Antonioni Discusses The Passenger

The Passenger (Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni)

Originally released in 1975, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger is, on one level, a thriller about a man trying to escape his past. This poignant film is a profile of an exhausted journalist, played by Jack Nicholson, whose means of escape is to take over the identity of a dead man. However, Antonioni is less interested in the suspense inherent in Nicholson’s situation, rather the plot is the starting point for a portrait of a man in spiritual and psychological crisis. 

Based on an original story by Mark Peploe and filmed from a screenplay by Peploe, Peter Wollen and Antonioni, The Passenger begins with Nicholson in remote Africa completing work on a documentary about rebels in Chad attempting to overthrow a tyrannical government. In a bar, he meets a stranger named Robertson (Charles Mulvehill) who unexpectedly dies in an adjoining hotel room (and who, unknown to Locke, is an in-demand arms dealer). Upon discovering the body, Locke — unhappily married and  sickened by the compromises of his work – assumes the dead man’s identity. 

Antonioni further suggests that Locke’s desire to identify with and absorb an alien personality is synonymous with the movie audience’s desire to identify with, and therefore live vicariously through, the experiences of fictional cinematic characters.

As Locke takes on Robertson’s life and commitments, it turns out that Locke has merely assumed one bleak prison for another. His odyssey takes him from Africa to Spain, Germany and England in a doomed flight from the past. In The Passenger, the only motif more prevalent than doubles is the image of spirals (from swirling sand, tyre marks in the dust, a rotating fan, or Antonioni’s spiralling camera movements) – a looped pattern which resolves to the idea that the cycle of life ends where it begins: in nothingness.

The famous climax of the film – a final sequence lasting seven minutes and taking eleven days to shoot – is a synthesis of the movie’s themes and a tribute to Antonioni’s virtuosity as a director. 

Antonioni considered The Passenger his most stylistically mature film. He also considered it a political film due to its topicality and the fact that it ‘fits with the dramatic rapport of the individual in today’s society.’

In the following interview with Larry Sturhahn and Betty Jeffries Demby, originally published in 1975, Antonioni discusses the making of The Passenger and analyses its place in the context of his work.

BETTY JEFFRlES DEMBY: Did you do the screenplay for ‘The Passenger’? 

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI: I have always written my own scripts, even if what I wrote was the result of discussions with my collaborators. The Passenger, however, was written by someone else. Naturally I made changes to adapt it to my way of thinking and shooting. I like to impro­vise  – in fact, I can’t do otherwise. It is only in this phase – that is, when I actually see it –  that the film becomes clear to me. Lucidity and clear­ness are not among my qualities, if I have any.

LARRY STURHAHN: In this case, were there any major changes in the screenplay? 

MA: The whole idea, the way the film is done, is different. The mood is changed – there is more of a spy feeling, it’s more political.

LS: Do you always adapt a piece of material to suit your particular needs? 

MA: Always, I got the idea for Blow-Up from a short story by Cortazar, but even there I changed a lot. And The Girlfriends was based on a story by Pavese. But I work on the scripts by myself with some collaboration, and as far as the act of writing is concerned, I always do that myself

LS: I have often felt that the short story is a better medium to adapt to film because it’s compact and about the same length as a film.

MA: I agree. The Girlfriends was based on a short novel, Among Women Only. And the most difficult pages to translate into images were the best pages as far as the novel and the writing were concerned. I mean the best of the pages – the pages I liked the most – were the most difficult. When you have just an idea it’s easier. Putting something into a differ­ent medium is difficult because the first medium was there first. In a novel there’s usually too much dialogue – and getting rid of the dialogue is difficult.

LS: Do you change the dialogue even further when you’re on the set?

MA: Yes, I change it a lot. I need to hear a line pronounced by the actors.

LS: How much do you see of a film when you’re looking at the script? Do you see the locations? Do you see where you’re going to work with the film?

MA: Yes, more or less. But I never try to copy what I see because this is impossible. I will never find the exact counterpart of my imagination.

LS: So you wipe the slate clean when you’re looking for your location?

MA: Yes. I just go and look. I know what I need, of course. Actually, it’s very simple.

BJD: Then you don’t leave the selection of location up to your assistants?

MA: The location is the very substance of which the shot is made. Those colors, that light, those trees, those objects, those faces. How could I leave the choice of all this to my assistants? Their choices would be entirely dif­ferent from mine. Who knows the film I am making better than me?

BJD: Was ‘The Passenger’ shot entirely on location? 

MA: Yes.

BJD: I believe most of your other films were too. Why do you have such a strong preference for location shooting?

MA: Because reality is unpredictable. In the studio everything has been foreseen.

BJD: One of the most interesting scenes in the film is the one which takes place on the roof of the Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona. Why did you choose this loca­tion?

MA: The Gaudi towers reveal, perhaps, the oddity of an encounter between a man who has the name of a dead man and a girl who doesn’t have any name. (She doesn’t need it in the film.)

BJD: I understand that in ‘Red Desert’ you actually painted the grass and col­ored the sea to get the effects you wanted Did you do anything similar in ‘The Passenger’?

MA: No. In The Passenger I have not tampered with reality. I looked at it with the same eye with which the hero, a reporter, looks at the events he is reporting on. Objectivity is one of the themes of the film. If you look closely, there are two documentaries in the film, Locke’s documentary on Africa and mine on him.

BJD: What about the sequence where Nicholson is isolated in the desert? The desert is especially striking, and the color is unusually intense and burning. Did you use any special filters or forced processing to create this effect?

MA: The color is the color of the desert. We used a filter, but not to alter it; on the contrary, in order not to alter it. The exact warmness of the color was obtained in the laboratory by the usual processes.

BJD: Did shooting in the desert with its high temperatures and blowing sand create any special problems for you?

MA: Not especially. We brought along a refrigerator in which to keep the film, and we tried to protect the camera from the blowing sand by cov­ering it in any possible way.

BJD: How do you cast your actors?

MA: I know the actors, I know the characters of the film. It is a question of juxtaposition.

LS: Specifically, why did you choose Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider?

MA: Jack Nicholson and I wanted to make a film together, and I thought he would be very good, very right for this part. The same for Maria Schneider. She was my understanding of the girl. And I think she was perfect for the role. I may have changed it a bit for her, but that is a real­ity I must face: you can’t invent an abstract feeling. Being a ‘star’ is irrel­evant – if the actor is different from the part, if the feeling doesn’t work, even Jack Nicholson won’t get the part.

LS: Are you saying that Nicholson acts like a star, that he’s hard to work with? 

MA: No. He’s very competent and a very, very good actor, so it’s easy to work with him. He’s intense, yet he doesn’t create any problems – you can cut his hair (I didn’t), he’s not concerned about his ‘good’ side or whether the camera is too high or too low; you can do whatever you want.

BJD: You once said that you see actors as part of the composition; that you don’t want to explain the characters’ motivations to them but want them to be pas­sive. Do you still handle actors this way?

MA: I never said that I want the actors to be passive. I said that sometimes if you explain too much, you run the risk that the actors become their own directors, and this doesn’t help the film. Nor the actor. I prefer work­ing with the actors not on an intellectual but on a sensorial level. To stim­ulate rather than teach.

First of all, I am not very good at talking to them because it is difficult for me to find the right words. Also, I am not the kind of director who wants ‘messages’ on each line. So I don’t have anything more to say about the scene than how to do it. What I try to do is provoke them, put them in the right mood. And then I watch them through the camera and at that moment tell them to do this or that. But not before. I have to have my shot, and they are an element of the image – and not always the most important element.

