[3] In a late-life interview with The New York Times, Berry spoke positively of his association with Welles and John Houseman, who co-founded the Mercury.
"It was like living near the center of a volcano of creating inspiration and fury, glamorous and exciting, full of the kind of theatricality that seems lost forever," he said.
[1] In 1950, Berry agreed to direct a short documentary on the Hollywood 10, a group of directors and writers who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in their pursuit of supposed Communist Party infiltration within the U.S. film industry.
After directing the crime drama He Ran All the Way (1951), Berry was named a communist by fellow director and former party member Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten, who had been jailed for contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with HUAC.
[2] At the time of his death in Paris, he was editing a film version (released in 2000, starring Danny Glover and Angela Bassett) of the 1969 Athol Fugard play Boesman and Lena, which he had directed in its acclaimed US premiere at the Circle in the Square Theatre in 1970.
His experiences during the Hollywood blacklist era were the inspiration for the character played by Robert De Niro in the film Guilty by Suspicion (1991).
[2] Berry played Ben, the night club owner, in the movie Round Midnight (1986), which was produced by Irwin Winkler, the writer-director of Guilty by Suspicion.