"She was vocal about saying that if she was to do this movie she’d need to do something very, very different from what she’s used to doing. I got an email she sent me of herself with a blonde wig, very Miami-ish. She said, “I think I need to look like this.” That Donatella Versace kind of extravaganza, with a creature feel to it, came from that. I’d call her KST. She was so larger than life, she needed a logo." — Nicolas Winding Refn on Kristin Scott Thomas
"For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter?"Actually, the answer to most of those is yes. Maybe not the family in The Corrections, or anything that Pynchon has written, but yes to Sabbath, Raskolnikov, Hamlet and Krapp, and O don't see why not Oedipus. All of them strike me as very entertaining company. But everyone piles on the concept of "likeability" as if sensing their last chance to alienate anything resembling a general reader. Franzen:
I hate the concept of likeability—it gave us two terms of George Bush, whom a plurality of voters wanted to have a beer with, and Facebook. You’d unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would.Really? That's quite a statement: You’d unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would. Why? I thought it was the artist's duty — or aim — to view their creations with the love and forgiveness accorded all God's creatures. Likeability is surely covered under that rubric. Only modern novelists mistake their pissy judgments of others for "the truth." It's why nobody reads modern fiction. Why I don't, anyway.
'I’ve long held the view that too much attention is paid to the way movie actors look, and not enough to the way they sound. Of the two senses we use to take in cinema, or apprehend an performance, sound accounts for a full 50%, maybe more. "The ear goes more towards the within,” said Robert Bresson, “the eye towards the outer”. An actor’s voice can be the most distinctive thing about them, whether that of Marilyn Monroe, which was variously compared to “cotton candy, smoke, wind, lollipops and velvet”, “Champagne lava,” and “the slow folding and unfolding of a pink cashmere sweater,” or the strange transatlantic locution of Cary Grant, neither quite English nor quite American, but some strange place in the middle where men in top hats did backflips and leopards interrupted your golf game.
Then there is Bogart. “They all said he lisped,” wrote Kenneth Tynan of the actor, whom he could imitate perfectly. “He did nothing of the sort. What he did was to fork his tongue and hiss like a snake.” As Bogart’s latest biographer, Stefan Kanfer recently pointed out, nobody “does” Di Caprio or Gosling they way they tried to do Bogart or Cagney. Such idiosyncracy seems to be a hallmark of the 1902 and 30s, when that first generation of Hollywood actors attempted to gain a foothold, or earhold, in the brand new landscape of sound cinema. In a post at her indispensible movie-blog savoring the “delicious purr” of Sydney Greenstreet, the “somber, nun-at-vespers intonation” and the “silky” growl of Robert Mitchum, The Self-Styled Siren argues that
“Early talkies did the human voice no favors, hitting the squeaky high notes with a frequency that gelded male stars and made female ones sound like Kewpie dolls. Once technicians got the sound more under control, though, performers began to stand out on the basis of their voices. Vaguely aristocratic tones like that of Ronald Colman were especially coveted. You strove for that mid-Atlantic accent, meaning not Delaware and Pennsylvania but somewhere in the middle of the ocean, between England and the former colonies. Eventually individuality blossomed, and the full spectrum of American accents was heard. The Siren thinks you hear a much wider variety of dialects in 1930s movies than you do in modern ones.”