Also, I see the film in its unity whereas an actor sees the film through his character. It was difficult working with Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider at the same time because they are such completely different actors. They are natural in opposite ways: Nicholson knows where the camera is and acts accordingly. But Maria doesn’t know where the cam­era is – she doesn’t know anything; she just lives the scene. Which is great. Sometimes she just moves and no one knows how to follow her. She has a gift for improvising, and I like that – I like to improvise.

LS: Then you don’t preplan what you are going to do on the set? You don’t sit down the evening before or in the morning and say, ‘I’m going to do this and this’? 

MA: No. Never, never.

LS: You just let it happen as you’re on the set? 

MA: Yes.

LS: Do you at least let your actors rehearse a scene first, or do you just go right into it?

MA: I rehearse very little – maybe twice, but not more. I want the actors to be fresh, not tired.

BJD: What about camera angles and camera movement? Do you carefully pre­plan in this area?

MA: Very carefully.

LS: Are you able to make decisions about print takes very soon, or do you –? 

MA: Immediately.

LS: Then you don’t shoot a lot of takes?

MA: No. Three. Maybe five or six. Sometimes we may do fifteen, but that is very rare.

LS: Would you be able to estimate how much footage you shoot per day? 

MA: No.

LS: Just whatever you can accomplish?

MA: In China I made as many as eighty shots in one day, but that was very different work; I had to rush.

LS: How long did it take to do the final scene of ‘The Passenger’?

MA: Eleven days. But that was not because of me but because of the wind. It was very windy weather and so difficult to keep the camera steady.

BJD: One critic has said that the final seven-minute sequence is destined to become a classic of film history. Can you explain how you conceived it?

MA: I had the idea for the final sequence as soon as I started shooting. I knew, naturally, that my protagonist must die, but the idea of seeing him die bored me. So I thought of a window and what was outside, the afternoon sun. For a second, just for a fraction – Hemingway crossed my mind: ‘Death in the Afternoon.’ And the arena. We found the arena and immediately realized this was the place. But I didn’t yet know how to realize such a long shot. I had heard about the Canadian camera, but I had no first–hand knowledge of its possibilities. In London, I saw some film tests. I met with the English technicians responsible for the camera and we decided to try. There were many problems to solve. The biggest was that the camera was 16mm and I needed 35mm. To modify it would have involved modifying its whole equilibrium since the camera is mounted on a series of gyroscopes. However. I succeeded in doing it.

LS: Did you use a zoom lens or a very slow dolly?

MA: A zoom was mounted on the camera. But it was only used when the camera was about to pass through the gate.

LS: It’s interesting how the camera moves toward the man in the center against the wall but we never get to see him, the camera never focuses on him.

MA: Well, he is part of the landscape, that’s all. And everything is in focus – everything. But not specifically on him. I didn’t want to go closer to anybody. The surprise is the use of this long shot. You see the girl out­side and you see her movements and you understand very well without going closer to her what she’s doing, maybe what her thoughts are. You see, I am using this very long shot like closeups, the shot actually takes the place of closeups.

LS: Did you cover that shot in any other way or was this your sole commitment? 

MA: I had this idea of doing it in one take at the beginning of the shoot­ing and I kept working on it all during the shooting.

LS: How closely do you work with your cinematographer?

MA: Who is the cinematographer? We don’t have this character in Italy.

LS: How big a crew do you work with?

MA: I prefer a small crew. On this one I had a big crew – forty people­ but we had union problems so it couldn’t be smaller.

LS: How important is your continuity girl to your work?

MA: Very important. Because we have to change in the middle, we can’t go chronologically.

BJD: How closely do you work with your editor?

MA: We always work together. However, I edited Blow-Up myself and the first version of The Passenger as well. But it was too long and so I redid it with Franco Arcalli, my editor. Then it was still too long, so I cut it by myself again.

BJD: How closely does the edited version reflect what you had in mind when you were shooting?

MA: Unfortunately, as soon as I finish shooting a film I don’t like it. And then little by little I look at it and start to find something. But when I finish shooting it’s like I haven’t shot anything. Then when I have my material – when it’s been shot in my head and on the actual film – it’s like it’s been shot by someone else. So I look at it with great detachment and then I start to cut. And I like this phase.

But on this one I had to change a lot because the first cut was very long. I shot much more than I needed because I had very little time to prepare the film – Nicholson had some engagements and I had to shoot very quickly.

LS: So you didn’t have time before the shooting to cut your screenplay down to size. 

MA: Right. I shot much more than was necessary because I didn’t know what I would need. So the first cut was very long – four hours. Then I had another that ran two hours and twenty minutes. And now it’s two hours.

LS: Do you shoot lip sync – record the sound on location? 

MA:Yes.

LS: What about dubbing?

MA: A little – when the noise is too much.

BJD: The soundtrack is an enormously important part of your films. For ‘L’avventura’ you recorded every possible shading of the sound if the sea. Did you do anything similar for ‘The Passenger’?

MA: My rule is always the same: For each scene, I record a soundtrack without actors.

BJD: Sometimes you make critical plot points by using sound alone. For instance, in the last sequence we have only the sound of the opening door and what might be a gunshot to let us know the protagonist has been killed. Would you comment on this?

MA: A film is both image and sound. Which is the most important? I put them both on the same plane. Here I used sound because I could not avoid looking at my hero – I could not avoid hearing the sounds con­nected with the actual killing since Locke, the killer, and the camera were in the same room.

BJD: You use music only rarely in the film, but with great effectiveness. Can you explain how you choose which moments will be scored?

MA: I can’t explain it. It is something I feel. When the film is finished, I watch it a couple of times thinking only about the music. In the places where I feel it is missing, I put it in – not as score music but as source music.

LS: Who do you admire among American directors?

MA: I like Coppola; I think The Conversation was a very good film. I like Scorsese; I saw Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and liked it very much­ it was a very simple but very sincere film. And you have Altman and California Split – he’s a very good observer of California society. And Steven Spielberg is also very good.

LS: I have the impression from your films that your people tend to just appear full-blown in a particular situation, that there’s not much  of a past to your characters. For instance, we find Nicholson in an alienated place with no roots behind him. And the same for the girl; she’s just there. It’s as though people are just immediately in an immediate present. There’s no background to them, as it were.

MA: I think it’s a different way of looking at the world. The other way is the older way. This is the modern way of looking at people. Today everyone has less background than in the past. We’re freer. A girl today can go anywhere, just like the one in the film, with just one bag and no thoughts for her family or past. She doesn’t have to carry any baggage with her.

BJD: You mean moral baggage?

MA: Precisely. Moral, psychological luggage. But in the older movies peo­ple have homes and we see these homes and the people in them. You see Nicholson’s home, but he’s not tied down, he’s used to going all over the world.

BJD: Yet you seem to find the struggle for identity interesting.

MA: Personally, I mean to get away from my historical self and find a new one. I need to renew myself this way. Maybe this is an illusion, but I think it is a way to reach something new.

RJD: I was thinking of the television journalist like Mr. Locke getting bored with life. Then there’s no hope for anything because that’s one of the more interesting careers.

MA: Yes, in a way. But it’s also a very cynical career. Also, his problem is that he is a journalist – he can’t get involved in everything he reports because he’s a filter. His job is always to talk about and show something or someone else, but he himself is not involved. He’s a witness not a protagonist  And that’s the problem.

LS: Do you see any similarity between your role as a film director and the role of Locke in the film?

MA: In this film it may be yes; it’s part of the film. But it’s different in a way. In The Passenger I tried to look at Locke the way Locke looks at real­ity. After all, everything I do is absorbed in a kind of collision between myself and reality.

LS: Some people think of film as being the most real of the arts and some think it’s purely illusion, a fake, because everything in a movie is still pictures. Can you speak a bit about this in relation to ‘The Passenger’?

