“Auteurism today? Well, everybody thinks they’re an auteur. But nobody seems to understand what the whole auteur thing was. It wasn’t a theory as far as the French were concerned. It was a political statement called la politique des auteurs. Truffaut and Godard were attacking the old-fashioned, well-made film, French or American. They thought Howard [...]
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“Time it was, and what a time it was, it was A time of innocence…” Simon & Garfunkel What a Time it Was “When I was a kid, I’d never seen a screwball comedy. So for me [What's Up, Doc?] was just this mind-blowing, new type comedy. …I went bananas for it.” Bridesmaid director Paul [...]
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“Can I tell one quick story? It’s not a funny story, but it’s a nice story to end with. It has to do with why we all sit around talking about movies so much. What is it we like about the movies? I was sitting with Jimmy Stewart one time and we got on to [...]
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“Nothing’s ever the way it is supposed to be at all.” Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd ) The Last Picture Show We are living in the wild west. Right now, right here in the good ole United States of America. Last night I watched the classic John Ford/John Wayne western The Searchers, and though the story is [...]
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There’s a lot to learn from looking back at the journeys that filmmakers take on their way to being a part of film history. In the case of writer/director/actor Peter Bogdanovich, one of the things that jumps out is his education. Not his formal education—as far as I know he didn’t attend college—but his film & [...]
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Over the weekend I watched the movie Mask for the first time since it was released in 1985. It’s a terrific film. Mask is not to be confused with the Jim Carrey comedy The Mask (1994), it’s more in line with David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980). Mask is based on the life of Rocky Dennis [...]
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“I remember I was having a conversation with Orson Welles one time and we were talking about Greta Garbo. He loved her—I do too—but he was rhapsodizing about her. And I said, ‘I agree with you, but isn’t it too bad that she only made two really, really good pictures out of forty?’ And he [...]
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“What I react against in other people’s work, as a filmgoer, is when I see something in a movie that I feel is supposed to make me feel emotional, but I don’t believe the filmmaker shares that emotion. They just think the audience will. And I think you can feel that separation. So any time [...]
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“I had a couple of big influences. When I was 16 I read a Graham Swift novel, Waterland, that did incredible things with parallel timelines, and told a story in different dimensions that was extremely coherent. Around the same time, I remember Alan Parker’s The Wall on television, which does a very similar thing purely with imagery, using [...]
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“I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve never changed. I used to noodle around with the camera but I didn’t go to film school. I studied English literature at college [...]
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