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Are there films you saw when you were young that really made you want to get into the industry?
They were mostly from the French New Wave, circa 1960: Breathless, 400 Blows, Jules and Jim. And international cinema in general: Bergman's The Seventh Seal, Kurosawa's Yojimbo, the films of Fellini, David Lean. Kubrick--I liked Kubrick a lot--2001 was made while I was in film school. I saw his earlier Dr. Strangelove in 1964 when I was in Paris, studying art history. I think almost all of us at film school in the mid-sixties were pulled there by what we had seen going on in foreign films. Hollywood was in kind of a down period. There were some good American films produced in that period--The Hustler, I liked, with Paul Newman, and Sam Peckinpah's films--but in general, Hollywood didn't feel at the cutting edge in those days. 1965 was right at the end of the old studio management. Some of the people who had started the studios were still running them: the Warner brothers, Sam Goldwyn. And the impact of television was still hurting, theaters were closing, multiplexes hadn't been invented. The first thing our teachers told us at film school was: get out now, while you can--which was a little dismaying. Hollywood didn't really begin to pick up until the early and mid-seventies, with The Godfather and Jaws, and then Star Wars, which were all made by film students.
The people you went to school with?
Yes. I was at USC. George Lucas was there too, and he and I got together with Francis Coppola, who was a couple of years older than us, at UCLA, our rival school across town. Spielberg went to Long Beach State; Marty Scorsese was at NYU. Francis and George and I left Hollywood and moved up to San Francisco to start American Zoetrope in '69, because it just didn't seem like Hollywood was the place, at that time, for young people to be making films. At least not the more personal, European kind of films we wanted to make.
And now, of course, it's more than ever a place for young people to be making films.
Yes. Although there are very creative younger filmmakers who work outside the LA-NY axis. Linklater in Texas. Shyamalan in Philadelphia.
What do you think of what's being made today?
In general, I'm optimistic. I forget who--I think it was Tallulah Bankhead--but someone once said: "At any time, 95% of what's being made is junk." I think she was talking about film, but it applies as well to novels in the nineteenth century, or music in the eighteenth century--or anything else, for that matter. We forget, because the novels that we read are 'the classics,' you know, the great novels, but there was a huge amount of junk written in the nineteenth century. All of that has disappeared now, just melted away, so we focus on the good stuff that is left, and think that's all there ever was. With film today, on the other hand, we are aware of everything that's happening right now, all the mediocre and unimaginative and repetitive stuff, as well as the good. In thirty years, we'll look back and maybe be surprised by what has survived from today.
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"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Brando as The Godfather
"Our general mandate to ourselves was to try and bring a more personal, European sensibility to the films we made."
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I remember in the early seventies--which is now looked on as a kind of classic, innovative period in filmmaking--our attitude was: "Well, this is nothing like the old days, we are not living in classic times, Hollywood is falling apart, but here's this opportunity--let's do as good as job as we can." Our general mandate to ourselves was to try and bring a more personal, European sensibility to the films we made. And, luckily, there had been changes in the executive management at the studios, they were looking for new directions and talent, and it happened that the lucky roulette ball landed on some of us.
Once The Godfather came out, and set a new box-office record, and then Jaws, which topped Godfather, and then Star Wars, which topped Jaws, those executives felt, "Oh, okay, so this is how we can do it. This is the new paradigm." And in typical management style, they attempted to codify the forms that experiment had produced, but discouraged the experimentation that had produced them.
Do you think now, with movies like The Blair Witch Project or even Being John Malkovich, that a more liberated style of filmmaking is coming back into vogue?
Well, yes. I particularly liked Being John Malkovich. You know, though, in any year, there's always something interesting coming up. Whether it adds up to a new wave or not, I don't think we can tell just yet. Certainly what's going to happen is that Internet distribution and promotion of films, which has already had an effect with films like Blair Witch, is going to have an even larger impact in the years to come. In the next ten years it will probably revolutionize the marketplace. If we can get the transmission rate high enough to download DVDs off the Internet, that will certainly take over from video rentals and sales. How that will affect the kinds of films which get made and distributed is a very interesting question. You can see partial answers right now with Internet companies such as Atom.com distributing short personal films.
But I don't think people will stop going to the theatres. There have been ups and downs over the years, but it seems to satisfy a collective, emotional experience that people need no matter what. Looking at a film in the home is nice and convenient but it's a very different experience than going out with friends or family to sit with like-minded strangers in the dark and experience a film together--there is some synergy that happens in theatres that is impossible to duplicate in the home, for obvious reasons: where would you put 600 people? Technically, I have no doubt that at some point fairly soon there will be a standardization of quality so that what you see and hear on screen in the theatres will not be any different from what you see and hear at home. It's already happened with sound, and it is on its way to happening with the image. But the one thing you can never have at home is 600 people sitting with you. Even if it's not six hundred, just the fact that you have left your familiar surroundings, paid money and taken a risk--really when you think about it, it's kind of strange: you're paying money to go sit in the dark with strangers and watch something you've never seen before. To top it off, the nature of film projection is such that for the duration of every frame on screen there's an equal amount of time that's complete darkness. You're not aware of it, but if you sit in the theatre for two hours, half of that time is spent in darkness. So there you are sitting in the dark, literally, with people you don't know, and yet having this collective experience--you know when it works, it's something that benefits the individual and society as a whole. It is the way we transmit myths and common reference points.
Even though I'm a big fan of DVD, I would still prefer to see something the first time on a movie screen.
There are certain kinds of films that absolutely benefit from being seen in a theatre. But there are other kinds of films where perhaps it doesn't matter so much. Also, the projection and the quality of the print need to be optimal for the theatrical experience to really work, which as we know is not always the case. CONTINUED...
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