MA: I don’t know if I could speak about it – if I could do the same thing with words I would be a writer and not a film director. I don’t have any­ thing to say but perhaps something to show. There’s a difference.

That’s why it’s very difficult for me to talk about my films. What I want to do is make the film. I know what I have to do. Not what I mean. I never think the meaning because I can’t.

LS: You’re a film director and you make images, yet I find that in your films the key people have a problem with seeing – they’re trying to find things or they’ve lost something. Like the photographer in ‘Blow-Up’ trying to find reality in his own work. Are you, as a director working in this medium, frustrated at not being able to find reality?

MA: Yes and no. In some ways I capture reality in making a film – at least I have a film in my hands, which is something concrete. What I am fac­ing may not be the reality I was looking for, but I’ve found someone or something every time. I have added something more to myself in making the film.

LS: Then it’s a challenge each time?

MA: Yes! I fight for it. Can you imagine? I lost my male character in the desert before the ending of the film because Richard Harris went away without telling me. The ending was supposed to be all three of them – the wife, the husband, and the third man. So I didn’t know how to finish the film. I didn’t stop working during the day, but at night I would walk around the harbor thinking until I finally came up with the idea for the ending I have now. Which I think was better than the previous one – for­tunately.

BJD: Have you ever wanted to make an autobiographical film?

MA: No. And I’ll tell you why: Because I don’t like to look back; I always look forward. Like everyone, I have a certain number of years to live, so this year I want to look forward and not back – I don’t want to think about the past years, I want to make this year the best year of my life. That is why I don’t like to make films that are statements.

BJD: It’s been said that in a certain sense a director makes the same film all his life – that is, explores the different aspects of a given theme in a variety of ways throughout his pictures. Do you agree with this? Do you feel it’s true for your work?

MA: Dostoevsky said that an artist only says one thing in his work all through his life. If he is very good, perhaps two. The liberty of the para­doxical nature of that quotation allows me to add that it doesn’t com­pletely apply to me. But it’s not for me to say.

– ‘Antonioni Discusses The Passenger’ in The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema. University Of Chicago Press (2007).

  

Emeric Pressburger: The Early Life of a Screenwriter

Emeric Pressburger was a Hungarian-born screenwriter who wrote and produced innovative and visually striking motion pictures in collaboration with British director Michael Powell, most notably The Red Shoes (1948).

Pressburger was born on Dec. 5, 1902, in the Hungarian village of Miskolc, and attended college in Prague and Stuttgart, before moving to Berlin in 1925. There, he wrote newspaper articles and film scripts, which he submitted to UFA, the German film company. 

Pressburger was hired by UFA’s script department in 1928, and his first writing credit was for a 1930 sound film by Robert Siodmak called Abschied (Farewell). He contributed to about eight films between 1930 and 1932, including Emil and the Detectives (1932) and many musicals. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Pressburger went to Paris, where he wrote several scripts, including La Vie Parisienne, a 1935 film directed by Siodmak.

Pressburger moved to London in 1935, and began working for Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born British film producer and launched his partnership with Powell with The Spy in Black (1939; U.S. title U-Boat). In 1941 he won an Academy Award for best original story for their third film, The 49th Parallel (U.S., The Invaders).

From 1942 Pressburger and Powell shared equal credit for writing, producing, and directing the 14 films that were released by their joint production company, The Archers. The team’s most successful films, which were notable for their use of lavish sets and vivid colours, included The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), Black Narcissus (1947), A Matter of Life and Death (1946; U.S. Stairway to Heaven), and The Tales of Hoffman (1951). After The Archers was amicably disbanded in 1956, Pressburger wrote two novels, Killing a Mouse on Sunday (1961; filmed as Behold a Pale Horse, 1964) and The Glass Pearls (1966). He was named fellow of the British Film Institute in 1983.

In the following extract, Emeric Pressburger describes how he started out working as a scriptwriter for the mighty German film studio UFA in the 1920s.

I called again at UFA for my appointment with Herr Podehl. He was a splendid man, genuinely anxious to do a good job and a true friend of writers. He fought for them and for their work, supporting them when they were ground up in the huge mills of the organiz­ation. He liked me, I believe, and I certainly took to him at once. He explained, with a total lack of condescension, how production worked at UFA. There were six production units, each with a leader, and they chose and developed about twelve subjects a year, from each of which about half were actually made. It was the dramaturgy department which found subjects, wrote treat­ments, doctored scripts and made contact with writers, before handing the material on to the production units. Herr Podehl said that he had liked my story and had circulated it among some of the production heads, but he couldn't generate a lasting interest in it. I immediately opened my battered attache case and handed him another treatment.

A fortnight later he contacted me again to say that he liked this one too, but that, again, the production chiefs had been lukewarm. When a third story met the same fate I was again summoned to Podehl’s office, and he admitted that he was a little worried by the situation. ‘You have brought me three decent stories. I encouraged you, and yet you haven’t earned a thing from us yet. So, if you want to do it, take a look at this book. If you like it, write me a short film treatment. That would be a commission, of course. I can pay 200 marks.’ I took the book from him and left the office, trying not to appear too eager, although I knew, and he probably did as well, that it wasn't a case of liking it, or even reading it - I would do it.

When I had completed my assignment I took the treatment to Podehl and he seemed pleased with it. But I don't think he ever imagined it would get made into a film. It was one of those dud properties which every film company has which are given out to young writers just to let them practise and cam a little money. My mother couldn't believe her eyes when I showed her that handful of crisp, new ten-mark notes, and she shook her head in awe and disbelief when I said, ‘Mother, I'm going to leave my job as a house agent's clerk. I’m going to be an author.’ ‘Don't rush it, darling,'’she pleaded. ‘Don’t throwaway a good job, a lasting job.’ But I had already made up my mind.

The next time I went to see Herr Podehl he told me that he had still had no luck with my stories. However, a new young director working in Bruno Duday’s production group had been very interested in one of them called Mondnacht (‘A Moonlit Night’), a clever romantic trifle about the power of the moon over the lives of ordinary Berlin folk:

That was the introduction. Anyway, Podehl wanted me to go and see this new director who had been under contract for months hut who had not found a subject which he found sympathetic. I found the director in his office, quite depressed. His first film had been an avant-garde success called Menschen am Sonntag (‘People on Sunday’), a short, silent documentary-style 
film about the ordinary adventures of four ordinary working-class Berliners. UFA had hired him on the strength of it and now he couldn't find anything to follow it up with. Did I have any ideas? I told him that I did, and rushed straight home. Of course, I hadn’t had any ideas when I was in his office, but by the time I arrived home I had the whole story mapped out in my head. I stayed up all night typing and retyping, and first thing in the morning I went to see the director. I waited in his office as he read the treatment, and when he had finished he looked at me and said, ‘This is my next film.’ I was overjoyed, stunned speechless. In his autobiography Robert Siodmak, for that was the director, says that I started to cry. I don’t remember that, but it is quite possible.

To write the script I was given a collaborator by Herr Podehl, a wonderful lady called Irma von Cuhe, an experienced writer who would teach me how to write in the proper style. The film was called Abschied (‘Farewell’) and was set in a boarding house of the type I knew well. It was about ordinary Berliners and the tragic misunderstanding which splits up two young lovers. The great invention in it, and what Siodmak particularly loved, was that it was a film that took place in real time. It was a two-hour film and concerned itself with two hours in the life of the boarding house.

The critics loved it, the ordinary people shunned it, but on the strength of it I was employed by the mighty edifice of UFA, as Lektor und Dramaturg. I was given my own little office, and on my first day there I bought a camera – being an UFA employee you got terrific discounts at the camera shops ­ and photographed myself at work. And that was how I got started in films.

