Classics: The Conversation

I saw Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation the other day. Again. What a strange, amazing, paranoid movie. Nobody could make a movie like that in America today. I bet no studio would touch it. It's too unique. Coppola made it in 1974, between the two Godfathers and after Watergate, and it is just right for that era and even more right for ours. It won Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Sound. In those days they gave Oscars to good movies.
It comes in handy to revisit The Conversation nowadays, when we have no more privacy (if you think you still have privacy, you are living in dreamland) and the corporate and government snooping are at an all-time high. The Conversation will chill your blood and make your hair stand on end, but not like you are used to, with cheap thrills. It will deeply disturb you.
The pace is almost glacial (for an American film), but what nerve Coppola had. What imagination. It is a truly original film. It has a tremendous, shocking revelation, and it is about the weirdest milieu ever. Who can forget that sorry ass snoopers party? A convention of surveillance stuff? Wow. WOW.
The infinite implications of this movie make you feel that tip of the iceberg frisson that is particularly delightful for those us who believe the world is a rotten cesspool of slime. Evil is everywhere in this movie and yet it comes from a deep human need to know and control everything and everybody. In a word: fascism (or communism, same thing). That's where we are heading, if we continue allowing the powers that be to intrude upon our lives with complete abandon and impunity.


Gene Hackman is so frozen into a massive lump of paranoia and distrust, he seems like he is about to shatter into shards of glass. The repetitive, loopy, melancholy music by David Shire is perfect, as is the sound editing, by the great Walter Murch. And John Cazale is there, and where there is John Cazale, I always miss him. The saddest man in movies, ever. He left too soon.
Let me say, for the sake of argument that there would be no The Lives of Others if it wasn't for The Conversation. Yet the clarity and lack of sentimentality or manipulativeness of the first movie, makes the other one, as competent as it is, look like a soap opera.

Three Days to the Shoot...

...and I'm having the weirdest dreams. I love it!

Yesterday I dreamed I was chewing gum and it got stuck to one of my fillings and I tried to pull it out and I pulled gobs and gobs of chewing gum that felt like concrete and I yanked my molar out and out came also my two front teeth. And I thought, oh great, I can't shoot a movie like this, without my two front teeth. I looked like a homeless junkie.
All of you amateur Freudians, you can go to town on this one. All of a sudden I'm having a very active dreamlife. I had a horrid nightmare that revealed to me part of the theme of my movie, and more interestingly, my deepest fears about making it. All I can say is, the subconscious rules! Too bad it happens while we're sleeping. On the other hand, if it happened in broad daylight, we'd all be living in a Ken Russell movie. And we don't want that, really.

Moviemaking 101

My friend and acting teacher Rob recommended that I read the book "A Film Director Prepares". And I'm glad I did. It tells you the really basic stuff that you think you know, but not quite, and it's been really useful.
Perhaps you already know this, smart readers, but through this process I have been discovering that film indeed works like a language. We get it instinctively, like babies who learn how to speak without knowing the rules, but it has a definite grammar and a set of rules and processes that you can learn and that are super smart and highly intuitive. I know, DOH, but bear with me.
So I love looking at the stuff I kind of know instinctively, and then finding out what it's named and what it really means and what it's good for, what it is supposed to communicate. What blows my mind is that film language and the process of making a film are really very smart and well designed. It's like musical notation or math, a crowning achievement of human thought, as far as I'm concerned.
Who came up with this wonder, of stringing images together to tell a story not in real time? What a beautiful thing.

Review of A Movie I Haven't Seen 2

There is a movie out there about a girl who decides to blow herself up in NY city. This movie I will not see. From the reviews it doesn't sound like a masterpiece. But even if they were great reviews, I'd be suspicious.
This for me is a no-brainer: suicide bombers are idiots. They are retards. And I'm in no mood for movies that pretend to "humanize" them. And I'm even in less of a mood for movies that use them as an excuse for manufactured suspense. Maybe I'm a tad oversensitive, and I don't mind in the least if my aggression belies a mortal fear of them. I have nothing to hide. I fear them all right. I agree with Martin Amis that suicide bombers are obscene, if that is the word that comes closest to describing their perverse human aberration, and therefore in my view, movies about them amount to unsavory pornography.
You can tell me suicide bombers are brainwashed, and manipulated and used. You can tell me they are young and impressionable; I can tell you they are morons. And of course the older people who have created the phenomenon, those who cowardly goad them on to their murderous deaths, don't deserve to be called human.

My Name in Lights

Darlings:
I'm in a high state of excitement, because by this time next week, I will be on my second day of shooting my modest little film. That is to say, if everything goes as planned. So far, it's been a blast. It's fun to feel excitement and fear and, at the same time, feel strangely calm as well. Okay, not that calm, but also not that fearful either. Modestly intimidated and hugely motivated.
I've tried to prepare as much as I can, but I also don't want to overdo the preparation. I know I'm going to screw up somewhere and that's part of the deal. The trick is to screw up less than reasonably expected. It's fun to be involved in something that you don't know all the answers to (hell, you don't even know many of the questions). I haven't felt like I've learned this much in a long, long time and it feels great. Cause you know what, advertising pays well only because otherwise nobody in their right mind would subject themselves to such enforced, and useless inanity.
But in this little, complicated movie world, I'm in my element, my dears. Let's face it: it ain't no secret I enjoy bossing people around. I'd like to think I do it nicely and politely and collaboratively, but I love to feel people are paying attention to me. Didn't need too many years of therapy to figure that one out. And as long as something worthy comes out of it, why not? It's very bracing.
I have written film reviews for years and I'm very happy to have the tables turned on me. Eat some humble pie.
I wish I could tell you some juicy gossip about this process, but I don't want to compromise anything before we start, because this is a public site, read by the six of you, but one never knows. Besides, there is really not that much to tell yet. I'm looking forward to working with the actors, and I hope that I can communicate to them what I'm looking for. Then I hope they help me and then I hope that what I want comes out on screen.
So wish me luck.