Who these days can compare? There is always Christopher Walken, of course, who reportedly taught himself his halting manner of speech by deleting all the punctuation from his scripts and who continues to sound as if recently arrived from the outermost ring of Saturn. There is Alan Rickman, who always manages to sound like a python halfway through a protracted process of digestion. But while I am second to none in my admiration for Di Caprio, particularly in the latest Gatsby, the only thing holding him back in other roles — particularly Eastwood’s J Edgar and Scorsese’s The Aviator — has been his voice, which plays much younger than his characters. Imagine him with Kiefer’s Sutherland’s sand-and-molasses murmur, or Alec Baldwin’s mink-lined fondle, or Sam Eliott’s resonant cello — sweet Jesus. Truly, we would have the new Orson Welles on our hands.' — from my Guardian column
"Ruddy of cheek, with long, floppy, brown hair and only a smattering of gray in his beard, Linklater, at 52, has the helpful glow of someone about to tune up your car engine, but with a daydreamer’s bashful, abstracted air. Most of his answers wind through some combination of “you know” or “I don’t know,” before hitting a groove on the effect of nitrous oxide on creativity (some of his best ideas have come in the dentist’s chair), or the Apollo 13 missions, then tailing off with a shrug and a look into his lap. At one point, comparing the mind’s imaginative leaps to the way people walk on the moon, he makes a slo-mo bound with his fingers across the table—a gesture whose disarming sweetness is impossible to imagine coming from any other working film director. He and Hawke have pitched many movies to studio executives over the years, and Linklater’s pitching abilities have not improved with time. “Rick and I would go into a meeting,” says Hawke, “trying to sell somebody on an idea for a movie, and the head of the studio would go, ‘So tell me about your film,’ and Rick would go, ‘Well, gee, I don’t know,’ and just stop there. He just doesn’t ever lie. ‘Well, you know ... what I hope to do is this.’ In a world where all directors seem like salesmen trying to project themselves as some kind of visionary, you don’t get this brittle ‘Oh, I’m an artiste, my work is important’—you don’t get any of that vibe from him. You tell him his movie is important, he’ll run as fast as he can.” — from my profile of Richard Linklater for New York
"Sofia Coppola is uncommonly gifted at the articulation of something so fleeting and ephemeral that it seems to be on the verge of evaporating on contact with her hovering, deadpan, infinitely patient camera eye ... If you wanted to get pithy about it, you could call her a neorealist of hyper-materialist life ... Like Somewhere, The Bling Ring sneaks up on you. Somewhere during the first visit to Paris Hilton’s house (if it isn’t the real thing, it could just as well be), you might find yourself, as I did, alternately charmed, mesmerized, and horrified by the lives of the characters and the homes they enter. Halfway through the film, Marc and Rebecca wander through what is supposedly Orlando Bloom’s open-plan house at night, viewed from an exquisite remove several tiers above in the Hollywood hills, the sounds of howling coyotes and wailing police sirens quietly echoing in the distance—a suspended spell of uncanny beauty, and one of the most beautifully lyrical stretches I’ve seen in a movie in ages." — Film Comment
“The worst fault in it is a big fault; I gave no account (and had no feeling or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Daisy and Gatsby from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe. However the lack is so astutely covered by the retrospect of Gatsby past and by blankets of excellent prose that nobody has noticed”The Redford version had a solution to all this: montages, all tennis whites and lawn-fed languor, filmed through lens so smeared with vaseline you wonder the operator managed to get it on the camera. The gauziness was fitting. As much as Fitzgerald's prose mimics the sensation of falling in and then out of love with Daisy, the suspicion has always lingered that not only is she unequal to the weight of Gatsby's desires, but viewed in the cold light of day, undeserving (“For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery"). The thankless task of turning her into a romantic heroine goes this time to Carey Mulligan, an actress whose forte is soft-throated vulnerability and therefore not at her absolute best when posing coquettishly between orchids. Mulligan does her best to go digging for a part without making much of an advance on the gasps and giggles Mia Farrow came up with in 1974; as for the scene in which pulls away from a clinch with Di Caprio with the line "Why can't we just gave fun like we used to?" I thought I heard a thousand teenage gasps at such heresy. Luhrmnn's ambition to film the iGeneration's Gone With The Wind just went splat into the brickwork.
"If there's something you would change, just say"It's hard to mistake the compliment Luhrmann is paying himself here: by the final reel, the film is one long air-kiss to it's own visionary prowess, a character study of a chronic perfectionist that is also made by one. The movie ends with Di Caprio breaking the surface of his pool, alone at last, as if letting the burden of this handsome, hectic movie slip from his bronzed shoulders. How strange that this most phantasmal of characters should, in Di Caprio's rendering, be the most rock-solid presence in the film. B-
"It's all perfect. Sprung from your irresistable imagination."