– The Early Life of a Screenwriter by Emeric Pressburger, edited by Kevin Macdonald in Projections ed. John Boorman.

Terrence Malick on Badlands

Badlands (Directed by Terrence Malick)

The son of an oil company executive, Terrence Malick grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. He went to Harvard and later to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to study Philosophy but failed to complete his thesis – his topic proving unacceptable to his tutor, Gilbert Ryle. 

Summer jobs took him from the wheat harvests in America and Canada, to working in oilfields and driving a cement mixer in a railyard, to journalistic endeavours for Life, Newsweek and The New Yorker. 

In 1967 he was sent on assignment to Bolivia to observe the trial of French intellectual Regis Debray who had fought alongside Che Guevera. Guevara was himself killed the day after Malick’s arrival. 

In 1968 Malick was appointed a lecturer in philosophy at MIT but abandoned teaching within a year. He explained: ‘I was not a good teacher; I didn’t have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else’.

Terrence Malick's lyrical directorial debut is based on the true tale of Charles Starkweather, a young James Dean obsessive who fled through the Midwest on a murderous rampage with his teenage girlfriend. Avoiding both the cliches of pulp crime story or the French New Wave’s romantic take on Bonnie and Clyde, Malick offers something unique: an eloquent fable about the cross over between crime, romance, and myth-making in contemporary America, and is noticeable for its inventive use of colour, editing, and voice-over. 

Martin Sheen, who plays Kit/Starkweather, considered Badlands as the finest screenplay he had ever read. "It is still," he states. "It was hypnotic. It rendered you defenceless. It was a period piece, yet it was timeless. It was unmistakably American; it captured the essence of the people, of the culture, in an instantly recognisable manner." Sissy Spacek starred as Holly, a baton-twirling high school student who takes off with Kit after he murders her father (Warren Oates). 

The film's disjointed emotional impact is nearly completely due to Holly, whose dull, matter of fact, narration runs counter to the film's theme, characterised by a discrepancy between what we see and what we hear. Badlands remains one of the most extraordinary debuts in American film

In a rare interview in 1975 for Sight and Sound magazine, Malick explained how he turned to making movies and the influences behind his first feature film, the semi-factual Badlands, which starred Martin Sheen as the serial-killer Kit Carruthers and Sissy Spacek as his girlfriend, Holly.

‘I’d always liked movies in a kind of naive way. They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else. I came to Los Angeles in the fall of 1969 to study at the AFI; I made a short called Lanton Mills. I found the AFI very helpful; it’s a marvellous place. My wife was going to law school and I was working for a time as a rewrite man – two days on Drive, He Said, five weeks on the predecessor to Dirty Harry at a time when Brando was going to do it with Irving Kershner directing. Then we all got fired by Warners; the project went to Clint Eastwood. I rewrote Pocket Money and Deadhead Miles. I got this work because of a phenomenal agent, Mike Medavoy.

‘At the end of my second year here, I began work on Badlands. I wrote and, at the same time, developed a kind of sales kit with slides and video tape of actors, all with a view to presenting investors with something that would look ready to shoot. To my surprise, they didn’t pay too much attention to it; they invested on faith. I raised about half the money and Edward Pressman (the executive producer) the other half. We started in July of 1972. 


‘The critics talked about influences on the picture and in most cases referred to films I had never seen. My influences were books like The Hardy Boys, Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn – all involving an innocent in a drama over his or her head. I didn’t actually think about those books before I did the script, but it’s obvious to me now. Nancy Drew, the children’s story child detective – I did think about her. 


‘There is some humour in the picture, I believe. Not jokes. It lies in Holly’s mis-estimation of her audience, of what they will be interested in or ready to believe. (She seems at time to think of her narration as like what you get in audio-visual courses in high school.) When they’re crossing the badlands, instead of telling us what’s going on between Kit and herself, or anything of what we’d like and have to know, she describes what they ate and what it tasted like, as though we might be planning a similar trip and appreciate her experience, this way. 


‘She’s a typical Southern girl in her desire to help, to give hard fact; not to dwell upon herself, which to her would be unseemly, but always to keep in mind the needs of others. She wants to come off in the best possible light, but she’s scrupulous enough to take responsibility where in any way she might have contributed.’

(Interviewer) 
I suggest to Malick that the film has been criticised for patronising Holly and her milieu.

‘That’s foolishness. I grew up around people like Kit and Holly. I see no gulf between them and myself. One of the things the actors and I used to talk about was never stepping outside the characters and winking at the audience, never getting off the hook. If you keep your hands off the characters you open yourself to charges like that; at least you have no defence against them. What I find patronising is people not leaving the characters alone, stacking the deck for them, not respecting their integrity, their difference. 


‘Holly’s Southernness is essential to taking her right. She isn’t indifferent about her father’s death...
You should always feel there are large parts of her experience she’s not including because she has a strong, if misplaced, sense of propriety. You might well wonder how anyone going through what she does could be at all concerned with proprieties. But she is. And her kind of cliché didn’t begin with pulp magazines, as some critics have suggested. It exists in Nancy Drew and Tom Sawyer. It’s not the mark of a diminished, pulp-fed mind, I’m trying to say, but of the ‘innocent abroad.’ When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés. That doesn’t make them laughable; it’s something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what’s most personal about them they could only come up with what’s most public. 


‘Holly is in a way the more important character; at least you get a glimpse of what she’s like. And I liked women characters better than men; they’re more open to things around them, more demonstrative. Kit, on the other hand, is a closed book, not a rare trait in people who have tasted more than their share of bitterness in life. The movies have kept up a myth that suffering makes you deep. It inclines you to say deep things. It builds character and is generally healthful. It teaches you lessons you never forget. People who’ve suffered go around in movies with long, thoughtful faces, as though everything had caved in just yesterday. It’s not that way in real life, though, not always. Suffering can make you shallow and just the opposite of vulnerable, dense. It’s had this kind of effect on Kit.

‘Kit doesn’t see himself as anything sad or pitiable, but as a subject of incredible interest, to himself and to future generations. Like Holly, like a child, he can only really believe in what’s going on inside him. Death, other people’s feelings, the consequences of his actions – they’re all sort of abstract for him. He thinks of himself as a successor to James Dean – a Rebel without a Cause – when in reality he’s more like an Eisenhower conservative. ‘Consider the minority opinion,’ he says into the rich man’s tape recorder, ‘but try to get along with the majority opinion once it’s accepted.’ He doesn’t really believe any of this, but he envies the people who do, who can. He wants to be like them, like the rich man he locks in the closet, the only man he doesn’t kill, the only man he sympathises with, and the one least in need of sympathy. It’s not infrequently the people at the bottom who most vigorously defend the very rules that put and keep them there. 


‘And there’s something about growing up in the Midwest. There’s no check on you. People imagine it’s the kind of place where your behaviour is under constant observation, where you really have to toe the line. They got that idea from Sinclair Lewis. But people can really get ignored there and fall into bad soil. Kit did, and he grew up like a big poisonous weed.

‘I don’t think he’s a character peculiar to his time. I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality. Children’s books are full of violence. Long John Silver slits the throats of the faithful crew. Kit and Holly even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale. Holly says, ‘Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened.’ But she enough believes there is such a place that she must confess to you she never got there.’ 


- ‘Beverly Walker: Malick on Badlands’. Sight and Sound, Spring 1975. Copyright Sight and Sound.


