Where do great films come from?

'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