"...Yet “Oblivion” is worth the trip. There are two reasons for this. The first is the cinematography of Claudio Miranda, who won an Oscar for his work on “Life of Pi.” Clearly, he is the man to go to for transcendent physical grace when your metaphysics won’t quite wash. If you like having your breath snatched, wait for the head-on shot of Jack’s swimming pool—a long, transparent tub, slung low beneath the house, and viewed by night so that we can trace the figures frolicking within." — Anthony Lane, The New YorkerIt's right on the edge. It's sci-fi so Kate won't go with me. And there's the plot, by all accounts. And yet those cloudscapes — filmed and then projected onto a wraparound screen behind the actors, the way they used to do rear projection — look gorgeous: "The most beautiful set I've ever been on," said Cruise. I have a weakness for cloud cities, like Swift's Laputa or The Empire Strikes Back's Bespin. They're so golden age, pre-space-flight, back when getting things airborne seemed the big miracle and jet-packs a must. I guess if I can make it through Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds, I can make it through this.
"As for what appears to be Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Amazon wish list page, it is a weird jumble of self-help books (Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”), covert-operations-style manuals (“The I.D. Forger: Homemade Birth Certificates and Other Documents Explained”), Chechen history books (“Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, New Edition”), Mafia books (Nicholas Pileggi’s “Wiseguy”) and books about the Roman Empire (“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”). There is Boethius’s “Consolation of Philosophy” — a staple of college curriculums that addresses ideas of good and evil and free will — and “Snatch,” the “inside story of the making of the smash-hit movie starring Brad Pitt. Did Tamerlan harbor macho dreams of being an action hero, or a Mafia operative? Did he want to read Boethius to grapple with deep existential doubts he was having, or was he assigned it in school? (The books all appear to have been added to the Amazon list in 2006 and 2007.) Did his interest in the Roman Empire have something to do with a conviction that the West was decadent and in decline? For that matter, does this Amazon wish list really belong to him? Or does our fascination with the list simply reflect our own desire to gain insight into his thinking, our hunger for more dots to try to connect?" — MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NYT
From my profile in Vogue:—Mulligan’s workbook for the 2008 Broadway production of The Seagull, in which she played Nina, contains a Chagall landscape, some drawings by her costar Mackenzie Crook, and a copy of the Yeats poem Ephemera, about waning love. She is much moved by such expressions of transitoriness, for reasons she doesn't like to go into but that have something to do, one suspects, with her upbringing in various hotels in Dusseldorf and London, where her father worked as manager; she used to observe guests from under the dining trolley. She compiles these scrapbooks for every role. It is entirely different from the scrapbook she prepared for the 2007 production of the play in London, which contains a letter to Chekhov from actress, press clippings about the working life of Russian women, a note from Mulligan’s director when she got appendicitis (“Recuperate, return”). Why didn’t she use the old scrap-book? “No,” she says. “I would have tried to copy it. I was a few years older and I didn't want to do the same thing over and over.” Mulligan is a creature of the present-tense. “It's the reason for the unpredictability with which she exists in the world, and which she exudes when you’re watching her onscreen,” notes Gyllenhaal. In a film career notably short of the kind of costume dramas with which English actresses usually pad out their résumés, she has instead sought out trans-Atlantic headwinds, appearing in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2, Steve McQueen’s Shame, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, bringing her talent for fresh apprehension — for emotions netted on the wing — to roles that feel flush with the present, or else haunted by its passing. She was affecting as one of the doomed youth in Never Let Me Go, while her Daisy is a living, breathing, rebuke to Gatsby’s obsessive exhumation of the past. We hear her before see her in the film, through a diaphanous scrim of white curtains at the Buchanan house, laughter rising up from behind an enormous sofa, as if the very décor were in on some irresistible joke. During filming she and Di Caprio exchanged in-character love notes, after Di Caprio made Mulligan a gift of a protein bar she had coveted. “So he got one for me and wrote me this little note: ‘Darling Daisy…’. and signed Jay. He’d drawn a little Daisy on the front of it….” she recalls.