Jean-Luc Godard on ‘Contempt’ (Le Mépris)

Contempt (Directed by Jean-Luc Godard)

The exigencies of making a movie with a comparatively large budget and stars, based on a well-known writer’s novel, limited the experimental-collage side of Godard and forced him to focus on getting across a linear narrative, in the process drawing more psychologically complex, rounded characters. Godardians regard Contempt as an anomaly, the master’s most orthodox movie. The paradox is that it is also his finest. Pierrot le Fou may be more expansive, Breathless and Masculine Feminine more inventive, but in Contempt Godard was able to strike his deepest human chords. 

If the film is a record of disenchantment, it is also a seductive bouquet of enchantments: Bardot’s beauty, primary colors, luxury objects, nature. Contempt marked the first time that Godard went beyond the oddly-beautiful poetry of cities and revealed his romantic, unironic love of landscapes. The cypresses on Prokosch’s estate exquisitely frame Bardot and Piccoli. Capri sits in the Mediterranean, a jewel in a turquoise setting. The last word in the film is Lang’s assistant director (played by Godard himself) calling out, Action! – after which the camera pans to a tranquilly static ocean. The serene classicism of sea and sky refutes the thrashings of men.  

– Phillip Lopate on Contempt, The New York Times, June 22, 1997.

A Cinemascope epic, Jean-Luc Godard's debut into commercial cinema, Contempt (Le Mépris) stars Michel Piccoli as a screenwriter torn between the demands of a proud European director (played by legendary director Fritz Lang), an arrogant and crude American producer (Jack Palance), and his disillusioned wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), as he attempts to fix the script for a new film adaptation of The Odyssey. 

The film is the director's adaptation of a book by Alberto Moravia. The film-within-a-film has been classically reimagined by filmmaker Fritz Lang (who plays himself) and commercially adulterated by philistine producer Jeremiah Prokosch (Jack Palance). 

There is also an interesting off-screen backstory going on: Bardot’s career struggling under the influence of her husband, Roger Vadim, with Godard interweaving aspects of his own relationship with wife Anna Karina into Bardot's role). Yet Bardot gives one of her best performances, alluring, mysterious, and touching.

Godard was himself dealing with the critical backlash from  his last film, Les Carabiniers, and he was keen to demonstrate that he understood the exigencies of traditional film making. He is aided by Raoul Coutard’s beautiful, smooth camerawork, all glides and pans.

Considered to be Godard's best film by non-specialists, Le Mépris is certainly one of the director's most approachable films and a notable contribution to the genre of films about filmmaking – on the death of cinema and the possibility of its renewal.

The following extract is from a 1963 interview with Jean-Luc Godard on the adaptation of Contempt from the novel by Alberto Moravia.

Moravia’s novel is a nice, vulgar one for a train journey, full of classical, old-fashioned sentiments in spite of the modernity of the situations. But it is with this kind of novel that one can often make the best films.

I have stuck to the main theme, simply altering a few details, on the principle that something filmed is automatically different from something written, and therefore original. There was no need to make it different, to adapt it to the screen. All I had to do was film it as it is: just film what was written, apart from a few details; for if the cinema were not first and foremost film, it wouldn’t exist. Méliès is the greatest, but without Lumière he would have languished in obscurity.

Apart from a few details. For instance, the transformation of the hero who, in passing from book to screen, moves from false adventure to real, from Antonioni inertia to Laramiesque dignity. For instance also, the nationality of the characters: Brigitte Bardot is no longer called Emilia but Camille, and as you will see she trifles nonetheless with Musset. Each of the characters, moreover, speaks his own language which, as in The Quiet American, contributes to the feeling of people lost in a strange country. Here, though, two days only: an afternoon in Rome, a morning in Capri. Rome is the modern world, the West; Capri, the ancient world, nature before civilization and its neuroses. Contempt, in other words, might have been called In Search of Homer, but it means lost time trying to discover the language of Proust beneath that of Moravia, and anyway that isn’t the point.

The point is that these are people who look at each other and judge each other, and then are in turn looked at and judged by the cinema – represented by Fritz Lang, who plays himself, or in effect the conscience of the film, its honesty. (I filmed the scenes of The Odyssey which he was supposed to be directing, but as I play the role of his assistant, Lang will say that these are scenes made by his second unit.)

When I think about it, Contempt seems to me, beyond its psychological study of a woman who despises her husband, the story of castaways of the Western world, survivors of the shipwreck of modernity who, like the heroes of Verne and Stevenson, one day reach a mysterious deserted island, whose mystery is the inexorable lack of mystery, of truth that is to say. Whereas the Odyssey of Ulysses was a physical phenomenon, I filmed a spiritual odyssey: the eye of the camera watching these characters in search of Homer replaces that of the gods watching over Ulysses and his companions.

A simple film without mystery, an Aristotelian film, stripped of appearances, Contempt proves in 149 shots that in the cinema as in life there is no secret, nothing to elucidate, merely the need to live – and to make films.

– From an interview in Cahiers du Cinéma, August 1963 (collected in Godard on Godard, edited by Tom Milne, Da Capo Press, 1986) 

Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema of Poetry

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinema is deeply embedded in Italian culture: hence the confusion that many British and American critics have felt when confronted with his work. This is not only because many of the important influences on Pasolini (1922-1975)—Pascoli, Gramsci, Rossellini—are little known in the United States and the United Kingdom, but also because Italian culture itself is full of contradictory traits and components, which Pasolini’s films reflect. The most obvious of these contradictions, of course, is that between Catholicism and Marxism, the two commanding ideologies that dominate Italian intellectual life, both of which have left their stamp on Pasolini. The restlessness and eclecticism of Pasolini’s career, which shifted incessantly from one genre to another—painting, poetry, criticism, short stories, novels, feature films, reportage, and the theater—and from one style and subject matter to another, reflect a search for some appeasement of the multiplicity of incompatible contradictions that formed his view of the world and of art.

Pasolini’s Marxism itself is far from being a unifying system: in his thought it is but one of many conflicting strands, now surfacing, now submerging. If there is one constant, one invariable, it is Pasolini’s uncritical attachment to the peasantry, an attachment that can be presented in the light of Marxism, but more consistently in the light of a backward- looking romanticism. He took from Gramsci, for example, the emphasis on the potentially revolutionary role of the Italian peasantry and the need,in Italian conditions, for a national-popular movement. Thus was Pasolini able to absorb Marxism partially without permitting it to overwhelm in its totality other aspects of his thought.

When Pasolini started directing films he had already worked on a number of scripts, for directors like Fellini and Bolognini. This was on the strength of his Roman novels, Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta. Many of his scripts were set in the same Roman sub-proletarian milieu, and these led directly to his first films as a director, Accattone and Mamma Roma, which should be seen as part of his “Roman” period, including novels and screenplays as well as his work as a director in his own right. It is misleading to divorce Pasolini’s work in the cinema from his other work, particularly his writing: poetry, novels, criticism. Like Robbe-Grillet and Kluge, Pasolini was a writer before he was a director, and his writing continued unabated throughout his career. Theorem, for example, appeared as a book as well as a film.

After Mamma Roma, Pasolini’s next major work was The Gospel According to St. Matthew, in which the influence of Rossellini, especially his film Francesco, giullare di Dio, first became prominent. Pasolini’s cinema is clearly in the tradition not only of Rossellini but also of Dreyer and Mizoguchi, in its juxtaposition of natural and supernatural elements, though it lacks the purity and coherence of the work of these masters. In The Gospel, for instance, a traditional Christology, drawn from sacred music and painting, is superimposed on the brusque and literal, Rossellinian treatment of a popular and anecdotal text, and the result is to deliver the film into the hands of the Catholic Church. Yet The Gospel is the film of Pasolini’s that least betrays his drive towards eclecticism and pastiche. In Uccellacci e uccellini, for instance, different levels, styles, and allusions—to Rossellini, Fellini, Lukács, Togliatti, even the Pope—jostle against each other in hopeless confusion.

