford Worley: I give up. Who are you? Vincenzo Coccotti: I'm the Anti-Christ. You got me in a vendetta kind of mood. You tell the angels in heaven you never seen evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you. My name is Vincent Coccotti. I work as counsel for Mr. Blue Lou Boyle, the man your son stole from. I hear you were once a cop so I can assume you've heard of us before. Am I correct? Clifford Worley: I've heard of Blue Lou Boyle. Vincenzo Coccotti:I'm glad. Hopefully that will clear up the "how full of shit am I?" question you've been asking yourself. We're gonna have a little Q&A, and at the risk of sounding redundant, please... make your answers genuine. You want a Chesterfield? Clifford Worley: No. Vincenzo Coccotti: I have a son of my own about your boy’s age. I can imagine how painful this must be for you. But, Clarence and that bitch little girlfriend of his brought this all on themselves. I implore you not to go down that road with them. You can always take comfort in the fact you never had a choice. Clifford Worley: Look, I’d like to help you if I could but I haven’t seen Clarence. Vincenzo Coccotti: You see that? [Holding a clenched fist in one direction, then striking Clifford with the other] Vincenzo Coccotti: That smarts, doesn't it? Getting slammed in the nose. Fucks you all up. You get that pain shootin' through your brain, your eyes fill up with water. That ain't any kind of fun, but what I have to offer you, that's as good as it's gonna get. And it won't ever get that good again. We talked to your neighbors. They saw a Cadillac. Purple Cadillac. Clarence's purple Cadillac, parked in front of your trailer yesterday. Mr. Worley, you seen your son? Clifford Worley: I seen him. Vincenzo Coccotti: I can’t be sure of how much of what he told you so…on the chance you’re in the dark about some of this, let me shed some light. That whore your boy hangs around with, her pimp is an associate of mine. That means he’s pimping and other affairs, he works for me in a courier capacity. Well, apparently the dirty little whore found out we were going to do some business. Cause your son, the cowboy, it's claimed, came in the room blazin', and didn't stop 'till they were pretty sure everybody was dead. Clifford Worley: What are you talkin' about? Vincenzo Coccotti: Talkin' about a massacre. They snatched my narcotics, hightailed it outta there. Woulda got away with it, but your son, fuckhead that he is, left his driver's license in a dead guy's hand. Clifford Worley: You know, I don't believe you. Vincenzo Coccotti: That's of minor importance. What is of major fucking importance is that I believe you. Where did they go? Clifford Worley: On their honeymoon. Vincenzo Coccotti: I get angry asking the same question a second time. Where did they go? Clifford Worley: They didn’t tell me. Now you just wait a minute and listen to me. I haven’t seen Clarence in three years, he shows up yesterday with a young girl saying that he got married. He asked for a…some quick a cash to go on a honeymoon. He asked me if he could borrow five hundred dollars. I felt like helping him so I wrote him out a check. We went to breakfast in the morning and that’s the last I saw of him. So help me God. They never thought to tell me where they were going and I never thought to ask. Vincenzo Coccotti: You know Sicilians are great liars. The best in the world. I'm Sicilian. My father was the world heavy-weight champion of Sicilian liars. From growing up with him I learned the pantomime. There are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give himself away. A guy’s got seventeen pantomimes. A woman's got twenty, but a guy's got seventeen... but, if you know them, like you know your own face, they beat lie detectors all to hell. Now, what we got here is a little game of show and tell. You don't wanna show me nothin', but you're tellin me everything. I know you know where they are, so tell me before I do some damage you won't walk away from. Clifford Worley: Could I have one of those Chesterfields now? Vincenzo Coccotti: Sure. Clifford Worley: You got a match? No wait, no don’t bother, I’ve got one. You're Sicilian, huh? Vincenzo Coccotti: Yeah, Sicilian. Clifford Worley: Ya know, I read a lot. Especially about things... about history. I find that shit fascinating. Here's a fact I don't know whether you know or not. Sicilians were spawned by niggers. Vincenzo Coccotti: [He does a double take] Come again? Clifford Worley: It's a fact. Yeah. You see, uh, Sicilians have, uh, black blood pumpin' through their hearts. Hey, no, if eh, if eh, if you don't believe me, uh, you can look it up. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, uh, you see, uh, the Moors conquered Sicily. And the Moors are niggers. Vincenzo Coccotti: Yes... Clifford Worley: So you see, way back then, uh, Sicilians were like, uh, wops from Northern Italy. Ah, they all had blonde hair and blue eyes, but, uh, well, then the Moors moved in there, and uh, well, they changed the whole country. They did so much fuckin' with Sicilian women, huh? That they changed the whole bloodline forever. That's why blonde hair and blue eyes became black hair and dark skin. You know, it's absolutely amazing to me to think that to this day, hundreds of years later, that, uh, that Sicilians still carry that nigger gene. Now this... [Coccotti busts out laughing] Clifford Worley: No, I'm, no, I'm quoting... history. It's written. It's a fact, it's written. Vincenzo Coccotti: [laughing] I love this guy. Clifford Worley: Your ancestors are niggers. Uh-huh. [Starts laughing, too] Clifford Worley: Hey. Yeah. And, and your great-great-great-great grandmother fucked a nigger, ho, ho, yeah, and she had a half-nigger kid... now, if that's a fact, tell me, am I lying? 'Cause you, you're part eggplant. [All laugh] Vincenzo Coccotti: Ohhh! Clifford Worley: Huh? Hey! Hey! Hey! [motioning with his hand three times] Vincenzo Coccotti: You're a cantaloupe. [kisses Clifford] You’re beautiful. [shoots Cliff in the face] Vincenzo Coccotti:I haven't killed anybody since 1984. Go over to this comedian's son's apartment, come back with something that tells me where that asshole went, so I can wipe this egg off my face and finish this fucked-up family for good. Comment - Tarantino considers this scene one of the best he's ever written. Memorable interrogation and dialogue.