“You feel like you’re in on some sort of secret with her constantly,” says Tobey Maguire, who plays Nick Carraway, the story’s amenable midwestern narrator. “You’re the one that she’s chosen to be part of a secret club or language. She pulls you in. I remember hearing her voice and I just went: that’s Daisy. It was like the cartoons with the snake charmer, and the eyes start swirling around. She said four words and I was there, I was snake-charmed." It is by her voice, of course, that Daisy is largely characterized in Fitzgerald’s novel — alternately described as “low, thrilling,” possessed of an “exhilarating ripple,” full of “fluctuating, feverish warmth,” and — most famously — “full of money.” Mulligan’s own register is naturally low. Even though her round, dimpled face plays young, her voice — one of those dulcet cut-glass British voices you used to be able to hear on the BBC — brings unexpected notes of sanguinity. "She’s got almost a childlike quality about her physically,” says Luhrmann, “but she has the voice of Rita Hayworth.” It was this paradox that tugged her performance in An Education closer to the zesty self-possession of a young Shirley MacLaine than to the winsomeness of Audrey Hepburn, to whom she was continually compared in that first spring of Hollywood’s infatuation with her, when Harvey Weinstein called her the “Belle” of Sundance and Warren Beatty, finding out she was taking a bus to meetings in LA, offered his services as a chauffeur.
"Most of the moments in the film are interstitial; the story is conjured and suggested rather than shown, and the emotions are evoked and induced rather than performed... Malick constructs the story as the love story, as the story of stories, as a primordial archetype realized in practical and even familiar places, and he films his unnamed characters more or less without dialogue.... Malick avoids many of the ordinary particulars of a couple’s life—why are they together, what drives them apart... Viewers with expectations, or, rather, prejudices regarding what constitutes a movie—regarding scripts, acting, and psychology—are bound to be confounded by “To the Wonder.” Malick has little interest in the psychology of his characters—in fact, it’s hard to call them characters. And the actors who bring them to life have a very difficult job, which they do remarkably... Affleck, a solid and muscular performer, manages to render himself diaphanous" — Richard Brody, The New Yorker
1. Naked (Leigh, 1993)
2. My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears, 1985)
3. Local Hero (Forsyth, 1983)
4. Brazil (Gilliam, 1985)
5. Meantime (Leigh, 1984)
6. Riff-Raff (Loach, 1991)
7. The Ploughman's Lunch (Eyre, 1984)
8. Pink Floyd: The Wall (Parker, 1982)
9. Letter to Brezhnev (Clarke, 1985))
10. Wetherby (Hare, 1985)
Rchives, Rilo Kiley; Bankrupt! Phoenix (April 23); Modern Vampires of the City, Vampire Weekend (May 11); Random Access Memories, Daft Punk (May 17); Trouble Will Find Me, The National (May 20); Untitled, Mariah Carey (May); Anthem, Hanson (June 18th);Untitled, MGMT (June); The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight. The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, Neko Case; Untitled, Goldfrapp; Untitled, Laura Marling; Untitled, Sigur Ros; Untitled, Kylie Minogue
From my Guardian column:—'How fast does a T Rex run? 20 years ago, the technicians at George Lucas’s effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, laboring to finish Jurassic Park in time for its June 11th release date, made a decision whose effects would reverberate for decades to come. “We had a zillion arguments about it,”said animator Steve Williams. Some argued, based on the animals estimated mass, that it ran slower than a jeep, the only problem being that a jeep was precisely what it was required to chase in Spielberg’s film. Others argued that it ran more like a lion: never unless it had to, and if it ran, only for a very short period of time, moving very fast. “Using that logic,” said Williams. “I had to throw physics out the window and create a T Rex that moved at 60mph, even thought its hollow bones would have busted if it ran that fast.”
That decision — cheating mass to achieve the desired velocity — set the pattern for the bendy new laws of physics that were about to unfurl. The eighties had been about nothing if not mass, when roid-head heroes came on like one-man biological armies, wiping out whole buildings, neighbourhoods, villages, with one clench of oily pectoral. “He fills the space, and you have to go with that,” said James Cameron of Arnold Schwarzenegger when casting The Terminator, originally a lithe assassin with a buzz cut, upturned trench-coat, capable of disappearing into a crowd. What he got was 220 pounds of Austrian bodybuilder, who could no more disappear into a crowd than he could perform a pas de deux. As the eighties boomed, so too did the biceps of its movie heroes. ”I always believed the mind is the bestweapon” insisted John Rambo, before strapping some beefy rocket launchers to his forearms, in case his mind wandered.