Despite the lack of any consistent drive, either in form or content, one underlying tendency can be discerned in Pasolini’s career: his emphasis on the need to restore an epic and mythological dimension to life, a sense of awe and reverence to the world—a sense, he believed, that the peasantry still sustain, though the bourgeoisie itself has done all in its power to destroy it. 

The following extract is from an interview with Pasolini in Rome in 1968. 

The Gospel According to St Matthew (Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Q: In “The Cinema of Poetry” you mention the importance of making the audience aware of the camera as a criterion of poetic cinema. There has been some confusion as to whether you meant that the cinema is naturally poetry and, if so, first, how has prose cinema—like the aforementioned Gideon of Scotland—managed on the whole to impose itself?; and, second, if the cinema is naturally poetry, in what way does making people aware of the camera determine whether or not it is poetry?

P.P.P.: In my view the cinema is substantially and naturally poetic, for the reasons I have stated: because it is dreamlike, because it is close to dreams, because a cinematic sequence and a sequence of memory or of a dream—and not only that but things in themselves, in reality—are profoundly poetic: a tree photographed is poetic, a human face photographed is poetic because physicality is poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a sign of a linguistic system. But who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself. Therefore the tree as a sign puts us in communication with a mysterious speaker. Therefore the cinema, by directly reproducing objects physically, is substantially if paradoxically poetic at the same time. This is one aspect of the problem, let’s say a pre-historic, almost pre-cinematographic one. After that we have the cinema as a historical fact, as a means of communication, and as such it too is beginning to develop into different subspecies, like all communications media. Just as literature has a language for prose and a language for poetry, so does the cinema. That’s what I was saying. In this case you must forget that the cinema is naturally poetic because it is a type of poetry, which, I repeat, is pre-historic, amorphous, unnatural. If you see a bit of the most banal western ever made or any old commercial film, if you look at it in a non-conventional way, even a film like that will reveal the dreamlike and poetic quality which exists physically and naturally in the cinema; but this is not the cinema of poetry. The cinema of poetry is the cinema that adopts a particular technique just as a poet adopts a particular technique when he writes verse. If you open a book of poetry, you can see the style immediately, the rhyme-scheme and all that: you see the language as an instrument, or you count the syllables in the verse. The equivalent of what you see in a text of poetry you can also find in a cinematic text, through the stylemes—i.e., through the camera movements and the montage. So to make films is to be a poet.

– An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini. In After New-Realism, Ed. Bert Cardullo.

Pedro Almodóvar: How To Make a Film

Volver (Directed by Pedro Almodóvar)

Pedro Almodóvar (born 1949) burst onto the film scene in 1980, riding Spain's post-Franco countercultural wave and establishing himself as one of cinema's most unique voices. Almodóvar's work helped to establish a new Spanish cultural and social order, and he has produced some of the most internationally significant films of the last three decades. His genre-defying work explores issues of transgression, desire, and identity via a combination of kitsch, melodrama, and comedy. Almodóvar has created a vibrant world filled with eccentric people, flexible sexual and gender identities, and nuanced and distinct female characters. His inclusive, anything-goes ethos, which honours all beings, feelings, and arguments, appeals to a global audience, enabling him to be both a countercultural provocateur and an Academy Award-winning writer/director.

Almodovar relocated to Madrid, Spain, after graduating from high school in 1968. He supported himself via a variety of odd jobs through the 1970s including clerical and administrative positions.

In his spare time, he published comic strips and essays for underground periodicals. Almodovar eventually transitioned towards the theatre and began performing. He met actors and actresses there who would subsequently feature in his films, including Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas. 

Almodovar started experimenting with filmmaking in the early 1970s, creating super-8 shorts. In 1978 he directed his first 16mm film, Salome. 

Almodovar's debut feature picture was released commercially in 1980. Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls on the Heap was shot on 16mm and enlarged to 35mm for distribution. It was financed by friends. The plot centred on a group of women from northern Spain who relocate to the city. Like many of his most successful films, the film had a vibrant aesthetic and a cast of individuals that lived on the outside of society. 

Almodovar started creating low-budget feature films in the early 1980s, aided by government funding. In 1981, he directed his debut feature film, Labyrinth of Passion, an intricate love story, which he also scored, featuring Banderas, who would become a star in America in the 1990s.

With his third movie, Dark Habits, Almodovar garnered international attention. The story poked fun at the Roman Catholic Church. The plot revolved around nuns who staged phoney miracles in order to support their cocaine and heroin addictions. 

Almodovar's first worldwide success, What Have I Done to Deserve This?, was released in 1984, a dark comedy about a dysfunctional family.

As a result of his success Almodovar was hailed as the father of New Spanish Cinema and the founder of La Movida (The Movement), Spain's post-Franco pop culture scene. While most of Almodovar's work was a response to Franco's authoritarian society, although he made no reference to the dictator in his films. Many of his films dealt with universal emotions and problems and centred on women. He was often lauded for his perceptive depictions of women, they were also permissive and irreverent, global and hugely popular.

Next, Almodovar directed Matador, a film about two people for whom murder is synonymous with sex. Diego, a retired bullfighter, and Maria, a lawyer, are connected by a common ambition. This picture defied several preconceptions and demonstrated how Almodovar's films are brimming with fascinating nuances. 

Almodovar followed up with Law of Desire, in 1987, another love tale centred on a triangle of gay and transsexual love.

1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was one of Almodovar's greatest successes. The story revolves around the lives of out-of-control, lonely, and abandoned women over the course of 48 hours. Maura portrayed Pepa, a vain soap opera diva who gets dumped through answering machine by her boyfriend. After she attempts and fails to commit suicide, a sequence of absorbing events ensue. The film was inspired by Jean Cocteau's one-man piece The Human Voice. 

Women on the Verge was 1988's biggest earning picture in Spain and one of the biggest box office triumphs in the country's history. 

Almodovar's follow-up to Women on the Verge, 1990's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, was less formal. The narrative revolved on the abduction of a lady called Marina, a pornographic and horror film actress. Ricki, a freshly released mental patient, kidnaps her and wants her to fall in love with him. Marina is also adored by the director of the films in which she appears. As Marina falls for Ricki, Tie Me Up! develops into a love tale. 

Critics were harsh in comparing it to Women on the Verge, but the film was still a commercial success.

In 1991, he directed High Heels, followed by Kika (1993) which did not fare so well, either critically or commercially.

With his next feature, Live Flesh (1998) Almodovar turned to a novel by Ruth Rendell, and created a noir-style crime drama about violent love, a recurring theme in his work. The tale followed five individuals connected by a murder and the impact it had on their lives over the course of several years.

Almodovar subsequent film, All About My Mother (Todo Sobre Mi Madre; 1999) was a melodrama with comic undertones that followed Manuela, a nurse as she hunts for the transsexual  father of her dead son. The film received more honours than any previous film by Almodovar, including the director's prize at the Cannes Picture Festival and the Academy Award for best foreign language film. 

Almodovar continued to stretch his limits as he matured. In 2002, he wrote and directed the romantic comedy Talk to Her (Hable Con Ella), set in a hospital where two women, Lydia, a bullfighter, and Alicia, a ballerina, are in a coma. The film gained widespread critical acclaim and was nominated for numerous top prizes. 

Almodovar preserved his own distinct view of Spanish society and the kind of individuals he chose to represent as a filmmaker. In 1999, he told Time International, "I've been creating films for the last two decades—and essentially the same kind of film. Sometimes, I was accused of being scandalously contemporary, and occasionally of being an opportunist. However, critics have recognised that anything I do is sincere. They can see how emotionally invested I am with the characters on the margin. My films are about those on the periphery of existence."

In the following interview Almodovar discusses his work and his approach to artistic creation.

It’s very difficult to explain the origins of everything in a film because it’s very mysterious and many things happen by chance. You have to be writing all the time and in my case I make notes all the time. l am always working on four or five ideas and there comes a time when I decide to just write one.
You never ever really feel that you are going to be able to pull off the project that you are working on. You never have complete confidence. But of course there comes a time when you feel that you have learnt the trade and the craft of making films, so I feel now that I know the language and how to use it to get a particular emotion. But even if you know all the elements of the technique, you need something else. You need vision, a lot of honesty, strong imagination, and control of that imagination. Language is something quite easy to learn, but the most important thing in a film is your point of view, your vision, and how you look at the world around you.

You never feel absolutely sure about the final outcome because all the different components that make up the film are alive as you make it. One of those elements, of course, is the people. In a film you’ve got forty, fifty or sixty people working with you and the most difficult thing is controlling them, not because they are trying to rebel against you or not obeying you, but because the material you are using to make the film is alive and they are interacting with it as well. So sometimes the end result is not the one you are looking for. The stamp or style you put on your films is extremely personal and there really aren’t that many rules governing it, because what might work for Orson Welles or for David Lynch doesn’t necessarily work for me at all. So you have to seek out your own preferences, the way you would like to use language, and it’s something you just get over time, little by little. I still haven’t discovered it fully yet. I am still working on it.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Directed by Pedro Almodóvar)

I remember that all through the 1980s, I was developing my own filmmaking style with a very specific aesthetic stamp on it. So in the late eighties, from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, everything the people in the decor department brought me was over the top. It was almost too Almodovar-y which is exactly what I didn’t want. It was almost as if the Almodovar style had become a cliche.

I battle against cliche. If you give a dramatic role to an actor who is suffering in their personal life, it is very easy for that actor or actress to cry. But I don’t want those real tears. For me the movie is always a representation of reality in every sense, from the actors to the lighting. I want their tears to be artificial as well.

When you’re a director you have to have your own language, you have to be in possession of that language and the vision of the story you want to tell through the film you are making. On top of that you also have to have bags of common sense and be very strong because you are a boss in the best and worst sense, and you have to demonstrate this all the time. You have to make 100 decisions every moment.

When you’re shooting a film—and this is something Francois Truffaut said—it’s like a runaway train. The brakes have failed and the director’s job is to ensure that that train doesn’t go of the rails at all. Some directors, even though they’re extremely talented as filmmakers, just don’t have the resilience to be able to cope with that process. And I really think that there are too many directors around who have that authority to be able to cope with the filmmaking and too few really talented ones who haven’t been able to last. Because you have to deal with the human factor and that human factor can destroy you.

Dark Habits (Directed by Pedro Almodóvar)

I remember when I was making Dark Habits (1983). there was one actress who was playing her first leading role, and as the days of shooting went on, I realized she wasn’t up to what the role demanded of her. So what I did was pass a lot of the dialogue on to actresses who were playing the roles of the nuns. I stripped her of the things she was supposed to be doing and during production that all went into the community of nuns in the film. Their roles got richer and richer. When you are shooting you discover things like this that you cannot discover during rehearsals; because in rehearsals you don’t have the props or the action.

How do I control all these elements? I repeat myself to the crew over and over again. If I want a specific blue color on the wall I get them to paint the whole spectrum of blues from gray to blue and then I point out exactly which one I want. It’s almost like being a painter gathering materials. but this time in three dimensions.

If I want to set up the scene with a table and two chairs and an armchair, I already have an idea in my mind of the colors, the composition, and the form of it all, so what I do is give photos to the design team to go off and find it for me. They bring me examples of the different tables and I try them out. It’s all through trial and error, moving things around, changing their position and checking what works together.

This process makes my filmmaking more painstaking than it could otherwise be, but I must also work in this way with my actors. It takes an awful long time to get the hairstyles right or the way they will dress. I take a long time trying things out with the actors because they never feel they are in character until they know what the character looks like. Just simple decisions like the length of hair that an actress should have take ages to work out. I come along with lots of fashion and hair magazines, and photos of ideas that I have with exactly the length of the hair the actress should have, but everyone’s hair is different, so you still have to see if it works with their hair.

Volver (Directed by Pedro Almodóvar)

For instance, it took ages to get that very natural, unhairdo-like style that Penelope had in Volver. It was supposed to look like she had just put it up, but the amount of time it took you would think we had constructed some elaborate hairdo. But it worked and was incredible. What is important is not to give up on the small things.

Of course, Volver had a strong relation to Italian neorealism, and, unlike the women in Spanish neorealist films, the women are very attractive. So I saw in my mind that I wanted a very attractive look. Then you have to take into account the social class of the character and how women from that class would look and you have to add a touch of humor. I did lots of research going into the homes of that type of housewife from that social class and picking out the little, funny details that I could replicate in the film. There are all sorts of color schemes you see in these homes. but by that point I had already made up my mind of exactly the range of colors I would be working with. I always do that through intuition when I finish a script and just before I start shooting. I have already made up my mind about the spectrum of colors in the film that I will be making. Before all this I always have a very clear idea of the whole narrative process itself as the film goes on. For me writing and directing are symbiotic, complementary. While I am writing, I am working out the moments when you are giving information to the audiences, and the moments when you are withholding information. How that works is the narrative flow through the film, the way the characters are built up, and how they react or interact with each other. This is all very clear in my mind when I am writing the script. The script also includes the atmosphere I want to feature in each scene, and the songs that each have a dramatic function and are integral to the script.

The importance of arts in general in my films can’t be underestimated, When I am writing the script, l am always going out because everything you see, everything you hear, every movie you see, you watch it and it informs the sensibility of the story you are writing. So I was writing The Skin I Live In when I saw an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois at the Tate Modern, and Vera is looking at a book of her work in the film, It is a way for her to survive.

Volver (Directed by Pedro Almodóvar)

Songs also very important. Cucurrucucu Paloma is a very famous Mexican song and there have been thousands of versions, but when I heard the Caetano Veloso version I was amazed because the song became something completely different. It became a dark lullaby, very moving. Then in Talk to Her, I present the character of Marco as a man who cries at certain times, so I needed a song to play in the party scene that was moving enough to make him cry. This is very risky because there is no way for the production to declare that at 1 am we will have deep emotion. But I needed that emotion because otherwise the audience wouldn’t understand that this was a man who cried with emotion. Then I tried to think of things that really move me a lot and one of those things was Caetano’s song, so I called him and asked him to perform it in the film. I was right because he was amazing and the situation is intriguing.

Likewise, a song gives Volver its title. Volver is all about this great Spanish tradition of the dead coming back to settle unsettled accounts. So Volver is coming back from beyond.

Sometimes I have things in my mind that aren’t visible in the final film, but they are important for me because they give me a basis from which I can jumpstart the story. I had a whole back story in my mind for Penelope’s character in Volver—she was a beautiful young girl who her mother adored, and she wanted her to be a singer and a performer and taught her this song Volver so she could go and perform it in auditions for little girls—which is exactly the same story you see in Bellissima [the Visconti classic featuring Anna Magnani in the mother role]. There’s a part in the film in the kitchen where Carmen Maura says to Penelope, ‘Did you always have big boobs like that?’ and she says ‘Yes, mummy, ever since I was a little girl.’ So for the auditions, the mother puts makeup on her and puts her in amazing dresses. Her father sees all this and it must have been quite a vision for him, so much so that he couldn’t resist the temptation. There was always a lot of incest within the family in these households in La Mancha.