That all changed in 1993. “Lizard eats Arnie’s lunch,” ran Variety’s headline, after Jurassic Park smushed Arnie’s appropriately titled Last Action Hero at the box office, ushering in a brave new world of computer-generated effects in which the bulk of Arnie, Sly, Bruce and the gang was suddenly a drag — un-aerodynamic. As The New Yorker’s David Denby wrote in his review of X-Men United (2003):—
“Gravity has given up its remorseless pull; one person’s flesh can turn into another’s, or melt, of become waxy, claylike, or metallic; the ground is not so much terra firma as a launching pad for the true cinematic space, the air, where bodies zoom like projectiles and actual projectiles (bullets say) sometimes move slowly enough to be inspected by the naked eye. Roll over Newton, computer imagery has altered the integrity of time and space.”This brave New post-Newtonian universe would belong instead to swift, svelte, low-cal metrosexuals like Keanu Reeves, Matt Damon, Leonardo di Caprio, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Andrew Garfield — buff but not ripped, able to cling to a window ledge by their fingertips, or run upside down a corridor, or wrap their tonsils around the gobblydegook of a script like Inception, whose exposition levels alone rendered it a no-fly zone to monosyllabic grunters like Sly and Arnie, whose eloquence at best stretched to a gruff “screw you” as he plunged a power drill into a man’s chest. Jurassic Park put paid to all that — it put machismo on the extinction list.'
Lucas walked into the meeting with an outline of the story, but he wanted to flesh it out with his writer and director. In the transcript, he begins by articulating a recipe for the contemporary blockbuster: the picture will consist of one big set piece after another.
“And each cliffhanger is better than the one before,” Spielberg adds, warming to the idea. “What we’re doing here, really, is designing a ride at Disneyland.”
The hero, Lucas explains, is a globe-trotting archaeologist, “a bounty hunter of antiquities.” He’s a professor, a Ph.D.—“People call him doctor.” But he’s a little “rough and tumble.” As the men hash out the Jones iconography, they refer, incessantly, to other films, invoking Eastwood, Bond, and Mifune. He will dress like Bogart in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Lucas says: “the khaki pants…the leather jacket. That sort of felt hat.” Oh, and also? “A bullwhip.” He’ll carry it “rolled up,” Lucas continues. “Like a snake that’s coiled up behind him.”
“I like that,” Spielberg says. “The doctor with the bullwhip.”
After establishing his hero, Lucas proceeds to walk through the film’s plot, beat by beat. There’s the opening sequence in South America, which Lucas describes as “misty and primeval, ‘King Kong’-ish.” (If you want a further sense of what a clever pastiche of earlier films “Raiders” ended up becoming, and haven’t seen this astounding supercut, it is well worth watching.)
Lucas captures the second act of the film pretty aptly:
In the essence it’s just bullshit stuff where he wanders around Cairo trying to uncover the mystery of his puzzle. At the same time, you meet all these interesting characters and every once in a while somebody throws a knife at him, or he beats somebody up, or somebody beats him up. Typical Middle Eastern stuff.
But most importantly, the film had to hurtle at a furious clip. Lucas envisioned the whole story as one elaborate chase: the hero chases Nazis, Nazis chase the hero, and everyone races to find the Ark of the Covenant. They needed a love interest, of course. “She’s sort of a Marlene Dietrich tavern-singer spy,” Lucas suggests, of the character who would become Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen). She works in a bar, he continues. It’s like Rick’s Place, in “Casablanca.”
Kasdan: This is in Cairo?
Lucas: No. This is in Nepal. She’s stuck there.
Kasdan: Who are her customers at this Rick’s Place in Nepal?
The filmmakers want Marion to have a romantic history with the hero. They also want to cast a young actress in her twenties, however. This raises logistical questions. But it’s an easy fix:
Lucas: He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
Kasdan: And he was forty-two.
Lucas: He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.
Spielberg: She had better be older.
Over the intervening decades of enormous wealth and success, both Lucas and Spielberg have carefully tended their public images, so there is a voyeuristic thrill to seeing them converse in so unguarded a manner. As the screenwriters Craig Mazin and John August pointed out recently on the Scriptnotes podcast, one delight of reading the transcript is watching Spielberg throw out bad ideas, and then noting how Lucas gently shuts him down. Spielberg, who had sought to direct a Bond movie—and, astonishingly, been rejected—thought that their hero should be an avid gambler. Lucas replied that perhaps they shouldn’t overload him with attributes. (Lucas himself had briefly entertained, then mercifully set aside, the notion that his archaeologist might also be a practitioner of kung fu.) There’s a good reason we seldom get to spy on these conversations: really good spitballing, like improv comedy, requires a high degree of social disinhibition. So the writers’ room, like a therapist’s office, must remain inviolable.
Spielberg fires off ideas with an adolescent’s stamina—and not all of them are bad, either. In fact, among his spontaneous interjections are some of the most iconic episodes in the film. “I have a great idea!” he exclaims. “There is a sixty-five-foot boulder, that’s form-fitted to only roll down the corridor, coming right at him. And it’s a race. He gets to outrun the boulder!”
Lucas eggs him on during these riffs, pushing him to wring the full potential from each sequence. Spielberg conjures a scene in which the hero falls asleep on an airplane, only to wake up and discover that the other passengers have parachuted off, and the plane is in free fall. “He’s trapped in this airplane and it’s going down.”
“Then what happens?” Lucas says. “One sentence further and it’s a great idea.”
Like a number of ideas from the meeting, the flight-from-hell sequence proved too much for “Raiders,” and was incorporated, instead, into “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” But what is extraordinary, reading the transcript (which runs to nearly a hundred and fifty pages), is how many inspired elements from the film were originally cooked up in these conversations. There is the nefarious monkey in Cairo. (Spielberg: “The monkey should be dressed up as a little Arab.” Lucas: “I like the idea of not only having a turban but also a little backpack.”) There is the clever plot device through which the Gestapo agent Toht burns his hand by grabbing the headpiece of the Staff of Ra, and the scar gives the Nazis a clue to the location of the ark. (Kasdan suggests that a fire might add intensity to the fight in Ravenwood’s bar; the flames heat the medallion—et voilà .) Even the final shot of the film, in which the Ark is filed away in a government warehouse, is settled upon in the meeting. The big winner at the end, Lucas concludes, is “the bureaucracy.”
At one point, hours into the conversation, Kasdan asks, “Do you have a name for this person?”
Lucas: I do.
Spielberg: I hate this, but go ahead.
Lucas: Indiana Smith.
The transcript does not note the sound of crickets, but nor is there any burst of enthusiasm.
Lucas: It has to be unique. It’s a character. Very Americana. Square. He was born in Indiana.
Kasdan: What does she call him, Indy?
Lucas: That’s what I was thinking. Or Jones.
'I’m just about to start my second semester teaching a history of film course at NYU, which means I’ve spent the last few months getting up close and personal with a list of classics — On The Waterfront, Vertigo, The 400 Blows, The Graduate, The Godfather, Raging Bull. I have come out of the experience with three observations to share: 1) The 400 Blows is as close to perfection as anything touched by human hand. 2) James Stewart can’t kiss a woman convincingly. 3) Great films arise when there is a triangulation between director, actor and protagonist — when all three are linked by the same spiritual umbilicus. As first written, Budd Schulberg believed On the Waterfront to be the story of the priest but Kazan knew it to be the younger brother, Terry’s film. In a remarkable letter to Brando which should be read by anyone curious about directing actors, he singled out Terry’s orphan status, and struggle for recognition, explaining, “Marlon this part is much closer to you and to myself, too.” The Greek immigrant who had ostracized himself from the Hollywood community by testifying before HUAC, Kazan saw his own knotted history in the part, and stayed on Brando’s side of the camera during rehearsals. “On the Waterfront was my own story,” he said. “Every day I worked on that film I was telling the world where I stood and my critics to go and fuck themselves.”