So when Penelope sings the song that her mother taught her in the film, she is remembering her mother very tenderly, even though she thought the mother didn’t do anything about the father raping her. And it is very moving for the mother, who is listening from the car on the street, because the song is talking about the passing of time. It is almost like the daughter is sending an unconscious message to her mother that she doesn’t really hate her, despite the passing of time. None of that is actually explained in the film at all, but my movies are all about secrets and the secret intentions I have that give me the reason to work. Of course they are not visible, but the audience can feel that strength.

— Extract from ‘Interview with Pedro Almodóvar’ in Filmcraft: Directing by Mike Goodridge.

Dialogue as Action: The Friends of Eddie Coyle

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Directed by Peter Yates)

Described by Elmore Leonard as ‘the best crime novel ever written’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle is an uncompromising and bleak account of criminal life on the mean streets of Boston. The story of a small-time gun-runner desperate to avoid going to prison, George V. Higgins’s 1972 fictional debut is constructed as an elegant series of interlocking dialogues which gradually reveal the book’s theme: an elaborate play of exploitation and betrayal. 

The dialogue is a virtuoso representation of genuine speech, compact and stylized yet not so self-conscious as to come across as overtly literary. The scenes are fragmented while significant events occur out of view. Events unravel without a moral purpose: a detached aesthetic that owes much to Higgins’s experience as a lawyer acquainted with the inner workings of the Boston criminal system. 

Throughout his writing career Higgins maintained his view that the best way to tell a story is by gradually exposing its outline through the conversations of its characters. Avoiding lengthy descriptive passages, and by focusing almost exclusively on his characters’ talk, he obliges the reader to pay attention to the dialogue if they want to know what is going on. 

In his book On Writing, a discourse on the writer’s craft intended for aspiring writers, Higgins discusses his reliance on dialogue:

Many of my critics seem to feel that they have to say, or strongly imply, that my gift for dialog is all I have; or that writing dialog is not the most important attribute a novelist can have . . .  A man or woman who does not write good dialog is not a first-rate writer. I do not believe that a writer who neglects or has not learned to write good dialog can be depended on for accuracy in his understanding of character and in his creation of characters. Therefore to dismiss good dialog so lightly is evidence of a critic’s incomplete understanding of what constitutes a good novel.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle was made into a superb, underrated film in 1973. Directed by Peter Yates and starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle, the script by Hollywood veteran Paul Monash sticks closely to Higgins’s aesthetic. The expressionless tone of the characters’ dialogue, the stark narrative and the unfolding tragedy of events, creates an overall effect that is at once fascinating and unsettling.

On release in 1973 the film was met with disappointment and confusion: the book seemed not to work on screen; critics found the movie flat and under-dramatized. Seen today, these alleged shortcomings now seem like strengths. The Friends of Eddie Coyle has a cadence and style of its own. The inventiveness of Higgins’s plot and the terseness of his language are reflected in a striking and extended visual scheme — Victor Kemper’s cold, urban cinematography reduces the city to abstract surfaces of diners, suburban banks, shopping-malls, parking lots — and an acting ensemble in empathy with the film’s mood of nonchalance and terror.

A crime film with minimal violence or overt displays of aggression, Yates’s direction finds the right pitch as one critic describes it as ‘somewhere near the edge of desperation’. As embodied by Robert Mitchum, in his last great role, the tone is deliberately undramatic. Action is mundane and professional, from the business-like masked bank-robbers to the hired hit-man negotiating over the fee for killing his friend. Despite the milieu of routine mistrust, of people going about their business, from robbing banks, selling guns or catching crooks, the underlying violence and chaos of their world is never far away.

The Criterion release of The Friends Of Eddie Coyle on DVD includes an essay by the critic Kent Jones. In the following extract he discusses the film’s themes, aesthetic and how dialogue in George V. Higgins’s world is central to telling the story:

‘I think that work like his is necessary for people to understand something about the humors of the criminal mentality,’ said Robert Mitchum of the novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle and its author, George V. Higgins. Yet he could have been describing the film itself, a melancholy succession of clandestine encounters conducted in the least picturesque parts of the Greater Boston area during late fall, going into winter. A middleman bargains with a gunrunner, the gunrunner bargains with a pair of wannabe bank robbers, a cop bargains with his stoolie, and the stoolie bargains with the man who works for the Man. The chips on the table may be machine guns or information or money, but the ‘humor’ looming over every encounter is survival.

Politeness and bonhomie are strictly provisional, and everybody knows it, which is what gives this film its terrible sadness. In the miserable economy of power in Boston’s rumpled gray underworld, Eddie and his ‘friends’ are all expendable, and the ones left standing play every side against the middle, their white-knuckle terror carefully concealed under several layers of nonchalance and resignation. There’s not a punch thrown, and only two fatal shots are fired, but this seemingly artless film leaves a deeper impression of dog-eat-dog brutality than many of the blood-soaked extravaganzas that preceded it and came in its wake.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is, in many ways, an inside job. Meaning that there’s not a minute spent orienting the viewer. The tale of a low-level mobster who gives up one of his contacts in a failed effort to bargain his way out of a New Hampshire prison stint is imparted to us a little bit at a time, through a series of seemingly affable but quietly desperate sit-downs between criminals and cops, or other criminals, in crummy coffee shops, underpopulated bars, and public spaces that give new meaning to the word ordinary. The filmmakers never do anything in the way of rhetorical underlining.

Director Peter Yates, born and trained in England and mostly known at this relatively early point in his career for his 1968 film Bullitt (and, to those fortunate enough to have seen it in the States, for the excellent Robbery), was an interesting choice for this material. Like that Steve McQueen classic, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is an all-action experience. But two crisply executed bank heists and a logistically complex parking-lot arrest aside, the kinetic excitement here is sparked by the verbal and gestural rhythms between the actors as they plead for their lives across dingy Beantown tabletops. Yates’s camera eye stays so casually observant and his cinematic syntax so spare throughout that when he finally retreats to a plaintive distance in the aftermath of the film’s one inevitable tragedy, it packs a considerable punch. At which point, Dave Grusin’s score, the busiest thing in the movie apart from the gunrunner’s patterned shirts and canary yellow muscle car, finally settles into a plangent farewell.

Off-handed fatalism is embedded in every word of every exchange, each of which alternates between hide-and-seek games and verbal tugs-of-war. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is an extremely faithful adaptation (in structure, spirit, and flavor) of the first published novel by the Brockton, Massachusetts–born Higgins, whose career as a United States prosecutor and then big-time criminal defense lawyer (his clients included Eldridge Cleaver and G. Gordon Liddy) coincided with his ascendancy as a novelist, and whose dialogue is one of the glories of American literature. ‘I’m not doing dialogue because I like doing dialogue,’ Higgins once said. ‘The characters are telling you the story. I’m not telling you the story, they’re going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.’ What is remarkable about the film is the extreme degree to which Yates and the producer and writer, Paul Monash, adhere to Higgins’s aesthetic, banking on the contention that if you render the action among the characters as faithfully as possible, their entire moral universe will be revealed.

And so it is. ‘Look, one of the first things I learned is never to ask a man why he’s in a hurry,’ says Robert Mitchum’s Eddie to Steven Keats’s inappropriately relaxed arms salesman, Jackie Brown (guess who’s a fan of this movie), in what might be the film’s most emblematic bit of table talk. ‘All you got to know is that I told the man he can depend on me because you told me I could depend on you. Now one of us is gonna have a big fat problem. Another thing I’ve learned: if anybody’s gonna have a problem, you’re gonna be the one.’ As in every good dialogue-driven film, talk in The Friends of Eddie Coyle equals action. In this case, manoeuvring for leverage and self-preservation...

– Extracted from ‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle: They Were Expendable’ by Kent Jones. For the full article go here