This goes beyond merely saying that certain actors become a director’s alter egos. Scorsese worked with De Niro many times but it was only on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull that they seemed to take up residence within the same lost soul, on loan to them from writer Paul Schrader. Two people must tell their most intimate story through third. Mike Nichols struggled for long months to cast Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, as written a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, southern Californian wasp. For a while, Robert Redford was in the frame. “Are these people having a breakdown?” thought Dustin Hoffman when was approached, “the guys name is Benjamin Braddock. He’s like six feet tall, he’s a track runner.” Nichols told Hoffman, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.” And of course he was: The Graduate is all about spiritual misplacement, about being a stranger even to your own family, so Hoffman’s feelings of being miscast — which persisted right up to the film’s opening — were crucial. Nichols, the displaced Jewish boy, the lone observer, had finally worked out why the part had been so hard to cast: “without any knowledge of what I was doing, I had found myself in this story”. The list goes on: the Godfather is Coppola’s shadow-King as much as he is Brando’s; One Flew over The Cuckoo’s Nest is Milos Forman’s kiss goodbye to soviet Czechoslovakia as it is Nicholson’s middle-finger salute to Hollywood. It also explains the airlessness that hangs over Citizen Kane, for of course actor, director and part are already united in the singular frame of Orson Welles himself. What was never sundered cannot coalesce." — Intelligent Life
"the book proceeds chronologically through Martin Scorsese’s extraordinarily rich and varied career as a film director. Tom Shone, the British film critic and writer, is currently the film critic for The Economist quarterly magazine Intelligent Life. He was previously the Sunday Times film critic from 1994 to 1999 and has written for Slate, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Daily Telegraph. He is the author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, published in 2004. He lives in New York and teaches film history at NYU."Tonight, celebratory meatballs!
“I’m driving one day, the phone rings and it’s Bill Murray, and he says, ‘Ted Melfi, I don’t know who you are, but I love your script.’ He asked me to meet him at LAX and go for a ride as he returned home from a golf tournament. I met him in baggage, we got in a town car. He pulls the script out of an attache case. It’s dog-eared and there are notes all over it. We stop at an In-N-Out Burger, and spent a three-hour drive to I don’t know where discussing the script. He understood everything about the character, and his notes were simple, direct and to the point. He said, this character is who I am at times, and this is how I talk, at times. It was one of those days where you think, if I died tomorrow, it would be okay.” — Ted Melfi, on getting the okay from Bill Murray
"I'd like to thank" — 225
"I love you" — 187
"My wife" — 181
"My mother" – 76
"Wow" – 73
"Cast and crew" – 65
"My father" – 50
“My mom” — 49
"I'd like to thank the academy" – 48
"Harvey Weinstein" – 40
"America" — 40
"Steven Spielberg" — 38
"My husband" — 37
"Thank everybody" — 34
"Thank everyone" — 28
"Fellow nominees" — 26
"My dad" — 24
"My agent" — 24
"My children" — 24
"Meryl" — 19
"Oh my God" — 19
"Thank God" — 17
"England" — 16
"My producer" — 14
"France" — 13
"Gosh" — 12
"My director" — 11
"Martin Scorsese" — 11
"Grandmother" — 9
"Jack Nicholson" – 9
"Oh God" – 6
"I would not be here" — 6
"This is unbelievable" — 5
"Oprah" — 4
"I cant believe it" — 4
"This is incredible" — 4
"I don't know what to say" — 4
"Oh man" — 4
"Thank you, God" — 4
"High school" — 4
"Publicist" – 3
"Go to bed" – 3
"Oh no" — 3
"Good God" — 3
"Whoa" — 3
"Jesus" — 3
"Too many people to thank" — 2
"My Grandfather" — 2
"What the hell" — 2
"Whoo!" — 2
"I had a speech" — 2
"Drama teacher" — 2
"You love me" — 1 (Spacey, 1999)
"Is this really happening?" — 1 (Reznor, 2010)
"Golly" — 1 (Leo, 2010)
"Holy mackerel" — 1 (Streep, 1979)
“I don't believe it” — 1 (Park, 93)
"Lord have Mercy" — 1 (Thornton, 1996)
"I'm not going to thank everybody I've ever met in my entire life" — 1 (McClaine, 83)
"I need a drink" — (Chappel, 94)
"Fucking wonderful" — 1 (Martin, 2011)
"Crap" — 1 (Palance, 91)
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